Army contributes to DOW-wide augmentation of counter UAS capabilities

WASHINGTON - The Army simulated a large scale drone attack to help bolster the Department of War's ability to detect and defeat enemy drones in the National Capital Region from Nov. 17- 21.

Following Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's June memo to U.S. forces on re-establishing drone dominance, Army Lt. Cols. Brian Reynolds, Chief of the Mission Assurance Division and Jesse Burnette, Joint Staff Director of Operations, designed a large scale joint exercise hosted by the Joint Task Force-Military District of Washington.

With the assistance of the Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines and local police, pilots launched drones from locations in the north of Fort McNair, in the east of the installation and in the south near the National War College, as an insider threat. And finally, the planners used another post on Hains Point between the Potomac River and the Washington Channel as an invasion point.

"Colonel Burnette and I had this idea to test our systems in a true live threat scenario," Reynolds said. "All these systems are tested in a perfect world scenario out in a desert or out in a very remote area, rarely are they tested in the situations and environments that they operate in. To our knowledge, this is kind of the first time that's ever been done."

At each location pilots tested the Unmanned Aircraft Systems' ability to hover, orbit and invade in real time during daylight hours. Testers then conducted a sensor check across each participating installation. At night, planners tested the same capabilities while studying mitigation and defense tactics from Fort McNair's sensors to handheld devices used by the post's military police units.

During each of the four days, drones began launching at about 9:30 a.m. until about 3 p.m. And then pilots began the same test from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. The tests studied whether Fort McNair, Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling and the Washington Navy Yard could detect and mitigate UAS threats.

After evaluating the results, the data will be used to build a larger exercise, said Reynolds. From January to May 2026, the planners hope to build a larger scale exercise involving more installations.

"There are capabilities that exist of both carrying a payload and causing threats to armed Soldiers to install critical infrastructure on the battlefield," Reynolds said. "And we have to take that approach at the garrison level to make sure that we're protecting both the assets on the installation as well as the personnel, the families, the Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen that reside on these installations."

"We're taking these lessons learned and applying them across the Department of War installations," he added. "Sharing that data is critical."

Reynolds and Burnette hope to identify gaps or weaknesses in the War Department's counter-UAS defense capabilities in the National Capital Region and use that capability in neighboring installations. The planning team also hopes to achieve air domain awareness, or the ability to attack, identify and monitor aerial activity at the counter-UAS level in the DC metro area as well as the continental U.S.

Drone attacks accounted for most casualties in the Ukraine War. Bolstering the Army's and U.S. military's ability to locate and counter enemy UAS can be critical on the battlefield and in future conflicts, Burnette said.

"The small drone problem has stymied countries from Denmark to [the U.S.], Russia-Ukraine, and in the Levant, and in the National Capital Region," Burnette said. "But an argument could be made for the rest of the Western world that [counter-UAS] is singular in its ability to defeat such incidents should they occur. And the aim of this exercise is to test our defenses."

Reynolds, who has a background in law enforcement, held planning sessions for nearly 60 days with Burnette, an infantry officer, to prepare for the exercise. To conduct the tests, they had to seek permission from government agencies including the Federal Aviation Administration and the Transportation Security Administration. The Soldiers plan to take the data collected from the experiments and apply it to building future UAS and counter-UAS testing exercises.

"We're not overlapping our capabilities and then integrating those into one common operational picture," Reynolds said." We're sharing the early warning system of our capabilities and then sharing that amongst the interagency at both the federal, the state, the local, the tribal, and the territorial levels."

The Soldiers believe that the DC metro region provides the ideal testing ground testing UAS capabilities in the challenging geography of the nation's capital and collaborating with more than 40 national and government agencies. Only blocks away sits one of the country's busiest airports, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

"If you could solve this problem here, you could probably solve it anywhere," Burnette said. "To be able to operate successfully in that environment is a challenge in and of itself."

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