Counter-UAS: what organisations should understand about drone risk

Counter-UAS is a subject where the available material is mostly unhelpful. Vendors describe capabilities without context, and serious operational material is not published for good reason. What is missing is the thing most organizations actually need: a way to work out whether this applies to them, and what they are lawfully allowed to do if it does.

Start with whether it applies

Uncrewed aircraft are now ordinary. Most flights near any given site are hobbyists, surveyors, film crews, agricultural operators or delivery trials, and treating all of them as a threat produces expensive attention on a non-problem.

Three questions separate a real concern from an imagined one.

• Does your site hold something whose value increases if it can be observed from above, layout, stock, movement patterns, security posture, or people whose presence is sensitive?
• Is there a safety case? Aircraft operations, high voltage, flare stacks and cranes create hazards where an uncrewed aircraft is a risk to the drone operator and to the site regardless of intent
• Has anything actually happened? Repeated, purposeful activity at unusual hours is a different signal from a single sighting during daylight

If the honest answers are no, no and no, the correct response is to record sightings and move on. Organizations that skip this step buy capability against a threat they never had.

What detection can and cannot tell you

Detection is the part of this subject that is legitimate for most organizations to consider, and it is worth being clear about what it delivers.

It can establish that something is present, roughly where, and (depending on approach) whether the activity is repeating. That converts an anecdote into a record, and a record is what turns a security concern into something that can be reported, escalated and acted on by people with the authority to act.

It cannot tell you intent. A detection is not evidence of hostility, and treating it as such leads organizations to escalate against a survey crew doing exactly what they were contracted to do. Nor is it reliable in the way buyers expect: environment, terrain and local radio conditions affect performance substantially, so any claim about range should be treated as a laboratory figure until it has been demonstrated on the site in question.

The legal position is the constraint, not the technology

This is where most organizational thinking goes wrong. The question is not what can be done about a drone. It is what an organisation is permitted to do, and in almost every jurisdiction the answer is narrow.

Interfering with an aircraft in flight, and interfering with radio transmissions, are regulated activities. In Kenya, radio spectrum is regulated by the Communications Authority and civil aviation by the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority, and the powers to intervene against an aircraft sit with the state rather than with a site operator. The position is comparable across the region.

The practical consequence: for a commercial organisation, the lawful response set is observation, recording, reporting and physical site measures. Anything beyond that is a matter for the relevant authority, and an organisation that acts unilaterally can find itself the party in breach.

What a proportionate response looks like

For most sites the answer is not a system. It is a procedure.

• A sighting log that records time, location, direction, duration and behaviour, kept consistently, because the pattern is the intelligence, not the individual sighting
• A named person who reviews the log rather than a folder nobody opens
• A reporting route to the relevant authority, established before it is needed rather than researched during an incident
• Physical measures that reduce what can be observed: screening, positioning, and moving sensitive activity out of overhead view where that is practical
• Instructions for staff on what to do and, importantly, what not to do

The last point deserves attention. The most likely bad outcome at a commercial site is not a drone doing harm. It is a member of staff attempting to bring one down, injuring someone, and creating both a safety incident and a legal exposure that would not otherwise have existed.

Why the log dies, and how to keep it alive

Sighting logs are easy to start and almost always abandoned, for an understandable reason: nothing happens. Staff record sightings for a month, nobody responds, and they reasonably conclude it does not matter.

The fix is feedback rather than discipline. If the person who reviews the log tells the gate team what came of their entries (that the recurring Tuesday flights turned out to be a survey contract, that a pattern was reported and is being looked at) the log stays alive. If reviewing produces silence, it stops within two months and the organisation loses the only dataset that would have shown a pattern.

Set the review cadence at something achievable and keep it. Monthly is enough for most sites. Weekly is better where there is a live concern and worse where there is not, because a cadence nobody sustains is worse than a slower one that survives.

Ask before you escalate

Most drone activity near a commercial site has a mundane explanation that is available by asking. A neighbouring development is being surveyed. A media crew has permission from someone. An agricultural operator is working a field two kilometres away and the flight path passes overhead.

Two relationships make that inquiry possible, and both are easier to build before an incident than during one. Neighbouring operators and landowners, who usually know what is being flown nearby and by whom. And the relevant authority, so that when something does need reporting the route already exists and the first conversation is not an introduction.

Organizations that build those relationships resolve most sightings without escalation. Organizations that do not escalate everything, which is expensive in credibility and eventually gets ignored.

When it becomes a genuine specification

Some environments do warrant detection capability: aviation facilities, certain government and diplomatic premises, some energy infrastructure, and sites with a demonstrated pattern of purposeful activity. Where that is the case, the work starts with a risk assessment and a conversation with the relevant authorities, not with a product.

Sequence matters here more than usual. An organisation that procures first and consults afterwards frequently finds it has bought something it cannot lawfully operate as intended, and the money is already spent.

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