Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and GrandSKY President Thomas Swoyer joined the Dawn of Autonomy podcast to lay out exactly how close the United States is to a serious counter-drone gap, and exactly what North Dakota is doing to close it. The conversation ranged from personal histories and hard budget numbers to a base security scare that still has no explanation and some recent big wins for the North Dakota UAS ecosystem. Ultimately, though, it revolved around their shared conviction that the next five years will define whether America leads or lags in autonomy.
The Sweet Spot: How Both Leaders Found Their Missions
The Senator’s flight path to chairing the Senate Armed Services Airland Subcommittee began well outside defense policy. He served as North Dakota’s economic development finance director under Governor Ed Schafer, then represented the state in the House, where he focused on energy and environmental policy. When he reached the Senate, he specifically sought the Airland assignment because of what was already happening back home.
“North Dakota was at the front end of innovation for unmanned systems, even before autonomy was as big a thing as it is today,” he explained. “And wow did we hit the sweet spot.”
For his part, Swoyer has spent fifteen years building GrandSKY on a 217-acre land-lease at Grand Forks Air Force Base, paired with a joint-use agreement that lets manned and unmanned aircraft fly directly off the base runway. Early work centered on legacy platforms like the MQ-9 and RQ-4. That has since expanded into Group 2 and 3 UAS as the war in Ukraine reshaped what the drone market demands.
“My whole job is to get people together and give them the resources they need to fly aircraft,” Swoyer said.
A Changing Threat Landscape Led to New Focus Areas
When asked what has shifted most urgently in the past year, Cramer pointed to a threat picture that barely existed when he joined the Armed Services Committee six years ago. Back then, lethal drones meant the MQ-9 and RQ-4. While both remain critical today, something far harder to track increasingly outnumbers them: small UAS.
“There are swarms,” the Senator noted. “They come out of pickups and campers, and they can swarm a runway or a tarmac very quickly. It has now become a domestic base issue and an international base security issue.”
“What keeps me up at night is the importance of counter UAS technologies,” he continued. “While we still make the case for the offensive side of drone technology, the defensive side is what frankly haunts me because I don’t think we’re very good at it yet.” He noted that people like Tom Swoyer, in places like GrandSKY, are exactly where the country can solve that problem.
From the operational side, Swoyer explained that, in response to the changing threat landscape, GrandSKY has sharpened its focus to three priorities:
- Continuing routine UAS operations for customers like Northrop Grumman and General Atomics
- Building out contested logistics capability and
- Investing heavily in counter-UAS detection, identification, and tracking.
He was specific about what tracking actually has to deliver. “You need a target track, not just ‘hey, I think there’s a drone out there somewhere’. It’s got to actually be able to put a weapon target on it, whether that’s a missile, a laser, jamming or another drone interceptor,” he emphasized.
Money, Machines and Infrastructure Build Out the Security Ecosystem
Cramer laid out the budget shift driving the current surge in autonomy investment. The counter-UAS budget alone jumped from three billion dollars in fiscal year 2026 to twenty-one billion in fiscal year 2027, part of a broader push of roughly $53 to $54 billion in the NDAA aimed at drone and autonomy technology writ large. He credited the increase to a demand signal that originated overseas rather than in Washington.
“Real demand comes from your enemy more so than from your government,” Cramer said. “We look rather slow by comparison.”
He pointed to private capital moving alongside government spending, citing investors which have backed companies like Anduril and Palantir. He credited Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg, a wealthy, successful venture capitalist, with pushing both primes and smaller innovators to compete for solutions. Multi-year procurement authority, secured in last year’s NDAA, now gives industry the durability it needs to invest with confidence rather than waiting on year-to-year appropriations.
Cramer also spoke candidly about the manufacturing side of that equation. Asked whether domestic industry can realistically fill the gap left by bans on foreign components, he said, “I don’t think we can in the time necessary.” He proposed leaning on allies rather than solving this problem in isolation. “We need each other a lot more than we’re admitting these days,” he said, pointing to deeper cooperation with Canada, Ukraine, and European partners, and citing co-production models already forming around Patriot missiles and the AUKUS submarine partnership as templates worth expanding.
Swoyer sees the same bottleneck from the industrial floor. “It’s not enough to build 20 prototypes. We have to build 2000,” he said, describing a GrandSKY partner working toward a counter-drone interceptor priced near $2,000 a unit. “When the government says, ‘I need 10,000 copies’, how do you scale that? We need to start building the capacity to scale those things.”
Unexplained Base Scare Inspires New Center of Excellence
The conversation turned personal when Cramer described the still-unexplained drone incursions over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, home to Air Combat Command, which General Ken Wilsbach had experienced firsthand before later visiting at Grand Forks. “They still don’t have a working theory as to whose they were and why they were there, how they were there,” Cramer said of the unidentified drones that crossed Langley’s airspace.
Because North Dakota hosts two legs of the nuclear triad, the stakes of that unresolved mystery are not abstract. “A B-52 bomber doesn’t do much good if a swarm of small drones can take it out on the tarmac,” Cramer said.
That episode carried straight into Cramer’s own visit to Grand Forks Air Force Base with Wilsbach, where security forces suddenly closed in around him and raised counter-UAS concerns directly. Soon after, then-Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Jim Slife told Cramer at Edwards Air Force Base that Grand Forks should become the nation’s counter-drone center of excellence, a call Cramer traced to work already underway at Swoyer’s conference table with the FAA, the Northern Plains UAS Test Site, and the University of North Dakota. That designation has now taken hold: Grand Forks stands as the counter-UAS center of excellence, anchoring North Dakota’s role at the center of America’s drone defense buildout.
“These are all people on the same side, going the same direction,” Cramer said of the state’s unmanned systems ecosystem. “It’s just a joy to be part of it.”
Building Toward the Next Phase…Including Lasers!
As the conversation closed, Swoyer previewed near-term momentum at GrandSKY, including the upcoming arrival of the Task Force Raptor group’s T-REX counter-UAS demonstration event across Grand Forks Air Force Base, GrandSKY and the North Dakota National Guard’s Camp Grafton site this month. In yet another show “reveal”, Swoyer indicated Grand Forks has also been designated a directed energy test location, which opens the door to laser-based counter-drone demonstrations.
Looking further ahead, Swoyer expects critical infrastructure defense to become a defining priority as the FAA’s Part 108 rulemaking advances beyond visual line of sight operations. “Surveillance infrastructure for drones is going to have to become much more prolific,” he said, pointing to North Dakota’s Vantis network, which will be certified under Part 146, as a model for the airspace management systems the rest of the country will eventually need.
Piling on, the Senator pointed out that North Dakota has deep roots in agriculture and energy, an underappreciated asset for commercial drone applications. From precision agriculture to pipeline and transmission line inspection, the state’s innovation culture predates its current defense focus by decades.
Near term, Cramer wants the state’s UAS Summit, set for October 14 in Grand Forks, to attract more than generals and technologists. He is hoping to bring venture capital directly into the room. “There’s a lot of capital sitting on the sidelines in this country right now looking for a place to invest,” he said. “Why not in this industry, in my little state of North Dakota, where I think some of the smartest people in this industry reside?”
Beyond that, both men admitted the crystal ball for what the industry will look like in the long run is a bit blurry, given how quickly the UAS ground keeps shifting. “The job that you’re asking about in three to five years doesn’t exist right now,” Swoyer said, “or is fundamentally different from how we understand it right now.” His advice was to keep some capacity in reserve, ready to move the moment a new opportunity defines itself. For an industry racing to defend against threats that barely existed two years ago, that kind of readiness may be the only strategy that keeps pace with the moment.