Two years ago a cheap quadcopter over a military base was a curiosity; today it is a planning assumption. Ukraine and the strikes across the Middle East have compressed a decade of doctrine into eighteen months, and the lesson is uncomfortable for anyone who bought air defence in the missile era: the cheapest thing in the sky is now the hardest thing to stop.
Two recent Defence Connect pieces capture Australia's two-part answer: an interview with Ben Westgarth, CEO of the Canberra-based electronic-warfare firm Department 13, on layered sensing, and a conversation with Lee Kormany of EOS Defence Systems on making the shot cheap. Each alone is half a strategy.
The threat stopped being tactical
Westgarth argues drones have moved from tactical nuisance to strategic weapon: they disrupt operations, hold critical infrastructure at risk, and routinely defeat air-defence systems never designed for them. Australia's 2026 National Defence Strategy and Integrated Investment Program reflect that shift, leaning into autonomous systems, electronic warfare, and integrated air and missile defence.
The hard part, he says, isn't buying drones but building the machinery to detect, track, and defeat them, which one more piece of hardware won't solve.
LAND 156 and the "system of systems"
LAND 156, the ADF's counter-small-UAS program that Department 13 contributes to, is built on that idea. Westgarth says its value isn't a silver-bullet effector (a laser, a jammer, a missile) but the architecture that ties sensors and shooters together. Department 13's role is radio-frequency detection: identifying and tracking drones, including encrypted ones, and handing that picture to the rest of the network.
The threat is diverse: commercial quadcopters flying ISR, long-range one-way attack drones, GPS- and AI-guided autonomous platforms, and fibre- or cable-connected drones with no radio link at all. No one sensor sees it all and no one effector defeats it all, so the answer is many sensing methods feeding a common picture, with many response options behind it.
The cost curve that breaks everything
Westgarth's most important point is about money: "The offensive capability of a drone is still far greater than the defensive equivalent."
Mass-produced Mavic-class drones and Iranian-designed Shahed attack drones cost from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars. The interceptors fired at them can cost millions; Westgarth notes US forces using multi-million-dollar missiles against targets two orders of magnitude cheaper. And the drones roll off a production line while the missiles carry long, complex lead times.
Detection is cheap; the expensive kinetic layer should be the last resort. Everything upstream (sensing, classification, early warning, cueing a low-cost or non-kinetic effector) exists to keep you from spending a million dollars on a thousand-dollar problem.
Australia's other half: make the shots cheap
Australia is also funding the other end of the chain. In July 2026 the federal government put $5.7 million behind EOS Defence Systems to develop the R400 SLINGER counter-UAS capability, under the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator's Mission Syracuse. EOS re-engineered an existing R400 remote weapon station into a drone-killer instead of running a decade-long clean-sheet program.
The bigger thread is directed energy. Lee Kormany, executive vice president of EOS Defence Systems Australia, sees high-energy lasers as increasingly central, for an arithmetic reason: a missile costs millions, a gun round dollars, a laser shot pennies of electricity. Against a swarm of $1,000 airframes, cost-per-engagement is the whole war, and directed energy is the first effector class that flips the exchange ratio back toward the defender.
You can't out-iterate a software product
Traditional platforms take decades to field; drones take a weekend. In Westgarth's words, a minor change can produce a major capability jump for almost no effort. Chasing specific models or vulnerabilities is a treadmill, the "cat-and-mouse game" his team decided early on was futile.
Their alternative is to target what every drone must do: sense its environment and depend on some enabling technology. Counter-systems built against those invariants stay relevant as airframes churn.
The blind spot layering is supposed to cover
Taken to its honest conclusion, the layered argument names the limit of an RF-first strategy. RF is a superb first layer: passive, long-range, and it identifies the operator as well as the aircraft. But the same interview lists two threat classes that emit little or no RF: fully autonomous drones navigating by GPS or onboard AI image recognition, and fibre-optic or cable-connected drones with no radio link. Ukraine is now fielding both at scale precisely because they defeat RF-based defences.
An RF sensor cannot see a target that doesn't transmit, which is the reason the doctrine is layered. Passive electro-optical and thermal (EO/IR) detection does not depend on the drone emitting a signal: it sees the aircraft by its own heat and form, on a control link or silent on autopilot. Radar and acoustic add further independent layers.
None of these, thermal included, is complete. Weather, range and resolution all constrain thermal, which is why it belongs in a layer rather than sold as a standalone answer. Resilience comes from overlapping, independent detection modalities whose blind spots don't line up. RF misses the silent drone; the thermal camera sees it. The thermal camera struggles in fog; radar carries the track.
Shooters are only as good as their cues
Australia is buying the defeat layer (SLINGER, lasers, effectors that can finally trade favourably against a cheap drone), but an effector cannot engage what it was never told about. A high-energy laser needs a precise, continuously updated bearing, elevation and range to hold a moving aimpoint long enough to burn it; a remote weapon station needs a track to slew onto. Every one of those numbers comes from the sensing layer.
So the blind spot matters more as effectors get better. A directed-energy weapon cued only by RF inherits RF's blindness: autonomous and fibre-optic drones walk through its field of regard because nothing handed it a track.
Beyond the battlefield
As Westgarth says, the problem isn't confined to the front line. Grids, ports, industrial sites, government facilities and resource projects face the same cheap aircraft, and need early warning, rehearsed procedures and hardened physical security together. For Australia, "critical infrastructure protection" and "counter-UAS" are converging into one discipline, and the rest of the world is close behind.
Australia's real advantage
The interview closes on a correct note: Australia's geography is a strategic asset. Its vast, sparsely populated space is an open-air range for testing drones and counter-systems at scale, from dense city to open desert to long coastline, and capability proven there travels well.
The takeaway
Everyone can now build drones fast and cheap; the race is to build the systems that defeat them. That makes counter-UAS an integration problem, not a shopping list: layered sensing where each modality covers another's blind spot, a common operating picture, and graduated responses that keep the expensive kinetic option for last.
Australia's LAND 156 and Mission Syracuse are serious steps toward that model, one buying the picture, the other an affordable shot. The lesson for everyone else: stop asking which sensor wins the drone war. None of them do. The architecture does.
Passive thermal is the layer we build: the one that still sees the drone when it stops transmitting. See it running on real hardware, with real detections: goteam.co.il/management.html
— Baruch
Sources: Robert Dougherty, “Winning the drone war: Australia's counter-UAS future revolves around layered defence strategy,” Defence Connect — Autonomous & Uncrewed 2026, interview with Ben Westgarth, CEO, Department 13. · “SPOTLIGHT: Counter-drone innovation, directed energy and delivering operational outcomes, with EOS Defence Systems' Lee Kormany,” Defence Connect Spotlight podcast, 14 July 2026 (host Robert Dougherty). Note: this is independent commentary by GOTEAM. We are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Defence Connect, Department 13, or EOS Defence Systems, and the analysis of RF's limits is our own reading of the public material — not a statement by any party quoted.
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