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Notes -
The End of An Era of Air Piracy in America
In the end of an era, by this time next year state and local police across the United States might no longer qualify as air pirates if they take down small drones harassing citizens…
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Wait, What?
Did you know it is generally a federal crime to take down a drone in the United States of America?
We’ve talked a lot on the Motte about how dangerous and effective drones can be as a weapon of war, it’s been a significant theme of Ukraine War discussion for years, and I even got an AAQC for musing how drones may change the relationship of society with the conduct of war. It’s not exactly a secret around the world that drones are capable of a great deal of damage or danger, and that it’s hard on a technical and material level to stop drones.
It's much less common for people to know that it is actually illegal to try outside a few, previously non-scalable, contexts.
In the US, but also more broadly, there is a basic chain of legal logic that links this. To quote from the US interagency legal advisory just linked-
Or put another way- in the eye of the law, drones are legally aircraft. This starts to cause complications if / when you have laws relating to aircraft that were created with only big, manned aircraft in mind. Laws like-
Or-
So, hypothetically, if you saw a drone hovering dangerously near, or even outright harassing, some people and you threw a blanket over it to take control of it… congratulations, you are an air pirate. And a criminal saboteur. Because if drones are legally aircraft…
But it’s not just aircraft laws either. Most drones are remote controlled by computers, or even cell phones. And many drone detection / mitigation systems go after those systems, which can put them in violation of communication and privacy laws like-
Were these laws written with things other than drones in mind? Yes. Have they been updated since the advent of small commercial drones? In many cases, no. Are they still on the books and thus still valid? Again, yes.
These are American laws, and they have their own nuances and exceptions, but they tend to have their foreign equivalents and are emblematic of common policy challenges across the world. Many of the means and measures that would be used to counter drones are prohibited to the general public, and for good reasons. A weapon that can shoot a drone out of the sky can, by its nature, shoot other aircraft. A detection device that can collect and analyst drone remote controls can collect the same sort of signals from other measures.
So, if taking down drones is super illegal, how does any state do it without throwing their hands up and accepting anarchy?
Simple- you give select agencies the authority to ignore the general law.
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Counter-Drone Policy In A Nutshell: If It Not Permitted, It Is Forbidden
The nature of national laws is the same authorities who make the laws can give parts of the government the authority to ignore them. These exceptions, typically known as authorities, can be broad or narrow.
For example, in the US example, the interagency legal advisory previously noted had this to say as to the state of the law in 2020-
In the Department of Defense, that authority can be found in Title 10, section 130i, which begins as-
With a fair bit more described if you care.
This level of description is needed because this language is precisely what protects the American military service members from, say, being sued by a private drone operator for shooting a drone that ‘accidentally’ flew over an American installation, or for violating the civil liberties for unreasonable search and seizure if they compromise a drone signal. But note in turn the restrictions on this authority. The Secretary of Defense may only “authorize members of the armed forces… with assigned duties,” and only in protection of a “covered facility or asset.”
What is a covered asset?
So, things the military and FAA agree upon, in the United States, directly affecting the military?
Note the sort of things that are NOT covered? Like, protection of public events? Or countering narco-drones. Or commercial airports. Or nuclear facilities.
Actually, that last one is reserved for the Department of Energy, not Defense. But this brings a point- different agencies are authorized different exemptions of varying scope. In a country like the US, even the US military- which is the part of the government with the most overseas experience with dealing with drones- has a relatively constrained role inside the US.
This is a policy challenge that generalizes. While different states have different laws- or in some cases no laws for drones given how new the policy field is- they all tend to have their limits. Even in countries in a state of war, like Russia or Ukraine, they can generally track their military-centric counter-drone measures to an authority authorizing the military to take whatever actions deemed necessary.
But laws for war are not the same thing as a competent domestic policy. In the front lines of the Ukraine War, any unidentified drone that isn’t yours might as well be assumed hostile. This still leads to a lot of friendly fire concerns You can’t do the same for any given drone in a country with hundreds of thousands or millions of legal drones. Setting aside the injustice of it, just the financial-industrial cost of trying to take down so many drones could bankrupt a country. And even if you can, or just want to spread ‘cheap’ countermeasures …
This principle of providing legal authorities isn’t just a western democracy phenomenon, but applies across the spectrum of governments. Even if you are the most authoritarian, civil rights-disregarding, tyrannical state on the planet… you still wouldn’t want to share counter-drone capabilities too broadly. Any organization that can collect and process so much information on drone signals has capabilities comparable to traditional spy organizations. Any security organization that can destroy, or hijack and control, drones at will, could use those capabilities against the government. Giving everyone ‘robust’ counter-drone capabilities is giving everyone (some) of the pre-requisites for throwing a coup.
And that’s without (literally) shooting down your share of a global commercial drone market valued in the 10s of billions of USD. Commercial drones have uses in surveying, infrastructure maintenance, farming, last-mile delivery, and many more things. The US alone has over 800,000 registered drones already, with many more expected.
Thus, the counter-drone policy challenge. How do you craft the laws and develop the policies that enable the state to effectively counter unmanned aerial systems?
Historically, and insufficiently, the global trend is ‘defer to the military.’
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The History of Counter-Drone Policy as Military Policy
If you define a drone as simply an unmanned aircraft, then counter-drone policy is as old as weaponized balloons. Incendiary balloons were developed in the late 18th and early 19th century. In 1849, the Austrians besieging Venice attempted to use such balloons to set the city ablaze. At this time, there wasn’t much of a policy a state could pursue to counter such a threat beyond policies of war or peace.
The first ‘modern’ drones as an unmanned but remote controlled aircraft emerged in WW1, with the British 1917 Aerial Target, a radio-controlled aircraft. The Aerial Target was intended to actually fly into German zeppelin-bombers, making it an anti-air drone. An American parallel, the Kettering Bug, was an experimental ‘aerial torpedo’, aka kamikaze drone, for attacking ground targets. While neither developed system was actually employed in WW1, these cutting-edge secret technologies were the purview of the greatest of powers. Counter-drone policy, in turn, was a subset of great power military competition.
This exclusivity diminished during the Cold War. As technology developed to allow for reconnaissance drones and electronic warfare capabilities in the 1960s, these technologies also proliferated with Cold War patronage and partner relationships. In 1973 during the Yom Kipper War, Israel would use both recon and EW drones. Counter-drone policy had devolved from great power competition to an aspect of conventional military conflict between even non-great powers.
This military exclusivity was dashed by the end of the cold war and the advent of commercial satellite and cellular network communications. When the US opened up the US military Global Positioning Satellite network to global airlines in 1983 following the Korean Airlines Flight 007 disaster, it did not initially provide full capability. There was a policy of selective availability to globally degrade ‘civilian’ GPS signal. However, the Clinton Administration in 1996 made it US policy to provide (free) GPS access and facilitate integration into civilian and commercial applications, and in 2000 removed the selective availability policy. Add in the proliferation of video-sharing technologies, which allow first-person-view in addition to global remote control, and gradually global markets had access to the same fundamental technologies as those behind the (in)famous predator drones. Or in other words- after about a century of being a military policy issue, in the early 2000s drones began to emerge as a commercial-regulatory issue.
Global civilian drone policy, aka drone regulations, started in the 2000s, first slowly and then gradually picking up pace in the 2010s. In 2002 the UK Civil Aviation Authority was among the first national entities to issue (nonbinding) policy guidance for drone users. By 2006, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued its first airworthiness certificate to a drone, as the first step in commercial drone regulation. The US passed the FAA Reform Act of 2012, mandating the integration of private and commercial drones into public airspace. Various other global actors followed suit,, with some countries trying to model after early regs, and some taking a wait-and-see approach to figuring out what worked.
And then
the Fire Nation attackedISIS became the first high-profile user of weaponized commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) small drones.ISIS was not the first user of COTS small drones. The first recorded combat casualties from a weaponized COTS were two Kurish soldiers and two French SOF Commandoes (pg. 109) in Syria by an unknown force. On page 12 of this CIS report on countering small UAS, or c-sUAS, the first identified organization to use militarized s-UAS at scale was the Yemeni Houthis. When the Houth rebellion in Yemen began in 2016 the Houthis received significant Iranian support in the form of drones. Many of these were ‘military-standard’ drones, but the Houthis have a reputation for modifying on their own, and at least some reports of modifying COTS drones.
ISIS was, however, the biggest and most disruptive early adapter of small drones, and made a point of propagandizing it. Part of this was that ISIS lacked a state patron for drones like the Houthis, and so had to make do. But part of this was that [early ISIS recruited heavily from the post-Saddam Baathist party, which already had significant technical expertise from when it ran Iraq, and had leveled up its improvisation and adaptability skills during the Iraq civil war when Sunni Baathists fought both Americans (who imposed de-Baathification policies) and Shia (who, among other things, were settling scores). In January 2017, after the rise of ISIS but before its major setbacks, ISIS released propaganda claiming 20 drone strikes.
This led to the (re)militarization of US counter-small drone, or c-sUAS, policy. The United States Central Command (CENTCOM), the military command responsible for the Middle East, noted in its March 2017 posture statement that it was initiating an interagency Joint Urgent Operational Needs (JUON) process to develop c-UAS capabilities.
Why is this significant?
A JUON is how the US military self-initiates new programs and investments without waiting for Congressional deliberation. (Or rather- Congress permits the US DoD a certain amount of leeway to start first, and ask for more permissions later.) Urgent Operational Needs are-
A Joint UON, or JUON, is a UON that are identified by a Combatant Command Commander (i.e. CENTCOM’s Commanding General), or the Chairman / Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (i.e. the military head of the Pentagon), as inherently joint and impacting an ongoing contingency operation. All JUONs are validated by the Joint Staff (i.e., all the branches of the military), meaning they indicate an inter-service concurrence, and common position when engaging policy makers and Congress.
JUONs are in turn the initial/interim material solution, the ‘get whatever you can, now,’ that can trigger longer term solutions. Most nations have their own equivalent to the US DOTMILPF framework for institutional capability development. DOTMILPF stands for Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership & Education, Personnel, Facilities, and Policy. These lines of effort are what lead the US military to push things like formalizing/updating counter-UAS operational doctrine, or establish a c-UAS university to train and teach future leaders, or start the many-years-long R&D processes to develop more cost-effective material solutions that fit into the doctrine and education frameworks.
While the big budget military spending absolutely requires Congressional assent, that P in DOTMILPF stands for Policy for a reason, and part of Policy includes pitching the concept to Congress. While Congress passes an annual budget, and has the power of the purse, and thus to accept, reject, or modify as it will such as refusing DoD requests to retire old airplanes, it does so in the context of longer-term military planning and repeated approaches. Because so many aspects of a national military strategy are long-term as opposed to year-by-year, the US military maintains a rolling 5-year plan presented as the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP). While Congress is the ultimate decider of budget, those decisions are shaped by the sort of cognitive biases that data asymmetry can benefit from.
Never considered the national budget in terms of the cognitive bias implications of long-term plans? The anchoring bias leads towards the first number presented… even if that number is part of a four-year forecast out years before you have to make a decision. The availability heuristic influences you by what is most easily at hand… such as years of military planning forecasts for years in advance. The framing effect can provide greater credibility to the more regular, consistently ‘professional’ presentations of a dedicated agency than an ad hoc lobbyist. The hindsight bias can make that proposal dismissed last year, but re-submitted again the next year, seem so much more reasonable given [more recent thing]. And hey, why not throw in the halo effect if you are a Congress person of a major military committee who likes the military, or the in-group bias for when those DOTMILPF implementation funds can flow to your or your allies constituents, or the bystander effect of just deferring the policy formation to the military, who clearly has spent so much more time thinking about the problem and how to solve it?
Longer-term and deliberate planning and pitching efforts is the dark secret of why militaries can so often have outsized influence in bureaucratic policy fights, which is what ultimately delivers organization and material solutions. Not everyone needs a good military, but a good military by design will try to be proactive, propose solutions for consideration, plan to identify and mitigate obstacles, and persist in overcoming challenges. These same virtues in a military sense have (some) translation to the policy influence sphere.
This is how, in the US at least, a JUON started in 2016-2017 is turning into military academies and truck-mounted c-UAS lasers within a decade.
By contrast, the first FAA Aviation Rulemaking Committee on small UAS was in 2008, and the Congressional mandate to integrate drones into the US airspace was passed in 2012, and the FAA presented a report on beyond-visual-line-of-sight regulatory considerations- not the regulations but a report on possible regulations- in… March 2023.
There are a lot of good recommendations in that report. A lot of necessary recommendations too, with a lot of thought put into practical implementation issues and involving relevant stakeholders. Something like a digital license plate requirement is a key capability, if only because it can mean any drone which is is NOT broadcasting itself and its registered user can be presumed non-law-abiding if it flies at a restricted area. That sort of distinction can be vital when you have potentially seconds to respond, and when you have a potential lawsuit on the far end.
But you have to admit- that rate of policy generation seems kind of slow. And if it takes the FAA so long to do so much, why not simply turn over c-UAS policy to the military in earnest?
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Obstacles To Military-Led Counter-Drone Domestic Policy
This section is going to focus on some uniquely American
disfunctionspolicy dynamics, to serve as a demonstrative example of what other countries may have their owncharming culturalchallenges in.Three general policy challenges for military counter-drone policy are when the military legally shouldn’t, physically cannot, and when a military involvement makes it harder for others to contribute.
On the legal side, few national leaders want the military to actively lead domestic law enforcement. Even military juntas tend to prefer not resorting to the military for day-to-day functions. Military doing daily law enforcement is the military moving on a day to day basis, militaries moving daily at their own discretion can move on other days at their own discretion, and if you give routinely moving military formations the sort of capabilities that go into counter-drone operations you have a potential coup force always on the move.
In the US, that policy challenge gets worse due to legal traditions and common law precedents.
Take the Posse Comitatus Act, which makes it a crime for individuals to use the US military to enforce federal laws except in contexts authorized by Congress. Congress has the President ways to do that, such as through the Insurrection Act, has been why opposition to military support to ICE has been to challenge the legal basis enabling such activations. Posse Comitatus has a checkered, arguably racist history- it was a basically the end to the post-Civil War Reconstruction Period where American southern states traded political support in a contested presidential election in return for an end to Federal troops being used in the South. However, it has become part of the American political tradition, and legal precedent with things like the US 8th Circuit case Bisonette v. Haig finding it as the reasonable basis for a possible 4th Amendment violation when the US military assisted US law enforcement operations at the 1973 activist occupation of the Wounded Knee Indian reservation. This case spurred a modernization of US legal policy on how the US military can support federal or state law enforcement and other agencies, collectively consolidated in the late Cold War period into the Defense Support of Civil Authorities(DSCA) policies.
So far so good, right? Not quite. In an important respect, the DSCA reforms and later commercial drone regulations made the US military less suited for providing domestic c-UAS support.
See, there is separate US legal policy on the matter of judicial branch deference towards executive actions not explicitly authorized by law. In the 1952 Korean War Steel Seizure Case, where President Truman nationalized various steel makers in order to support the war effort, citing executive branch powers. The Executive lost the case, and in one of the concurrent opinions, Justice Robert Jackson established the still-standing 3-category standard for how much deference the Judicial Branch (particularly the Supreme Court) would give to Executive Branch actions. The three categories were if the Executive Branch operated in line with a Congressional law (maximum deference), if the Executive Branch acted in opposition to Congressional law (minimum deference, unless separation of powers favored the Executive), and the ‘twilight zone’ where Congress was silent. This Supreme Court precedent gives some deference to the Executive if Congress has not passed a law.
But- this twilight zone does not apply to counter-drone policy, because Congress has passed laws on drones.
They may be bad laws, or incomplete laws, or laws whose rulemaking recommendations only came out in 2023, but there are laws on the books as to who may counter unlawful drones in the US and how, even if they have nowhere near the manpower or resources of the US military. And per the nuances of the Steel Seizure case, where Congress not including an authority in an otherwise topical law is interpreted as ‘Congress considered and chose not to’ as opposed to ‘Congress has not considered at all,’ Executive policy proposals to use the military for domestic c-UAS would face stricter scrutiny / minimal deference.
Which means they would run into the posse commitatus prohibition. Which means relying on exceptions largely written into laws written before domestic drones were a consideration. Which goes back to authorities, and the constraints on authorities that do exist.
And that’s if the military was the best suited instrument at all. Which, uh, it isn’t.
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Issues With Military-Led Counter-Drone Domestic Policy
There are a number of policy-level drawbacks to relying on the national military to deliver your domestic drone defense policy. And this isn’t just the competence question of letting military officers write regulations for the FAA in a multi-billion economic sector. Or the misaligned incentives in such a system.
Part of this is just a numbers and manpower reality. The US Army has about 8,600 air defense soldiers in the active service, national guard, and reserve.. There are about 20,000 public and private airports in the US. Even if you took every single air defense artillery expect from every other military function and spread them around the country, you wouldn’t have enough for one dedicated military air defender per airport.
By contrast, there are nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the US when you factor state and local law enforcement.
Part of this is a budget issue. The opening Trump administration budget request for the entire defense department in FY26 was about 1 trillion USD. That includes everything from manpower to aircraft carriers.
In comparison, US states in FY21 spent about $1.8 trillion USD, on top of the about $1.9 trillion spent by municipalities below the state level.. Even though law enforcement expenditures are ‘only’ about 4% of state and local expenditures, that is literally tens of billions that could be reconsidered to assist local and regional counter-drone protections…
…if it weren’t a federal crime for SLTT law enforcement to conduct various counter-drone actions with anti-drone equipment.
And finally, part of this is an information / coordination issue, including classified information policies.
If you give a domestic counter-drone mission to the federal military, you are not relieving them of their obligation to restrict the information according to national security information directives. After all, classified information is restricted because it could be used by adversaries to harm a country. The locations, limitations, and capabilities of defensive systems certainly count, and all the more sensitive if applied to places of exceptionally serious consequence, which could be even more restrictive classifications.
But there are only so many people with security clearances, and most of them work for the federal government. Even Congressional representatives are allowed just two staffers to have Top Secret clearances. While American law enforcement agencies have broad access and use of Law Enforcement Sensitive (LES) information, this information- from a policy perspective- is considered unclassified. It can be shared more easily than classified information because it categorically not Classified, a distinct legal category.
And it is not just civilian law enforcement that is limited by classification considerations. Academic and external reviews suffer as well. Consider what it takes for an academic, or a journalist, or even a good governance group to do to conduct a review of government counter-drone efforts. One of the first requirements for a review is to have information to work from. If the government agencies involved are (Properly! Legally required to!) restricting relevant information, very few people are going to be able to see or review that information.
Which means few people will write on it, even if a new emerging policy weren’t changing so often that major reviews would be outdated before they were published. And this doesn’t touch on how government administrative divisions generally mean one part of a government typically does not, and cannot, write to the competencies of the other. Imagine if the civil air authorities tried to proscribe counter—drone doctrine, or the military tried to order counter-drone processes of the national police, or the national police tried to dictate the legal rights or obligations of drone users. Separation of powers does not just limit the government ability to act, but also the ability to provide comprehensive and consolidated information for outsiders to use.
You can see this impact if you look for numbers of academic publications on ‘drones’ versus ‘drone policy.’ Everyone can talk about how dangerous drones are because the information is public, but there is a lot less available on what states are doing about it… which in no way implies they are doing what they are doing well.
Like, say, keeping a national policy that forces local police to become air pirates if they want to throw a jacket on a dangerous drone. Will they get prosecuted as such by government officials? Probably not. Might they get sued as such by private citizens? Maybe not. Could malefactors or ambulance-chasing lawyers sue them to try and coerce a settlement or deter an action? Absolutely. That sort of legal disfunction leads to policy paralysis even when a couple cargo trucks with drones can blow up a non-trivial fraction of a strategic bomber force in a couple of hours.
So despite all the institutional and policy first-mover advantages a military has in trying to mitigate drones from a military perspective, it is not enough. A military solution is leaving masses of manpower and law enforcement budget resources on the floor. If you give a policy portfolio like domestic drone defense to the a military, you are inheriting all the policy baggage restrictions that come with it, ranging from legal restrictions (that could be changed) to budget and manning (which are a lot harder to) to basic coordination paradigms.
Counter-drone policy is hard, man. When I told @Amadan that I considered drones a revolution in military affairs that would change the relationship between the population and how war is conducted, this is part of what I meant but did not fully elaborate on at the time.
Domestic drone regulations / drone security policy is going to be a part of national defense and security politics going forward. Even Ukraine and Russia stop formally sending hundreds of drones at each other as cruise missiles, they are still going to need the domestic policy apparatus to make sure the other doesn’t do it on the sly. Law enforcement resources will be utilized to enforce drone laws, the nature/willingness of citizen cooperation/voluntary enforcement of such laws will determine the scope within which malefactors can use drones malevolently, and the tools of civil drone defense will overlap with the tools of military drone warfare.
If, you know, it’s not a crime for you to do your part.
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So, What Changed?
Ah, I never answered that when I went on a bit of a policy history tour, did I? Amusingly enough, some non-military counter-drone policy reforms were smuggled into the US FY26 National Defense Authorization Act that was signed into US law mid-December 2025.
After that record-breaking government shutdown at the start of the fiscal year, which broken in part because of the political costs of withholding paychecks from air traffic controllers and military personnel, the Republicans and Democrats didn’t agree so much to a government budget as much as the military budget for the year, which is the lion’s share of the discretionary budget anyway. Since it was going to pass, various riders and defense-adjacent topics were included, including the SAFER SKIES Act.
The SAFER SKIES Act provides a host of authorities most notably to the Department of Homeland Security (which coordinates state and local law enforcement intelligence-related issues at that Unclassified//LES level), the Department of Justice (which coordinates traditional law enforcement), and the Department of Transportation (which owns the FAA, which regulates drones, whose rules are to be enforced). It also provides legal supporting roles for the Department of Defense (with its military counter-drone expertise and policy-thinking) to help the aforementioned agencies, albeit not so much directly.
The most significant new authority permits the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice to create regulations authorizing SLTT law enforcement agencies to lawfully conduct c-UAS. This is very much a federal oversight / ‘you may only do so if you fully comply with our rules’ model, but what it also means is that state and local governments can apply to and eventually establish counter-UAS capabilities at critical infrastructure, major social events, and in other contexts. Naturally, they will often do so at their own expense in terms of manpower and money… but now that it’s legal to, they can also ask their state representatives lobby for Congressional aid in that respect.
This isn’t the full list of policy reforms included in the proposed-but-not-passed H.R.5061 - Counter-UAS Authority Security, Safety, and Reauthorization Act, which itself was the re-introduction of H.R.8610 of the same name, which itself was built on previous bills that died in committee.
But it did pass into law, and the authorities are written in such a way- particularly the authority for the DHS and DOJ to come up with their own regulations in coordination with the FAA and DOD- that this is a substantial… not blank check, but ‘write the requirements you wanted us to write’ mandate. A lot of those would-be lawful requirements are probably going to be federal regulations backed by this law instead.
Which, going back to legal precedent of the Steel Seizure case from the Korean War, gives the Federal government a lot more policy flexibility in terms of judicial deference. While a H.R. 5061 passage would provide for even stronger judicial deference grounds, the SAFER SKIES Act moves the needle from ‘presumptively illegal’ to ‘some deference, subject to judicial review.’
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So, What’s Next?
To be clear, a law is nowhere near enough on its own. It is ‘merely’ a critical pre-requisite. Now that it is no longer necessarily a federal crime for states or cities to invest in counter-drone capabilities, they can start doing so if they want to… which, if you remember New Jersey from a year ago, some probably would like to. Once the DHS and FAA make their regulations on what a ‘legal’ counter-UAS system is, local authorities can look into buying it. Once the DOJ does its own certifications of how privacy-infringing technologies can be used to mitigate infringements, and settles on the sort of training and solemnly signed paperwork people will have to go through to use it, people can be hired to use them. At which point military trainers, or military veterans who already know the systems before they join the force, will gradually start training classes of volunteers, building contracting companies of certified operators, and all that privatization of defense jazz.
The more there is a legal military contribution to the domestic counter-drone policy, the more Department of Defense/War experts on air (and drone) defense, policy/programming, or investment planning can do so with an eye on things like military surplus transfers to law enforcement down the line. Once the FAA/DOJ/DHS make regulations saying it’s okay for certified SLTT law enforcement to use them, of course. Maybe in a couple of decades, instead of mine-resistant infantry carriers your local police department will get counter-drone laser trucks that will sit the in background of public events, or do staged demonstration events in front of school children and parents as part of the security theater to persuade people it’s safe to be out under drone-filled skies.
Heck, this is even good news if you are the sort of person who thinks it is a good thing for the US government, or even state and local governments, to have both foreign and domestic partnerships. As alluded to before, a lot of emerging drone policy is either copying what others do or waiting and watching. Russia and Ukraine may have both fielded significant military counter-drone defenses, but not generally the stuff that can simply be shifted to the civil sector.
A government that actually develops and field-tests a domestic c-UAS policy is a government that can weigh in and persuade other states to adopt a more aligned c-UAS policy with more respect to underlying considerations, like ‘how much information should be included in drone registration’ or ‘retention of signal intercepts by private companies.’ Especially if you have an expeditionary military, every dollar, system, or body a local host provides towards its local c-UAS is an additional dollar, system, or body that can also be protecting your forces.
So, good news overall, if not sufficient news. The best time to
plan a policyplant a tree was twenty years ago, the second-best time to start is now, and all that.Still, it is the end of an era. A bad era, a worrying era, a frustrating era where uncounted people raised uncounted cautions only to see them play out on TV in the skies over Germany and the US, and then still fall behind the culture war of the hour for yet another year. But an era nonetheless.
In the future, a little child I know will have no idea what’s behind the smirk when I snatch their little drone out of the air, or why I insist on putting a jolly roger sticker onto it.
[caveat: there's public information on this topic I'm not going to discuss here, and I'm going to encourage anyone who recognizes to not discuss here]
That's... not strictly true, at least for lower tiers of "drone signals". You can (if you have a ton of money, and are a US citizen, and don't mind getting probed) just buy a commercial 'drone signal tracker' box and antenna kit. My guess is that the smarter ones do a lot of complex FPGA-based TDMA-like analysis work, but there's probably a few cheaper-tier ones that are just boxes stuffed full of SDRs. There are even STC'd variants for shoving into aircraft, though guessing from first principles I doubt they're very good. DJI even makes one for its specific protocol...
Which is the limiting factor: decoding traditional analog control signals doesn't tell you much about DJI's various protocols, which don't tell you about MAVLink, which doesn't tell you about some schmuck hackadayer's DIY version. Protocols are (notoriously) easy to make, and the .mil versions of a drone don't even have to use the same frequency bands as cOTS drones. Then we can throw in encryption, and you're really screwed. The only really universal response to radio control signals is triangulation, and a) that doesn't tell you much more than 'something was here' and b) are the sort of technology that has good solutions old enough to vote.
Blocking the more specialized drones that don't use radio signals gets a lot more complicated. AFAIK, we haven't seen any fiber cable drones in the continental United States, or purely-camera-driven drones... but it's a matter of when, not if.
Oh, I think it's much worse than that. I'd like to be in a world where the meta favors some type of tightly-targeted EMI weapon that burns out drone motor controllers -- that would still be costly to legitimate drones if misused, but mostly just drones. I don't think we live in that world, though.
Consider what a meta where physical interception with a net by a 300kph low-cost counter-drone looks like, includes, and could in the hands of a bad actor to non-drone known targets, including non-drone targets that are not considered 'critical infrastructure' but would cause tens, hundreds, or thousands of deaths if attacked. And that's still an optimistic case!
Specifically, until 2000, GPS degradation was based on an additional psuedorandom delay... that had been turned off over short periods before during periods of military (during the Persian Gulf War) or civil (disaster response) need, and enough had been learned during those temporary turn-off periods that differential GPS had already made it possible to eliminate the noise factor for most applications, and both government and nongovernment orgs were pushing for an implementation. It was still a good thing that Clinton took out SA, but it's also something that was reaching the end of its usefulness as a technology already. The government implementation of dGPS/WAAS meant those higher-quality fixes remained under gov control that could be turned off with a flick of a switch if needed...
Until GLONASS was in good working order in 2011, and dual (or triple-) single-chip GPS/GLONASS/Beidou chips became the new standard (2015?). Now, there's really no way to degrade GPS signal short of just jamming it.
Tbf, the vast majority of the public airports are tiny, pretty irrelevant, and operate using local contractors for pretty much everything; almost all of the private ones are even more irrelevant to the calculus. To be less fair, you aren't defending the big international airports with one person, or even one person per shift.
Eh... anyone can try to sue over anything, but there's not really a lot of grounding for that case here. At least from people in this field, I've seen more concerns about second- or third-party harm (eg, taking down a drone and it landing one someone else).
At least pre-SAFER SKIES, one of the biggest issues was not the FAA or DHS, but FCC -- they really don't like anything even remotely close to signal jamming or devices that can accidentally jam stuff. For a while, the only way the FCC was letting even tests of long-distance drone signal jamming tech happen involved one of their designees standing directly behind the person holding the button down, in person. That's starting to change, but not quickly, and I'm skeptical that it can change as quickly as technology will in response. Dunno if SAFER SKIES changed that, though.
IMO one of the few sane solutions for legitimate drone usage would be locking down the controllers somewhat. Some drone analog of ADS-B (I hear that actual ADS-B won't take kindly to 1000 drones in line-of-sight), combined with (real-time?) geofencing rules might at least be practical. "Won't fly without GPS fix. Won't fly where it's not supposed to. Sends location telemetry in real-time." is at least the right direction.
I think the only "EMI" weapon that even remotely fits the bill is laser weapons hitting drone batteries or other weak parts. "Some things in this
roomdrone don't react well tobulletsdirected energy". I won't be surprised if a decade from now semi-autonomous anti-drone laser SHORAD is openly fielded in a few places. Maybe even not military ones.EDIT: It's worth noting that large airports nationwide have full-time teams scaring birds away from airports as aviation hazards. Would an equivalent size anti-drone team even get noticed in the noise?
The FAA has promoted a RemoteID system in the United States, and I think TheNybbler's commented on it and its problems before. Most modern drone receivers that fly-by-GPS have a fallback to safely land if GPS is interrupted and have some coded-in-keepout zones, but fly-by-eye or by-remote typically don't (or, in extreme cases, might be intended for use in GPS-less environments). And there's an absolute ton of old ones out there. And disabling an outbound antenna isn't that hard. And a lot of important keepout zones aren't permanent. And the software controller is largely not hard part of the drone software.
It'll probably help (and probably be frustrating) on the margins, but it's just extremely hard to lock things down that aggressively.
Yeah, that's probably true, and also probably something that could be a weapon of its own. I'd hoped that maybe you could treat the brushless motors like antenna, but the math doesn't really work out with modern tech.
Fair point, and sometimes those are somewhat hilariously aggressive -- tamed hunting falcons or dogs on one end, noise 'cannons' at the other -- though they're also all from back when we could Just Do Things.
I think you could maybe get away with an active transponder requirement (challenge/response cryptographic signature, at a minimum) for trusted airspace, otherwise authorities are allowed to shoot down first and ask questions later. And over time uncontrolled access could be limited to relatively safe areas (farmland or equivalent). As someone who has been at least a bit involved in the space since before DJI made drones good Christmas gifts, I feel for the RC plane community that has had to work hard to carve out their legal niche.
I thought it interesting that the wildlife specialist role required enough paperwork to get a security clearance (I assume for access to customs spaces? Maybe they're already doing drone things quietly).
On the topic of brushless motors, they're pretty high frequency drivers, but I don't think could work practically (OTOH it'd be "near field", which is well out of my wheelhouse).
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