Tomorrow’s counter-drone systems will need to fire without human approval, Pentagon’s joint missile defense commander says. “The ability to accurately discriminate the threat, positively ID the threat, and then have the system auto-select the right interceptor or non-kinetic capability to defeat the threat is where we would definitely like to go,” Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey, the head of U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command and Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense, said Tuesday at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “We will push the boundaries on that, because we have to.”

Drone swarms are getting too large and too smart to be stopped by systems that rely on human command-and-control, Gainey said, noting Russia’s use of autonomous drones to target civ

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