Episode Notes:

On Friday, the U.S. Air Force carried out multiple airstrikes against targets linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria, following a drone attack which killed a US contractor.

Here to discuss the challenges one-way suicide drones pose for U.S. ground and air forces is Ryan Fishel, a F-15E pilot with time in Syria.

[:28] A difficult challenge

[1:22] Tracking drones

[3:38] Russian aggression 

[5:22] Future of air superiority and air supremacy 

[7:22] An air-to-ground attack

Episode Transcript

Aaron Stein: My name is Aaron Stein and I am the Chief Content Officer at War on the Rocks. You are listening to the Warcast, the members-only podcast for what you need to know — now. 

Hello and welcome to the show. Today, I’m joined by Ryan Fishel, who's an F-15E Pilot with time in Syria. And I think on your record, you've actually shot down a Shahed 129, do I have that right? So the reason why I wanted to have you on is this is a rejoinder to an earlier Warcast that we did with Jonathan Lord, where we were talking about the politics that are going on in Syria. We're gonna divert away from politics on this Warcast. So we're gonna just talk about what's going on with these unmanned drones and why they're so difficult to see and perhaps to track. So Ryan, what do you think about that? 

Ryan Fishel: Yeah, I mean, they're difficult. One of the reasons is because of how technology has evolved in the past, you know, 10, 20 years or so. You've had drones that are smaller, get a little bit longer range, as well as carry a little bit bigger payload on them, which can pose a pretty persistent threat to troops on the ground. They're mobile, you can take them wherever you want. You can launch them wherever you want and just due to their sheer size they're relatively hard to keep an eye on. 

Aaron Stein: I'm not gonna ask you again the specifics about what happened, but if you could expand on that a little bit, like why they're hard to defend against. Are they actually hard to see, or is it just that you have to be in the right place at the right time? 

Ryan Fishel: You always have to be vigilant, right place at the right time. So, essentially, like we said, the technology has come a long way in the past 20 years or so. One of the key things is that there's a lot of commercial technology out there that people can use off the shelf. You can put on whatever homemade weapons, or whatever you want. We saw ISIS doing that as well. And then you get into some of the bigger state actors that have a little bit more, maybe deeper pockets or something they can design, something that's a little bit harder to detect from an RF perspective, because they have to be controlled in some way. There's a trend right now for autonomous drones, which are essentially suicide drones that aren't controlled. You just tell them to go to point X and then they go. So keeping tabs on that, it's part of the big ISR enterprise, the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance enterprise, that kind of keeps a tab on where everybody's at to build intel. 

And that can be very, very tricky to do based on the sheer amount of drones that there are out there and the number of things you have to keep an eye on from a defense point of view. If you're on the ground or whatever it is, you're always on alert waiting for a drone attack or whatnot. And that can create a lot of fatigue, which causes you to be a little bit complacent, and then you can get attacked as well by not looking out all the time for them. From a technical perspective, they're tricky to track based on their speed. Modern radars generally use the Doppler effect to be able to track stuff, and then you can get into what's called the Doppler notch, which is a really slow speed point where the radar will start to filter out things, or you can track them via heat, or just the fact that if you're using a camera or something like that, you can see them for a long ways, it's kind of optical. But due to their small size, kind of low heat signature, as well as their slow speed, they present a little bit… They're not impossible to deal with, but they're definitely tricky. 

Aaron Stein: One of the things that came to my mind is that against this backdrop there has been, and I think that this came out in testimony in front of Congress, so it's completely out there and open source, is against the backdrop of this attack the Russians have also been overflying U.S. positions in Syria, and also being a little bit more aggressive in how they fly. Do you have any thoughts on that in terms of how this could make life more complicated in terms of what you're looking out for as you theoretically fly around? 

Ryan Fishel: From a pilot perspective, and granted it's been a little bit of time since I've been out there, but your use of force is really dictated by the rules of engagement. You're not officially at war with Russia and you're not officially at war with Iran, so from that perspective, you just can't start shooting people out there. And then you really have to judge whether or not they present kind of a clear and present danger to U.S. positions in real-time, which is very difficult to do, so they kind of exploit the gray area there and that's just kind of how the conflict is right now. That puts a lot of onus on the pilot or the air defense system operator to be able to react without a loss to U.S. life as well as mitigating a threat in preemptive action without escalating things on a political level. It is a very tricky problem to solve and it's a lot easier to do at, as we say, zero knots and zero Gs when we're on the ground thinking about it, versus when we're in the air and it's actually happening and you're trying to interpret somebody's actions. Maybe they made a mistake or maybe you don't have all the information about an agreement that was signed that allowed them to fly over X position or whatever it was. 

Aaron Stein: So because this is a Friday afternoon, I guess we'll start to pivot to the wrap-up here, but one thing I'm curious about is with the drone attack, and with previous types of drone attacks, albeit ones that didn't result in any loss of life, in this case for a U.S. contractor, what do you think it says about the future and even how we use terms like air superiority in the Air Force, even the analytical community that does this for a living? 

Ryan Fishel: That's a great question. I think back in 2021 or 2022, I can't remember exactly, but there's some questions raised specifically about UAVs and what they may mean for maintaining air superiority. From the air operations side your goal, goal number one, is to maintain air superiority so that troops on the ground can conduct a ground mission without a persistent… they aren't inhibited, basically, in whatever it is that they're doing. So from that perspective, these menacing drones etc. are causing us to kind of question whether or how we're going to be able to maintain air superiority going out there. If you look at history, I think 1953 was the last time that the U.S. didn't have air superiority and that we lost a U.S. troop to enemy aerial fire, so we've maintained that for a really long time. We take that for granted sometimes, and I think that a lot of ground force commanders, as well as commanders all around, take air superiority and what it takes to make that happen for granted, just because we've had it for so long. So as threats evolve and as we meet new challenges, we have to sort of evolve our conception of how we're going to be able to mitigate this, and it may not be necessarily the traditional way to handle establishing air superiority. And it's important really to kind of differentiate the terms, between air supremacy and air superiority, and what that means from a holistic perspective and a realistic perspective. 

Aaron Stein: Let me ask one last question as we wrap up here. As somebody in the Air Force, when you saw the news this morning, what was the first thing that popped in your mind when something that breathed air dropped on a U.S. position? 

Ryan Fishel: From a pilot, especially since I've done defensive counterair for a long time, I think most of us are pretty familiar with the challenges that a lot of aircrew face as far as making decisions, whether or not to use force, who to use force against, etc. I was not super excited, I would say, to see that news. I was pretty saddened by it. I mean, our goal is to try to maintain air superiority and not let anything happen to the ground element from an enemy aerial attack. Granted that this was… Iran is a known harasser, and I'm not a hundred percent sure if it was Iran per se, or if it was a militia aligned with Iran, or who knows? I haven't really read into the reports on that, so I'm not trying to assign blame exactly, but a hostile drone, from that perspective, it definitely saddens me that we weren't able to take care of it. However, that's a team effort. Some of it rests on the shoulders of short-range air defenses that are embedded with bases, as well as the air players that are a little bit more concerned with some of the Group 5 UAVs that are the size of Predators etc., as well as air-breathing threats such as Su-24s or whatnot. However, some of the smaller drones, some of the guys are definitely concerned about. 

Aaron Stein:

We're gonna leave it there, Ryan. I have hundreds of other questions, but it is Friday, so thanks for joining the Warcast. 

Just a quick note before we head to the outro music. Everything discussed here is just two guys talking, and in no way represents the U.S. Air Force or Department of Defense. Thanks again for listening.