CNAS Insights | America Isn’t Ready for a Drone War

This week, U.S. personnel near El Paso, Texas, tested a high-energy laser as part of their mission to shoot down cartel drones along the southern border. The resulting confusion between the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Pentagon triggered the longest airspace closure since 9/11, just the latest example of how unprepared America is for a drone war.

In August 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth created a new task force to rapidly field drone defenses, but recent events highlight the considerable work that remains.

This drone threat is not new. In 2016, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was the first to use quadcopters to drop bombs on U.S. forces in Mosul, Iraq, raising alarms about how this commercial technology was being weaponized. Since then, the threat has only metastasized as drones have proliferated—and with America’s adversaries building millions of drones annually. Enemies could use these drones in clandestine attacks against U.S. bases, like Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web, or launch them in large numbers to overwhelm U.S. defenses.

Drones have, in fact, been used in combat for decades—so why is the U.S. military so unprepared to meet this threat? After the Cold War, American forces became accustomed to overwhelming dominance of the air and over-indexed on lopsided fights in which they had a monopoly on long-range attacks. Thus, the U.S. Army largely divested its short-range air defenses, creating a significant vulnerability that is exacerbated by drones. The Pentagon’s latest defensive investments have been hindered by insufficient scale and urgency, leaving U.S. forces dangerously exposed.

The recent drone offensive against the United States in the Middle East foreshadows the future threat. Our analysis shows that between October 2023 and May 2025, hundreds of Iranian-made one-way attack drones were fired at U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria and at ships in the Red Sea. Unable to detect the inbound drones more than several miles away, U.S. soldiers had less than two minutes to respond with a patchwork of defenses. Nevertheless, they shot down 80 percent of the more than 100 drones fired at them. At sea, U.S. sailors similarly intercepted most of the cheap Houthi drones but often used multimillion-dollar missiles to do so.

Despite stopping most of the attacks, this combat exposed holes in U.S. defenses which would be fatal against a more capable adversary. After 18 months of continuous operations, the worn down fleet had several accidents that resulted in the loss of three Navy jet aircraft. Tragically, in January 2024 an inbound Shahed-101 drone crashed into a containerized housing unit on Tower 22, a small base on the border of Syria and Jordan, killing three U.S. soldiers and injuring 40 more.

The drone threat in the Middle East, while serious and deadly, is negligible when compared to the capabilities of China, whose People’s Liberation Army will soon have the largest and most advanced drone force in the world. China’s recent military parade prominently showcased many large drones, demonstrating how far its military has come in the last decade.

While current air defenses can manage a few of today’s drones, they would be quickly overwhelmed by autonomous drone swarms or large, complex raids that pair low-cost drones with advanced missiles, akin to the massive attacks that Russia routinely fires into Ukraine. The scale and sophistication of China’s drones will stress U.S. warplanes to the point of failure.

There is no easy answer to this problem, and no one technology offers a silver bullet solution. The Pentagon must prioritize resilience with multiple layers of defenses rather than reliance on any single system. This should include emerging technologies like high-power microwaves and AI-enabled sensing and command and control, but also old-school tools that can be fielded today, like antiaircraft guns and rockets.

The events in El Paso are a useful reminder: The drones will keep coming, and the United States is running out of time to stop them.

Stacie Pettyjohn is a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, where Molly Campbell is a research assistant. They are authors of the report Countering the Swarm: Protecting the Joint Force in the Drone Age.