Who Shoots Down the Drone Over the Shipyard?
Last updated 06:27 AM EDT • Read time: 6m
The Pentagon should be given a lot of credit for moving quickly to address the drone threat to our homeland. Alongside a slew of other directives, Secretary Hegseth last week released a memo telling the officials who approve counter-drone systems to “treat delay as risk.”
The approval process was a real problem. In January, an Inspector General report found that many bases, including Luke Air Force Base, at which nearly 75% of the world’s F-35 pilots are trained, lacked authorities to use C-UAS capabilities. And as B-52 bomber crews were prosecuting Operation Epic Fury from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, security forces at that base watched as waves of jamming-resistant drones were flying overhead.
This directive caps a year of reform efforts starting with the creation of JIATF 401 last August. The memo resolves the issue of fragmented authorities by expanding and centralizing authorities and responsibilities with JIATF-401. This critical agency now has the what it needs to accelerate CUAS use for the military. The command is importantly empowered to override lower-level commanders who disapprove or delay counter-drone requests.
Additionally, the memo strips the old Pentagon philosophy of it only takes one person in the chain to say “no” to stop an action. Once the safety or legal review gets to “yes,” identical configuration setups are waived through the approval process.
While the Pentagon has made real progress with this memo additional actions are needed. As we argued in our recent report, The Shield America Forgot, defending critical infrastructure requires legal authorities that only Congress can provide. Where the memo comes up short is in defining the legal authorities needed from Congress to defend the nation’s critical infrastructure, and for this Congress needs to act.
Every one of the preceding reforms stops at the edge of the Pentagon’s authority. An adversary bent on blunting America’s will or capability need not evade a base’s defenses to achieve their goals. They can attack the privately owned and impossible to disperse shipyards, electrical grid, ports, and other critical infrastructure that makes the American ways of life and war possible.
We don’t have to wait to see what the gist of the playbook is. Russia has spent the past four years targeting Ukraine’s energy grid while Ukraine has imposed “long-range sanctions” by targeting Russian refineries and other infrastructure. And during this year’s Iran war, the Iranians sent drones and missiles to target desalination plants, airport fuel tanks, oil terminals, ports, residential buildings, hotels, and more. This on top of the destruction levelled on CENTCOM military installations.
Here is the gap. If tonight a private shipyard or switchyard observed a drone overhead, they would have either no or limited legal authority to down it. Relevant federal aviation and telecommunications law make it a crime for a private operator to disable a drone. Congress narrowed the gap last year with the passage of the SAFER SKIES ACT in the FY2026 NDAA. That act lets trained state and local law enforcement down drones menacing critical sites. But that authority is bottlenecked by the single FBI training facility in Alabama. And no police department can sustain a counter-drone team at every station or substation in its jurisdiction. Authorities need to flow to the people who are at critical private facilities to meet the problems of time and scale imposed by the drone threat.
Even Russia has figured this out. This past March, Putin signed a law allowing private firms to use firearms to protect critical infrastructure. The same law allows these firms to obtain weapons from Russia’s National Guard (Rosgvardia). Now, starting in May, private companies are allowed to buy “anti-aircraft artillery systems, turrets, radar equipment, specialized vehicles, and electronic warfare systems.”
The Russian model is undesirable. Putin has decreed that the state may take control of facilities that are deemed inadequately protected. But the recognition of the threat is correct: private actors must learn and be allowed to play defense. It took a few years of Ukrainian ‘long-range sanctions’ for Russia to learn this lesson. If the Congress finds this option unpalatable, then it needs to provide the Pentagon with the authorities and resources to do this across the nation. The bottom line is, the responsibility and authority has to clearly lay somewhere.
Some in Congress have already done some of the hard work to address this. One option to consider is Senator Tom Cotton’s CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AIRSPACE DEFENSE ACT that would grant trained staff at designated critical infrastructure sites authority to track and mitigate drones deemed to pose a credible threat. What’s more, it would provide federal liability protection save for circumstances of gross negligence and would authorize grant funding of $250 million to support purchases of approved systems. But as of writing it is languishing with no Senate cosponsors. Whether Congress adopts this bill or another, waiting until disaster strikes is not a viable option.
The Pentagon should propose to Congress three critical pieces of information to inform the legislative process.
- Provide a clear definition of covered sites that explicitly includes the defense industrial base so that shipyards, munitions plants, and ports among other facilities don’t have to wait for a DHS designation process.
- Provide a path for using Pentagon assets to break the certification bottleneck by accrediting training facilities beyond the FBI’s single schoolhouse.
- Providing the digital integration infrastructure so that private sensors send data to JIATF-401 and NORTHCOM to create a common airspace picture. And this all needs to be linked with commercial aviation authorities to prevent avoidable mishaps or worse.
There are certainly real risks associated with all this. There may be incidences of misidentification, falling debris, jamming that spills into GPS and telephone service. These objections point to effective training, carefully selected designated sites, approved equipment, and oversight.
As Secretary Hegseth has clearly stated, delay is an operational risk. If we do not solve this and an adversary attacks the homeland, what do we tell the American people?
MG John Ferrari is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where his work focuses on the defense budget, defense reform and acquisition, and the U.S. military. Dillon Prochnicki is his research associate.