With daily drone incursions over bases, NORTHCOM takes aim through Falcon Peak

DESTIN, Florida — Flying hundreds of feet in the air against a clear blue sky, the small drone barreled toward a defended position, its profile similar to other unmanned systems that have evaded authorities on US installations. But this drone wouldn’t return to its sender: soon after its detection, defending personnel dispatched their own drone that smashed into the encroacher, sending both plummeting back to earth.

That’s life for a drone during Falcon Peak, a second-year exercise hosted by US Northern Command in late September to hone counter-drone prowess at domestic military facilities. Despite concerted efforts by the US government to defeat unmanned threats, their incursions into US military installations are increasing, according to NORTHCOM head Gen. Gregory Guillot. 

“We’re between [about] one and two incursions per day” at DoD installations, Guillot told reporters during a roundtable here. A NORTHCOM spokesperson later told Breaking Defense there were 230 drone incursions reported over military installations between September 2023 and September 2024, which jumped by 82 percent to approximately 420 sightings reported over roughly the same period the following year.

Whatever the cause of the increase — and Guillot noted, “I don’t know if the problem’s worse, or we have more systems out there that can detect them” — that kind of major jump is bound to get a response from the Pentagon.

Drone incursions over domestic bases have been a top problem for officials following mysterious unmanned flights over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia in late 2023 and other high-profile sightings, prompting widespread scrutiny over why many installations seem powerless to stop them. The issue, officials have said, is that typical counter-drone technologies are not safe to use in civilian airspace, a problem compounded by a byzantine set of rules for installation self-protection. 

Hence the Falcon Peak effort, where the government has called up industry to offer its very best solutions that can detect, track and defeat small drones in ways that maintain the integrity of civilian airspace. Similar to the first Falcon Peak, held last year at the foothills of Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, this year’s event used testing ranges belonging to Eglin Air Force Base on the beaches of Santa Rosa Island in Florida. 

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“What we learned last year at Falcon Peak” between the DoD and industry is that “we’re pretty good at detecting UAS [unmanned aerial systems] of all types and sizes,” Guillot said. “Our ability to track them once we’ve detected them, especially through maneuvers and altitude changes was okay, not great. And then our ability to defeat them was poor, especially if it was only in a non-kinetic means.” 

The good news? Guillot then said that based on results from this year’s Falcon Peak, it’s clear there’s been significant improvement in all three areas. 

Like last year, Guillot said his general observation is that most drone incursions on US military installations are probably just hobbyists who don’t know the rules. Still, officials have said apprehended drone operators, like a Chinese national who flew a drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base late last year, pose national security threats too. (Guillot said officials have yet to establish a link between drone overflights and a foreign government.)

“So majority, I think, are hobbyists that are in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there’s enough of the others that has me concerned,” he said. 

Industry Brings Its Kit

Over the course of several days, NORTHCOM ran hundreds of incursion scenarios to test industry’s counter-drone mettle, with some culminating in “pretty complex” events that involved multiple drones, various flight profiles and even internal navigation technologies that don’t emit signals, according to NORTHCOM Deputy Test Director Jason Mayes.

“They were successful in some, not successful in others,” Mayes said on the Falcon Peak sidelines, adding that it would take time to fully analyze results.

Guillot said his “focus area” for the event this year was low-collateral kinetic defeat, as demos last year using non-kinetic tools — think jamming or hijacking a drone to commandeer its controls — showed that the approach has limitations. More traditional kinetic weapons also pose a risk to bystanders, prompting the need for a solution that can take down a drone with minimal threat to others in the area. 

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Paladin counter drone system, consisting of a shotgun mounted on a drone, on display at Falcon Peak. (Michael Marrow/Breaking Defense)

The smashing intercept viewed by Breaking Defense was performed by Anduril’s Anvil drone, one element of a broader package of capabilities offered by the company that NORTHCOM selected to serve as the command’s first “flyaway kit.” The kit, according to a NORTHCOM presentation shown to Falcon Peak attendees, includes the Anvil, a trailer-mobile radar and camera tower, an electronic warfare system called Pulsar, an infrared sensing system dubbed SkyFence and command and control (C2) software through the firm’s Lattice platform. 

The Falcon Peak event “was an opportunity to continue the learning and the refinement of how we deliver that system, how we train the teams that are going to use it [and] how we provide them with the tools that they need to be able to operate that kit on their own,” Parks Hughes, Anduril’s senior director for air defense, told Breaking Defense at the AFA conference in September, days after Falcon Peak concluded. “It’s always valuable to test the system against a variety of threats.”

Other vendors, like Anduril, brought along comprehensive solutions. But some firms brought individual pieces of the puzzle to show off. 

Norwegian firm Squarehead Technology, for example, brought along an acoustic sensor called Discovair. Acoustic detection has recently grown in popularity since many drones now no longer emit electronic signals, and can instead only be sensed by physically listening for features like rotors.

The Discovair device “allows you to sort of listen to everything at once, in all directions. And if it doesn’t sound like a drone we just throw it out,” Knut Torbjørn Moe, Squarehead’s vice president of defense, told Breaking Defense at the company’s Falcon Peak booth. A key thing to get right is eliminating false positives, he said, noting that “it’s becoming clear to everybody” that technologies like acoustic detection are “needed to be able to fight back against” newer drone threats. 

The small American company Thalrix was also present at Falcon Peak and brought along a camera system called Sentinel. According to CEO Justin Luce, the low-cost camera rings in at about $20,000 for daytime operations and $30,000 for a version that can perform both day and night monitoring. The system, roughly the size of a shoebox and weighing four pounds, can detect the smallest drones, also known as Group 1, about one and a half kilometers away. 

“The main thing for us is, as we’ve seen the price of the effectors and the weapon systems come down, we haven’t seen the price of detection” similarly decline, Luce told Breaking Defense at the company’s Falcon Peak booth. “So our goal has just been getting the cost of our systems down as low as possible, and then putting it out there, testing it and seeing how low can we get this price point.”

Similar to others, Thalrix has its own C2 system, but like in the spirit of Falcon Peak — where Guillot said a top goal was vendors being able to connect different systems together — Luce said the company advises integrating the Sentinel with other companies’ software.

“We recommend any of the existing C2s, as opposed to throwing our own in the ring,” he said. “Because there are already so many options. No need to add another one.”

Authority Challenges

Beyond technical limitations that prevent facilities from halting drone incursions, policy plays a big role both in determining who can respond to drone flights and how. 

Some DoD installations like special operations and nuclear facilities are expressly permitted under US law to take measures to defend themselves against unmanned threats, but others are not. The issue is currently being sorted out on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers weigh a legislative proposal submitted by the Pentagon earlier this year [PDF] that would broaden the category of facilities that are permitted to defend against drones and enforce perimeter security, among other changes. (Thanks to a bipartisan amendment, the Senate’s version of the Pentagon’s annual defense policy bill that passed late Thursday includes changes sought by the department, though the provision will need to make it into a final version of the legislation and signed into law.)

Mayes said too that Pentagon officials are working to centralize and streamline relevant information on the topic, and that installation commanders have the ability to take out a drone that they deem as a threat to life or critical assets. “So there’s definitely engagement criteria that have to be met. We can’t just shoot anything down just because it’s over our installation,” he said. 

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Engaging drones further requires coordination with the Department of Transportation, chiefly through the Federal Aviation Administration. Heeding a call by Guillot, NORTHCOM was tapped last year to serve as a homeland DoD “synchronizer” for counter-drone authorities, meaning that the command leads all interagency coordination on the issue. 

“It gives us a lot of ability to go out and drive standardizing responses where necessary,” Guillot said of the synchronizer role.

Falcon Peak’s focus on low-kinetic intercepts appears to be due in part to the regulations required for intercepting drones. Wary of shooting into a civilian-trafficked sky, some officials have talked about using tools like lasers to defeat drones, though Mayes said that more learning is needed. 

“I think we’re moving forward, but it’s a very, very slow process,” Mayes said, pointing to potential collateral effects like a laser disrupting a satellite in low earth orbit. “I think there’s a pathway to get there, but where we’re at in that yet, I’m not really sure.” 

Through its new counter-drone leadership, NORTHCOM is also responsible for deploying the Anduril-supplied flyaway kit where necessary. Under a framework outlined by Guillot, if installations are having trouble repelling unmanned incursions, NORTHCOM can come to one’s aid by deploying the kit within 24 hours. The command aims to field up to three kits — one each on the East and West Coasts and one in Alaska — that could come with different features provided by other vendors. 

“I think 24 hours is fast. Obviously we’d like to be faster,” Guillot said.

Anduril’s Anvil drone effector, left, sits next to a drone it disabled during a demonstration at the US Northern Command Falcon Peak event on September 18, 2025. (Michael Marrow/Breaking Defense)

According to Mayes, the flyaway kit currently comes with about a half dozen Anvil interceptors, which can carry other means of defeat like spoofing a signal. (The Anvil that took down the target drone was also reused from a previous event, so some may be able to take out multiple targets depending on how they’re used.) Estimating the kit’s cost at up to $12 million depending on configuration, Mayes described it as a stopgap measure to fill a need that the military services are ultimately responsible for satisfying. 

“The systems aren’t cheap, so there is a budget aspect of that,” he said. 

The 24 hour window is needed to not only deploy the kit, but also to provide adequate time to coordinate its use with the FAA. 

Asked whether this approach was sufficient to stop a Spiderweb-type operation, where Ukrainian forces stunned the world by destroying Russian air assets deep behind front lines using armed drones launched from trucks, Guillot emphasized a surprise attack will ultimately fall to an installation to defend themselves first. 

“One thing that we’re doing is we’re working with the services and the combatant commands to try to replicate that and use some of our existing systems to see if they’re sufficient for the type of thing that we saw over there,” he said. “But not just to solve last month’s problem, but to think, how are they going to evolve and make sure that we stay ahead.”