The U.S. military is racing to build defenses against a threat American forces have repeatedly confronted overseas but could face on their own soil: waves of enemy drones targeting military bases and critical infrastructure.
The threat could come as part of a larger military strike designed to overwhelm American air defenses with a combination of sophisticated missiles and far cheaper unmanned aircraft. The U.S. intelligence community assesses that China, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia will continue developing one-way attack drones and that their militaries will likely pair high-end missiles with cheaper expendable weapons to strain U.S. missile defenses, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“Even now, drones appear periodically over military bases and civilian airports. Most are likely from hobbyists, but some are believed to be malign,” retired Marine Col. and Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Mark Cancian told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Few defenses exist because these facilities are generally in inhabited areas. Technologies exist for killer drones and soon for laser defenses, but deploying them widely would be expensive.”
“There is no silver bullet for dealing with rogue drones. There needs to be a ‘Swiss cheese’ approach involving multiple layers to close the gaps,” Suat Cubukcu, an assistant professor of homeland security at Towson University, told the DCNF. “A layered defense structure is necessary for effective defense because each technology comes with limitations. Drone risks vary based on the threat and the environment.”
Drone defense involves a three-step process where targets must be detected, identified and defeated, a counter drone expert told the DCNF. He said the U.S. has a lot of work to do in integrating these systems.
“There is currently no single system that provides Detect, Identify and Defeat (DID) capabilities, so layered approaches are needed,” Jamey Jacob, the director of the Counter-UAS Center of Excellence at Oklahoma State University, told the DCNF. “For example, a radar to detect a drone, an optical and acoustic system to identify it as friend or foe, and a radio frequency jammer to defeat it. Different systems are available at each step, but we don’t have good enough data yet to determine the in each alone, let alone as a set of coordinated collaborative system.”
U.S. defenses are not uniform across the country. More than 350 military installations in the homeland have “varying degrees of defensive capability and criticality,” while individual services and installation commanders retain responsibility for defending their bases, according to U.S. Northern Command.
“Testing under various conditions of these layered systems are needed to fill in all of holes of the slices of Swiss cheese and ensure nothing gets through,” Jacob told the DCNF. “Our mission is to test systems to find and fill the gaps. We are so far fortunate (i.e., lucky) that we haven’t suffered a major attack yet.”
The threat posed by armed drones has already surfaced domestically. Federal prosecutors charged eight men in connection with an alleged plot to attack the June 14 UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House, with conspirators planning to use explosive-laden drones to force an evacuation before snipers fired on fleeing government officials and other attendees, according to the Justice Department.
The military is in a stronger position than it was several years ago, but some vulnerabilities remain, Mark Roosevelt Ditlevson, then-acting assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs, told lawmakers in April 2025, according to the Pentagon. The Pentagon had little ability to detect, track, characterize, disrupt or defeat a series of drones that appeared around Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia in December 2023.
The problem becomes more complicated if a foreign military attacks in volume. Nation-state actors possess the resources to develop coordinated drone swarms, and advances in artificial intelligence could make such attacks easier to execute, FBI official Mike Torphy said during an Aug. 21 counter-drone roundtable hosted by the Army’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401, according to the Army.
Shahed-type one-way attack drones and other larger unmanned aircraft operating overseas should not be dismissed as threats that could never appear inside the United States, Torphy said during the roundtable. Russia has already used Iranian-designed Shahed drones extensively in Ukraine, while Iran and its proxies have employed one-way attack drones against American forces and warships in the Middle East, according to a Congressional Research Service report.
“The type of attack we are most susceptible to is the massed attack using small one-way attack drones,” Jacob told the DCNF. “Controlled remotely via FPV or using pre-programmed guidance, these are hard to detect and hard to defeat, with ability to circumvent some defenses with knowledge. See Operation Spiderweb for an example, where Ukraine forces used these systems to take out nearly 40% of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet.”
Defending against such attacks cannot rely solely on conventional surface-to-air missiles. U.S. Patriot inventories have fallen below 1,000 interceptors, and THAAD inventories stood at roughly 250 following extensive combat use during the Iran war, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated in July.
The Pentagon is consequently pursuing cheaper layers of defense. Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401), the Pentagon’s lead organization for countering small unmanned aircraft systems, has tested Bumblebee interceptor drones designed to physically collide with hostile unmanned aircraft and is fielding radio-frequency detection and non-kinetic defeat systems under its Domestic Shield initiative, according to the Army.
The Pentagon is also placing high-energy lasers and high-power microwave systems at several U.S. installations to evaluate whether directed-energy weapons can provide another layer against drones, according to the Department of War. The pilot includes Naval Base Kitsap, Whiteman Air Force Base, Grand Forks Air Force Base, Fort Bliss and Fort Huachuca.
“What I can say regarding the homeland security sector, which includes civilian infrastructure, is that it does not rely on missile-defense interceptors to prevent drone threats. Instead, it focuses, or aims to rely, on other systems, such as jamming, spoofing, netting, high-energy weapons, and interceptor drones,” Cubukcu told the DCNF. “There is definitely a need for more feasible and cost-effective mitigation systems. Spending a million dollars on a missile to bring down a drone that costs only a few hundred dollars is not a workable or sustainable approach.”
Yet the central problem may be scale rather than whether counter-drone technology exists at all.
Preparing for a military drone assault could therefore require a layered network of sensors, electronic warfare, inexpensive interceptor drones, directed-energy weapons and conventional missiles rather than relying on any single system. JIATF-401 has adopted that approach because there is “no single solution for drone defense,” Army Col. Tony Lindh said in July, according to the Army.
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