Experts See Urgent Need to Defend Bases from Drone Attack. Here’s What USAF Is Doing

The Air Force is racing to create a “Point Defense” force of Airmen, specially trained and equipped to protect air bases from unmanned attack more effectively than ever before. But in a new report, an expert says even more is needed to defeat the large-scale enemy drone attacks already wreaking havoc on today’s battlefield.

Attack drones have become a constant threat to U.S. forces in the Middle East during the ongoing air war with Iran. They are also the weapon of choice in the Russia-Ukraine war; just this week, Ukraine launched drones that flew inside Russia and damaged oil refineries, logistics facilities, and a major retail warehouse.

The threat has been percolating for several years now—the Air Force came under immense pressure from Congress in late 2023 after unidentified drones flew for days over Langley Air Force Base, Va.. More drone incursions followed at bases in Ohio, Utah, and the United Kingdom.

In response, the service published new doctrine on the “Point Defense of Air Bases” in April 2025 to ensure the service plays a more active role in air defense, a mission that has traditionally been an Army responsibility. The doctrine gives air base commanders more freedom to identify threats and “secure air operations using organic PD capabilities.” The Air Force also stood up the Point Defense Task Force and Point Defense Battle Lab to develop to identify new training, equipment and tactics needed for the new mission.

The service has also created the first point defense flights, specialized units of Airmen trained to rapidly deploy to the Pacific and other hotspots and defend future remote air bases from drone attack. In the long-term, the service is developing a new job specialty code for base defense as the first step in developing this new career field.

“We’ve seen that the adversary is evolving … and we have to do the same,” Michael Sheehy, director of future operations under the Air Force deputy chief of staff for operations, told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “We’re putting more emphasis into the point defense mission from an organize, train, and equip standpoint. One of the things that I’m driving after, from an organizational perspective, is to professionalize this mission set for our wings and for our deployers.”

But retired Brig. Gen. Houston Cantwell questioned the scope and the urgency of the Air Force’s plans and argues for a comprehensive strategy for defeating an adversary’s ability to launch effective drone attacks on air bases in a new paper from AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Canwell, a senior fellow with the Mitchell Institute, credited Air Force officials for their efforts to tackle this problem so far but said “it doesn’t feel like there’s a sense of urgency; It feels like it’s a bureaucratic response to something.”

“Point defense is obviously going to be critical to this, but a [purely] defensive strategy is a losing strategy,” Cantwell told reporters July 29 ahead of his policy paper’s official release. “We have to think beyond point defense.”

In Cantwell’s view, the Air Force has to start by training and equipping Airmen with the latest technology to detect, identify, track, and destroy enemy drones. An expanded array of airborne early-earning sensors has to be part of that effort. The service also has to develop an offensive strike plan to attack enemy drone manufacturing capabilities. The strategy also has to include a new, multilevel protective posture to help air base personnel adapt to changing drone threat levels. Air base commanders also have to be able to manage the electromagnetic spectrum at their bases.

“Congress and the Department of War have got to additively resource the Air Force with the personnel and the equipment to defend these air bases,” Cantwell said. “This is an additive mission … and we’ve got to provide those capabilities.”

In his paper, Cantwell writes that the “Air Force must focus its efforts, adapt its doctrine and procedures, and develop, integrate, and deploy the technology to counter the proliferating air threat posed by [small unmanned aerial vehicles]. Air base defense is core to the service’s ability to generate airpower and must be prioritized to maximize aircraft generation, even in the face of sUAV attack.”

The Air Force’s Point Defense Task Force has been developing training for the service’s point defense units and conducting exercises to identify new capabilities the service will need in the future drone fight.

The Point Defense Task Force, or PDTF, is part of Air Combat Command and is responsible for figuring out the “foundational capability that the Air Force has … and how do we develop those tactics, techniques, and procedures,” said Air Force Col. Cody Moore, who just finished commanding the PDTF.

“I’m running as fast as I can to make these solutions, so they come in pieces,” added Moore, now the chief of future operations at ACC, describing the task force’s work to develop how the new, 20-Airman point defense flights will be organized.

“We’ve spent a little over two years working on some of that problem, and now the Air Force has come out and said, “hey, this is going to be a flight underneath our operational support squadrons—that was a recommendation that came out of the Point Defense Task Force,” he said. “We did tabletop exercises. We did operational rehearsals, real-world experimentation with what kind of Airmen have these skills.”

The flights will include enlisted Airmen with aviation, battle management, and command-and-control experience. They will go through a roughly three-week training course at the Joint Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems University, located at Fort Sill, Okla., to learn how to use U.S. military counter-drone technology and how to defend against enemy drone attacks.

The Air Force is working with Fort Sill’s university to develop the formal technical training Airmen with the future base defense specialty code will go through.

Cantwell said that he fears the university will not have the capacity to train all of these new base defense Airmen on top of training similar personnel for other services.

“There’s just so much demand on that university that they can’t train all the joint requirements at once,” he said. As an alternative, Cantwell said the Point Defense Battle Lab at Grand Forks Air Force Base, N.D., should become an “outpost of the Joint UAS university. … It’s an opportunity for the Air Force to be able to take the curriculum, get your own instructors, and make that a reality.”

The PDTF has also created mobile training teams—one in the U.S. and one abroad—to travel to Air Force bases to provide point defense training to Airmen, Moore said. The two-week course is for “anybody that the wing commander deems would be involved with point defense.” Moore added.

The mobile training teams include command-and-control enlisted battle manager and an air traffic controller,

“That’s one of the biggest points we hit with this mobile training team is you need airborne command-and-control understanding—how do you deconflict the airspace,” Moore said. “Our air traffic controllers are heavily involved in that process.”

The teams also have a security forces Airmen and an Airman that specializes in maintaining and sustaining radar, weather systems, and other air base equipment, Moore said.

Heather Penney, a former Air Force F-16 pilot and a senior fellow at Mitchell, applauded the Air Force’s recent moves to focus on training Airmen to take on this new mission but stressed that this will require a cultural shift across the entire service.

“This is about everybody needing to have this attitude to defend against and offensively preempt small UAS attack,” Penney said. “It’s also about educating Congress about the resources that the Air Force needs.”

Penney added that the Air Force has shouldered a large portion of the burden in combat missions over the last three years, such as Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Epic Fury, “but is still getting the least funding out of all the services.”

“It’s time for Congress and the [Pentagon] to provide the resourcing to the Air Force, not only to get healthy, but to begin to expand its mission areas,” Penney said.

More resourcing means equipping more air bases and units with low-cost point defense systems capable of tracking and defeating drones as well as passive defenses such as camouflage to deceive and confuse incoming enemy drones, Cantwell said.

“There’s an overwhelming amount of capability out there when it comes to point defense,” he said.

The Air Force relies primarily on the Small Unmanned Air Defense Systems, or SUADS, as the service’s program of record. The system is a detection platform capable of identifying and tracking enemy drones of all sizes. It also is equipped with an electronic warfare effector for downing incoming drones.

It’s available in two variants, one for fixed air bases and one that can be rapidly deployed on an aircraft pallet for rapid deployment missions. Congress included $51.8 million for SUADS procurement in fiscal 2026, according to Air Force budget documents. 

“The Air Force’s approach to that is that we own that baseline system, and as we identify those new capabilities … I can go out and buy that high power microwave and plug it into my SUADS,” Moore said. “I can go out and buy that kinetic interceptor from company x and connect it to SUADS. If I build that foundational capability with the electronic warfare, the command and control, the detect and track and ID capability—now all I’m building is additional defeat options based on the location that I need to be in.”

An Air Force spokesperson said the service is acquiring and fielding additional, commercially available systems, but tracking those buys is murky since they don’t currently show up in the service’s proposed fiscal 2027 budget.

Funding that was dedicated to the Pentagon’s Replicator 2 counter-drone initiative was consolidated into the Joint Interagency Task Force 401, which stood up last year to quickly develop counter-drone technologies for all the military services, said Sheehy, who works closely with the joint organization.

“JIATF 401 is a great partner, and we are procuring small UAS sensors, effectors, and C2 systems through that money in JIATF 401,” Sheehy said. “It doesn’t show up in the Air Force books, but the Air Force is definitely getting its fair share.”

Sheehy said the Air Force will not discuss specific system by company name but said the service is acquiring different types of effectors as well as “C2 systems that will take in all the sensor data then the effectors.”

Cantwell writes in his paper that airborne sensors such as the MQ-9 Reaper are critical to providing early warning of inbound enemy drones.

“I can’t overemphasize the importance of getting airborne sensors,” Cantwell said, describing how Russian forces have learned to avoid Ukrainian fixed-base radars and other sensors and avoid them.

“By having airborne persistent sensors, it allows us to … be unpredictable because those sensors can be anywhere on the battle space. A UAV like an MQ-9 is able to persist for 20 to 24 hours and can surveil the battlespace,” he said.

Sheehy would not discuss the idea of using MQ-9s in that role, citing operational security concerns.

“The U.S. Air Force takes a layered defensive approach to point defense and is not reliant on a single type of radar or sensor,” he wrote in a statement. “To preserve our tactical advantage and ensure operational security, we will not disclose specific technical capabilities and system configurations.”

Point defense alone is not enough, Cantwell stressed. The drone threat facing air bases has grown exponentially. Potential adversaries are capable of launching hundreds, possibly even thousands, of drones against airfields attempting to generate combat aircraft.

“We just don’t have the mass arsenal of weapons to be able to stop all these aircraft,” Cantwell said, pointing to the need for offense counter-air operations designed to target and destroy enemy drone-making capabilities.

“We have to get that offensive counter air to be able to stop the threat before it becomes an actual threat to the base,” he said.

Sheehy agreed that offensive operations will be a key factor in defeating the drone threat and referred to Task Force Scorpion Strike launching the Low-cost Unmanned Combat System, or Lucas, into combat for the first time during Epic Fury.

Other recommendations from Cantwell’s report include:

More resourcing for a standardized set of equipment that can provide airborne early warning, tracking, and identification, as well as both kinetic and nonkinetic effectors that can defeat airborne threats from the ground.
The acquisition of cost-effective airborne early warning and defeat capabilities for sUAV, ensuring defense-in-depth for air bases
The need for commanders to deliberately manage the electromagnetic spectrum. Both drone and counter drone operations “depend heavily” on radio frequency energy, GPS, datalinks, jamming, sensing, and communications, the report states. “Without disciplined spectrum management, friendly systems risk interfering with one another and undermining the very defenses they are meant to enable.”
The development of “Drone Protection Postures” as a guide for Airmen generating aircraft sorties. “A low threat might call for very few defensive measures as Airmen continue to focus on accomplishing their primary jobs, while higher DPPs might direct the immediate launching of aircraft,” the report states. These postures must be regularly exercised to ensure Airmen understand them and can execute the proper procedures.