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Jared Giesbrecht: I really feel like we’re at one of those inflection points where warfare is changing a lot. You have to have a higher level of technological savvy to be able to operate in this new battlefield.

Captain Adam Orton: Hi, I’m Captain Adam Orton with the Canadian Army Podcast. The future is now, and crazy new technologies and creative ways of using everyday items are making their way out of the battlefield. Drones that were used to record skateboarding videos are used for dropping grenades into tanks now. Defense Research and Development Canada or DRDC has been working on the problem and finding creative new ways for the Army to protect itself from drones. Joining me from Suffield is Jared Giesbrecht, a DRDC research scientist who has been coming up with ideas on how to do that. Welcome to the podcast.

Jared Giesbrecht: Hi there.

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Capt Orton: All right. So not a lot of people have heard of what DRDC is or what you do. So what's going on over there?

Jared Giesbrecht: Yeah, so I work for Defense Research and Development Canada, and we are a part of the Department of Defense. And we do research in a broad range of activities. You know, everything from weapon systems to protective measures—you know, the whole range of science and technology. But in general, our job is to give advice to the Canadian Forces to help them do their job better.

Capt Orton: Can you give an example?

Jared Giesbrecht: So in my particular example, I work on ways of detecting and stopping drones. So the Canadian Forces have identified that there’s, you know, a challenge or a technology gap in that area—that the world is changing and they need some scientific help with that. So my job is to learn as much as I can about the topic, and to come up with solutions for them. So yeah, in this case, it happens to be about drones. But yeah, we have a wide variety of scientists and technologists that are engineers and chemists and biologists and all sorts of different types of personnel that work for DRDC.

Capt Orton: Just the best of science.

Jared Giesbrecht: Maybe not in this case. But yes, generally it is the best of science.

Capt Orton: Speaking of drones, I think it’s been a common trope on TV for at least the past 10 or 20 years that you have a drone that’s probably looking at something that shouldn’t. We know that this kind of problem has been around for a long time. Why are we looking into countering drones now?

Jared Giesbrecht: I think what’s really changed is sort of the phrase I’ve heard is the democratization of drones. Meaning that drones used to be big and expensive and complicated to operate and hard to obtain. And that’s not the case at all anymore. They’re cheap; they’re easy to obtain, they’re easy to use; the capabilities just keep shrinking into smaller and smaller packages. And so what may have been the realm of you know, the expensive Western military to have drones. Now, everybody can have a drone, whether it’s a military or an insurgent group, or private citizens or any of those things, they’re just becoming ubiquitous. We’re going to find drones everywhere. So, as this increases, then the Canadian Forces need to, you know, have a handle on that problem, both at home and overseas.

Capt Orton: Aside from the obvious problem of maybe drones being used for observation, outside of the large predator style drones that are like bigger than a car or something like that, what are some of the problems spaces of drones in, let’s say, an Army combat environment?

Jared Giesbrecht: Yeah. So in terms of applications, yeah, definitely, just having a camera that can go everywhere, is still the main use, I mean, being able to, you know, spot what’s around the next corner in the urban environment, or maybe being able to find an adversary who’s hiding underneath the tree. But if you’re up in the sky, with an infrared camera, all of a sudden, you can find an adversary very easily—which is something that wasn’t a capability that they had before.

And so there’s a lot of different applications for drones in a military context. And you mentioned the obvious dropping grenades on people’s heads. I mean, that’s absolutely a capability. But it goes much beyond that, for example, correcting artillery fire. So you can imagine you’re trying to fire artillery rounds onto an enemy, and you don’t know if you’re hitting your target or not, but you now have an eye in the sky, that’s telling you: “Yeah, adjust your aim 200 metres to the south.” And that’s a really powerful tool.

So this capability, which used to only be for whoever had air superiority, is gone. So that age of air superiority is over, right? I mean, now we can assume that there’s going to be contested airspace wherever we’re operating. And that's for the full range of combat environments from, you know, low level peacekeeping missions up to full scale war, our adversaries can assume that there’s always eyes on them no matter where they are or what they’re doing. So, the real challenge with drones is what used to be big and complex is now small and simple. And so they’re quiet and they’re tiny. So they're hard to see. They’re hard to hear. They’re hard to spot with technology. And so this is a real challenge to to know where they are and what they’re doing.

Capt Orton: Most people when they think of a drone, they’ll think of a standard quadcopter or something like that. But I watched a video just the other day on YouTube and it was a surface motorboat drone that was used as basically a ship-based weapon. So there’s like a lot of different ways to use drones, I guess. What are some of the different types of drones that you’ve been looking at as part of this research?

Jared Giesbrecht: So, absolutely, you’re right; we would call them uncrewed systems, that basically—systems that had to have personnel on board in the past, don’t need to anymore. So there’s a whole realm of just about anything you can imagine. You know, submarines under the water, or like you mentioned, surface vehicles, or drones on land, what used to have to be vehicles with drivers on them, we don’t need that anymore. And then air vehicles. So my particular area of focus is on the air vehicles, because that’s where we're seeing the biggest change at this moment.

So you can imagine that the air environment in general is a little simpler to operate in. You know, if you’re trying to drive a car through a city, it can be complicated. Right? There’s obstacles, there’s pedestrians, there’s all sorts of things. But in the air, things are a little bit easier. And so that's where we've seen the first initial spread of uncrewed systems. So yeah, within the realm of uncrewed aerial vehicles, or uncrewed, aerial systems—UAS, that’s an acronym that's used a lot—or drones, for that matter, there’s different sizes. Like I talked about, there’s everything from, you know, the size of something that fits in your hand, up into the size of something that's as big as the biggest airplanes. And then, as you mentioned, there’s different types. So, quite often, when people think about drones, they think of a small plastic device with four propellers that hold it in the air. Those kinds of drones are very useful, because they’re manoeuvrable, you can hover in place, you can take off and land wherever you want. That’s not the only capability that you might like. So there are other types of drones that we would call fixed-wing drones. So a drone with the helicopter, we call that maybe a rotorcraft or rotary-wing drone or something like that. But then fixed wing drones are drones that kind of look like airplanes, but they might not be the size of airplanes. So, there’s small fixed-wing drones that might be as small as a few tens of centimetres across, but they still have wings, they still have a propeller, they still have all the things of a full size airplane, but they have it in a small package. So the advantages of fixed wing drones are you can fly a lot further for the same battery power. And it’s easier to fly at higher altitudes.

Capt Orton: Okay.

Jared Giesbrecht: Yeah, and then on top of that, we’ve spoken about drones that are battery powered, but they might be powered by a gasoline engine or something like that. There’s also drones that combine, you know, the form factor of an airplane with a helicopter so they can take off and land vertically, but they can also soar around and glide. So, yeah, there’s no limit really on the form factor or the type of what they might look like.

Capt Orton: Weird. I’m just trying to picture a helicopter-airplane in my mind. Other than like an Osprey or something like that, like…

Jared Giesbrecht: Yeah, well, some of them look like that. Some of them look exactly like the Osprey, but just shrunken down to a small, small package.

Capt Orton: Cool. So I guess the next most obvious question is, I mean, as an infantry guy, I’m like: smash? But how do you counter drones? Like, obviously, you can shoot at them? I’m guessing, but what are some of the tools available to protect against them?

Jared Giesbrecht: That’s everybody's first instinct, right? Is: “Let’s just take a gun and shoot them down.” And it is absolutely possible. It’s just effective at much shorter ranges than you think.

Capt Orton: Yeah.

Jared Giesbrecht: So we’re not able to shoot them down nearly as far as you think you could. Drones are mostly empty space. They’re, you know, a little bit of electronics and battery and some rotors and some motors. So they’re hard to hit. And they’re manoeuvrable—they move around a lot. They’re just not that easy to shoot down, even though they're trained rifle or, you know, a machine gun, that shooting out a lot of rounds a minute. It’s just that's not the best solution in general, especially if you're operating in a world where you're worried about collateral damage, and where all these spent rounds are going. Right? So, as I alluded to, the first step is really knowing that it’s there.

Capt Orton: Yeah, detection.

Jared Giesbrecht: Yeah, the detection piece is so huge. Because, if you don’t know it’s there, you’re not even going to attempt to shoot it down or even adapt your behaviour, because you’re not aware you’re being watched. So this is really the first line of defence that the technologies that we’re interested in, are how do we know that there’s a drone there, where it’s going, how fast it’s moving, how high it’s at. And these are challenging problems. So our traditional air defence technologies are geared towards things that are big and fast and made of metal. And they’re generally easy to detect either with a radar system or a camera, or something like that. So, with drones, there’s a big challenge that these traditional air defence systems just aren’t effective. And so that’s where we’re going is trying to investigate solutions to help detect and defeat where our previous technologies didn’t work.

Capt Orton: When I was talking about preparing for this, we’re talking about weapon systems that could shoot down drones. And if you’re an infantry soldier, you have a rifle. That’s what’s available to you, but my first thought was like, shotguns. Right? How do you shoot down small flying things when you’re hunting? It’s like shotguns, it seems like that would work. What are some limitations of that?

Jared Giesbrecht: Yeah, obviously it's just a range issue. Right? I mean, The optical systems on these tiny drones have just improved every year in terms of resolution, in terms of image stabilization, in terms of, you know, the focal length, the length of the zoom lens they’re able to pack onto a small drone. It just keeps growing and growing. So, to watch what you’re doing a drone doesn’t need to be 30 metres away from you, or whatever the range of a shotgun is.

Capt Orton: Right.

Jared Giesbrecht: They’re hundreds of metres or kilometres away. And so these sort of short range solutions are, you know, maybe effective in a small number of scenarios, but not a general purpose solution. And obviously, there’s not just the range issue, but there’s the altitude issue, right? That drones can fly really high.

Capt Orton: Yeah.

Jared Giesbrecht: And so yeah, that’s a double edged sword.

Capt Orton: So we talked a little bit about detection. We talked about shooting them. What other mechanisms do you have at your disposal to interfere with drone operations?

Jared Giesbrecht: I guess I can just walk you through what kind of systems that we throw at them. And, typically, there’s no silver bullet, there’s no magic drone detector, and there’s no magic drone defeater. So we tend to combine a whole bunch of stuff together to try to make a system that can cover off all of the challenges. So, typically, a counter drone system will have a radar. And usually it’s a radar that's been adapted from another purpose. So, we, you know, bounce radio waves off the drone, and they can detect drones at, you know, good distances—but they’re also great bird detectors. So we tend to pick up a lot of birds. And, you know, there’s a lot of clutter in an environment from a radar perspective. And if you’re looking for something small and plastic, versus something that's big and fast and metal, suddenly, you’re going to see a lot more stuff.

Capt Orton: Yeah.

Jared Giesbrecht: So with that, we usually pair camera systems with the radar. So we’ll have the radar do the initial detection, and then the camera will kind of zoom in on what it thinks might be a drone. And then you get a video feed that says: “Oh, yeah, that’s definitely a drone.”

Capt Orton: Right.

Jared Giesbrecht: And probably the biggest technique right now is using radiofrequency or radio signals to detect and stop drones. So the drone almost always is being controlled by a human operator. And they need to communicate with the drone; they need to control it, tell it where to go. They need to get the video back, what are they seeing? What’s the drone seeing? They want that signal back. And so that’s done with radio waves with RF. So in general, these signals are detectable. And your drone is up in the air. And it's broadcasting its signal everywhere. And so that's a great way to try to find the drone. And so there’s a lot of systems that are designed to do that automatically. So they will have sort of a library of known drone signals, and they’ll sort of recognize a radio signal and say: “Hey, I’ve seen this signal before—this looks like a drone signal; there’s a drone operating in the area.” And then they know. And then along with that radio frequency jamming is the obvious counterpart to that, that you’ll then use noise, radio noise to block that signal from getting back to the operator. So, you can imagine, if two people are trying to talk to each other in a crowded room, and you go up in between them and just start making a whole bunch of noise and talking louder than both of them, they can’t have a conversation.

Capt Orton: Right.

Jared Giesbrecht: And so that’s what we do with radio waves as well.

Capt Orton: Yeah. And also, you know, you talked at the very beginning about, you know, the entry barrier getting easier to get over. So, anybody can have a drone. It’s just when you start hitting semi autonomous or fully autonomous drones, that’s probably at the higher end of the cost spectrum. So, maybe a little bit of a lesser problem to your average infantry soldier on the field right now.

Jared Giesbrecht: Well, maybe, but the technology is changing. We really noticed in the last few years that something that is a university research project level of technology, within very few number of years, will suddenly be on commercial drones. The technology is just improving that quickly. And there’s a big market for drones. Right? So it’s a little like the automobile industry being able to drive technology, because there’s just so many cars on the road. It’s the same thing with drones now that they’re able to introduce and develop new technologies because there’s such a big market for it in the civilian world. You know, the autonomy of these things is improving every year. They get less and less reliant on the human operator. And that definitely poses another set of challenges for people trying to detect and stop them.

Capt Orton: I feel like research and development is pretty, let’s call it artistic endeavour. How do you go through the process of evaluating and testing all of this stuff? Do you reach out to universities and talk to people who are developing things? Like what’s your process for kind of gathering all this data on drone operations and how to fight them?

Jared Giesbrecht: In the case of counter drone operations, it’s a big problem that a lot of people are looking at. And so there’s a lot of companies out there that are already tackling it in a lot of different ways. So, in this case, we’re not developing that many technologies in house so much as trying to adapt and evaluate technologies that are out there, like you said. So, part of that is, you know, market survey kind of situation; like you said, getting in contact with universities or where DRDC has hosted, you know, symposiums about that where we invite academia in.

But in general, what we like to do is to see that technologies live and in person because there’s nothing like having the rubber meet the road to find out whether or not something’s practical and usable and useful.

Capt Orton: Yeah, of course.

Jared Giesbrecht: One of the big events that we’ve run this twice now in 2019 and in 2022, was called a counter UAS sandbox. So the idea of the Sandbox is we’re providing the place to play, and you bring your stuff, and we’ll bring our stuff and we'll see what works and what doesn’t. So with that, each time, we’ve run the sandbox, we've invited 12 companies in and we test these technologies over a month. The companies kind of proposed what they think is an effective solution. And then we’re able to bring in military observers, scientific observers, and we run tests. So we fly the drones, we play the bad guys, or we call it the red team. And we try to defeat their technologies and see how well it performs and, and what they can do and what the weaknesses are, and what the benefits of each technology are. So yeah, that’s my job—is to really put these things to the test and be an honest broker for the Canadian Forces. You know, any company is trying to put their technology in the best light. And so it’s our job to understand the “really, no kidding,” pluses and minuses of each piece of technology.

Capt Orton: Sometimes it’s just that things shake out. I remember, this was a big deal. I think it was like, early or mid 2000s, when the US military, some of the drones had unencrypted feeds. And then they were just getting intercepted by the adversaries. And then this was discovered. It's like: “Oh, yeah. We should definitely encrypt these feeds.”

And sometimes there’s unanticipated weaknesses about your platforms. Right?

Jared Giesbrecht: That’s right.

Capt Orton: So tell us a little bit about during your sandbox trials, what kind of scenarios were you using? Like, how did that look?

Jared Giesbrecht: We run the sandbox out in Suffield, Alberta where I’m stationed. It’s Canadian Forces Base Suffield. It’s a pretty benign environment; it’s a flat prairie. We don’t have a lot of trees or a lot of buildings, we have a great test environment, a great playground to sort of try out a lot of different things. So, when we run these tests, we sort of do the, you know, crawl, walk, run thing with each of the companies that come in. If a company says: “You know, I have the greatest radar since sliced bread for detecting.” So we’ll start off with just some simple tests of, you know, how far away can you detect a drone? If it’s at this altitude, we’ll just fly in a straight line, and, you know, what range can you detect it at? Depending on what the type of technology is, if it’s a Radio Detection System, or a camera system. There’s lots of different things that we can do to try to figure out: “Okay, what angles does it cover? What altitudes does it cover?”

And that’s kind of the less interesting scientific data collection aspect of things. But we do really try to get it to a red team, blue team thing, where we are challenging the companies and saying: “You know what? We’re going to come at you from a random angle from a random altitude at a random speed with a random flight pattern. We’re not going to tell you anything. And you need to tell us where the drone is and what it’s doing and what type of drone it is.”

And the best companies can do that sort of thing. And so this sort of crawl, walk, run approach to our testing allows us to sort of separate the wheat from the chaff of technologies.

Capt Orton: Yeah. And I imagine, like, you have, like, you said, the crawl, walk, run is at the beginning, it’s just like, semi static or consistent movement—then it’s complex scenarios, like some sort of operational environment or something like that.

Jared Giesbrecht: Yeah, one of the biggest challenges, of course, using multiple drones at once. So something that might work well, or that is very straightforward and simple for one drone, we'll throw five or 10 drones at a system at the same time. And then sort of all hell breaks loose, right? I mean, in terms of knowing what's a drone, what isn’t a drone? How many drones are there? Where are they? Yeah, it's really challenging. And so there’s definitely lots of room for us to improve on the run side of things in terms of countering drones.

Capt Orton: So what is shaken out from these trials in terms of things like system size, their portability, like what are the strengths and weaknesses of them—does anything glaring stand out to you is being particularly interesting?

Jared Giesbrecht: Well, yeah, I mean, there’s always the practicalities of the real world, right? I mean, we will always like to take all our technologies and package it into something you can carry in your hand. Right? It’s not realistic. Yeah. And so that’s—we get the whole range of systems, we get the system that has everything and does everything but it arrives on eight pallets and takes two days to set up. Right? There’s a time and place for that. And then we have other systems that, you know, are vehicle mountable. That’s a really big one. I mean, if you can get your system to work on a vehicle that can be moved around and transported and be moved to the frontlines of the fight, or wherever you have an issue, that’s really important. So that’s something that we focus on is can we adapt this to a vehicle on the move operations? And then of course, there’s the dismounted soldier—they are already overburdened. There’s a lot of stuff on the soldier. So trying to create counter drone systems that can be used by the dismounted soldiers is definitely a challenge area. There are systems out there but they’re definitely diminished in capabilities. And, yeah, that’s the big green fields of research and development.

Capt Orton: What does it ultimately mean for some troop who is now potentially facing UASs?

Jared Giesbrecht: So I really feel like we’re at one of those, like, inflection points where warfare is changing a lot. You know, with the World War I and World War II with the introduction of aircraft. It’s kind of that same deal, that it’s right now, we’re a little bit in the, you know, wild west phase of how these things are going to be used and how they’re going to be introduced. And what’s the most effectiveness. And on top of that, you get this arms race scenario. And we’ve seen that in Ukraine, especially over the last year with different types of drones being introduced and different types of counter drone systems being introduced. And so there’s always this one upmanship, and you can’t rest on your laurels. So, what does that mean, for the average soldier? Well, one thing it does mean is, like I said earlier, we can sort of assume that everybody in the vicinity has eyes on them at all times. So, right away, that brings the risk level up for soldiers a lot. Just because you’re not at the frontline doesn’t mean you’re not a target. And that’s a big deal. And so with that, it behoves us to protect these people and provide capabilities to protect themselves—or at least know that they’re being watched. Right. And so this has changed a little bit. UAS are going to be everywhere. But what does this mean for an average soldier, and this doesn’t just apply to drone warfare—it applies to a bunch of stuff. But, our forces need to be much more tech savvy and much more willing to use technology and willing to learn new things and adapt on the fly, to apply, you know, new types of techniques that they wouldn’t have had to in the past. You have to have a higher level of technological requirements, technological savvy, to be able to operate in this new battlefield.

Capt Orton: It’s interesting that you mentioned that because as you were kind of talking, the thing that stood out the most for me, I was thinking with my infantry soldier brain was assume you’re being observed at all times. And so you’re talking about being more tech savvy, but also, that kind of, in a lot of ways rolls back to basic field craft. Right? Which is always apply your camouflage principles, you know, that comes up a lot, sometimes in fields of discussion, where people are like, do trenches still have value? Yeah, like, if you dig yourself in a nice little hole and have a place to hide, you can’t be spotted. And so like, there’s the tech savvy direction. But there’s also like, the just ongoing application of basic field craft, which in of itself can be something that you can control directly, as a soldier on the ground to increase your protection from observation.

Jared Giesbrecht: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, that’s part of the lesson here is that not all the solutions to countering drones is going to be a technological solution. Some of it is just changing the patterns of the way you operate. I actually saw an article this morning that was talking about, in the war in Ukraine, sort of, like a cape or a poncho, that different troops are wearing to shield their infrared signature. And that’s not something that really was worried about at infantry low level in the past is, what’s my IR signature? And boy, that’s one of those things, it's becoming really more important. It’s a real concern. So you're right about the field craft. And, but also, some changes to the field craft, too, I think.

Capt Orton: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, that’s classic evolution of warfare stuff—pretty much anytime is, somebody’s gonna come up with a clever way to do a thing. Which actually, that kind of makes me think, has anything popped out at you that you thought to yourself, that’s unusual and clever—or something of that nature.

Jared Giesbrecht: One of those things that always comes up whenever I talk to, you know, my family, or whoever about countering drones is: “Oh, I read this article about they’re using hawks and eagles to track down drones.” And yeah, absolutely. That’s an interesting idea. It’s great. And with a lot of this stuff, the difficulty comes from the practicalities, that okay, so now do we have a trained falconer deployed with every section of soldiers? Or, you know, how does that look in the real world? And that’s really the problem with all the new technologies we come across is like: “Oh, yeah, that’s a pretty good idea.” But how do we implement that in the field environment where we’re not trying to overburden our troops? Cost is always a concern, you know—how many of these things can we buy? So yeah, certainly, there are interesting technologies that come along. And I have the unfortunate job of poking holes in great ideas. That’s kind of what I do for a living.

Capt Orton: Yeah, having a 27 Falconer Battalion probably wouldn’t be super sustainable necessarily. Yeah. And that’s a really good point is something that people often forget about is sustainability. Right? Not only does it have to work, but it has to work repetitively and consistently…

Jared Giesbrecht: Yeah.

Capt Orton: …in multiple environments.

Jared Giesbrecht: Yeah. And some of the great new solutions to countering drones are, I mean, it sounds like Star Wars, but high power lasers is probably one of the most promising solutions to that. And so the concept is you have a laser weapon that’s aimed with a camera—and it shoots a laser beam at the drone and it actually starts it on fire and burns a hole through the drone. And then the drone, you know, malfunctions and drops out of the sky. And then some of the practicalities of that are, you know, lasers are expensive—they’re big. We’re now talking about sensitive optics. Right?

Another really cool solution is a high power microwave system. So basically you take radio waves, microwaves that can transmit over long distance, and you aim them at the drones, and you kind of scramble the electronics. So the drones brain goes nuts, and it doesn’t know what it's doing, it’ll fly away or drop out of the sky or whatever. So yeah, there’s lots of interesting stuff—and it’s not clear yet what the final solution is going to be. And so that’s where we’re working right now is trying to figure out what’s the right path to explore.

Capt Orton: So what are you seeing in terms of unique Army requirements versus like, let’s say, naval, or Air Force?

Jared Giesbrecht: The Army, a lot of it is about mobility. Right? Like I was talking before about being able to mount a vehicle or being able to give something to a dismounted soldier out on patrol. Those are very specific Army things that other branches might not need. And then there’s the whole difference in requirements between you’re deploying something overseas versus trying to protect assets at home in Canada. Whether that’s an airfield that the Air Force might be operating or, you know, a ship in harbour, or those sorts of things. And so it does create a lot of different requirements. And one of the biggest problems actually, is the authority or the right, or the collateral damage concerns about using these counter drone technologies. Right? RF jamming in downtown Halifax? That’s not a great look. You cannot be firing weapons wherever you like. And so that's not just a technological challenge. It’s also a bit of a policy challenge—like how do we enable people to defend themselves at the same time, and not causing problems for civilians around us?

Capt Orton: Just out of curiosity, are there any other left-field style warfare items that have been popping up? Has something else, like, captured your interest, let's say as an unexpected weapon system.

Jared Giesbrecht: One of the things that is being blurred is the line between a drone and a weapon or a missile.

Capt Orton: Right.

Jared Giesbrecht: And so the big one—they’re called loitering munitions. Basically, it’s a drone that has a bomb in the front of it, it’ll get launched. And it’ll fly around and observe until the operator sees a target. And then it becomes a missile. Right? And then it’s sent on a course to impact the target. And so that’s kind of blurring the lines between a weapon system and an observing system. Yeah, and the drones, like I said earlier—they’re changing a lot. I mean, there’s people with hobbyist jet powered drones so that they’re really fast. Right? And this is a tiny jet. This is a jet that fits on your table. But it’s small and fast. There’s drones that look like birds. They flap their wings. And so how do you tell that kind of thing from a regular drone? Like I said earlier, I think it’s still the Wild West phase of drones that we’re gonna see a lot of changes and interesting new concepts.

Capt Orton: Your last point, maybe you must have heard of it, birds aren’t real, right?

Jared Giesbrecht: No, I haven't.

Capt Orton: You haven't heard of birds aren’t real?

Jared Giesbrecht: Is this like a conspiracy theory?

Capt Orton: Yeah. So it’s an internet thing where people have bought into that all birds are drones—and birds aren’t real. They’ve been replaced by the CIA in the 1950s. And all birds are drones now. Yeah, look it up. It’s a good laugh.

Jared Giesbrecht: I can see your technology’s not quite there yet, but maybe someday.

Capt Orton: Birds are real, for now. All right, perfect. Well, thanks so much for talking to us about counter drone warfare.

[Music starts]

Jared Giesbrecht: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you very much.

Capt Orton: That was Jared Giesbrecht, a defence research scientist with DRDC in Suffield, Alberta. And I’m Captain Adam Orton for the Canadian Army Podcast. Orton out.

[Music ends]