Two paired exercises ran at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida last September. In Operation Clear Horizon, Army Special Forces played attackers and mimicked Ukraine's June 2025 Spiderweb raid on Russian airbases -- using commercial quadcopters, frequency-hopping drones, and units piloted over cellular LTE. In Falcon Peak 25.2, NORAD tried to defend against them. Defense One published the strategy-shift story this week. The takeaway, per JIATF-401 director Brig. Gen. Matt Ross: drones could "easily demolish" US airbases. The Pentagon is now spending hard.

1. We're Way Behind, And We Have To Catch Up (Wicker, Reed, Ross, Anduril)

Ukraine wrecked Russian strategic bombers with $400 drones. US bases are not ready for that.

Three hundred and fifty drone detections over US bases. That's the Pentagon's own count. Langley Air Force Base saw 17 straight nights of unidentified drone swarms in late 2023, with F-22s relocated. SASC Chair Roger Wicker and ranking member Jack Reed have been pushing on this since their April 2024 op-ed and got a major counter-drone authority into the FY2026 NDAA. The bipartisan posture is unusual: both want more authority and more spending, fast.

The Pentagon is paying. The Army awarded Anduril a $20 billion enterprise counter-UAS contract vehicle in March. DoD's April 21 announcement was its largest-ever drone-and-counter-drone investment. JIATF-401 ran 67 separate tests in three months. Anduril's Falcon Peak kit -- Mobile Sentry, Pulsar, Anvil interceptor, Lattice -- runs up to $12 million per fly-away configuration. The companies that sell this stuff are having a year.

2. Especially China (Stacie Pettyjohn, CNAS)

A $20 billion Anduril contract is a lot of money. China just ordered a million one-way drones. Catching up isn't a technology problem; it's an industrial base problem.

China has copied virtually every US drone at lower cost, and Beijing has reportedly ordered 1 million one-way attack drones for delivery this year. Stacie Pettyjohn at CNAS laid this out in her 2024 Swarms over the Strait report and has been making the case ever since. The Replicator program -- the Pentagon's swarming-mass answer for the Indo-Pacific -- aims for thousands.

Clear Horizon was a wake-up call about the homeland. Pettyjohn's point is that the same gap exists overseas, and worse. Tests and contracts are necessary. An industrial base capable of producing drones at the scale of consumer electronics is what actually wins a drone war. The US doesn't have one. Twenty billion in contracts and 67 tests don't fix that by themselves.

3. Domestic Surveillance Is A Real Cost Though (ACLU, Jay Stanley)

Counter-drone systems detect, classify, and track everything in the airspace. That includes the protest, the hobbyist, the kid. Where does the data go?

The Fourth Amendment doesn't have an exception for "we're defending the base." The ACLU sued the Pentagon in March over domestic drone data collection on those grounds, arguing the sensors sweep public airspace far beyond what's needed to protect the perimeter. The ACLU of Florida has been writing about how government drone-tracking systems quietly expand into surveillance infrastructure. Jay Stanley, the ACLU's senior privacy analyst, has been pointing this out for years. The DoD even published privacy guidance on counter-drone testing in March -- a tell that the agency knows this is going to court.

The FAA fight is the same problem in another costume. Most counter-drone tools -- jammers, kinetic interceptors, microwave systems -- aren't safe to use in civilian airspace. As JIATF-401 expands beyond bases, deconfliction gets harder. Defending Eglin is one thing. Defending a stadium during an event is something else, and the legal authority to do it doesn't fully exist yet.

Where This Lands

Where this lands depends on whether the FY2026 NDAA spending actually translates into US-made drone production at scale, on whether the ACLU lawsuit forces the DoD to write down clearer surveillance limits, and on whether the next drone incursion over a US base happens before the defenses are deployed. The Pentagon learned the lesson at Eglin. Whether it can act on it before someone runs the same play for real is the open question.

Sources