Borrowing from aviation safety’s Swiss Cheese Model, no single layer of airspace defense is airtight. But stacking several layers together closes most of the gaps. At this year’s Law-Tech Connect (LTC) Workshop, five panelists representing radar, RF cyber takeover, detection sensors, government acquisition and national security law, spent less time describing individual products and more time arguing about where the holes in the cheese still are. Here’s what they had to say.
What Actually Keeps The Experts Awake
Moderator Jennifer Daskal, who joined Venable after serving as deputy homeland security advisor at the White House, kicked the panel off with the fear that has followed her out of government and into private practice. “One of the crises that kept me up at night, and that I worried about the most, was the threat posed by drones in the homeland,” she said. She then asked each panelist to name the threat that worries them most. The answers revealed just how differently the counter-drone problem looks depending on where someone sits in the ecosystem.
Dan Senott, co-chair of the national security group at Greenberg Traurig, pointed to the supply chain underpinning the entire industry. He noted that FCC rulings and annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provisions increasingly restrict sourcing from China, North Korea, Russia and Iran. Building out a domestic manufacturing base to replace that supply chain on both the drone and counter-drone side “is going to take some time,” he said. Meanwhile, the threats these systems are meant to counter are not waiting.
Chris Hewlett of GrandSky, who directs Project ULTRA at GrandSKY for the Department of War’s acquisitions office, framed the problem as an interagency coordination issue. Around any Core 30 airport, he explained, responsibility for what flies underneath the airspace ceiling could be split across the Bureau of Prisons, the Department of Energy, the Department of War and the Department of Transportation. However, none of those systems talk to each other. “How do we adequately layer defense to be able to support and defend the critical infrastructure that exists underneath the Core 30 airport alone is a daunting task,” he noted.
A psychological blind spot among counter-drone system buyers concerns Tom Adams, director of public safety at DroneShield and a former FBI counter-drone program supervisor, the most. End users, he explained, fixate on mitigation, or the ability to take a drone down. They neglect detection, the step that has to happen first. “A lot of times they don’t even want to talk about detection because they’re so focused on mitigation,” he said. But you can’t address a threat you can’t see.
Some stakeholders have yet to fully appreciate the significance of the drone threat. Curtis Walters of Echodyne described conversations with critical infrastructure operators who still frame the threat as accidental rather than deliberate. He recalled a utility executive whose main concern was “the kid down the street accidentally dropping his drone near a substation” rather than a coordinated attack. He warned that some systems currently deployed in the field are already obsolete against the threat that exists today.
Brett Fedderson of D-Fend Solutions worries about something less technical and more bureaucratic: momentum. “It took well over a decade to get the landmark legislation for SAFER Skies enacted,” he said. The rollout since then has been stifled by process. He believes the country may be “just a couple of actors away from a catastrophe,” without yet having built the safety net the threat demands. (See prior AG coverage addressing SAFER Skies limitations).
The SAFER Skies Act Meets Bureaucratic Friction
With that segue, Daskal steered the conversation toward the SAFER Skies Act, passed as part of last year’s NDAA, which for the first time gave FBI-trained state and local authorities and correctional facilities explicit authority to take mitigation action against drones. (See prior AG coverage of SAFER Skies interim final rule here).
Fedderson had a real-world case to offer. The Pennsylvania State Police became the first state agency to use that authority during the NFL Draft in Pittsburgh, operating under the FBI’s task force framework. The numbers from that weekend illustrate both the promise and the limits of the new law. Eighteen drones were detected, two were mitigated electronically and the remaining pilots were tracked down by ground forces. But Fedderson described a scheduling mismatch that left a gap in coverage. The FBI’s authorization packet matched the FAA’s temporary flight restriction window, an hour before and after the draft itself. When organizers extended the flight restriction to cover three full days of fan zone activities drawing 320,000 people, the FBI did not extend its authorization to match.
“The Pennsylvania State Police sat there with a capability to detect drones but were forced to keep it turned off because the FBI did not allow the authority to continue,” Patterson said. “So fans over the three-day period were not protected, or at least not receiving detection by the state police…”
Drawing on his own FBI background to defend the packet process, Adams explained that authorizing a mitigation deployment has implications for other agencies working in the same airspace, which sometimes includes the Secret Service. Coordination requirements exist precisely to avoid one agency stepping on another’s operation. His concern was less about the process and more about its capacity to scale as demand grows. He pointed to a wave of NFL games and correctional facility deployments coming later in the year.
Hewlett reframed the entire mitigation debate as a symptom of a much bigger conceptual problem around airspace awareness. “This subject of counter-UAS often becomes a mitigation conversation,” he said, “but I think it really is a traffic management conversation.” He argued that a bad actor or a careless hobbyist will not politely stay inside segregated airspace built for drone traffic management. Any system designed only around cooperative, well-behaved aircraft will miss the threats that matter most. “If you’re approaching the problem from the wrong detection, tracking and identification perspective,” he warned, “you’re never going to get to mitigation because you’re never going to fully identify who should be mitigated and how.”
Training capacity also emerged as its own bottleneck. Senott noted that all eleven FIFA World Cup host locations managed to get personnel through FBI training in a matter of months, an impressive pace for the government. Even so, he questioned what happens once federal funding tied to the tournament dries up. (See prior AG coverage of SAFER Skies training).
Fedderson added granularity to the training problem. Each training class holds only fifteen people. That means most police departments send just one or two operators through the course, which cannot support continuous operations without unsustainable overtime. Adams added that the FBI’s counter-UAS program has historically been underfunded to the point of running on improvised budgets. “I’m not even going to tell you the budget I had to work with,” he said. “A lot of car washes and fundraisers,” he quipped. He placed some responsibility on departments themselves to choose people who will stay in the role rather than rotate out for a promotion.
A Long-Awaited Rule Changes the Calculus for Critical Infrastructure
The conversation shifted to a regulatory development barely a week old at the time of the panel, but still ongoing today: the FAA’s long-delayed notice of proposed rulemaking implementing Section 2209 of the 2016 FAA Extension, Safety and Security Act. That provision, nearly a decade in waiting, would let critical infrastructure owners and operators with fixed facilities apply directly to the FAA for temporary flight restrictions over their sites. (See prior AG coverage of 2209).
Walters welcomed the momentum but was candid about what the rule does and does not solve. “The world we live in from a radar perspective is really focused on the non-cooperative,” he said, referring to drones that fly without transponders or remote identification (remote ID). The rule leans on remote ID to help identify cooperative aircraft, but Walters said the real threat lies with the ones that fly dark. Detecting them requires layering multiple sensor types and fusing the data with confidence. He also flagged a practical concern buried in the FAA’s own estimate of roughly nine thousand applications expected once the rule takes effect. Walters called that approval workload “an incredible number to try and manage.”
Hewlett ran the numbers further and worried aloud about what nine thousand overlapping flight restrictions would do to an already congested low-altitude environment. “I don’t even know what the airspace looks like with nine thousand restrictions,” he said.
But does the proposal have sufficient teeth to be meaningful? It does not tie mitigation authority to the existence of a 2209 flight restriction, Fedderson noted. A restriction only establishes that an unauthorized drone is breaking the law and exposes the operator to civil or criminal penalty. It does not by itself hand critical infrastructure owners the authority to shoot a drone down or jam its signal. Daskal underscored that point. Nothing in the rule gives infrastructure owners mitigation authority, she warned. What it does give them, she said, is a clearer basis for calling in state or local law enforcement once mitigation is warranted.
Building the Sensor Stack Nobody Owns Alone
The panel moved to detection, which evoked the Swiss Cheese framing as more than just a metaphone and a true engineering problem. Walters described the layers explicitly: remote ID, ADS-B, radio frequency detection, radar, and where possible, acoustic sensing. All of this must be combined through command-and-control (C2) software that fuses the data into a single confident picture. “If my cheese has a hole,” the system falls apart. Integration across different sensor types and the C2 for them is key.
The harder question, which Daskal pressed repeatedly, was who pays for that stack and who owns it. Walters admitted there is no clean answer. Echodyne’s radar already serves multiple, disconnected use cases in the same municipality. For example, it supports law enforcement in one context and airspace clearance for drone deliveries in another, without the data being shared between them. His preferred outcome would be to have some version of sensor infrastructure offered as a shared, subscribable service rather than duplicated system by system. He acknowledged that vision needs a funding authority above any single vendor or agency to make it real.
Hewlett pushed this idea further. He described a need for universal electronic conspicuity, essentially total transparency about what is flying and where. He pointed out that cell towers, DNS infrastructure and satellite navigation systems already generate usable data that the aviation world has not yet aggregated into a common operating picture (COP) shared across the FAA, the Department of War and the Department of Homeland Security. His advice was to inventory the data that already exists before reaching for new sensor builds. “Before we go down the process of being a hammer looking for a nail,” he said, “we need to figure out what technology we do have and how we can aggregate it.”
Perhaps drones should be treated as aircraft under a framework similar to a military air tasking order, with transparency comparable to ADS-B so that anyone could see what is flying nearby, Fedderson mused. Senott agreed with the underlying goal but rejected the military analogy on execution grounds. He called the Department of War’s authorization process “incredibly cumbersome, slow,and not made for modern technology,” particularly for software platforms that need constant updates.
The DJI Problem Nobody Has Fully Solved
Daskal circled back to the supply chain issue. She noted that an estimated seventy-five to eighty-five percent of state and local law enforcement drones in the field are made by DJI, the dominant Chinese manufacturer.
Senott framed this as a problem the Department of War shares with the civilian sector. Years of investment in expanding domestic drone manufacturing has not been matched by actual purchase orders. He drew a comparison to the Huawei and ZTE “rip and replace” programs and suggested state and local agencies may eventually need federal money specifically earmarked to remove DJI hardware from their fleets. He suggested that counter-UAS purchasing represents a fresh opportunity, since most departments are only now acquiring this technology and have not yet locked in a vendor.
Hewlett offered an analogy from his own career in the U.S. Navy to explain the federal government’s reluctance to pick technology winners. He recalled a time when every federal employee, himself included, carried a BlackBerry. Nobody hesitated when the market moved to iPhones and Samsung devices instead. “I don’t know why there’s this hesitancy now to pick a specific technology as a winner for the federal government,” he said. Critical components like servos, rotors and engines are largely standardized across drone manufacturers regardless of brand. Senott’s caveat applies here too. Even domestically preferred vendors need multiple suppliers behind them, since DJI’s own dominance shows what happens when a single point of failure controls too much market share.
Data Sharing Remains the Unfinished Layer
The panel’s final exchange turned to a problem that had been implicit throughout, that almost nothing gets shared.
Fedderson described the current state of affairs as a pattern where vendors fund individual demonstrations for individual agencies that never compare notes afterward. “Every time there’s a demo, every time there’s an evaluation, every time there’s testing for every federal agency, it’s a new series,” he said. He added that states are separately building their own centers of excellence without talking to each other, even as universities and companies compete for the same test corridors.
Hewlett offered a counterexample from his own work on Project ULTRA, describing live data exchange testing between commercial and federal systems at Grand Forks Air Force Base, feeding toward planned flight demonstrations between Grand Forks and Cavalier Space Force Station. (Watch the Worldwide premiere of Project ULTRA on AGN). He also revealed his dual role as one of the leads on a multi-state collaborative effort building what he called a minimum viable infrastructure for flight information exchange between states. He suggested the coordination gap is narrowing in pockets, even if it has not closed nationally.
The discussion closed on the question of third-party validation, whether a single trusted testing body, similar to how the FCC certifies laboratories, could spare vendors from repeating the same demonstrations for every agency that wants proof a system works. Adams voiced open support for that model, saying vendors are tired of an endless demo cycle that stretches sales timelines into years without any shared record of results. Fedderson agreed in principle but wanted assurance it would not become another costly gatekeeping exercise.
Daskal, stepping outside her moderator role for a closing note, urged the industry not to let a validation process turn into what she has seen elsewhere where young companies pay up to a quarter million dollars and wait two years for approval through a checklist that adds cost without adding safety. She ended the panel much the way she began it, pointing to the gaps that must be addressed. The layers discussed on stage, sensors, statutes, training pipelines and data-sharing agreements, all exist in some form today. None of them yet overlap cleanly enough to make the cheese whole.
Advice for a State Building Its Own Plan From Scratch
At the close of the session, an audience member identifying as the director of the Oregon Department of Aviation asked for guidance while drafting a statewide counter-UAS plan. The panel’s answers doubled as a summary of everything discussed before it.
Fedderson advised mandating coordination as a first principle. He insisted that any state plan force agencies to talk to the FAA and understand FCC rules before operating independently. Adams added that a workable plan needs buy-in across the National Guard, emergency management, state police, the department of transportation and aviation officials, all feeding into one shared airspace awareness picture rather than isolated pockets of detection.
Hewlett’s advice leaned on hard-won military experience. “Make sure the overall theme allows for adaptability, flexibility and scalability,” he said. “The enemy always gets a vote. No plan survives first contact.” He warned against writing anything so rigid it cannot evolve as adversaries change tactics, and insisted the architecture stay open rather than siloed, since a system that cannot talk to a neighboring state’s system ends up strangling commerce rather than protecting it.
Walters cautioned against over-indexing on any one vendor, noting that the right technology mix depends heavily on geography. Adams agreed, using a homegrown Oregon example to make the point concrete. Protecting a small town like Pendleton calls for a different setup than protecting Hayward Field in Eugene. States avoid vendor-lock by buying into a single approved vendor across every jurisdiction.
Watch Law-Tech Connect Online (LTCO), “Layers of Protection: Airspace Awareness, Safety & Counter-Drone Defense” here.
LTCO is made possible by the generous support of this year’s LTC Premium Sponsors: Akin (Gold), Crowell and Greenberg Traurig (Silver), Venable and GrandSKY (Bronze).