Last week members of the 380th Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron, stationed at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates, participated in a training exercise in which they located and destroyed inbound drones.
Transcript
So, we were responding to training exercises with drones. With that, we were going out, locating them where they were telling us, which direction they were coming from, how high they were, and we were responding with our drone-buster to eliminate that drone, training-wise, to see how it reacts with that system. They get on their system notification that there is a drone inbound and then they release that information to us through our radios and that’s when we dispatch out to that area. Whether it’s north, south, east, or west, we go and we start looking up into the sky trying to locate this drone that their system at B dock has detected.
A drone-buster is a point-target weapon that is used to defeat categories one and two drones. It’s really important because right now the threat is emergent which means that it’s new, it’s new stuff that’s coming. And now terrorists and other adversaries are using drones, small drones, to attack and collect information on U.S. forces and their coalition partners. It gives me some peace of mind knowing that my defenders will be able to defeat it in the event that something were to happen.
I’m confident after actually using the drone-buster system and seeing what happens. It effectively disables that drone and either sends it back to where it come from or it brings it down and makes it crash into the ground. Bringing it out of the sky which is what we wanna do. It is a big responsibility, it can be a lot of weight on your shoulders. Not everybody can do it. That’s why defenders are so special to the Air Force because at the end of the day they’re the ones that protect everybody on the base from whatever threats arise, whether it be foreign or domestic.