Whose Sky Is It Anyway?

Some of you may have picked up on an interesting, if not downright fascinating, story from earlier this month. The short version is that Customs and Border Protection agents shot an experimental laser at a balloon and it caused the civilian air space around El Paso to be shut down. As with all things you read, there's more to the tale than that -- CBP was using a laser on loan from the Army, the Federal Aviation Administration sensed a threat to its statutory control over civilian airspace, U.S. national security entities are growing frustrated with the FAA, the FAA is growing frustrated with U.S. national security entities, and the fight is spilling into the public domain. Hence the big, attention-snatching headlines that the FAA had essentially implemented an air-embargo of El Paso, Texas. The incident was severe enough that the FAA felt it needed to exercise its sovereignty.

The problem is one of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), best known as drones. Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, even the intelligence community are all rightly worried about the thread of UAS to civilian infrastructure. Those concerns are well-founded. Last year, Ukrainian forces struck about 34 percent of Russia’s strategic cruise-missile delivery aircraft at airbases using low-cost drones smuggled into Russia. Israel did something similar against the Iranians last year. In both cases, a low-cost, distributed capability degraded high-end platforms that cost billions to field. The same can happen to us.

And it's not a new concept. Years ago, as a Senate staffer, my curiosity got the better of me and I presented a scenario to leaders at Global Strike Command. This is the Air Force's command for long-range nuclear bombers and missiles. It was a simple enough exercise and it was derived from my own time on missile alert with Global Strike Command years earlier. In a heightened state of readiness, think DEFCON 2 or worse, a few 18-wheelers park in the geographic center of our missile fields in Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Hundreds of small drones with little kinetic payloads pour out of the trucks and fly anywhere between one to 30 miles to launch facilities, where they hover outside sensor range and wait for the ICBM launcher doors to open and then strike the missiles in the few seconds that they are vulnerable. Or damages it in the first few seconds of the missile's boost phase. The strike preemptively wipes out 60 percent of our ICBMs in the opening seconds of a nuclear exchange and ultimately leads to a lost nuclear exchange and potential loss of national sovereignty. The questions of the Air Force leaders predated the Israeli and Ukrainian operations against vital military assets years later.

The Air Force's response, which I will keep opaque, was professional and thoughtful. But they admitted existing FAA authorities, written decades ago, somewhat hampered their ability to respond and protect national assets. The military is not wrong when they complain that the FAA has been slow to respond to the drone threat and still today resist efforts to test new counter-drone technologies. To wit, just twelve little drones, loaded with small explosive charges, could fly over a fence line and detonate the fuel tanks of a dozen international flights at JFK awaiting departure -- a scenario that could exceed the September 11 attacks in casualties. That's to say nothing of the vulnerabilities to our key military assets. Sometimes it can seem like the FAA is more comfortable with offensive drone systems in enemy hands than they are with defensive systems in friendly hands.

But the FAA is not wrong in their caution either. The military tends to lean hard into new missions and challenges, and to safety-conscious air traffic controllers, aggressive testing and rapid fielding of new counter-drone technologies can seem like cowboy behavior that risks the lives of 3 million people daily who fly domestic routes in the U.S. Shutting down the El Paso airspace, to outside observers at least, seemed more about flexing their legal authority over American skies than it was a response to a legitimate threat -- a message from the FAA that they have a responsibility to protect Americans, too, and by law most U.S. airspace and everything that goes through it is theirs to control.

Either way, swarms of cheap, autonomous systems are now a security reality. NATO war games and U.S. exercises all come with the same conclusion. Massed drones change the economics of air defense. Competing federal fiefdoms need to play nice with each other in order to protect American citizens, soldiers, assets, and infrastructure. And it's not just the one-off drone threat that the interagency has to worry about. Too much of our counter-UAS architecture remains built around one effector for one threat: a missile for a drone, a burst of a gatling cannon against a drone, or a laser shot on a drone. That model fails against swarms, which is where the economics justify drone-war tactics.

The threat isn't some theoretical abstract off in faraway lands. Mystery drones loitered over Langley Air Force Base for days, where $6 billion in F-22 fighters sat largely unprotected. Sensitive facilities such as Plant 42 in Palmdale have seen incursions, where lots of highly classified military engineering work occurs. On the southern border, the problem is routine. Steven Willoughby, deputy director of DHS’s counter-drone program, testified before Congress that cartels are using drones nearly every day to transport drugs and surveil Border Patrol. He told lawmakers that more than 27,000 drones were detected within 500 meters of the southern border in just six months in 2024. That is an operational airspace problem inside the United States.

Congress, in a rare moment of bipartisanship, has been pushing both the Department of War and the Department of Transportation to go faster and play nice together. House Armed Services Committee Vice Chairman, Representative Rob Wittman of Virginia, has been among the clearest voices on the scope of the problem, warning that the Joint Force "does not have sufficient ability to find, fix, track, and ultimately engage these enemy drones at home and abroad." Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker has pressed Pentagon leaders to accelerate counter-drone investments and close homeland defense gaps, admirably throwing the full weight of the Senate Armed Services Committee behind efforts to expand drone-defeat authorities (sponsored by Senators Cotton and Gillibrand) and rapidly field new, non-kinetic solutions to killing drones (pushed by Senator Angus King of Maine) that don't involve cannon fire or missile shots over Hampton Roads, Va.

Compounding the risk is policy confusion. For years, the FAA has constrained meaningful counter-drone action out of concern that jamming or kinetic responses might endanger civilian aircraft. Brigadier General Matt Ross, commander of a new federal counter-drone task force, recently described the complexity: “When I say installation X is covered under [U.S. law], now that installation commander has to figure out what their plan is to defend it, and then they coordinate with the FAA, and they say, ‘Hey, I plan to use a combination of active and passive sensing. I want to use this electromagnetic defeat mechanism. I’m going to make sure that doesn’t interfere with any airports around here.’” Even with recent changes in law, the FAA can still freeze out base commanders trying to protect their installation. The FAA is right in the sense that safety matters. But paralysis carries its own risk. Therein lies the heart of the technical, legal, and sometimes philosophical debate that the government is wrestling with.

The technology challenge is evolving as well. Legacy electronic warfare can disrupt radio-controlled drones. It cannot reliably defeat fiber-optic-guided or AI-enabled “dark drones” that do not depend on traditional links. That requires capabilities that operate at scale and are not dependent on one-to-one engagements. High-power microwave systems are one increasingly attractive solution.

Rather than chasing each drone with an individual interceptor, microwaves can create force fields against swarms, think a wall of electromagnetic interference that discombobulates circuits using waveforms that are effective against unmanned systems, but acceptable to the FAA and their imperative to protect commercial air traffic.

Recent demonstrations have shown the ability to defeat large numbers of drones in a single engagement, including systems not susceptible to conventional jamming. The Army has exercised high-power microwave capabilities in the Indo-Pacific and deployed prototypes in multiple theaters. So called "non-kinetic" solutions like this also offer a way to defeat drones over the contiguous U.S. without raining debris over American neighborhoods.

The FAA, as it is, made their point and reopened the El Paso airspace well ahead of the threatened ten-day shutdown. But the incident laid bare the fierce debate that's transpiring over drones. We've had enough warning both overseas and at home. The technology is there. The legal authorities are there. If there is a mass casualty drone attack here in the U.S., it will be because we failed to get out of our own way.