The debacle at the El Paso airport this week is a sign that America’s counter-drone technology — and the ability to deploy it — is still at an early stage, despite billions of dollars invested in recent years.
An attempt this week by the Customs and Border Protection agency to use a laser to take out a foreign object in the sky set off chaos. The Federal Aviation Administration, concerned about a lack of information about the potential risks to civilian planes, shut down the El Paso airport for hours.
Top Trump administration officials claimed that an incursion of Mexican cartel drones across the border required a military response that prompted the airport shutdown. But the episode was precipitated by the C.B.P.’s use of an anti-drone laser without coordinating with aviation officials, as The New York Times previously reported. The laser appeared to have struck a party balloon rather than a drone.
The anti-drone technology was said to be on loan from the Defense Department, which has invested heavily in lasers, attracted to the idea that they could be cost-effective and would never run short of ammunition.
But that technology has proved unreliable in the field, according to Stacie Pettyjohn a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank. Prototypes were deployed in the Middle East to help soldiers defend against drones launched by militias in Iraq but failed to perform in rainy and dusty conditions, she said.
“They should be testing,” Ms. Pettyjohn said, of the laser technology at the border. “But they have to do it safely.”
The El Paso incident illustrated how difficult it is to test the technology in the real world. Equipment that can knock out an enemy drone — GPS jammers, lasers, drones capable of intercepting other drones — can wreak havoc on civilian life.
Although drones have become crucial to winning modern wars, the United States still lags its adversaries in both the manufacturing of low-cost drones and the training and equipment needed to defend against hostile small drones.
A laser-based weapon the Army paid Kord Technologies to make in 2019 “was not mature enough” for mass production, according to a Government Accountability Office report last year.
Russian soldiers have become experts at jamming enemy drones, a skill honed during the war in Ukraine. China announced that it can launch swarms of autonomous drones to hit a target using artificial intelligence.
But in the United States, state and federal officials are just beginning to test and deploy anti-drone technology, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection is starting to play a more central role in deploying drones. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security opened a new office to advance drone and counter-drone technologies. It also requested proposals from the counter-drone industry for technology worth up to $1.5 billion to protect critical infrastructure, the border and the public, according to a news release.
Leaders from D.H.S. acknowledged that they were scrambling to acquire new counter-drone technologies to help secure the skies above the stadiums in 11 American cities during the FIFA World Cup games this summer.
“It’s a pretty heavy lift,” James Thom, executive director of domain awareness security operations for Customs and Border Protection, said at an annual border security symposium in December. He added that the agency was working more closely with the military than it ever has.
To prepare for the World Cup, the federal government has given millions of dollars to host cities to purchase equipment that can help them identify, track and, if need be, neutralize unfriendly drones that enter the airspace above crowded stadiums.
This week, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York announced that four public-safety agencies involved with the security of World Cup events received more than $17.2 million to buy equipment to protect against the threat of the illegal use of drones.
Systems that can protect against enemy drones include sensors that detect flying foreign objects, software that identifies drones based on unique signals they cast off, and technology that can hijack them, scramble their navigation systems or physically knock them out of the sky.
Eric Brock, the founder of Ondas, a company that manufactures counter-drone technology, said federal officials were still hammering out which technology would be used under which circumstances.
“What you are going to use at the FIFA World Cup is not the same thing you do at the border of Mexico, which is not the same thing that you do on the battlefield,” he said.
He acknowledged that it can be time-consuming and difficult to get permission from the F.A.A. to test systems in real-world conditions, but said that the technology was still moving forward. Four years ago, Ondas bought Iron Drone, a company that invented a system that deploys drones capable of capturing other drones with a net. Last fall, it acquired Sentrycs, a company that he said has the capability to hijack the internal controls of a wayward drone and land it safely.
“The need for counter-drone infrastructure is so vast, this is a 10-year investment cycle,” he said. “To cover this properly and comprehensively as is likely to be needed, it’s going to take a long time.”
Farah Stockman is a Times business reporter writing about manufacturing and the government policies that influence companies that make things in the United States.
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