The Army’s top civilian leader told lawmakers the service is leaning on its new counter-drone marketplace to bolster local security at upcoming high-profile events, ones that experts and officials have warned are at risk of unmanned aerial system threats.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon debuted an initial launch of its “Counter-UAS Marketplace,” which officials have touted as an “Amazon-like” platform with a catalogue of anti-drone parts and systems for government personnel to buy.
The Pentagon’s counter-drone entity, Joint Interagency Task Force 401, said this week that $13 million-worth of tech — such as low-collateral systems, sensors, radars and electronic warfare platforms — has been purchased from the site since its launch.
During a House Defense Appropriations subcommittee hearing Thursday, the Army’s top official said non-federal agencies can also buy items from the marketplace.
“State and local and federal law enforcement officers across the country can purchase from this site. We’ve already had purchases,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said when asked about the service’s role in sharing counter-drone capabilities for security at events in the United States.
He said Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall has hosted 350 state and local police departments, though he didn’t specify when, and that the Army is “syncing them in” to JIATF-401’s counter-drone efforts.
While briefly mentioned at Thursday’s budget hearing, Driscoll’s comments about the marketplace and its role in combatting what one lawmaker described as “high security concerns” at major events, highlights long-brewing alarm over stateside drone defense.
Experts have told DefenseScoop that the threats drones present to domestic infrastructure and civilians is ubiquitous given their low cost, easy access and hard-to-detect nature. FIFA World Cup events and America 250 celebrations this summer as well as the 2028 Summer Olympics in California will bring heightened drone security concerns.
“It used to be that we just did the Super Bowl once a year with that kind of cap,” Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a recent interview with DefenseScoop. “But we need lots of Super Bowl-style bubbles over lots of things all year round.”
“Now that does not mean a perfect astrodome over the entire United States and every blade of grass,” he added. “But what it does mean is you need a ton of sensing — ubiquitous sensing — and then a number of relatively robust … air defense capabilities that can be moved around.”
Evidence of such concerns has been playing out for years in the U.S., with hundreds of drone sightings in 2024 over military installations, at the southern border and most recently at Barksdale Air Force base last month where “several unauthorized” UAS entered airspace resulting in a brief shelter-in-place order.
JIATF-401 recently announced it committed $100 million for the FIFA World Cup security, “focusing on mobile co