Sharper: El Paso and the Drone Threat

This week, the airspace over El Paso was suddenly closed after what turned out to be the use of a counter-drone direct energy weapon. The resulting confusion captured headlines, but the event and the patchwork system of drone defense that it revealed demonstrated what CNAS researchers have repeatedly found—America is unprepared for the drone threat and time is running out to find a solution. In this edition of Sharper, CNAS experts analyze events in El Paso, the status of America’s drone defenses, and more.

Features

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

The drone threat is not new, with a decade of evidence of how drones have allowed even small terrorist groups to strike from the skies. The post-Cold War divestment of short-range air defenses by the U.S. Army has created a significant vulnerability in the fight against drones, and the Pentagon’s efforts so far have lacked the scale or urgency to properly counter this threat. As Stacie Pettyjohn and Molly Campbell write in the latest CNAS Insights, “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.”

Report | Countering the Swarm

Pettyjohn and Campbell’s analysis of events near El Paso built on their 2025 report, Countering the Swarm: Protecting the Joint Force in the Drone Age, a wide-ranging analysis of the first significant drone assault faced by the United States. U.S. forces were forced to adapt when novel threats exposed the vulnerabilities in untested air defense systems. Yet as the authors warn, what American forces faced in the Middle East pales in comparison to the possible drone threat posed by China. As the report argues, “the United States risks having its distributed warfighting strategies overwhelmed by massed Chinese drone attacks, and the United States could lose a war over Taiwan.”

Brussels Sprouts| NATO’s Counter-Drone Conundrum

In September of last year, Russian drones repeatedly violated NATO airspace. The incursions demonstrated that urgent action is needed to improve NATO’s insufficient counter-drone capabilities. On Brussels Sprouts, Stacie Pettyjohn and Michael Kofman joined hosts Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Jim Townsend to chart how NATO can develop adequate capabilities and analyze the novel threat posed as drones become increasingly central to the war in Ukraine.

Watch It Again | Drones and Deterrence: Building Taiwan’s Asymmetric Capabilities

In a potential conflict over Taiwan, drones would be a critical tool employed by both sides. A recent report from the Taiwanese Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology (DSET) focused on how the United States and Taiwan can work together to develop the aysmmetric capabilities necessary to deter Chinese aggression. In a panel discussion that included former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner, co-author of the DSET report Hong-Lun Tin, Director of the CNAS Defense Program Stacie Pettyjohn, and Research Assistant Molly Campbell, the group discussed the need to expand industrial base cooperation to scale up the production of drones, and how to defend against the drone threats that could be employed in an attack across the Taiwan Strait.

More CNAS Drone Research

In addition to its work on countering the novel drone threat, the CNAS Defense Program has examined the increasing role played by drones in modern combat in a series of reports.

Find them here:

In the News

Insights from Stacie Pettyjohn, Molly Campbell, and Samuel Bendett

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