Base Defense: Evolving Threats Require New Approaches to Defending Installations.

• Author: Carberry, Sean

AURORA, Colorado -- On March 23, a suspected Iranian-made suicide drone struck a U.S. compound in northeast Syria, killing a contractor and wounding five troops and another contractor, according to the Defense Department.

The attack was just the latest example of the threats that state and non-state actors pose to overseas U.S. installations today.

Gone are the days of the danger being unsophisticated ballistic missiles that come from one general direction that can be tracked and defended with a platform like the Patriot missile defense system, said Lt. Gen. Alex Grynkewich, commander of Air Forces Central Command, during an interview at the Air & Space Forces Association's Warfare Symposium.

In January 2020, Grynkewich was deputy commander for operations of the Combined-Joint Task Force--Operation Inherent Resolve when Iran launched a missile strike against the Al Asad Air Base north of Baghdad. More than 100 service members suffered traumatic brain injuries in the attack.

"No doubt in my mind, the precision and lethality of those ballistic missiles was way better than what we experienced a couple of decades before, say back in Desert Storm or even in 2003 and the invasion of Iraq," he said.

Along with developing more precise ballistic missiles, adversaries like Iran are producing inexpensive cruise missiles with increased range and explosive capability and proliferating them around the Middle East, he said.

"So, it can come from different directions," he added. "And then [unmanned aircraft systems] --those highly adaptable platforms--you don't know when you see them necessarily, whether it's doing ISR against you, whether it's packed with explosives, whether it's going to drop a payload." Drones fly low and slowly and are difficult to detect and attack, he added.

Enemy tactics, techniques and procedures have evolved, so they are attacking from every angle at once, he said. "And they are complex attacks, where it's not just a UAV attack, but it's ballistic missiles with UAVs that are launched a couple hours earlier. So, they're impacting at the same time.

"And now you've got to decide, am I going to pick up the missiles coming at me, am I going to try to find the UAVs, where are the cruise missiles coming from?" he continued. "So, they're able to layer the attack against you as well."

That has forced the service to reevaluate its tactics, techniques and procedures "and think about how we're executing command and control across all the...