UK Army Tests Passive Drone Detection at Warminster
If you can buy a small drone cheaply and fly it from a distance, you can see why defence planners are paying attention. The worry is not only what a drone might carry. It is also what it can quietly collect: images, video and signals from above a site that may believe it is secure. According to the GOV.UK case study, that is the thinking behind Project Halo Shield at Warminster garrison. Led by the British Army's Experimentation and Trials Group and funded by UK Defence Innovation, the project has put a passive drone detection system into live use at a UK Army base. The government describes that as a UK first for Army base protection.
The word passive matters here. Some detection tools send out their own signal, as radar does. Passive systems work differently. They listen for radio links, watch the sky and help operators piece together what is overhead without broadcasting in the same way. **What this means:** on a military site, quiet detection can be a real advantage. You want awareness of nearby drones, but you do not want to make your own position easier to study.
The early figures help explain why the Army is interested. GOV.UK says the system recorded 29 drone position alerts in its first 17 days of live monitoring, with detections out to 5km. None of those flights posed a threat to the base. That is an important point to hold on to. Not every drone near a sensitive site is hostile. Good security is not about panic. It is about seeing clearly, checking carefully and responding in proportion to what is actually there.
The Army also tested the system with its own drones, using them to look for weak spots. That may sound obvious, but it is exactly what serious testing should involve. If you want confidence in a new tool, you need to know where it struggles as well as where it performs well. The speed of the rollout did not come from luck. The Experimentation and Trials Group had already worked with both suppliers in earlier counter-drone demonstrations and exercises, including Project Vanaheim and Project Flytrap. In simple terms, the people involved already knew the equipment, the defence networks and the technical standards, so the move from trial to deployment was much quicker.
One layer of the Warminster system came from Dedrone, now part of Axon. The GOV.UK article says the company protects more than 1,130 sites across 35 countries, including airports and critical national infrastructure. Its software brings together several sensor feeds into one operational picture, so staff are not left switching between separate screens and trying to make sense of them one by one. At Warminster, Dedrone's role centres on radio frequency sensing. Three RF sensors are used to triangulate a drone's position across the site, while a fourth helps recognise both the drone and its controller. The same case study says the project moved quickly even by commercial standards, with a demonstration in November 2025, an on-site recce in January 2026 and the system operational by March 2026.
The second layer came from Quell, a British company whose SkySpyke system adds optical and AI-enabled monitoring. GOV.UK says it provides full hemispheric sky coverage, detects and tracks airborne objects, and uses AI to filter alerts and give visual confirmation of items worth attention. This matters because drone threats are changing. Some aircraft may not give off the kind of radio signal that RF sensors can easily catch. An optical system helps cover that gap by looking for the drone itself, not only the signal between the aircraft and the pilot. For the people using it day to day, that means fewer blind spots and less overload on the screen.
Quell's appearance at Warminster also tells us something about how defence innovation often works. The GOV.UK case study says earlier UK Defence Innovation funding helped the company improve its Deep Truth software platform, increase detection range and redesign the hardware into a modular system. That is not the flashy part of defence technology, but it is usually the part that turns a promising idea into something reliable enough for real use. The company then carried those improvements into Army activity including the Army Warfighting Experiment and Taskforce RAPSTONE's counter-drone exercises. If you are new to this subject, that is worth noting. Military technology is rarely finished at the first attempt. It is tested, adjusted, tested again and only then trusted on an operational site.
The bigger lesson from Warminster is not that one sensor has solved the drone problem. It is that a layered approach appears to give the Army a more dependable picture. The British Army says future phases could add radar and acoustic sensors alongside the existing RF and optical tools, creating a broader detection system across other garrison sites. Col James Howard of the Experimentation and Trials Group said work with UK Defence Innovation and industry is helping make Army sites safer while improving wider counter-drone capability. Read another way, the message is simple: the answer is not one magic device, but several tools working together. **What it means for you:** whether we are talking about a barracks, an airport or other critical infrastructure, modern security increasingly depends on spotting small changes early, checking them properly and understanding what they mean before a situation turns serious.