Pentagon

The attack on alleged drug smugglers brings death toll of US military campaign against suspected drug boats to about 150.

The United States military has announced another strike in the Caribbean Sea that it said targeted drug smugglers, killing three people.

The Southern Command of the US military (SOUTHCOM) shared footage of the attack on Monday, showing a small boat exploding and going up in flames after the strike.

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” SOUTHCOM said in a statement.

“Three male narco-terrorists were killed during this action. No US military forces were harmed.”

The attack brings the death toll from US boat strikes on boats allegedly smuggling drugs, which began last year, to about 150.

Rights advocates have said the US military campaign targeting alleged drug smugglers amounts to extrajudicial killings and risks violating international and domestic laws.

The administration of US President Donald Trump has argued that all the targeted boats were carrying drugs, but it has offered little evidence other than grainy footage of the strikes.

United Nations experts warned last year that the attacks “appear to be unlawful killings carried out by order of a Government, without judicial or legal process allowing due process of law”.

“Unprovoked attacks and killings on international waters also violate international maritime laws,” the experts added.

“We have condemned and raised concerns about these attacks at sea to the United States Government.”

The strikes started in September last year, as the US was building up its military assets in the Caribbean amid tensions with Venezuela. Since then, the attacks have expanded to also targeting boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

A separate US strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat on Friday also killed three people.

The campaign has continued even after US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro early in 2026.

Trump and other US officials have argued, without providing evidence, that each bombing saves thousands of lives from overdose deaths. But it is not clear whether the deadly campaign has significantly affected the drug trade in the region.

The latest attack comes as Mexican authorities push to curb violence by drug cartels after the killing of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel leader, Nemesio Ruben Oseguera Cervantes, also known as “El Mencho”.

Trump has been pushing to present himself as launching a literal war on drugs across the Western Hemisphere.

“Mexico must step up their effort on Cartels and Drugs!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday.

The US has often accused its critics in Latin America, including Colombian President Gustavo Petro, of ties to the drug trade.

Meanwhile, in December, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year prison sentence in US jails after being convicted of drug trafficking.

US president’s announcement comes amid a surge of interest following comments on aliens by ex-President Barack Obama.

United States President Donald Trump said he is directing federal agencies, including the defence department, to begin “identifying and releasing” government records related to unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and alien life forms.

Trump did not specify whether classified documents would be released to the public, but added that the files should include “any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters”.

“Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs),” Trump said late on Thursday in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The move appears to stem from a surge in public attention following recent comments by former US President Barack Obama, who suggested in a podcast interview that aliens are “real”, but that he had not personally seen one, and none were being kept in secret government facilities.

On Sunday, Obama released a statement on Instagram, clarifying what he meant by his comments, which have since gone viral.

“Since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he said.

“But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

Earlier on Thursday, Trump had criticised Obama for his remarks regarding aliens, telling reporters that Obama “was not supposed to be doing that” and implying that the former president’s comments bordered on classified information.

“He made a big mistake,” Trump said of Obama.

No evidence has yet been produced of intelligent life beyond Earth, and the Pentagon in 2024 released a report stating that it had no proof that UFOs were alien technology, most being spy planes, satellites and weather balloons.

Nevertheless, messages of support poured in swiftly on social media and from Capitol Hill following Trump’s announcement to release all documents.

“Thank you POTUS!” wrote Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who chairs a congressional task force on unidentified aerial phenomena.

“As the Chairwoman of the Task Force that investigates these subjects, we are incredibly grateful for you doing this! I look forward to going through all the footage, photos, and reports with the public!” she wrote.

Democratic Senator John Fetterman also voiced support during an appearance on Fox News, calling Trump’s decision “fantastic” and saying that “America and the world deserve this”.

Feb. 12 (UPI) — President Donald Trump has directed the Pentagon to purchase coal-fired electricity to boost domestic coal production, a move that has drawn staunch criticism from energy and environmental experts.

Trump issued the directive via an executive order that he signed Thursday at the end of a White House ceremony attended by coal executives called “The Champion of Coal Event.”

“We’re going to be buying a lot of coal through the military now,” he said. “And it’s going to be less expensive and actually much more effective than what we have been using for many, many years. And again, with the environmental progress that’s been made on coal, it’s going to be just as clean.”

The executive order directs the Department of Defense to approve agreements with coal-fired power facilities to serve its installations and other mission-critical facilities.

The order aligns with Trump’s domestic policy focus of reinvigorating the U.S. coal industry, which has declined over recent years due to environmental concerns.

“Kentucky coal is BACK — and it’s because President Trump fights for American energy,” Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., said in a statement.

Barr was at the White House for the ceremony, and said in a recorded statement that the Trump administration was ending the “war on coal” waged by the previous Democratic presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

“We’re putting our coal miners back to work to make America energy dominant again,” he said in a recorded statement, while describing Trump’s executive order as “great.”

During the ceremony at the East Room of the White House, Trump was given a trophy inscribed with the words “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal” by the Washington Coal Club lobby group.

After receiving the trophy, which is shaped like a miner, Trump signed the executive order.

While the Trump administration and Republicans champion the resource as “beautiful clean coal,” energy economists and environmental advocates broadly describe coal as a costly and highly polluting power source.

“Rather than helping people with their crippling electrical bills, Donald Trump is illegally bailing out his coal industry buddies with precious taxpayer dollars,” Laurie Williams, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, said in a statement.

“As energy bills and hospital bills stack up for everyday families, Americans have one man to blame: Donald Trump — the undisputed champion of expensive energy and deadly pollution.”

Julie McNamara, associate policy director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, lambasted the executive order as a wast of time, money and opportunity.

She said there are cheaper, cleaner and more efficient options at the president’s disposal, but he chose coal while ending development of new solar and wind projects and stopping investment to build out a modern grid infrastructure.

“Reality doesn’t lie: coal is a rapidly dwindling relic of the past, not a solution for the future,” McNamara said in a statement.

“The Trump administration’s failings come with real consequences,” she said, adding that forcing the use of aging coal plants risks power outages and will increase electricity costs.

Former Environmental Protection Agency scientist and vice president of federal policy Matthew Davis similarly said this plan risks driving up energy prices for Americans.

“Coal power not only has one of the highest costs of any energy source, but also has the worst reliability record of any form of energy, with twice as many unplanned shutdowns and interruptions in generation as wind power,” he said in a statement.

“Instead of forcing the government to waste taxpayer dollars on dirty outdated coal, we should be focusing on increasing access to clean, reliable energy sources like wind and solar that are the fastest, cheapest way to deploy energy onto the grid.”

The Pentagon, which buys and sells hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons every year, is changing how it conducts business. And this time, such a claim being made does seem different than many false starts in the past. The changes come amid a backdrop of growing threats and depleted arsenals, which have magnified the chronic issues of delays and cost overruns for a lot of military hardware, and long waiting lists for foreign customers.

The War Department’s revamping of how it procures and transfers weapons follows executive orders signed by President Donald Trump, who has frequently expressed his displeasure with the defense industry’s long timetables and lack of risk taking without the department footing the bill. 

In January, Trump imposed new restrictions on executive compensation and threatened to cancel contracts with RTX [Raytheon] if it did not step up and invest in “plants and equipment.”

“I have been informed by the Department of War that Defense Contractor, Raytheon, has been the least responsive to the needs of the Department of War, the slowest in increasing their volume, and the most aggressive spending on their Shareholders rather than the needs and demands of the United States Military,” Trump said in a separate post on Truth Social.

Earlier this month, Trump instituted the “America First Arms Transfer Strategy” aimed at ensuring “that future arms sales prioritize American interests by using foreign purchases and capital to build American production and capacity.”

Acting on the first of these executive orders, the Pentagon last week “warned defense contractors to brace for sweeping performance reviews that will identify companies it says aren’t fulfilling their contracts,” The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a message sent to the defense industry.

“We have completed initial reviews to assess company performance as part of this executive order and will now undergo an extended period of review in which we will make noncompliance determinations,” Michael Duffey, the undersecretary of defense in charge of weapons buying, wrote in a Feb. 6 email to executives reviewed by the publication. “Following the upcoming decision period, we will be in touch with identified companies to begin remediation plans.”

Since the executive order was announced, defense companies “have been walking a tightrope trying to satisfy both Trump and their shareholders,” the Journal added. “During quarterly earnings calls late last month, executives from RTX, General Dynamics and other contractors boasted about billions of dollars in capital investments their companies have made to expand weapons manufacturing and defended dividend payouts.”

The Pentagon has also reached agreements with Lockheed Martin and RTX to expand production of munitions, the newspaper noted. It also made a $1 billion investment in L3Harris Technologies to accelerate missile production.

When it comes to selling materiel to foreign customers, Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday announced he was merging two Pentagon agencies into one to speed up deliveries while bolstering American arms makers.

“Everybody wanted weapons, but we couldn’t get them to them fast enough,” Hegseth said in a video posted on X. “And today, as a demonstration of our progress on these issues, I’m proud to share that we’ve completed the realignment of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DCSA) and the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) within our Acquisition and Sustainment (A&S) team.”

DCSA is largely responsible for facilitating the sale of U.S. weapons to partners and allies. It is also tasked with developing and planning the long-term partnerships and training opportunities that accompany those sales. DTSA identifies and mitigates risks associated with transferring technology to partners and allies. 

Foreign Military Sales 101

“This realignment has created a single, coherent defense sales enterprise within the department, one that moves at the speed of war, but with the purpose of deterring aggression,” Duffey said in the X video. “Coupled with this new executive order, we’re now positioned to leverage the total aggregated global demand for U.S. weapons.”

The goal, Duffey added, is “to grow our nation’s industrial might, while maintaining the American warfighters’ technological edge” and “we’ll proactively target sales that unlock foreign investment to help power critical production lines, fueling companies to invest in new manufacturing plants, hire more engineers and create thousands of well-paying American jobs, all while better equipping our partners to share the burden of our their own conventional defense.”

Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have placed tremendous pressure on the U.S. defense industry, which is struggling badly to keep up with the demands for both domestic and foreign customers. These wars have consumed large amounts of stockpiled weapons. Many of these munitions take years to produce, a problem exacerbated by global supply chain and procurement decisions. Those worries are exacerbated by China’s increasing belligerence and Russia’s resurgence, which has spurred a massive demand for weapons from foreign customers. An already lugubrious situation will only become exponentially worse should Washington and Beijing tangle kinetically. This would consume advanced munitions and other materiel at an extreme rate.

Amid all these challenges, the pressure is rising on the U.S. defense industry to step up its game even as it suffers ongoing cost overruns and delays. The Pentagon wants to put more of the cost-sharing burden on them to drastically increase production rates. Meanwhile, large prime contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and others are facing competition from startups like Anduril who are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons development and infrastructure costs, as well as wholly self-funding development of some systems.

This is also manifesting in the Pentagon moving away from a weapon system’s original manufacturer ‘owning’ the program for its lifecycle. This situation, referred to as ‘vendor lock’ makes it impossible to compete sustainment and major upgrade contracts, for instance. Instead, the Pentagon will own the rights to the system and be able to have other companies bid on various aspects of its sustainment and upgrade throughout its service life.

“We will enable third-party integration without prime contractor bottlenecks. Success will be measured by the ability of qualified vendors to independently develop, test and integrate replaceable — excuse me, replacement modules at the component level throughout the system life cycle,” Hegseth said in November. “There’s no more complacency and no more monopolies.”

Still, though Trump and the Pentagon have taken aim at defense contractors, the War Secretary said many of these problems are also at least partially self-inflicted.

“We look at ourselves first, the way we do business,” he said in an interview following his visit to the Bath Iron Works in Maine. “We’ve been impossible to deal with – a bad customer who…year after year, changes our mind about what we want or what we don’t want, and then we make little, small technological changes, which makes it more difficult for them to produce what they need to produce on time.”

“So we have to fix our own house first, provide clarity, simplify the system, allow more people to access it [and] give that steady demand signal…”

The buying and selling of weapons is one of the greatest drivers of the U.S. economy and a critical factor in national security. Changing how the Pentagon conducts its business is a huge and fraught endeavor. How it could reshape the military industrial complex, if it succeeds at all, is yet to be fully understood. As is what exactly will happen to companies that end up on the administration’s ‘naughty’ contractor list.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

Feb. 7 (UPI) — Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon would end its academic partnership with Harvard University over what he called a “woke” institution that is not welcoming to the U.S. military.

In a video posted on Friday to X, Hegseth said the Department of Defense would end its partnership and work with the private university — which dates to before the American Revolution — over its alleged “wokeness.”

The move, according to a statement from the Pentagon, is “because attendance at the school no longer meets the needs of the [Department of Defense] or the military services.”

Calling the decision “long overdue,” Hegseth said that all professional military education, fellowships and certificate programs at Harvard will be formally ended starting with the 2026-2027 school year.

Members of the military who are already attending classes there, however, will be permitted to finish their courses of study, the Pentagon said.

Noting that the U.S. military has had “an important and often positive relationship” with the university for more than 250 years, Hegseth said that “Harvard is no longer a welcoming institution to military personnel or the right place to develop them.”

“Too many of our officers came back looking too much like Harvard — heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks,” he said, adding that “the school has become a factory for woke ideology and a breeding ground for anti-American radicals.”

Hegseth alleged that Harvard research programs work with the Chinese Communist Party, university leadership has encouraged celebrations of Hamas and allowed attacks on Jewish students, and that the university “promotes discrimination based on race.”

Harvard University has been involved in some way with the U.S. military in an official capacity since 1775 when George Washington used the university as a military base, according to The Harvard Gazette.

Washington basing about 1,000 soldiers in Harvard Yard followed Harvard students and faculty who had “given their lives for the burgeoning nation” in war efforts for 150 years preceding the Revolutionary War, the university said.

Since President Donald Trump was inaugurated back into office in January 2025, Harvard has been one of several universities to draw his administration’s ire.

This has included everything from protests against the war between Israel and Hamas, academic programs and federal investments it deemed waste and their introduction of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs to improve student and faculty life.

Hegseth noted in the statement about Harvard that DOD plans to evaluate all existing graduate education programs for active-duty members of the military at all Ivy League and other universities.

“The goal is to determine whether or not they actually deliver cost-effective strategic education for future senior leaders when compared to, say, public universities or our military graduate programs,” he said.

The entire U.S. military is now pushing to acquire hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new drones, especially smaller types, in the coming years, spurred on by new direction from the Pentagon. In turn, a demand for new containerized launchers capable of rapidly deploying and, if need be, recovering those uncrewed aerial systems has now emerged. On several occasions in the past, TWZ has called attention to the value of exactly these kinds of launch capabilities, for use on land and at sea, especially for employing fully networked swarms.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) laid out broad requirements for what it referred to as a Containerized Autonomous Drone Delivery System (CADDS). DIU’s central focus is on leveraging new and improved commercial-off-the-shelf technologies to help meet U.S. military needs.

“The Department of War (DoW) faces a robotic mass challenge: current methods for deploying and sustaining unmanned aerial systems (UAS) rely on direct human interaction to launch, recover, and refit each system,” the CADDS notice explains. “This 1:1 operator-to-aircraft model limits deployment speed and scale while exposing operators to unnecessary risks.”

The “problem” to solve then is that “the DoW requires the ability to deploy large quantities of UAS rapidly, while minimizing the risk and burden to human operators executing kinetic and non-kinetic UAS operations in contested environments,” it adds.

To that end, “DOW seeks innovative solutions that enable the storage, rapid deployment, and management of multi-agent systems to provide either persistent UAS coverage over extended periods or massed effects within a single geographic region and time,” per DIU. It needs to be “employable from land and maritime platforms, in both day and night conditions, and during inclement weather.”

These have to be “designs [that] can be transported by military or commercial vehicles (land, sea, air)” and that “can be quickly positioned and made operational with minimal handling or setup.” They also have to be able to provide “automated functions for drone storage, launching, recovering, and refitting within the containerized platform; the intent is for the system to exist in a dormant state for a period of time and launch UAS upon command.”

DIU does not name any particular drones that the CADDS has to be able to accommodate or say how many UASs a single launcher should be able to hold. The notice does say the system will need to support “homogeneous and heterogeneous mixes of Government-directed UAS.”

The launch system also has to be capable of being set up and broken back down in a time frame measured in minutes and have a small operational footprint. “Ideally, the system should require a crew of no more than 2 personnel,” per DIU.

When it comes to the “autonomous” element of the launch system, DIU says it needs to support “both operator-on-the-loop and operator-in-the-loop decision-making processes.”

The market space for containerized launchers for various payloads, and for use on land and at sea, has been steadily growing globally in recent years. There has already been a further trend in the development of such systems for launching loitering munitions and other uncrewed aerial systems, or the adaptation of existing designs to be able to do so.

As one example, in the past year or so, Northrop Grumman has begun touting the ability of what it is currently calling the Modular Payload System (MPS) to launch drones, as seen in the computer-generated video below. TWZ was first to report on the development of that system all the way back in 2018, when it was being presented solely as a way to surface-launch variants of the AGM-88 anti-radiation missile. MPS is also now being pitched as a launcher for the Advanced Reactive Strike Missile (AReS), a surface-to-surface missile derived from the AGM-88G Advanced Anti-radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range (AARGM-ER) and its Stand-in Attack Weapon (SiAW) cousin.

Modular Payload System: Launching from Land or Sea

Last year, another concept for a containerized launcher capable of holding up to 48 drones at once also emerged from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan. Back in 2024, Germany’s Rheinmetall and UVision in Israel had also unveiled two very similar designs, specifically for launching members of the latter company’s Hero series of loitering munitions.

This is just a small selection of the designs that have been seen to date. Firms in China have been particularly active in this regard, and developments in that country have often also been tied to work on swarming capabilities.

中国电科陆空协同固定翼无人机“蜂群”系统

中国电科大规模无人机蜂群任务全流程试验

Container-like launchers for uncrewed aerial systems, often mounted on trucks, have already been in service in many countries for years. This includes Iran, where they are used to launch Shahed-type kamikaze drones, as can be seen in the video below.

Баражуючий іранський боєприпас «Shahed 136»

However, many of these systems are focused squarely on the launch aspect and lack the recovery and refit capabilities that DIU has outlined for CADDS. Chinese drone firm DJI and others in the commercial space are increasingly offering container-like ‘docks,’ but which are often designed to accommodate just one uncrewed aerial system at a time.

What is particularly interesting here is how many of the stated CADDS requirements actually sound very similar, at least in very broad strokes, to a containerized system capable of launching, recovering, and recharging thousands of small, electrically-powered quadcopter-type drones at the touch of a button that the Chinese company DAMODA rolled out last year. That launcher, dubbed the Automated Drone Swarm Container System, is for drone light shows for entertainment purposes rather than military use.

Behind the Scenes of DAMODA Automated Drone Swarm Container System.✨

China just dropped a new level of drone swarm tech | One-click auto-deploy of thousands | by DAMODA

Still, as we previously wrote:

It is worth reiterating that DAMODA’s Automated Drone Swarm Container System, at least as it exists now, is clearly designed for entertainment industry use first and foremost. Though the company’s drone light show routines are certainly visually impressive and often go viral on social media, they are pre-scripted and conducted in a very localized fashion. What the company is offering is not a drone swarm capable of performing various military-minded tasks in a highly autonomous manner at appreciable ranges from its launch point.

At the same time, large-scale drone light shows put on by DAMODA (and a growing number of other companies), do highlight, on a broad level, the already highly problematic threats posed by swarms. The new Automated Drone Swarm Container System underscores the additional danger of these same threats hiding in plain sight. The steady proliferation of advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, especially when it comes to dynamic targeting, will only create additional challenges, as TWZ has explored in detail in this past feature.

This is not theoretical, either. As mentioned, in June [2025], Ukrainian forces launched multiple drone attacks on airbases across Russia with the help of covert launchers loaded on the back of unassuming civilian tractor-trailer trucks. This entire effort was dubbed Operation Spiderweb and took months of planning.

Even in an overt operational context, readily deployable containerized systems capable of acting as hubs for drone operations across a broad area with limited manpower requirements could offer a major boost in capability and capacity. Ships, trucks, and aircraft, which could themselves be uncrewed, could be used to bring them to and from forward locations, even in remote areas. If they can support a “heterogeneous mix” of uncrewed aerial systems, a single container could be used to support a wide array of mission requirements, including intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, electronic warfare, kinetic strikes, and/or communications signal relay.

An inherent benefit of a drone swarm, in general, is that each individual component does not have to be configured to perform all of the desired tasks. This creates additional flexibility and resilience to threats, since the loss of any particular drone does not necessarily preclude the swarm from continuing its assigned missions. There are tangential design and cost benefits for the drones themselves, since they can be configured to carry only the systems required for their particular mission demands.

Army Aviation Launches Autonomous Pack Hunters

TWZ previously laid out a detailed case for the many benefits that could come along with loading containers packed with swarms of drones onto U.S. Navy ships. Many of those arguments are just as relevant when talking about systems designed to be employed on land. Containerized systems are often readily adaptable to both ground-based and maritime applications, to begin with.

Drone swarms are only set to become more capable as advancements in autonomy, especially automated target recognition, continue to progress, driven by parallel developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as you can read more about here. Future highly autonomous swarms will be able to execute various mission sets even more efficiently and in ways that compound challenges for defenders. Massed drone attacks with limited autonomy already have an inherent capacity to just overwhelm enemy defenses. In turn, electronic warfare systems and high-power microwave directed energy weapons have steadily emerged as some of the most capable options available to tackle swarms, but have their own limitations. Even powerful microwave systems have very short ranges and are directional in nature, and electronic warfare systems may simply not work at all against autonomous drones.

In terms of what DIU is now looking at for CADDS, the stated requirements are broad. It remains to be seen what options might be submitted, let alone considered for actual operational U.S. military use.

Still, DIU has laid out a real emerging capability gap amid the current push to field various tiers of drones to a degree never before seen across America’s armed forces, which counterinsurgency launch systems look well-positioned to fill.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

New Pentagon guidance for defending critical infrastructure against drone attacks calls for the increased use of netting, cables, and other kinds of passive physical defenses. This reflects a notable shift in policy within the department. For years now, U.S. military officials have often pushed back on the utility and cost-effectiveness of investing more in the physical hardening of bases and other critical facilities, especially shelters to shield aircraft from drones and other threats.

The Joint Inter-Agency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401) released the three-page document on “Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructure” last Friday. The Pentagon established JIATF-401 last August to coordinate counter-drone efforts across the department and help accelerate the fielding of new capabilities. Last week, the Pentagon also announced new authorities for military base commanders, expanding their options for responding to drone threats more broadly.

The new guidance from JIATF-401 talks about “critical infrastructure” mostly in terms of civilian sites ranging from power plants to sports venues. Drones do present real and still growing threats to critical civilian infrastructure, something TWZ has been calling attention to for years now. The Pentagon explicitly said the document had been released as part of work it has been doing in cooperation with the White House’s FIFA Task Force, which is preparing for the United States to host the World Cup later this year. However, it is made clear that the contents are equally applicable to helping protect military facilities from uncrewed aerial systems.

“When we talk about Homeland defense, we’re not just talking about military bases, power grids and ports; we’re talking about places where Americans gather. With major international events like the World Cup on the horizon, the security of our stadiums, for example, is a national priority,” U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, Director of JIATF-401, said in a statement accompanying the release. “Whether it’s a forward operating base, an outdoor concert venue or a stadium hosting the World Cup, the principles of risk assessment and physical protection outlined in this guide remain the same. This new guidance provides a common playbook for our forces to work closely with federal and local partners to ensure a safe and secure environment against the growing challenge of nefarious drones.”

The new counter-drone guidance’s central concept is a framework called HOP, standing for Harden, Obscure, Perimeter.

“Hardening does not mean enclosing an entire facility, but selectively introducing obstacles that disrupt predictable aerial access,” the document explains. “Even modest obstacles can deter low-cost, consumer-grade drones and force higher-risk flight profiles.”

As noted, the guidance highlights nets and tensioned cables as examples of this kind of cost-effective hardening. It also recommends closing retractable roofs and otherwise covering any other roof openings where and when it is feasible to do so. Underscoring the immediate focus on the World Cup, the document notes that “netting used to protect fans from projectiles can be repurposed to disrupt sUAS [small uncrewed aerial systems] flight and observation.”

The guidance also recommends the construction of more substantial “permanent or semi-permanent structural shielding, including concrete walls, enclosures, or hardened roofs designed to protect critical systems from overhead approach, observation, or objects released from a UAS.”

We will come back to all of this in a moment.

The “Obscure” component of the HOP framework focuses on making it harder for drones and their operators to find their targets in the first place. This can include an array of different tactics, techniques, and procedures, such as physical camouflage and decoys, as well as regular changes to how personnel and assets move through a facility. “If a drone cannot easily identify targets, crowds, or critical systems, its effectiveness drops sharply,” the new guidance notes.

Lastly, there is the “Perimeter” portion of the HOP framework, which is centered on expanded security zones around a specific site and ways to improve general situational awareness. “Pushing the effective perimeter outward forces drones to operate at greater distance, which strains battery life, degrades video and control links, increases the chance of operator exposure, [and] creates a larger safety buffer if a drone is downed.”

As an aside, the recently announced new counter-drone authorities for the commanders of U.S. military bases include the ability to respond to threats inside expanded zones beyond the facility’s immediate “fence-line.” The right-sizing of perimeters around domestic facilities and their enforcement has been a particularly complex issue for the U.S. government when it comes to counter-drone policies in recent years. Potential second-order impacts to surrounding areas, especially in densely populated urban environments, have to be taken into account and mitigated. This all imposes limits on the kind of assets that can be employed to neutralize drone threats once they’ve been detected, as you can read more about here.

As mentioned, the “Harden” part of the HOP frame stands out given how U.S. military officials have treated the topic in the past, at least publicly.

“We will have the need for bases, the main operating bases from which we operate,” U.S. Air Force Gen. Kevin Schneider, head of Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), said during a panel at the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) 2025 Warfare Symposium last March. “The challenge becomes, at some point, we will need to move to austere locations. We will need to disaggregate the force. We will need to operate out of other locations, again, one for survivability, and two, again, to provide response options.”

Schneider added at that time that his service was faced with the need to “make internal trades” in how to apply available funding, including “do we put that dollar towards, you know, fixing the infrastructure at Kadena [Air Base in Japan] or do we put that dollar towards restoring an airfield at Tinian.”

“I got tons of airfields from tons of allies, and we have access to all of them. The problem is, I can only protect a few of them,” now-retired Air Force Gen. James Hecker, then head of U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE), another member of that same panel, had also said. “We can’t have that layered [defensive] effect for thousands of airbases. There’s just no way it’s going to happen.”

“I’m not a big fan of hardening infrastructure,” Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, then head of PACAF, had also said at a media roundtable at the Air & Space Forces Association’s main annual symposium back in 2023. “The reason is because of the advent of precision-guided weapons… you saw what we did to the Iraqi Air Force and their hardened aircraft shelters. They’re not so hard when you put a 2,000-pound bomb right through the roof.”

It is worth noting here that traditional high-end guided missiles and other precision-guided munitions are no longer necessarily required to carry out strikes of this kind. Drones costing thousands of dollars, and able to be launched from very long distances away, can now execute precision attacks.

Wilsbach is now Chief of Staff of the Air Force, the service’s top officer.

The U.S. military has faced pushback from Congress on the topic of hardening. Multiple independent assessments have also raised alarms. TWZ has been following this often-heated debate closely.

There have been signs that the U.S. military’s position on hardening, and that of the Air Force’s more specifically, has been shifting already. In 2024, authorities at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina both put out contracting notices asking for information about nets and other physical barriers to stop potential drone attacks. Langley had become a focal point for the drone threat discussion by that point after the base was subjected to weeks of still largely unexplained drone incursions in December 2023, which we were first to report.

Last year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) announced that it had developed upgrades for a family of modular, rapidly deployable protective structures specifically to improve their effectiveness against drone attacks.

“The technology is not going to solve this problem for us. We can’t field a system that will stop every drone,” JIATF-401 director Brig. Gen. Ross told TWZ and other outlets during a press call in December in response to a direct question about physical hardening from this author. “At the end of that would be protection, which would be netting or fencing or physical barriers that would prevent a [sic] unmanned system from having its intended effect.”

Brig. Gen. Ross had said that this was among the things JIATF-401 had discussed in meetings with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies as part of World Cup preparations, presaging the release of the new guidance last week.

“As you think about protection, I would go all the way down to protective protection type assets, those will be included in our marketplace. And so if somebody wants to buy a $10,000 radar that has limited range, they’ll be able to buy it on the marketplace. If they want to buy a low cost interceptor for … [small drones] that just uses kinetic energy to defeat a drone – that’s a drone that hits a drone for $1,000 – they’ll be able to buy it on our marketplace,” he added. “If they want to buy physical barrier material, whether it’s a fishing net or a chain link fence, they’ll also be able to buy that as part of that counter-UAS marketplace.”

The central “marketplace” mentioned here, through which elements of the military and other U.S. government agencies can source counter-drone capabilities, is a key initiative that JIATF-401 has been working on and that you can learn more about here.

It is important to stress that U.S. military officials are unified in their position that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to countering drones. Physical hardening is just one part of a layered approach and is not a ‘silver bullet’ solution to protect against all types of drone threats. Active defenses, including electronic warfare jammers, drone-like interceptors like Brig. Gen. Ross mentioned, and more traditional anti-aircraft assets, are still part of the equation, to differing degrees, for defending against drones at home and abroad.

At the same time, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine has shown that even limited, lower-cost measures like netting can be useful for disrupting attacks by smaller kamikaze drones and loitering munitions in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

In Shebekino, Belgorod region, 41 apartment buildings have been covered with anti-drone nets. The local creatures are loving it – they joke about it and, as always, endure it with classic patience. pic.twitter.com/Q26fwKX1ut

— WarTranslated (@wartranslated) April 3, 2025

Last year, near-simultaneous covert attacks by Ukrainian forces on multiple air bases in Russia utilizing quadcopter-type kamikaze drones underscored the level of damage that even lower-tier uncrewed aerial attackers can inflict on high-value targets. Mass drone attacks are only set to get more threatening as time goes on, as the barrier to entry on automated targeting and swarming capabilities lowers thanks to the steady proliferation of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. This, in turn, only increases the challenges for defenders, including the prospect of simply being overwhelmed. For years, TWZ has been separately sounding the alarm on how aircraft sitting on open flightlines are especially vulnerable, in general.

The russian terrorist state no longer has the ability to produce Tu-95s or any kind of strategic bomber. This is a tremendous victory for Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/SVeQE78v0h

— Michael MacKay (@mhmck) June 1, 2025

Outside of the United States, among adversaries and allies alike, there has also been a growing trend toward more physical hardening at air bases and other facilities. China has embarked on a particularly extensive effort to build new hardened and unhardened shelters at air bases across the country. The Chinese have been observed building other kinds of hardened infrastructure, including a new pattern of protected air defense sites along their disputed border with India, as well. Even before the unprecedented drone attacks last year, Russia had also been working to add new shelters, hardened and unhardened, to various air bases, but with a focus on ones closer to the fighting in Ukraine.

Structures that are sturdy enough even just to protect against shrapnel could have broader value, too. Just over a year ago, the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., published a report assessing that 10 missiles with warheads capable of scattering cluster munitions across an area with a 450-foot diameter could be enough to neutralize all exposed aircraft on the ground and critical fuel storage at various key airbases. Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan and Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as well as Langley in Virginia, were specifically highlighted, as seen below.

Overall, the Pentagon’s counter-drone prescriptions are still evolving, especially when it comes to defending bases and critical civilian infrastructure within the United States. At the same time, despite public stances that officials have taken in the past, hardened structures and other kinds of physical defenses have become an important part of the current counter-drone playbook.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com