WASHINGTON—The United States has spent decades planning for attacks against the homeland by terrorists, hackers, saboteurs, and state adversaries armed with long-range weapons. But today it must face an additional threat: the drone, or unmanned aerial system (UAS).
The United States has already experienced numerous drone scares and incidents at home, although none has yet led to physical destruction or the loss of life. In July 2020, for example, a drone flew toward a Pennsylvania power substation with copper wire dangling from it—apparently intended to cause a short circuit. The drone had been stripped of identifying marks, its camera, and its memory card to avoid detection. It crashed on a nearby roof before reaching the target, and its operator was never found. An interagency security bulletin later called it the first known case of a modified drone specifically targeting US energy infrastructure.
It was not an isolated incident. Four years later, in Nashville, Tennessee, an American white supremacist allegedly planned to attack a power substation with an explosives-laden drone. He was arrested before carrying the plan out. In January 2025, multiple unidentified drones were observed operating near the Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant in Minnesota. And between 2021 and 2025, more than three thousand drone incidents were reported near US airports. Several incidents forced aircraft to take evasive action or caused significant operational disruption.
The United States should not assume that future incidents will remain harmless. That said, it’s not realistic to detect and destroy every hostile drone. The goal should be to identify critical infrastructure where an attack could cause the most damage and build better systems around those sites.
Why drones are different
The United States has many enemies. To take only the most recent example, the US war with Iran has increased the threat of Iran-related terrorism against the homeland, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In addition, domestic extremism from the right and the left has risen in the United States over the past decade. Those looking to strike within the United States likely view drones as a promising option.
What elevates the threat from drones is that many are cheap, accessible, easy to assemble, difficult to detect, and capable of performing multiple functions. They can provide persistent surveillance, approach sensitive facilities without warning, and potentially unleash a kinetic strike.
Unlike more overt weapons, explosives, and dangerous chemicals, drones have many different uses and can’t simply be regulated out of circulation among the general public. After Timothy McVeigh used fertilizer to blow up a federal building in downtown Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, for example, controls on the material were tightened. It is now virtually impossible for anyone to purchase large amounts of ammonium nitrate without getting a call or visit from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Drones present a different challenge because their civilian use is legitimate and widespread.
While not outlawing the use of drones, the US government has taken some steps to manage their use. For example, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has established Remote ID, which requires most registered drones to broadcast identification and location information. This gives the FAA, law enforcement, and other agencies a means of identifying a drone and potentially locating its control station. The Remote ID requirement is only for drones over 250 grams, however, so recreational pilots flying lighter ones don’t have to comply with it.
The increasing ubiquity of drones has increased demand for counter-UAS capabilities, and US and international defense markets are awash with new products. Those products range from physical netting and kinetic solutions to sophisticated electronic interference. The DHS and federal law enforcement have acquired some of these capabilities, and they have incorporated counter-UAS operations into their work to protect federal facilities, borders, major events, and law-enforcement activities. In January 2026, the DHS launched a new office “dedicated to rapidly procuring and deploying drone and counter-drone technologies.”
The US military, too, is moving quickly on this issue. In December 2024, the Pentagon issued its first unified Strategy for Countering Unmanned Systems, explicitly acknowledging that drones pose a growing threat within the US homeland, not only to US forces abroad. Then in August 2025, it created Joint Interagency Task Force 401 to coordinate military and government capabilities against hostile drones and strengthen protection of US airspace.
Yet while technical measures and innovation have better prepared the United States for the UAS threat, technology alone cannot solve the problem. No single system can guarantee the detection or disabling of every hostile drone.
The shift: borrowing from counterterrorism logic
The US response should shift from seeking to destroy every drone to defeating an attacker’s aims and reducing the effects of an attack. The logic is similar to counterterrorism: prevention matters, but so do protection and resilience.
Providing persistent nationwide protection is unrealistic in a large country like the United States. A more feasible approach is to prioritize select critical infrastructure sites.
Which of those sites gets funding for drone protection is a conversation that must be had at both the local level and on Capitol Hill. The process might even be reminiscent of civil defense discussions during the Cold War. While the drone conversation is unlikely to become as heated or politically charged as debates in the 1950s and 1960s over how to survive nuclear attacks, decisions about what to protect will inevitably be political. The decisions must be made nonetheless.
Once priorities are set, the next step for homeland defense is anticipation: figuring out where drones could cause the most damage. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has identified several potential threats to critical infrastructure, including surveillance, smuggling or delivery of dangerous payloads, intellectual property theft, and intentional disruption.
Every major facility—including power plants, refineries, airports, and ports—should be required to assess its vulnerability to drones. It should be clear to operators what constitutes legitimate activity and what does not. To aid in this effort, the federal government should provide tools and best practices with which to make those assessments.
Just like with preventing terrorism, being able to anticipate an attack requires a strong understanding of the threats. Through increased intelligence and systematic analysis on state adversaries, terrorists, and lone actors, law-enforcement agencies are better able to determine which targets are most vulnerable and, therefore, which require more hardening or increased protection. Realistic anti-drone drills at both the local and state levels can boost readiness, too.
After anticipation comes organization—who does what before, during, and after an incident. Authorities and responsibilities should be clear. Operators should know who to call and what they’re legally allowed to do—and not do. For example, operators cannot simply shoot down a suspicious drone without a local or federal permit. Federal law sharply limits who can disrupt, seize, disable, or destroy a drone.
The next element is resilience. Facilities should be designed to limit the consequences when a drone gets through. Hardening infrastructure is one way to bolster civil defense. Sensitive equipment should be protected where practical. Essential operations, such as communications and power systems, should have safe shutdown procedures and built-in redundancy. Emergency responders should know what they are likely to encounter.
Finally, the United States needs a system to learn from every incident. If a drone gets through and hits its target, investigators must gather as much information as possible from the wreckage to understand what happened and prevent similar attacks.
Those lessons then need to move beyond the specific facility to the national level. To do that, institutional cooperation and information sharing will be critical. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, showed the consequences of severe information-sharing failures among US spy agencies. At present, CISA provides public-safety resources for unauthorized drone incidents, but more work and greater transparency are needed. US agencies should work on a national mechanism to make knowledge exchange more systemic.
