An Army-led task force is building an online marketplace where commanders of military installations, officials of agencies such as the FBI and Homeland Security Department, and more can purchase tested and vetted components to build systems for countering small-unmanned aerial systems.
Industry offers hundreds of sensors, weapons and other pieces of counter-UAS gear, but there’s no central ordering hub, Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, who commands Joint Interagency Task Force 401, told reporters Friday, so the marketplace will allow agencies to streamline purchasing and build systems that make the most sense for their missions.
“We’re trying to make sure that across the department, we have an integrated system that allows [vendors] to introduce their capability, so that we can test and evaluate it and provide them feedback, and then get them focused on the most recent or current problems for the department,” Ross said.
A launch date for the marketplace is still to be determined, but the task force is planning a counter-UAS summit for later this month, bringing together subject-matter experts to discuss the policy, science and technology, operations, and intelligence collection of a national counter-UAS effort.
In addition to the marketplace, the two-month-old JIATF 401 will be testing new components and creating policy and guidelines for selecting and deploying systems domestically, including at military installations and along the southern border.
The Defense Department has been primarily focused on defending troops abroad, where small drone attacks have sometimes been an everyday occurence. But the systems that work well at remote bases in Iraq and Syria, where troops are prepared to quickly don protection and take cover during an attack, don’t translate stateside.
“Today, if we were to field a counter-UAS solution around some critical infrastructure in the U.S., we would likely not include an explosive warhead,” Ross said.
An electronic jammer would be more appropriate. Or, he added, if it’s appropriate to fire an actual round at the drone, it should be something that doesn’t explode, so the damage is limited.
The task force is also taking a look at different kinds of UAS threats. The U.S. has “robust capability” for shooting down Group 3 UAS, Ross said, larger drones with medium ranges that might drop missiles or gather intelligence.
But the threat from smaller drones—Groups 1 and 2, under 20 pounds and between 21 and 55 pounds — is more consistent stateside, so the department wants to put more time into creating strategy to counter them, he said.
The task force doesn’t yet have a budget, but Ross said he expects it to draw funds from a mix of operations and maintenance; research, development, test and evaluation; and procurement pools.
“I only have one measure of effectiveness, and that’s delivering state-of-the-art counter-UAS capability to the war fighter, both at home and abroad,” he said. “And so as we look at those different colors of money, especially in the near-term, I think procurement is going to be really important for us.”
But JIATF 401 will also have a hand in testing and evaluating systems before they’re added to the marketplace, alongside the regular counter-UAS exercises that the services may be doing.
“If a vendor comes and performs this month in November 2025, and a similar capability is evaluated in March of ’26 at a different exercise or demonstration, we should be able to do a relative comparison between those two evaluations,” Ross said. “Today, we can’t do that because we do not always measure the same performance attributes, and so we are taking that on across the department to make sure that we’ve got a more synchronized model.”
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