The American military’s efforts to speed up defensive tools and tactics against uncrewed aerial systems. Different branches of the armed forces have been working to integrate electromagnetic and kinetic countermeasures into their units and arsenals, with varying stages of progress. Now the Pentagon is setting up a joint interagency task force to try and coordinate the different programs.
The new interagency group is being created in part because the military “cannot move fast enough in this space,” according to Gen. James Mingus, Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. Mingus revealed the new task force while speaking at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The exact details on the task force and its makeup weren’t specified but Mingus compared the risks that UAS pose to the dangers of improvised explosive devices during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“We need an organization that is joint, interagency, has authorities, a colorless pot of money and the authorities to go after, from requirements all the way through acquisition in a rapid way to be able to keep pace with that. We are in the process of standing that organization up and get it going,” he said.
Per Mingus, the Army will lead the new task force, but “this will be a joint organization to be able to deal with joint solutions in the future.”
The growing importance of drones in modern military tactics has been discussed by the U.S. armed forces since the outbreak of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but has taken on greater urgency over the last 18 months due to fighting in the Middle East. U.S. forces have intercepted or been targeted by waves of combined drone and missile attacks in ground bases in Iraq, Syria and Jordan, among other nations, and in the waters around Yemen. The attacks have resulted in dozens of injuries and three deaths, and current air defense options have been costly, from the use of Patriot missile batteries or Navy ships heavily using expensive Standard Missiles to take out relatively cheap UAS.
The military has been after a new strategy for countering aerial drones for more than a year. Last spring William LaPlante, then the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment at the Department of Defense, outlined the need for a reliable and affordable counter-UAS program that could be made at scale, noting that the current options are “getting too expensive.”
Earlier this year a memo outlining a planned transformation in the Army highlighted integrating drones into the service and expanding on ways to counter them. It specified a need for cheaper options, which can be integrated in small maneuver units as early as next year. The Army for its part already asked for more than $800 million for counter-drone initiatives from Congress in its 2026 budget request. Other services are working on their own ways of dealing with the ground threat. The Navy is pursuing several cheaper ways to intercept aerial drones while the Marine Corps is deploying units out with prototype countermeasures meant to work with small-unit tactics.
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