Because the US military can’t just shoot down the mysterious drones

“From all indications, (small unmanned aerial systems) pose a safety and security risk to military installations and other critical infrastructure for the foreseeable future,” Air Force NorthCOM General Gregory Guillot. said the journalists of the time. “Mitigating those risks requires a dedicated effort across federal departments and agencies, state, local, tribal, and territorial communities, and Congress to further develop the capabilities, coordination, and legal authority necessary to detect, track and address potential sUAS threats in the homeland.”

But U.S. military officials also indicated to reporters that the types of counter-drone capabilities the Pentagon may be able to deploy for domestic defense may be limited to the non-kinetic means of “soft kill ” such as the interruption of RF and GPS signals and other relatively low. interception techniques -tech like networks and “strings” due to legal limitations on the ability of the US military to engage with drones on American soil.

“The threat, and the need to counter these threats, is growing faster than the policies and procedures that (are) in place can keep up,” said Guillot. said journalists during the counter-drone experiment. “Most of the work we do in the homeland, it’s a very sophisticated environment in that it’s complicated from a regulatory perspective. It’s a very civilized environment. It’s not a war zone.”

Defense officials echoed this sentiment during the unveiling of the Pentagon’s new counter-drone strategy in early December.

“The homeland is a very different environment in that we have a lot of hobbyist drones here that are not a threat, that are kind of congesting the environment,” a senior US official. he told reporters at the time. “At the same time, we have, from a statutory perspective and from an intelligence perspective, fair enough, (a) more restricted environment in terms of our ability to act.”

The status in question, according to defense officials, is a specific subsection of Title 10 of the US Code, which governs the armed forces of the United States. The section, known as 130(i), includes military authorities regarding the “protection of certain facilities and assets from unmanned aircraft.” It gives US forces the authority to take “action” to defend against drones, including measures to “disrupt the control of an unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aircraft, without consent preventive, including disabling the unmanned aircraft system or the unmanned aircraft by intercepting, interfering with, or causing interference with, the wired, oral, electronic, or radio communications used to control the unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aircraft” and “using reasonable force”. to disable, damage, or destroy the unmanned aircraft system or the unmanned aircraft.”