Urban warfare: Next Falcon Peak exercise to take counter-drone tech to the streets

YUMA PROVING GROUND, Ariz. — After the joint force and its federal agency partners spent almost a month in the near-vacant desert training to defeat drones coming over the US-Mexico border, military officials have opted to hold their next large-scale counter-drone drill in a very different setting: a bustling city with oodles of people and buildings. 

“Homeland defense is not about protecting from outside; it’s also protecting inside. We could do one without taking care of the other, and that’s not the right answer,” Brig. Gen. Jason Rueschhoff, operations director of US Northern Command, told reporters on Sept. 24 in Yuma during Falcon Peak 26.2 — the fourth iteration of the exercise. 

“The big things for us to be focused on will be collateral damage issues,” he said.

Falcon Peak is run by NORTHCOM, and the most recent exercise in September at Yuma marked the first time officials from the command, the Defense Innovation Unit, the Army-led Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) 401 and the Department of Homeland Security all came together for the exercise. Together, they tested ways to neutralize drone threats in the open desert — whether through electronic means or by blasting them out of the air — and learned how the heat, wind and sand can wreak havoc on different systems, as Breaking Defense previously reported. 

But like Rueschhoff, Marine Col. Scott Humr said he expects the next edition, scheduled for about a year from now, to be more complicated, considering the physical, operational and legal challenges that come with operating in and around populated civilian areas.

In regards to physical barriers, dense buildings, electronic “congestion” and other physical obstacles create signal interference and “block the line-of-sight required for conventional radars and cameras,” Humr, the deputy director of science and technology for JIATF 401, said. 

“Legally and operationally, defending urban areas in the homeland requires navigating strict domestic policies, complex jurisdictional boundaries and heightened collateral-damage concerns that are not present on an open test range,” he said.

Humr noted that JIATF 401’s “primary takeaway” going from the recent Falcon Peak to the next one will be taking a “highly coordinated” interagency approach, especially working closely with DHS and the Federal Aviation Administration.

In the past, coordinating with such agencies hasn’t been so seamless. For example, in February the FAA suddenly and mysteriously shut down the airspace around the busy El Paso, Texas airport. It was later discovered that the emergency was related to a miscommunication between federal agencies about the use of a counter-drone laser by Customs and Border Patrol, on loan from the Army. 

Since then though, military officials have emphasized close coordination with the FAA, culminating in a joint agreement for a laser system to protect the southern border. Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, JIATF 401’s commanding general, also told reporters during Falcon Peak that the task force and the military writ large continues to coordinate testing with the FAA. 

But Rueschhoff and Humr said perhaps the highest priority, and a key challenge, will be learning how to protect any civilian population from any collateral damage. In the desert, there are relatively few issues with using a shotgun to simply blast a quadcopter out of the sky, but Humr said that for an urban environment, the Pentagon and task force will focus on using low-collateral and non-kinetic options to make congested environments as safe as possible.

The exercise, Rueschhoff said, will be “really telling for capabilities, and this will get at more than just our borders.”