By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How to Secure the Sky

On June 1, Ukraine’s security services launched a covert strike on five air bases across Russia. More than 100 attack drones smuggled into Russia in plywood cabins on trucks driven by unsuspecting Russians destroyed bombers sitting on tarmacs as far away as the Belaya air base in Siberia, around 3,000 miles from Kyiv. According to Ukrainian government sources, the strikes took out about one-third of Russia’s long-range bomber force and cost Moscow roughly $7 billion. Dubbed Operation Spiderweb, it was one of the most spectacular and daring attacks to date of the war in Ukraine. It was also a dramatic warning of a growing threat to American soil.

Echoing the 9/11 Commission’s famous conclusion about the United States’ failure to anticipate the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Today, the drone threat is no longer difficult to imagine. States can use them to sow economic disruption or to spy on sensitive sites, lone-wolf actors can use them for political violence, and hobbyists can accidentally crash them into critical infrastructure.

Both the Biden and Trump administrations have taken steps to protect the country from drones, such as specifying federal roles and responsibilities, banning drone flights over certain sensitive sites and special events, and investing in counterdrone technology and its deployment. Recent legislation goes even further to close jurisdictional gaps. But despite this progress, the United States has not kept pace with the threats. Vulnerabilities remain, including inadequate systems for identifying and restricting drones in U.S. airspace, limited funding for advanced counterdrone systems capable of protecting sensitive infrastructure and mass gatherings of people, and supply chain risks tied to China’s dominance of the global drone market.

The United States, in other words, still lacks a comprehensive drone defense. The good news is that the country and its partners have the means and ability to mitigate the domestic threat from drones, and there is bipartisan consensus in Washington for doing so. They just need the bureaucratic and political will to act before a crisis forces them to.

A German soldier demonstrating a drone jammer, Hamburg, Germany, September 2025

 

Swarming Skies

The risk from drones has evolved dramatically since 2022. Russia’s war against Ukraine has demonstrated the lethality of drones, which according to Ukrainian government estimates are now responsible for 70 percent of all casualties. The war in Ukraine has also served as a testing ground and innovation accelerant for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), including the mass production of first-person-view drones, the development of fiber-optic drones that can travel for miles and cannot be thwarted by radio frequencies, and long-range strike drones that are ever more capable of effectively hitting targets such as energy and civilian infrastructure. Skilled drone pilots can guide their payloads into the open hatch of a tank and have been recording such attacks to score propaganda points for Kyiv or Moscow. Ukraine is manufacturing some four million drones a year—by some estimates more than all NATO countries combined—while Russia is making around two million per year. Mounting a defense, meanwhile, has been difficult, with neither Russia nor Ukraine able to find scalable and broad countermeasures to protect itself against the onslaught.

During this time, drones have become ever more present in U.S. skies as well. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, more than 800,000 drone operators are registered in the United States. But the number of actual drones is far higher because of the many hobbyists operating small drones that fall below registration thresholds and because operators can use a single registration to fly multiple drones.Drones are now being used for everything from monitoring crop health to assisting firefighters and law enforcement. And the day when drones deliver goods to your front door may not be far off: in 2024, Amazon’s Prime Air service secured FAA approval for its drones to fly beyond the operator’s visual line of sight, laying the foundation for the company to scale such operations.

Yet while drones can deliver major economic benefits, their proliferation heightens the risk of accidents and complicates the ability of law enforcement agencies to distinguish legitimate activity from potential threats. The United States has already experienced a series of confusing drone-related incidents. In December 2023, Langley Air Force Base in Virginia experienced 17 consecutive nights of mysterious drone flyovers that forced the temporary relocation of F-22 Raptor aircraft and the suspension of training operations. Witnesses described formations as long as 20 feet traveling at 100 miles per hour. But despite weeks of investigation, the FBI, the Pentagon, and NASA were not able to identify the operators. Over the following year, more than 350 drone incursions were detected across 100 different U.S. military installations.

Last December, meanwhile, a wave of drone sightings concentrated in New Jersey set off a media frenzy. The governor reported nearly 50 sightings in a single night as the FAA imposed restrictions on flights around critical infrastructure. Once again, authorities were unable to determine the origin of the drones or even corroborate the sightings. These incidents highlight the challenge of identifying who is responsible for unknown UAS—and, just as important—determining which authorities are responsible for dealing with them.

Part of the problem is that drones are easily accessible to dangerous actors as varied as lone wolves, criminal organizations, and adversarial states. In the hands of individuals, cheap drones can be tools for terrorist acts. In July 2024, for instance, a 20-year-old used one to survey the rally grounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, before taking aim at Donald Trump during a campaign appearance. States, meanwhile, can deploy drones to cause economic disruption: consider recent hybrid attacks in Europe, which European officials attribute to Russian intelligence. In September, unusual drone activity forced temporary closures of the main airports in Copenhagen and Oslo. The next month, similar incidents near the Munich airport derailed flights for more than 3,000 travelers. Russian authorities denied involvement, but the incidents cost millions. Such examples show how hostile actors in a moment of future tension could employ drones to surveil sensitive sites, destroy commercial or military targets, or conduct plausibly deniable economic disruption in the United States.

The United States urgently needs an integrated national system for detecting drones, identifying and attributing potential threats, and executing a response in real time. The FAA tried to address part of this issue with its Remote ID Rule, which became fully enforceable in March 2024 and requires registered drones to fly with a “digital license plate” that broadcasts their identification and location information. Compliance has been slow, and enforcement has been tepid, however: a Government Accountability Office report found that in many cases, state and local law enforcement were not even aware of the Remote ID requirement. The federal government should provide greater resources to the FAA to facilitate full implementation. Still, given the limits of the Remote ID technology and its integration with state and local systems, the more advisable path may be to replace the program altogether with a new, more agile technology developed in collaboration with industry.

To complement identification efforts, the FAA, in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security, should establish a single catalogue of restricted airspace and institute “hard” geofencing requirements—software guardrails built into every drone—that would automatically block them from flying over these sensitive areas. The European Union requires drone manufacturers to incorporate geo-awareness systems that warn or restrict operators from flying into prohibited zones, but in the United States such measures remain voluntary and depend on the manufacturer’s discretion. In fact, in January 2025, DJI, a Chinese company and the world’s largest drone manufacturer, rolled back geofencing software that had previously prevented U.S. drones from flying in FAA-restricted areas. By making hobbyist and commercial drones easier to identify and barring them from sensitive areas, authorities will be able to more quickly distinguish inadvertent disruptions from nefarious threats.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth tours a military base, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, March 2025

 

Drone Defense

The United States also needs to double down on counterdrone measures. Today, the most advanced of these systems use directed-energy weapons—high-powered lasers and microwaves that disable or destroy drones—that complement existing electronic warfare tools, including GPS spoofing, radio-frequency jamming, and remote takeover technologies that can neutralize drone swarms. But these systems can run into the tens of millions of dollars. By contrast, the drones they are combating often cost just a few hundred dollars—an unsustainable asymmetry.

The Defense Department should thus boost funding and R & D to develop agile and innovative counterdrone technologies. The Pentagon has already earmarked significant resources for the effort, and Congress recently ordered the formation of a joint interagency task force to better coordinate acquisition and deployment. But the government needs to allocate billions of dollars more to make it scalable. Because large numbers of drones can overwhelm even the most sophisticated air defense systems, an effective strategy will rely not just on one device or system but on intentionally layered defenses that integrate physical, electronic, and kinetic counterdrone measures.

The United States will then need to focus on deploying these counterdrone systems where they are most needed, such as around critical infrastructure. Airports are an obvious target: the FAA recorded 411 illegal drone incursions at airports in the first quarter of 2025 alone, an increase of more than 25 percent over the same period in 2024. Mass gathering sites, such as stadiums and concert venues, will also need their own enhanced defenses, particularly ahead of the 2026 World Cup games and the United States Semiquincentennial on July 4, 2026. The FBI has reported that it is only able to protect around 0.05 percent of the more than 240,000 events eligible for its oversight. This is an unacceptable gap that puts the American public at risk.

Data centers are the new frontier in this domain; as firms invest hundreds of billions of dollars into the build-out of artificial intelligence, these sites are increasingly becoming national security assets. With plans to build new AI data centers approaching the size of Manhattan, major tech companies previously focused on cyber defenses will need strong policy incentives and assistance to protect such sites from physical attacks, including from drones.

 

An Opportunity To Act

At the same time that the United States is working on its drone defenses, it also needs to play offense and develop a whole-of-government strategy to address the supply chain risks from Chinese dominance of the drone market. Today, 80 percent of the U.S. consumer drone market is held by a single Chinese company. This dominance opens the risk that Chinese drones could transmit sensitive information back to Beijing—as well as the possibility that they might be remotely hacked to sow disruption. In late December, the Federal Communications Commission placed all foreign drone companies on its Covered List, effectively banning new models of foreign drones in the U.S. market. This will help address the vulnerability from new Chinese drones in U.S. airspace, but it will not affect foreign drones already in widespread use or restrict the import and sale of drones previously approved for the U.S. market. And even with the ban, it will take time to diversify away from Chinese manufactured drones. The United States will need greater incentives to encourage both manufacturing and non-Chinese drone use if it wants to develop a competitive drone market.

The United States should also lean into the opportunity to learn from partners on the frontlines of drone warfare, including Ukraine, Israel, and now, several of its European NATO allies. Ukraine has been at the vanguard of creating lower-cost counter-drone methods, such as interceptor drones that can ram hostile counterparts, to help defend itself against relentless Russian attacks. Israel, which has faced recurring drone attacks from Iran and its proxies over the last several years, has invested in advanced systems to identify, track, and intercept drone threats in crowded airspace. And NATO recently proposed a “drone wall” to detect and intercept threats along its eastern flank. The United States should coordinate with NATO on counterdrone initiatives and form working groups with Ukraine and Israel to exchange technology and best practices. These discussions should include not just representatives of the U.S. military but also the Department of Homeland Security, the FAA, the FBI, and other authorities.

Given the urgency of the threat and the magnitude of the legal, technical, and policy challenges at hand, Congressional leaders should also convene a blue-ribbon commission to examine recent domestic and international incidents; develop an integrated system for identifying, tracking, and mitigating drone threats that spans civilian and military applications; devise a way to adequately fund the development and deployment of drone detection and mitigation technology; and address critical vulnerabilities in U.S. supply chains for drones. The commission should be small, with no more than five members and a well-resourced staff working in both classified and unclassified dimensions, and it should be charged with delivering concrete recommendations within 12 months on how to strengthen the U.S. counterdrone posture across the government as a whole. Such a commission is typically created after an attack or major disaster, but the United States can seize the moment now.

The drone threat is no longer theoretical. It is here, it is accelerating, and it will only grow more challenging. The United States still has the means to shape the environment before a crisis forces its hand, but the window is closing. The federal government must act fast to eliminate regulatory gaps, build a layered defense, and find the political will to fund and deploy counter-drone systems at scale. If it does not take these steps by choice, it will be forced to take them—and more—in the wake of a preventable tragedy.

 

 

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