One process for five departments
Yesterday the Departments of Defense, Transportation, Homeland Security, Energy, and Justice signed a memorandum of understanding that sets out a more unified federal process for testing and deploying counter-drone technology inside the United States. The White House Task Force to Restore American Airspace Sovereignty led it. Under the agreement the FAA reviews proposed systems and runs safety risk assessments, and it can add its own protective measures, including airspace restrictions. The agencies will work with the FAA and the FCC as they develop and integrate systems. The text has not been published.
The stated aim is to make sure these technologies do not adversely affect aircraft operations or navigation equipment. That concern is practical. Jamming a drone can also disrupt the radar, communications, and GPS of an airliner passing overhead. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said border deployments show that counter-drone defenses, including high-energy lasers, can be deployed rapidly and safely alongside civilian aviation.
Speed is arriving from three directions
The memorandum is the third move in six weeks. A September 28 directive told approval authorities to treat delay as operational risk, made Joint Interagency Task Force 401 the synchronization point and the repository for hazard assessments and approved mitigations, and ordered a single process to cut authority-to-operate timelines from months to days or weeks. On November 4 the Pentagon reported more than 25,000 drone and counter-drone systems delivered to Central Command this year, over 24,000 of them counter-drone systems, for roughly $782 million.
The command-and-control decision came earlier. The task force's director said last December that every new capability "has got to plug in immediately to a common C2 framework." In March the task force reached an enterprise agreement to deploy Anduril's Lattice as that common platform across participating organizations, under a contract vehicle worth up to $20 billion. A shared picture across services and agencies is the right foundation.
Faster approvals raise the value of the record
More systems, approved faster, operated by more organizations near civil airspace means more engagements that someone outside the unit will review. DroneXL's account of the agreement recalls why. On February 10 a counter-drone laser was fired near Fort Bliss at what turned out to be party balloons, and the FAA closed El Paso's airspace for hours. The FAA later found the lasers posed no increased risk to fliers. Since July 1, a local agency that takes down a drone has to notify air traffic control within five minutes of starting.
Every one of those reviews asks the same questions. What did the sensors report, and which sensor reported it? How was the track classified, and how confident was the classification? Was there crewed traffic nearby? Who authorized the response, and when was the notification sent? A site that can answer in minutes from its own record keeps its authority to act. A site that has to reconstruct the night from three vendor consoles and a radio log invites the next airspace restriction.
What the site node has to do
EdgeLance treats each sensor as a source of typed observations: a radar return, an RF hit, a camera detection, an ADS-B report. Its multi-domain tracker fuses them into one set of tracks, refuses reports it cannot verify, and keeps a disputed identity visible to the operator. Crewed aircraft sit on the same picture as the drones, which is the first thing an aviation safety review will ask about. Every track, classification, decision, and engagement is written to the mission record with its time and source.
The node runs at the site, on the site's own hardware. If the link to the regional operations center or the common command-and-control system drops, the gate and the flight line keep their picture and their delegated authority, and the record keeps being written. When the link returns, EdgeLance is designed to exchange tracks via open standards such as Cursor on Target, so the enterprise system receives what happened during the outage with the original timestamps. The site node complements the common platform. The enterprise layer holds the shared picture across agencies. The site layer keeps one installation working through a bad night and hands back a clean, attributable account of it.
Ask for the record first
Installation commanders now have faster approvals, more equipment on the way, and a federal process that puts aviation safety review in the loop. The useful question to put to any counter-drone system, sensor, or software layer is what it writes down, where, and whether that survives a link outage. The systems that answer well will keep their approvals.
The whitepaper Defending the Installation covers the layered design in detail, and an earlier post explains why bases need one picture as sensors multiply. The counter-UAS and base defense mission page shows how it runs at one site and across several. See the platform and the capabilities for the rest.