By the time a system needs armor, it may already be strategically obsolete.
(PRUnderground) January 13th, 2026
Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have become indispensable across defence, security, and critical infrastructure. From reconnaissance and logistics to inspection and emergency response, drones now operate where humans cannot. Yet as their utility has grown, so too has the sophistication of the threats designed to neutralize them—particularly electronic warfare, jamming, and spoofing.
At recent global defence forums, including DSEI in London, the message was clear: the drone battlefield is no longer defined by airframes or sensors alone, but by the electromagnetic spectrum. The industry’s response has been swift and technically impressive. It has also been expensive, complex, and—arguably—strategically constrained.
The question facing decision-makers today is no longer how to harden drones against jamming, but whether incremental hardening is still the right strategy at all.
The Current Playbook: Layered Resilience at Rising Cost
Modern anti-jamming and resilience strategies rely on stacking technologies, each designed to address a specific vulnerability.
Controlled Reception Pattern Antennas (CRPA) electronically steer antenna nulls toward interference sources, preserving satellite navigation signals. Frequency hopping rapidly switches communication channels to evade narrowband jammers. Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) provide short-term positioning when GPS is denied. Sensor fusion blends vision, LiDAR, radar, and GNSS to maintain situational awareness. Advanced signal processing attempts to detect and cancel interference in real time. Multi-constellation GNSS adds redundancy by leveraging multiple satellite systems. And in the most contested environments, fiber-optic tethered drones bypass RF entirely by physically connecting the aircraft to the ground.
Each of these approaches works—within limits. And each carries a cost.
CRPA systems alone can add tens of thousands of dollars per platform, along with size, weight, and power penalties that make them impractical for smaller drones. Military-grade INS units can reach six-figure prices, yet still suffer from drift over time. Sensor fusion increases robustness, but at the expense of processing load, endurance, and operational fragility in poor visibility or cluttered environments. Frequency hopping and signal processing demand continuous software updates as adversaries adapt. Fiber-optic tethers deliver near-perfect immunity to jamming, but only by sacrificing range, mobility, and the very freedom of movement that makes drones valuable.
The result is a familiar pattern: resilience increases non-linearly, while scalability collapses.
The Economic Tension: Attrition vs. Capital Assets
This escalation creates a fundamental economic conflict. Modern doctrines increasingly assume that drones are attrition-tolerant systems—numerous, distributed, and replaceable. Yet the more resilience layers are added, the more each platform resembles a protected capital asset rather than an expendable node.
At DSEI, many showcased systems were technically sophisticated, but implicitly designed for low-loss environments or limited fleet sizes. That is a mismatch with the realities of contested operations, where loss is expected and resilience must emerge from the system as a whole—not from any single, hardened platform.
In other words, the industry is spending more to protect individual drones, even as strategy demands architectures that can afford to lose them.
Regulatory and Operational Constraints
Beyond cost and complexity, there are legal and operational limits. In many jurisdictions, active RF mitigation—such as jamming—is tightly regulated or restricted to specific authorities. Civil operators, municipalities, and infrastructure owners are often left with detection and documentation, but limited response authority.
Meanwhile, the data generated by multi-sensor detection systems introduces its own burden: false positives, operator fatigue, training requirements, and integration challenges with existing command-and-control infrastructure.
The harder systems become to operate, the narrower their practical utility grows.
A Deeper Issue: Defending the Assumption
What links these challenges is a shared design assumption: that drones must remain continuously connected through contested channels—RF links, GPS signals, or physical tethers—to function.
History suggests that such moments often precede an architectural shift. In computing, centralized mainframes gave way to distributed networks. In cybersecurity, perimeter defenses evolved into zero-trust models. In warfare, heavily armored formations yielded to maneuver and dispersion.
In each case, escalating defensive complexity was not solved by more armor, but by changing the system’s underlying assumptions.
Rethinking Resilience: From Platforms to Networks
An alternative approach—still emerging, but increasingly discussed in defence innovation circles—focuses less on hardening individual platforms and more on redistributing intelligence and sensing.
Instead of protecting a single drone at all costs, this model emphasizes:
- Ultra-low-power or battery-free sensing
- Minimal reliance on persistent RF or GPS
- Intelligence embedded at the edge rather than centralized
- Graceful degradation rather than catastrophic failure
- Economics that favor density and redundancy over protection
One example of this architectural direction is the Smart Dust patch concept developed by EPIC Semiconductors, which reframes sensing as a distributed, network-level property rather than a platform-level feature. Rather than asking how to keep a drone connected under jamming, the approach asks whether continuous connectivity is required at all.
The significance is not the form factor, but the philosophy: resilience through invisibility, distribution, and independence—not through escalation.
The Strategic Inflection Point
The technologies showcased at DSEI and elsewhere demonstrate remarkable engineering progress. But they also reveal strategic inertia. Each layer of protection reinforces a vulnerable dependency, driving higher costs and tighter constraints.
As electronic warfare becomes ubiquitous rather than exceptional, the winning systems are likely to be those that operate comfortably in silence, that expect disruption rather than fight it, and that scale economically in the face of loss.
For investors, defence planners, and technology leaders alike, the critical question is shifting:
Are we building better shields—or building systems that no longer need them?
About EPIC Semiconductors
EPIC Semiconductors is a Canadian-based technology company pioneering a new category of energy-autonomous semiconductors purpose-built for mission-critical defense applications. Its Smart Dust platform integrates sensing, AI, energy harvesting, and secure communication — all without batteries, antennas, or RF transmission. Engineered for performance in metal-dense, underwater, and high-interference environments, EPIC’s technology enables real-time tracking, monitoring, and decision support where conventional systems fail. EPIC’s solutions are designed to strengthen situational awareness, operational readiness, and resilience across a wide range of defense and security scenarios.
For more information or media inquiries, contact:
info@epic-semiconductors.com
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Original Press Release.
