Carahsoft Technology Corp. held its inaugural Drones in Public Sector Summit on September 9, 2026, at its Conference and Collaboration Center in Reston, Virginia. The event drew government officials and industry executives together to examine how unmanned aircraft are reshaping missions across defense, public safety and critical infrastructure.
Craig Abod, President and CEO of Carahsoft, welcomed the crowd and credited Lacey Wean, who leads Carahsoft’s drone and unmanned aircraft system business, with building the event’s lineup and outdoor area with hands-on demonstrations of unmanned aircraft technology.
One of the day’s featured discussions, a panel titled “Wings for Warfighters: Drones on the Modern Battlefield and Beyond,” brought together defense and industry voices to unpack how the military is fielding unmanned aircraft, the acquisition hurdles slowing deployment and where the technology heads next. Jim McCool, Vice President of Tradecraft at the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), moderated the conversation, which featured Peter Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Ironaxe, and Dave Raley, who leads digital business efforts for the Marine Corps Community Services organization (MCCS). Here’s what they had to say.
Drones Have Extended the Battlefield
McCool opened the panel with observations about how dramatically warfare has changed, pointing to Ukraine’s use of drones far beyond the front lines. He explained that Ukrainian forces have struck logistics hubs used by major Russian shipping companies, hit export terminals and cargo ships to disrupt Russian grain and barley exports, and caused widespread disruption to commercial air travel inside Russia. He noted that Ukrainian leaders have even discussed the goal of shutting down all commercial air activity in Russia using drones. He described this not as combat moving beyond the battlefield, but as an extension of it, reaching into an adversary’s economy and infrastructure in ways that were not possible a decade ago.
McCool, who spent 25 years at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before moving to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, where he helped stand up the organization that led to the well known artificial intelligence (AI) initiative called Project Maven, cautioned that deep expertise can sometimes make it harder to see change coming. He called this “the curse of knowledge” and warned that experts who have spent careers mastering older systems and doctrine may be slower to recognize how thoroughly drones have altered the rules of engagement.
Battlefield Tactics Have Not Caught Up
Schmidt did not hold back when describing how far military tactics lag behind the technology. He told the audience that large warships and tanks are now obsolete, and argued that Western militaries have not fully absorbed that shift. He pointed to a NATO wargame in which Ukrainian-style drone tactics effectively defeated traditional NATO forces, and said the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) that ground troops rely on need an overhaul.
Schmidt runs Ironaxe, a company that builds tilt wing aircraft, a type of vertical takeoff and landing drone that shifts its wings and propellers to fly efficiently like an airplane after taking off like a helicopter. The company brought one of its own three-dimensional (3-D) printed aircraft, designed specifically for countering unauthorized drones through detection and safe mitigation, to the Summit. Schmidt said the same sensors and navigation technology found in ordinary smartphones, such as accelerometers and orientation sensors, now power the autonomous flight capabilities inside modern drones, which is why he believes the technology is here to stay.
Schmidt also raised concerns about organizational resistance to change, noting that an Army initiative created to speed up drone adoption was recently shut down. He said the bigger barrier to progress is not the hardware itself, but the doctrine and training habits that have not caught up with what drones can now do on the battlefield.
Government Software Approval Delays Slow New Technology
Raley focused his remarks on one of the most persistent obstacles facing new military technology: the lengthy process required to approve software and systems for use, known as an authorization to operate (ATO). He said many people mistakenly treat that approval step as the entire problem, when it actually reflects a much larger gap between how the military buys and certifies technology and how modern software companies build and update it.
Raley helped build and manage a Marine Corps software delivery platform called Operation Storm\Breaker, which uses a Navy certification process to compress a review that traditionally takes many months into roughly 15 minutes. He explained that the platform separates the underlying cloud infrastructure, which already carries its own approval, from the individual pieces of software running on top of it. Because the infrastructure is pre-approved, new updates or applications can be scanned, tested and cleared for use far faster than under the normal process, which he said can take up to eighteen months and often results in approvals that are outdated before they are even finalized.
He argued that battlefield success today, including the use of drones, depends on digital systems. A slow approval pipeline undermines the military’s ability to compete with adversaries who can update software on drones and other equipment within days or even hours. Raley said he would like to see this kind of streamlined authorization service made available as a shared resource across the Department of War (DoW) and its vendor partners, similar to how cloud computing became a standard utility rather than something each organization builds from scratch.
Domestic Drone Manufacturing Faces Supply Chain Gaps
Schmidt described supply chain limitations as another practical barrier facing the drone industry today. He said China still overwhelmingly makes the majority of components used in drones, including motors and electronic parts. Building a domestic manufacturing base capable of matching that scale and precision will take time. He noted that if the DoW placed a large order for drones built entirely with components from trusted sources, often called a “blue supply chain,” the industry does not yet have the capacity to fill that order within a year.
Raley added that his team addresses software supply chain risk by closely tracking the origin of every code library used in a program and evaluating the associated risk early in development, rather than waiting until a system is nearly complete.
In response to an audience question, Schmidt pushed back on the common assumption that software built using publicly available source code is less secure than proprietary alternatives. He argued that open systems are often easier to test and verify for security purposes.
Both speakers agreed that as drone technology and artificial intelligence (AI) evolve together, keeping a close eye on where every component and every line of code originates will only grow more important.
Autonomy Will Define the Next Five Years of Warfare
Asked to look five years ahead, Schmidt said the biggest shift in warfare will involve autonomy, and pointed to developments already underway in Ukraine. He described autonomous ground vehicles carrying drones that identify and engage targets without constant human control, as well as autonomous vehicles that locate and retrieve wounded soldiers from the battlefield today. He surmised that the central challenge going forward will be how militaries let networks of autonomous systems make coordinated decisions while keeping meaningful human oversight in place.
He also described his company’s vision for what he called a “software defined aircraft,” in which the same core design can be resized or reconfigured based on what a mission requires, then manufactured on demand using mobile 3-D printing equipment near the front lines. Schmidt was candid that questions remain about how to prevent increasingly autonomous, AI-driven combat systems from operating outside intended boundaries. He referred to it as one of the most important open questions facing the industry.
During audience questions, one attendee asked how the industry keeps AI systems onboard drones from behaving unpredictably as autonomy increases. Schmidt explained that his company’s aircraft rely on a traditional flight control system layered with supervisory software that enforces mission boundaries set by a human commander, including geographic limits the aircraft cannot cross. He contrasted this modular approach with newer methods where an aircraft is trained purely on video footage to recognize and maneuver toward targets without any separation between decision making and flight control, which he said creates far less predictable and harder to safeguard systems.
The panel concluded with broad agreement that the military services adopting drones fastest, and pairing that adoption with modern software delivery and a resilient supply chain will dominate, as unmanned systems become a permanent fixture of modern conflict.