The US military is using the southern border as a testing ground for counter-drone technology as cartel surveillance flights increasingly threaten troops and federal law enforcement officials operating there, senior leaders said this week.
“We have a lot of fixed and movable counter-UAS capabilities, but not really anything that would follow a patrolling soldier,” Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of US Northern Command, said during a panel discussion at the annual SOF Week conference in Tampa, Florida.
As the American military tries to absorb drone lessons learned from Ukraine and the Middle East, the US border with Mexico presents a slightly different challenge, he said. “The cartels are flying over our soldiers and Marines all the time.”
His comments come amid growing Pentagon concern that the same inexpensive drone technologies that have transformed warfare in Ukraine are now proliferating among criminal organizations closer to home.
While US forces possess tools to counter those drones, solutions that can reliably combat multiple drones at once or shield troops on the move do not yet exist, a significant source of anxiety for the military.
Six US service members were killed in Kuwait in March by an Iranian drone strike, and three soldiers were killed in 2024 in Jordan by a drone launched by an Iran-backed militia. An investigation obtained by Business Insider into the attack indicated that the military was poorly prepared to defend against drones.
To combat the growing threat, the armed forces need both training and equipment.
“If you’re willing to bring it down to the southern border, we’ll put it to use. We’ll tell you if it works,” Guillot said, describing the US southern border as “a literal and a figurative sandbox” for testing emerging counter-drone systems to see if they can defeat them in practice.
“If it does, we’ll probably buy it. If it doesn’t, we’ll tell you exactly what you need to work on.” According to Guillot, the military now has “hundreds of systems” operating along the border as officials try to identify the technologies capable of protecting troops from UAV threats.
The US has sent thousands of troops to the southern border, where forces are conducting both mounted and dismounted patrols and encountering cartel drones in the process. That makes the border both an operational challenge and a live test environment for counter-drone tools that might later be needed in combat.
The “democratization of technology” has dramatically lowered the barrier for acquiring lethal drone capabilities, Adm. Bradley Cooper, who leads US Special Operations Command, said during the panel.
Most of the US military’s defenses were designed to tackle the most “exquisite threats,” a term for high-end, costly weapons such as advanced missiles and aircraft, the admiral said. Drones, on the other hand, are cheap, commonly available, and harder to contain.
“The barrier to be able to have a lethal, precise weapon to aim and orient at our maneuvering forces is lower to the point where anyone with an Alibaba or an Amazon account can piece those things together,” Cooper said. “It requires us to think through that spectrum of weapons we have to defend against from the exquisite to the more pedestrian.”
