US Army Tests AI-Enabled 3D-Printed Counter-Drone System in South Korea
The US Army's 532nd Military Intelligence Battalion has spent eight months testing a low-cost, 3D-printed system for detecting drones in South Korea. By September it reached over 90% confidence against low-altitude threats.
The US Army's 532nd Military Intelligence Battalion, known as "Black Horse" and part of the 501st Military Intelligence Brigade, has spent the past eight months in South Korea identifying and testing capabilities for counter-uncrewed aircraft systems (C-UAS) operations, meaning defence against drones. The result is a low-cost system that the unit now wants to move into larger-scale production and a formal Army programme.
Project MANOWAR
The battalion worked with the US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory, the 2nd Infantry Division, industry partners and Republic of Korea Army forces to carry out Project MANOWAR. It consisted of a series of two-week field experiments at Camp Humphreys, about 40 miles south of Seoul, and at Baegiri Airfield, home of the Republic of Korea Army Drone Academy.
MANOWAR stands for Mobile Acoustic Network for Operational Warning and Aerial Reconnaissance. It is a low-cost, attritable system built to detect, classify and locate low-signature small unmanned aircraft, including lethal first-person-view (FPV) drones.
How the system works
The system is designed to fit within an integrated, layered air defence. It has a 3D-printed chassis and a custom machine-learning algorithm developed in-house by military intelligence soldiers together with scientists from the Army Research Laboratory's Mechanical Sensing Branch. The US Army describes it as a "self-healing mesh network" in which individual sensors act as relay stations powered by standard military batteries.
Results
At Baegiri Airfield, the system's confidence rating against low-altitude threats rose significantly between the May and September events, thanks to improved detection. In a press release the Army linked this to "Super Intelligence", the US government's new term for artificial intelligence. By September the system had validated high-fidelity classification and localisation, achieving more than 90% window-level confidence against low-altitude threats.
The 532nd battalion is now working to transition the successful experiment to scaled production and a formal Army programme of record.
