THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And while the ISIS drones are still a far cry from good old US high tech killer drones, luck and poor training can amplify the effect of a small explosive package on your enemy.

At the vast, windswept White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico earlier this year, nearly a dozen military contractors armed with laser guns, high-tech nets and other experimental systems met to tackle one of the Pentagon’s most vexing counterterrorism conundrums: how to destroy the Islamic State’s increasingly lethal fleet of drones.

The militant group has used surveillance drones on the battlefield for more than two years. But an increase in deadly attacks since last fall — mostly targeting Iraqi troops and Syrian militia members with small bombs or grenades, but also threatening American advisers — has highlighted the terrorists’ success in adapting off-the-shelf, low-cost technology into an effective new weapon.

The Pentagon is so alarmed by this growing threat — even as it routs the Islamic State from its strongholds in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria — that it has launched a $700 million crash program overseen by two senior Army generals to draw on the collective know-how and resources of all branches of the armed services, Silicon Valley and defense industry giants like Boeing and Raytheon to devise tactics and technology to thwart the menace.

One important piece of that effort was the contest in New Mexico. It amounted to a Pentagon counter-drone bake-off, called the Hard Kill Challenge, to see which new classified technologies and tactics proved most promising. The results were decidedly mixed, and underscore the long-term problem confronting the Pentagon and its allies as it combats the Islamic State and Al Qaeda in a growing number of hot spots around the world beyond Iraq and Syria, including Yemen and Libya.

“Threat targets were very resilient against damage,” the Pentagon agency assigned to help crack the problem, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization, said in response to questions from The New York Times about how the contractors fared against mock enemy drones. “Bottom line: Most technologies still immature.” The agency said some of the technology might work well with “adjustments and further development.”

In the meantime, the Pentagon has rushed dozens of technical specialists to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan to help protect American troops and to train and, in some cases, equip local allies against the drone threat, which has killed more than a dozen Iraqi soldiers and wounded more than 50. The aircraft, some as small as model airplanes, conduct reconnaissance missions to help Islamic State fighters attack American-backed ground forces. Other drones drop bombs or are rigged with explosives to detonate on the ground.

About 100 years ago, the budding air forces of the World War I combatants were following a similar path with manned airplanes. It will be interesting to see how they turn out.