DHS says it needs $100M worth of counter-drone tech to protect America

The US Department of Homeland Security has revealed plans to spend more than $100 million on systems designed to take out hostile drones.  

While not a formal announcement per se, DHS published a notice Wednesday in its Acquisition Planning Forecast System, revealing its intention to acquire Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS), potentially from multiple vendors, between the beginning of 2026 and September 2030. 

“The purpose of this procurement is to acquire C-UAS capabilities to address evolving threats posed by unauthorized or malicious unmanned aircraft systems,” DHS said in the APFS notice. “These capabilities will support the detection, tracking, identification, and mitigation of UAS threats across diverse operational environments, ensuring the protection of critical infrastructure, public safety, and national security.”

C-UAS technology can take a number of forms, from a hand-held anti-drone rifle that forces drones to make a controlled landing so they can be recovered and inspected, to wearable models like Project Flytrap and truck-mounted units. The US Army has even experimented with crashing an explosive-laden drone into an opposing airborne unit. 

DHS plans to publish the C-UAS solicitation on September 8, and while it expects to award the contracts early next year, there was no mention of when DHS expects to field its anti-drone systems, or for what purpose.

Could this have waited?

DHS has been taking a lot of heat lately for its enforcement of the Trump administration’s policy to round up and deport immigrants who can’t prove that they’re in the country legally. It’s the parent organization of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has been conducting raids on suspected undocumented immigrants for months, leading to nationwide protests. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has met those protests with calls to the US military to arrest protestors, an act that is prohibited under federal law. 

DHS has also been flying MQ-9 Reaper drones over protests, the same sort of drones that are used to conduct aerial surveillance, and which can be loaded with various types of weaponry. Some lawmakers are concerned about whom exactly those drones are meant for, and bills have been introduced in the city of Los Angeles and in US Congress to ban the use of drones to monitor civilians. 

Cheap drones have also been an increasingly popular weapon of war in the world’s premier military tech testbed conflict, Russia v. Ukraine, where both sides have used them to target humans, military equipment, and infrastructure. DHS, which conducts most of its operations on US soil, may not be readily facing the same threats as a nation involved in a hot war, but let’s not forget recent panics around mystery drones and Chinese weather balloons. 

Then there was the time in California earlier this year when a drone struck a firefighting aircraft. C-UAS tech could have prevented that incident entirely.

DHS didn’t respond to questions for this story. ®

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