“Twenty years ago, the state of North Dakota poured in multiple millions of dollars to figure out what it looks like to do beyond visual line-of-sight operations for Class One, Two, and Three Drones. That was just the very nascent stage. Just a decade ago, ten years ago, they figured out that they can do this. They could do this at Grand Forks Air Force Base. Right across from our [air base] runway, on the active duty side, is a place called Grand Sky. It is an innovation research park for all counter-drone operations. It is one of the largest in the United States. They rent the space on our base. It's legitimately federal property that they lease for the research park.”
That was Air Force Col. Alfred J. Rosales, Commander, 319th Reconnaissance Wing, based at Grand Forks Air Force Base, speaking on September 14, at the 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference, as moderator of a panel on Counter-Drone Defense.
I had never heard about what the Grand Forks locals call GrandSKY as a home for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), where for a decade major defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman and General Atomics have been flight testing and carrying out drone research and development.
Back in May, the Defense Department’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401, central authority for the counter-small unmanned aircraft systems program, selected five installations to participate in the directed-energy counter-unmanned aircraft systems pilot program, of which Grand Forks was one.
More recently, as Rosales put it, at the Grand Forks Base, they have been “strapping on vendor equipment” to “build tactics and techniques.” That process will help determine, he said, “How do we want directed-energy weapons to be used inside the United States in FAA [Federal Aviation Agency] controlled airspace, not in the restricted ranges of our Air Force.”
Rosales introduced his September 14, panel whom he said were industry leaders who were “translating technology into trust to allow us to win in the future.”
They were:
Dr. Ben Van Roo, Chief Executive Officer, Legion Intelligence, who, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) was working to get the equipment needed at the tactical level to be able to provide decision-making space without being connected to the Cloud the entire time.
Early on Van Roo said, “We're really still in the infancy right now of how we think about where we're going to use [computer] agents [AI]. What are we going to allow them to decide on? How do they work their way into our TTPs [Tactics, Techniques and Procedures] into our doctrine? And then, the other side, and the big question that we also think about is are they even going to be available?”
Van Roo continued, “The way that we want to use Artificial Intelligence is going to be one, it's still got to be sorted out. What are we going to allow these things [AI] decide to do? Where are they going to work? Into everything from the kill chain to just basic intelligence gathering? And then how are we going to make them more resilient? These are the next layers of challenges that are ahead of us.”
Adam Mohamed, Chief Technology Officer, Asylon Robotics, a Boston Dynamics Partner, who works on autonomous robotics, figuring out how we can layer base defense architecture with our air domain experts.
“Situational awareness is king,” Mohamed said, “because everything else flows from that. And having static situation awareness, mobile situational awareness, being able to understand your battle space is going to take precedence over everything else. The sensor fusion will happen. We'll have the AI. We'll have the ability to operate without a Cloud. But we need to be able to operate when we start losing our sensors, we start losing our radars, we start losing our shooters, and how do we adapt and how does the system adapt for you, because there won't be time for you to make the change to switch over.”
Colton Wood, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Force Technologies, who works on multi-sensor integration. How do we use AI to get the common operating pictures we so desperately desire -- the integration piece that's going to help defeat drones.
Wood said, “Talking about human in the loop is okay. I got a target, I need to go through the process of actually engaging and affecting that target. As we see the threat evolving, that is going to be an incredibly difficult thing to do if I have, you know, multiple threats, multiple targets, multiple different engagement systems…I've set all the rules of engagement. I've set the governance on the systems and then I have a strong decision supported by tools in front of me. But once I've made that decision, I need to be able to engage the systems and machines need to be able to engage the threats, almost autonomously.”
Therefore, Wood explained, “And so I think a lot of simulations, understanding how these systems operate, where the left and right limits are and then allowing these systems to be as effective as they can be without us having to shepherd the process is a very thing that we have to think about [in the] very near future here.”
And finally, Michael Hiatt, Chief Technology Officer, Epirus, who works with Directed-Energy weapons, lasers, the essence of kill-chain dynamics. He comes with skill sets on how to integrate and work in that space.
Hiatt said, “Your risk is very different if you have to literally put metal [kinetic weapons] in the air, you know, with kinetics or, you know, proximate-burst rounds or whatever the kinetic options are. If you can have an option that has lower collateral effects and no collateral damage, you know, which is what the Directed-Energy [DE, laser] weapons offer, you start to be able to change your risk calculation.”
Hiatt continued, “But when for the folks that are on the ground, you know, the battle captain trying to trying to make that assessment, it's not a cost asymmetry problem. It's a magazine depth issue because, you know, what's the reload time on my kinetic? What's the, you know, what's the fly-out time? How many do I, you know, what's my shot doctrine? Do I do a shoot, look, shoot? Do I do a shoot, shoot, look? You know, those are the things that affect magazine consumption.”
Hiatt added, “The reality is you know DE weapons aren't out-ranging kinetic [weapons]. And so when you start to say, ‘All right, I'm going to hold fire on my kinetics. I'm going to let that threat come in closer than I would like because I trust that my DE weapons are going to take it out.’ That's the level of trust that we got to get to.”
At the end of the 41-minute session, Col. Rosales tried to sum it up saying, “This space in counter drones is not a spectator sport. It's for all of us to think through it, industry, academia, the United States Air Force. What I hear is that we are beyond asking what these things are, AI agents, as they incorporate into this picture. We're at the point where we're figuring out what it could look like in terms of policy [so] that we can then get to the next step -- in training and exercising with a rigor to ensure that we have the trust to have our airmen engage when those courses of action are recommended.”
My guess is we are nowhere close to deciding policies where AI fits into the counter-drone fight, nor in warfare itself.
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