Inside the Utah companies at the forefront of drone warfare tech

SALT LAKE CITY — Drones are revolutionizing combat zones from within Ukraine and Russia to the Middle East, but somewhere far from those places — in the state of Utah — some of the latest drone warfare technology is being developed.

State-of-the-art drones with offensive and defensive capabilities are being designed, tested and manufactured in places like Lindon and Bluffdale, and recently KSL got an inside look at Fortem Technologies and Vector, two Utah companies that are at the forefront.

Fortem Technologies

Fortem Technologies produces the DroneHunter F700, which uses advanced radar technology and artificial intelligence to identify and neutralize incoming drone threats.

"When it launches, it's told by a ground-cueing sensor that the target's out somewhere," Fortem founder and chief technology officer Adam Robertson explained during a recent demonstration at a test range in Eagle Mountain. "It locks onto that target and pursues it — even if it's evasive, moves, tries to get away — chases it down, and when it gets just the right distance again using the onboard radar, it knows exact distance, relative velocities, runs a mathematical formula, shoots a net at it."

Robertson said the 3-meter-by-3-meter net captures the drone and entangles all the propellers.

"(The netted offensive drone) falls from the sky," Robertson said. "We have a tether that holds it, now connected to the DroneHunter. The DroneHunter flies it back to a safe location, lowers it down to deposit it, lets it go, and then lands itself."

The DroneHunter is something Robertson didn't initially envision when he started up the company to create radar systems for drone delivery.

"Radar onboard that small aircraft would ensure you don't hit anything else in the airspace," Robertson told KSL. "That was the idea."

When the company applied for an Air Force research grant, its technology drew the attention of the military.

"Rather than detect and avoid hitting aircraft, they wanted to know if I could use my radar systems to detect and pursue and capture, and we got a grant from the U.S. government right off the bat," Robertson said.

Eventually, the company turned to drones equipped with compact, high-performance radar systems.

"That took us into quickly, 'Can we detect it, can we track it, can we pursue it, can we capture it. We needed something higher-performance, more athletic, more aggressive,'" Robertson said. "In a short period of time, we found ourselves not only doing the radar systems but doing the entire drone and, more importantly, the drone autonomy system—the autonomy stack."

Robertson said the DroneHunter technology was deployed as a security measure recently by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security around FIFA World Cup sites.

The company, he said, supplies the U.S. military, as well as allies overseas with DroneHunter and radar systems.

The technology offers a safer solution to intercepting drone threats than other options, according to Robertson.

"You don't want to shoot a gun, you don't want to shoot a missile — you don't want it to fall out of the sky," Robertson said. "The DroneHunter serves this really interesting purpose of physically capturing it, taking it out of the sky. Nothing falls down. No one is hurt."

Vector

Vector, meanwhile, is a 2024 startup headquartered in Bluffdale and co-founded by Andy Yakulis, Matt Long, George Matus and Larsen Jensen, and was recognized this week as a "top-performing competitor" in the U.S. Department of War's Drone Dominance Program.

Yakulis billed Vector as a "modern warfare-as-a-service" company.

"We do a lot of tactical and technical training with our users, the Department of War," said Yakulis, who served in the U.S. Army for roughly 18 years as a helicopter pilot and in special operations forces. "We are also, as you can see, a full-scale manufacturer of drones. We're working on ensuring we have this very innovative model where we're constantly updating the drone, updating our training, and integrating both the tactical application of our technology and the technology as well."

According to Yakulis, just under half of the company's employees are former military personnel.

He said the company hires drone racers to test its Hammer and Dagger "attritable" drones before they ship.

"Drones are being used in this fashion that we call 'attritable,'" Yakulis explained. "Attritable technology is this concept that the Department of War now uses for consumable technology where you have this very, very unique capability at a very cost-effective price point."

The state of drone Warfare

Yakulis said the role of drones on the front lines has changed over the years.

"Drones have been used on the battlefield for decades now, but the way that drones are being used almost like a munition, a one-way attack munition — that's very new," Yakulis said.

Drone strategies utilizing expendable drones armed with explosives have been commonly witnessed in Ukraine and Russia have proliferated around the world, he said.

"That really creates this cat-and-mouse game where you see this rapid innovation happen as a new piece of technology is introduced on the battlefield and then the adversary tries to counteract that technology," Yakulis said. "That's created this incredible innovation that has happened in unmanned systems, which is then being copied by countries all over the world to increase their capability for their military, and the American military is no different."

Yakulis said drones have the potential to save the lives of the soldiers they serve alongside.

"If you can have a robot do the work of a human and that robot is destroyed, that's one more human life that you're saving on the good guy side," Yakulis said.

He acknowledged offensive drone technology has helped to level the playing field for otherwise outmatched forces, which is a departure from the past and something referred to as the "democratization of warfare."

"You had the United States and the U.S.S.R. building very exquisite, very high-end systems — GPS, stealth bombers, aircraft carriers, jet fighters, things like that," Yakulis said. "Now, what we've seen with this revolution of military affairs is where the price points of the systems have gone down for the capability or the effectiveness that they have. Almost any country or non-state actor can build a drone, slap a bomb to it, and have that outsized impact."

Where drone warfare technology is headed

Increasingly, Yakulis said drones on the battlefield are becoming swarms of drones, augmented by artificial intelligence.

"We do see elements of swarm technology or elements of fully autonomous capability," Yakulis said. "Think about an algorithm that is looking for a very specific shape of a tank in a very specific location. You can send a drone out with a human out of the loop, so to speak, into that geographic location, looking for, recognizing the image of what that tank should be, and then telling it, if you see that in that location, strike that tank. Those are some very basic elements of autonomy that are already on the battlefield in Eastern Europe right now and being worked on all over the world."

The Vector co-founder said drone warfare tech will only develop from there.

"The technology is going to this concept of full autonomy," Yakulis said. "A lot of people talk about swarm right now. Swarm is this concept of AI or autonomy controlling multiple groups of drones. If you look at where drones started, where it would take many people to operate one large drone — these are like the Predator or Reaper drones that you may have heard of in the Global War on Terror. Where we are today is now you have kind of like one operator operating one drone, so we've gone from many operators operating one drone to one operator operating one drone. Where we need to go in the future and we're getting very close is one operator operating many drones."

Yakulis said that ultimately is where the ideas of "attritable mass" and winning on volume are realized.

"You have one service member, one soldier, operating or, really, orchestrating a group of drones and that group of drones could be anywhere from 10 to 100 to, in the future, maybe thousands, and that's where it gets very interesting but also very scary," Yakulis said.

Yakulis said he believes the success of drones on the battlefield means a future with humanoid robot soldiers — similar to those depicted in the "Terminator" movie franchise — is less likely.

"Why does it need to be a humanoid robot that costs millions of dollars with a rifle," Yakulis said. "If the capability is you want to go in, look behind a corner and if you see a bad guy you need to be able to take him out, all you really need is a small, flying drone that isn't going to knock into the walls and has a munition on the bottom to have that capability you need."

The future of drone defense

At Fortem Technologies, Robertson said his company also foresees a future involving drone swarms fueled by artificial intelligence.

"We see a future where there's not just a one-on-one, but a one-on-many," Robertson said. "The DroneHunter has up to four net guns on it already, so we can, with a single DroneHunter, take out up to four drones. We've demonstrated recently, just earlier this year at this very site, five DroneHunters dealing with five threats simultaneously where the machine learning technology — this AI that we applied to it — allowed the DroneHunters to automatically be assigned to various targets, fly deconflicted so they didn't hit each other, coordinate on which DroneHunter took out which threat, defeat them all simultaneously and land without the need for human intervention."

Robertson also said drones have revolutionized how war is conducted, and that only underscores the importance of drone defense at home in the future.

"We have to be prepared to defend against that," Robertson said. "With that fundamental change, I see drone protection as more fundamental across the world. We need to protect all of our critical assets, whether that's a dam, a power station, a capital building, a data center—all of these need protection from drone threats, and it could be a single, lone wolf actor that could do it."

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