This week The Strategist, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s analysis and commentary site, published my article on a question that sits closer to our day job than most defence writing does: what happens when drone designers start using materials that fire engineers already know well?

The article draws a direct line between two fields that rarely speak to each other: fire engineering and drone survivability. Reflective ceramic coatings already sprayed on Australian rooftops to cut cooling loads, gypsum plasterboard that absorbs heat by releasing crystallised water as steam, open-cell aluminium foam used for decades in industrial laser-safety beam dumps, and intumescent paints that char and insulate under heat — all are commercially available, inexpensive, and already standard in Australian construction. Applied to a drone’s wing and spar, the same physics that keeps a building’s structure intact under bushfire radiant heat can buy a strike drone enough time to survive a laser’s engagement window.

This is an unusual topic for an architectural-science consultancy, but not an unusual problem. Hygrothermal analysis, radiant-heat engineering and material behaviour under thermal load are precisely what this practice does for buildings. Applying that knowledge to a fast-moving airframe turned out to be a short step. The uncomfortable implication is that any competent cross-domain engineer can take it: which means adversaries have, or soon will.

How cheap, simple building materials can protect strike drones from lasers