House panel hears DOD officials warn of faster, cheaper drone threats and press for procurement, policy fixes

Top Defense officials told the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces that small unmanned aerial systems, including cheap, mass-produced drones, are a rapidly escalating threat overseas and inside the United States and that the department must move faster to field countermeasures.

The witnesses — including Defense Innovation Unit Director Michael Beck, Lieutenant General Eric Austin of the Marine Corps, Lieutenant General Robert Collins of the Army, and Major General David Stewart, director of the Joint Counter-UAS Office — described advances in sensor, decision and defeat capabilities, a need for flexible funding and acquisition reforms, and ongoing initiatives to deliver lower-cost, low-collateral counter-UAS tools to protect bases and forces.

Why it matters: Members repeatedly cited recent incursions at installations such as Joint Base Langley–Eustis and Picatinny Arsenal as examples of how small, commercially available UAS are being used to probe defenses and, in some cases, conduct sustained operations against U.S. facilities. Committee members signaled they plan to press the issue in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), including refining authorities tied to “130i” and other installation protections.

Beck, director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), told the subcommittee the pace and scale of UAS production and tactics — an evolution he said he observed firsthand in Ukraine — outstrips traditional defense acquisition timelines. “We must put capability in place now,” Beck said, adding that the department needs “authorities and resources…to scale up production capacity” and a culture that accepts measured risk to accelerate development.

DIU described several concrete efforts. Beck said DIU used agile funding to partner with the Army and prototype a company-level small UAS capability that moved from concept to deployed prototype in about six months, and DIU is overhauling its Blue UAS program to increase the number of commercial platforms and components it can vet year-round. He also outlined a “blue manufacturing” initiative that pairs defense tech companies with U.S. advanced manufacturers to scale production.

Service witnesses described parallel efforts. Lieutenant General Eric Austin said the Marine Corps is fielding systems such as the Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MATIS) and prototype light variants to each Marine expeditionary force and is experimenting with attritable, low-cost armed first-person-view (FPV) drones. “We must pursue faster and cheaper solutions,” Austin said, and cited a new Marine Corps attack drone team that recently completed a test firing of an armed FPV drone at Quantico.

Lieutenant General Robert Collins said the Army is shifting buying models to embrace commercial-off-the-shelf systems, modular and open architectures, and iterative buys to increase competition. Collins stressed a layered approach across small-UAS groups and a need to pair the right sensor, decision and defeat mechanisms.

Major General David Stewart, director of the Joint Counter-UAS Office (JCO), described the office’s coordinating role across requirements, training, demonstrations and rapid response. Stewart said the JCO funds operational assessments, hosts instrumented demonstrations for industry, and has developed a joint counter-UAS university with online modules to build doctrine and training.

Committee members raised policy and operational gaps. Chairman Whitman and others cited incidents at Langley and Picatinny and pressed officials on whether commanders have clear authority and backing to act when they detect hostile UAS. Officials said policy confusion and capacity shortfalls remain: Stewart said “the capability is there” but “we have a bit of a capacity problem across each one of the services at installations.” Several witnesses pointed to the need for mobile “flyaway” kits and asked for an inventory of kit in place at installations and the capacity to move kits within hours when a threat emerges.

The panel discussed efforts to reduce collateral effects in populated areas. DIU and service witnesses described work on low-collateral defeat mechanisms — including electronic measures, net-capture and directed energy — and stressed that defeat options must be matched to threat profiles and urban constraints. Beck said DIU will soon launch a DIU–CSO effort focused on low-collateral defeat technologies for populated environments and that the FAA has been engaged in related initiatives such as Replicator 2.

Several witnesses emphasized sensing and decision technologies as critical bottlenecks: lower-cost, mobile radars, acoustic detection, leveraging commercial cellular and 5G data, and AI-driven decision support to fuse large volumes of sensor data in milliseconds. Beck said commercial tech can supply many of those capabilities but needs faster pathways into DOD use.

On acquisition reform, Beck advocated shifting from prescriptive requirements documents to problem statements co-developed with warfighters, wider use of flexible funding and portfolio approaches rather than rigid programs of record, and recruitment mechanisms to increase talent flow between industry and DOD. “We’ve got to be much more comfortable with failure on our way to success,” he said, urging Congress to permit iterative risk-taking.

Members signaled near-term action. The chairman said the subcommittee will “provide a little refinement” to installation authorities in this year’s NDAA and encouraged members to submit follow-up questions for the record. Several members requested a written inventory of counter-UAS kit at U.S. installations and further briefings on policy coordination with the FAA, DOJ, DHS and FCC.

What was not decided: The hearing produced no formal votes or new binding authorities. Witnesses described ongoing programs, pilot efforts and planned changes, and the committee indicated it will seek statutory and budgetary adjustments in the NDAA process.

The subcommittee adjourned after more than an hour of testimony and questioning; members said the record and follow-up submissions will inform legislative language on acquisition, installation authorities and funding for scaled manufacturing and low-collateral defeat systems.