Crowd-sourcing sUAS intelligence using smartphone apps – a new tool for Special Operations

Smartphone apps like Ukraine’s ePPO, which citizens use to report UAS activity, can fill gaps in traditional air defenses. Use of these apps can also be extended to non-state actors such as cartels, who increasingly use UAS to control populations and territory, or beyond the air domain in resistance operations against repressive regimes.

In these contexts, smartphone apps are a valuable tool that can be provided by Special Operations Forces (SOF) to civilian populations and guerrilla forces in order to better “arm” to take action, as well as to acquire data for kinetic and non-kinetic SOF responses.

However, to be effective in these wider contexts, design and deployment of apps must address considerations including technical collection capability, legal status of citizen reporters, verification and reliability of data, and segmentation and security.

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