PHOENIX — Officials at the Departments of Homeland Security and War are gravely concerned about the security of the nation’s skies along the land border and have admitted that the airspace is incredibly easy to penetrate from Canada and Mexico.
Recent and continuing major improvements in infrastructure at the U.S.-Mexico border have already begun to push terrorist organizations and cartels into the air to get around ground infrastructure, such as walls, river barriers, and sensors, as they smuggle money and guns into Mexico and drugs into the United States, according to government officials leading efforts to counter unfriendly drones.
“What happens when you shrink the battle space? They go up … or they go down,” said Anthony Crane, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s acting executive director for countering unmanned aircraft systems within the defense capability group, during a discussion at the Border Security Expo in Arizona this week. “As we fundamentally look at the threats as they approach, that’s where we’re focused on, mainly above ground, because that is the easier access. It takes a long time to build a tunnel. It does not take a long time to go to Walmart, buy a drone, to fly it.”
Crane said cartels have advanced quickly in recent years, deploying fiber optics and GPS-enabled drones, as well as tweaking store-bought drones to outsmart detection systems or carry heavier payloads.
“Stuff overseas, well, it’s now at our homeland,” Crane said. “We are seeing things that do scare me, that do keep me up at night, as it relates to the counter-UAS mission.”
Cartels use drones for everything from smuggling to spying
Steven Willoughby, acting director of the C-UAS program at DHS, which works to detect and take down rogue or enemy drones, explained that there is virtually no limit to the nefarious ways that drones can be used at the nation’s border, particularly by cartels and terrorist organizations.
“You can use drones for whatever you dream up in your imagination, right? You can carry a payload. You can do surveillance, counter-surveillance. You can have it fly and deliver, deliver munitions. You can carry narcotics, firearms. I mean, the ability to repurpose a drone to carry out some sort of illicit activity is boundless,” Willoughby said, adding that drones are also used to spy on federal law enforcement on patrol and scout out areas on the border that may be easier to move people or goods across, undetected.
The southern border is top of mind given that cartels made billions of dollars annually pushing people and drugs into the U.S., but the U.S.-Canada border is two and a half times as long as the southern border, making it more vulnerable.
Brigadier General Matt Ross, director of the Joint Interagency Task Force 401 DOW, described a deeply concerning situation from a national security perspective of how drones from outside the country can easily penetrate U.S. airspace, unbeknownst to even homeland and defense officials.
“We fight wars in the two dimension until the airplane came around, and then we started realizing the Air Force can handle it all,” Ross said. “What the threat is now doing has tremendous access to the third dimension. It extends their lines of operation and lines of logistics beyond anything you can think of right now, because it’s just battery power, which is extensive. And then it deepens it because it adds the third dimension. It allows you to fly at altitudes, different altitudes and different depth, as far as inside the space at which you want to control.”
U.S. airspace is “not as controlled as everyone thinks,” according to Ross.
“You start to get lower altitudes, we say between 100 feet and about 1,000 feet … inside the United States, it’s pretty much unfettered access, unless you’re around an airport,” Ross said.
Border Patrol loads up on drones
In recent years, Congress has allowed Border Patrol and other federal agencies to use drones and to work on detecting non-U.S. drones. The trouble for federal law enforcement, such as Border Patrol, who work on land between vehicle crossing points, is managing the feeds and monitors they have right now along the border. Crane said Border Patrol is buying drones in bulk to “flood the border” with the machines.
“If you go to a Border Patrol station right now, to an [CBP Office of Field Operations] port of entry, to their tactical operations center. They’re looking at 12 different screens at any given time,” Crane said, noting ground sensors that alert agents to foot traffic along the border, air sensors and those for non-CBP drones, radio communications and phone calls.
Crane said the new DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, saw and learned about the threats posed by enemy drones during a recent trip to the border, and Mullin also has knowledge of the problem from private briefings as a former senator.
Willoughby wants to “normalize” unmanned aerial systems as tools accessible to all personnel across CBP, the Coast Guard, the Federal Protective Service, and other DHS agencies.
“Your small UAS, which I mean, I’d love nothing more than to see, you know, alongside the shotgun in a truck is a drone capacity for every [Border Patrol] agent that’s out there,” Willoughby said. “You want to be able to have that persistent surveillance capability at higher altitudes, to provide that overwatch, to conduct surveillance, to monitor traffic … protect the personnel.”
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Aside from making small drones available to federal agents, identifying rogue drones in the sky is a huge challenge. Federal police use a wide variety of systems that display sightings and may only have 20 to 30 seconds from seeing a drone on a screen to decide how to respond.
Crane, Willoughby, and Ross implored the more than 100 attendees at their discussion to put forward technology that can simplify this process.