Countering Fibre Optic Un-Crewed Aerial Systems Through Optical Tether Detection and Directed Energy Defeat PFWL-DE is a novel electro-optical counter-UAS system designed from first principles to address the specific and critical capability gap created by fibre optic-controlled un-crewed aerial systems. These platforms are inherently immune to all radio frequency-based detection and countermeasure techniques because their command and control link is carried by a physical optical fibre rather than a radio frequency transmission. Jamming, direction finding, GPS spoofing, and all conventional electronic warfare approaches are structurally ineffective against this class of threat. PFWL-DE defeats this immunity by targeting the fibre tether directly. The adversary's primary tactical advantage — the physical isolation of the control link from the electromagnetic spectrum — becomes their primary vulnerability. The tether, being a physical object with invariant optical and material properties, cannot be made electromagnetically silent, cannot be camouflaged against a coherent optical sensor designed specifically to detect its Mie scattering signature, and cannot survive a focused kilowatt-class laser beam held on it for less than one second. Core proposition: The fibre tether is simultaneously the adversary's greatest strength and their greatest vulnerability. PFWL-DE is designed to exploit both facts in sequence: detect the tether using its optical scattering signature, characterize it using distributed reflectometry, and destroy it using directed energy through the same aperture. jason crowe mosaic systems architecture jason.crowe@alumni.com
Jason Crowe (Tue,) studied this question.