Report 185 · Defense Tech
Buried in a congressional report on counter-drone programs is a line most readers skip: the Navy built its backpack drone jammer, DRAKE, out of JCREW, a system made to stop radio-triggered roadside bombs. That is not a trivia point. It tells you exactly what this kind of jammer can do against a drone, and exactly where it stops.
I served as a Counter-IED and Electronic Warfare Officer. Counter-IED jamming is the place where those two halves of the title meet, which is why one sentence in a Congressional Research Service report stopped me. Here it is, from CRS report R48477, "Department of Defense Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems," dated 31 March 2025:
the Navy derived its Drone Restricted Access using Known Electromagnetic Warfare (DRAKE) system from the Joint Counter Radio-Controlled Improvised Explosive Device Electronic Warfare (JCREW) system, one of the projects of the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) in the 2000s.
The same paragraph says DRAKE "is designed to be carried as a backpack and to jam the communication links between the operator of the adversary drone and the aircraft." The rest of this report explains why that reuse worked, using the best open technical description of how these jammers operate, and what the bomb-jamming heritage tells you about the drone fight.
The clearest public description comes from a 2012 article in the Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest by Michael Pesci, whose lab led jamming-technique development for the Marine Corps' counter-radio-controlled-IED program, known as CREW. The threat is simple. In the article's words, a radio-controlled IED "is simply explosive material that is integrated with a handheld wireless radio or device that will trigger upon receipt of a signal from a second wireless handheld device."
The defense is just as simple to state. The CREW system "continually scans the environment for signals believed to be those of a threat device trigger. When a suspect signal is located, the system projects energy at the target receiver in an attempt to disrupt communications."
Notice the target. A jammer does not attack the triggerman's transmitter. It attacks the receiver sitting in the bomb, by putting more radio energy into that receiver than the triggerman's signal delivers. Pesci describes the early systems exactly that way: performance came from "projecting more power on the emplaced threat receiver than the threat transmitter." I walked through the same jamming-to-signal arithmetic for radar in Report 161. The principle does not change with the target.
The APL article describes an evolution that matters for drones. The first CREW systems "were broadband noise jammers using active-only techniques," which the article defines as projecting "power around the system in all directions at all times, regardless of the environment." Because the threat could be any of many radios on many frequencies, those jammers had to put energy into every possible threat channel at once.
That worked until it didn't. As threat devices multiplied, "the technological demand on the early active jammers became too great, and their performance deteriorated." The answer was reactive jamming. Reactive systems "are able to focus their power only on a single threat channel when triggered rather than spreading it over the entire threat band, because the systems are able to monitor and 'listen' to the electromagnetic environment to detect threat signals."
The article also names the piece that makes all of this work: the threat load, "the technique employed by the hardware to interfere with the IED communication link." Each possible threat device gets its own interference analysis, and a jammer is only as good as the library of threat loads loaded into it.
Strip away the explosive and the airframe, and a radio-triggered bomb and a radio-controlled hobby drone present the same problem to a jammer: a receiver, some distance away, waiting for a command from a distant transmitter. That is my framing, but the Navy's program manager said essentially the same thing in public. At the Surface Navy Association symposium in January 2024, Capt. Jon Haase said DRAKE is "the same hardware" as JCREW, and explained why, as reported by DefenseScoop:
And the reason it's the same hardware was because it's a software-defined system. And when the counter-UAS requirements emerged, we found that we could take the hardware in the JCREW and we could create the DRAKE to deal with the counter-UAS threat.
He described JCREW itself as "the bubble that we provide in the electronic spectrum to protect sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines," and DRAKE as "onboard ships, providing counter-UAS bubbles of protection." Per Naval Sea Systems Command as reported in the same piece, JCREW Increment One Block One comes in mounted, dismounted and fixed-site variants.
The Air Force took a parallel path. CRS describes its NINJA program as designed to "detect, track, locate, identify, and defeat UAS threats using the radio frequency communications between the drone and the operator," and reports that then-Secretary Frank Kendall testified in 2023 that 99 Air Force locations had installed it. Same idea: the link is the vulnerability.
Here is the part that the "IED tech repurposed for drones" headline leaves out. Everything that limited a bomb jammer carries straight over.
No link, no target. A CREW jammer defeats a radio trigger; that is the whole definition of the threat it was built for. It does nothing against a bomb set off by a command wire or by the victim stepping on it, which is why it was always one layer of protection, never the whole answer. The drone equivalents are a drone flying a preprogrammed route or one steered over a fiber-optic cable. DRAKE, by the CRS description, jams "the communication links between the operator ... and the aircraft." If there is no radio link to jam, there is nothing for it to do. I covered fiber drones in Report 002 and the non-jamming options in Report 007 and Report 055.
The library has to keep up. Pesci is blunt: "RCIEDs continue to evolve as quickly as they are countered." His team's process for a new threat load was built to deliver "no more than 6 weeks from needs analysis and requirements development to delivery of the final threat load." The drone world moves at least as fast, and the APL article's logic applies directly: a jammer that has no technique for a given radio protocol is not jamming it. That is my inference, not a claim about DRAKE's actual library, which is not public.
Energy everywhere hits friends too. The active approach that projects power "in all directions at all times" does not care whose radio is on the channel. That is the fratricide problem I wrote about in Report 037, and it is one reason the move to listen-first reactive jamming mattered. Whether a given drone jammer runs active, reactive or both is a design choice the public sources here do not specify.
DRAKE's performance is not public in anything I opened. I found no frequency coverage, range, power or test result for it, and I have not inferred any. Nothing here should be read as a claim about how well it works.
The technical description is about CREW in general, as of 2012. The APL article describes the Marine Corps CREW program and early-generation systems. It does not describe JCREW I1B1 or DRAKE specifically, and the technology has moved on since.
Two of CRS's own sources went unread. CRS cites the JIEDDO FY2008 annual report and a 2021 Sea Air Space presentation by Capt. Dan Malatesta for the DRAKE lineage, and a USNI News article for the backpack description. I did not open the first two, and USNI News refused my request. The lineage claim rests here on the CRS text and on Capt. Haase's remarks as reported by DefenseScoop, which agree.
DRAKE being a converted bomb jammer is good engineering, not a shortcut: a software-defined jammer that already knew how to overpower a receiver waiting for a command could be taught a new class of receiver. The same heritage tells you where it stops. It needs a radio link to attack, a technique for that specific link, and a plan for the friendly radios nearby. Against a drone with no link, it is the same as a CREW jammer against a pressure plate. When you see "counter-IED tech now stops drones," read it as "counter-radio-link tech now stops radio-linked drones." That is real, and it is narrower than the headline.
Scope note: this report explains, at the level of public sources, why a counter-IED jammer could be adapted against drones. It contains no jamming techniques, frequencies or evasion guidance.
U.S. Army combat veteran (Counter-IED / Electronic Warfare), peer-reviewed researcher in microwave spectroscopy, and founder & CEO of Shroombiosis. Consults on laboratory operations, AI, and supplement formulation.