In the Arizona desert in late September, US Northern Command completed the fourth iteration of Falcon Peak, an exercise built around a single adversary: the small, cheap, unmanned aircraft. Defense vendors came, along with Joint Task Force-Southern Border, the Department of Homeland Security and the Army-led Joint Interagency Task Force-401, Business Insider’s Chris Panella reports, to test systems meant to detect, disable and destroy the drones that drug cartels now fly along the Mexican frontier.
The testing has given the Pentagon a better picture of how the cartels use their drones, and it is laying the groundwork for a layered network of defenses — because, officials say, no single technology will defeat all of them.
After the exercise, military officials described a “very noticeable” rise in detections of cartel drones over recent months: 378 in the past month alone. “It’s an increasing trend,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Brian Filler, deputy commanding general for operations with the southern border task force, told reporters on a call. The drones, he said, work mostly as the traffickers’ eyes — intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — and are “largely commercial off-the-shelf available drones,” nearly always carrying a camera as payload.
Brig. Gen. Jason Rueschhoff, NORTHCOM’s operations director, cautioned that the numbers say as much about American sensors as about cartel habits. More counter-drone systems have been deployed, so “we’re able to see more than we had previously,” he said, and the rising count does not necessarily mean more drones are being flown.
Filler described the watch being kept on the line: “We have high electro-optic cameras that can see the drones in flight, and that’s how we do some of the positive ID on them and get a sense of what’s flying. Very often, we see drone launches, and then we see movement across the border. We have sensors that help us with that. We have cameras that help us with that.”
The border has become the Pentagon’s proving ground. “If you’re willing to bring it down to the southern border, we’ll put it to use. We’ll tell you if it works,” Gen. Gregory Guillot, the NORTHCOM commander, said earlier this year, calling the frontier “a literal and a figurative sandbox” for counter-drone experiments.
The sandbox now includes weapons. In late August, the border task force said it had successfully used a laser weapon to destroy three cartel drones; the system was identified as the Army Multipurpose High Energy Laser. Lasers have emerged as a potentially more sustainable and feasible way to kill small drones than traditional interceptors, though they carry their own power-generation difficulties.
The lessons absorbed in Arizona rhyme with those coming out of the war with Iran and Russia’s war in Ukraine: there is no silver bullet, so defenses must come in variety. It is a doctrine with money behind it — JIATF-401, one of the task forces at Falcon Peak, has opened up to $7 billion in counter-drone contracts for military units and government agencies.
It is the old dialectic of war, miniaturized and hung on the wall of a hobby shop: the cheaper the flying machine, the more of them take to the air, and the more elaborate the machinery a state must build to swat them down. The cartels buy their drones off the shelf; the republic answers with lasers, generals and a layered architecture of sensors. Along that desert line, the future of warfare is being rehearsed against opponents who carry cameras, not bombs — so far.