The Department of Defense has announced that it will be creating a task force to counter enemy drones. The official name will be the Joint Interagency Task Force 401, and it will be charged with developing new technologies to counter drones, known in the military as unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
The threat posed by enemy drones is something that the U.S. military has been thinking about and planning for, at seemingly all levels from platoon level up to division. The war in Ukraine has shown that adversaries will employ drones in future conflicts and that America has to have a way to counter them.
While there is a real threat for the military to deter, there has also been a bit of a modern-day "War of the Worlds" panic around drones in recent years. In 2024, people began reporting drone sightings over New Jersey, sparking widespread news coverage, which CNN described as a hysteria. A White House spokesman clarified that the drones were not flown by foreign adversaries. "After research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons," the White House spokesperson stated at the time.
However, drone technology is proven on the battlefield at this point, and DOD is taking it seriously. "There's no doubt that the threats we face today from hostile drones grow by the day," Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a recent press conference.
Although details of the Task Force remain unknown, Hegseth stated that the program will "send a clear message" that DOD will "never be outmatched."