Responding to President Trump’s recent executive orders on drones

President Donald Trump’s June 6, 2025 Executive Order (EO) “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” calls for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) or drones to “enhance United States productivity, create high-skilled jobs, and are reshaping the future of aviation.” Its ambitions include “transforming industries from logistics and infrastructure inspection to precision agriculture, emergency response, and public safety.”

The EO provides a comprehensive challenge to government and industry to become the global leader in UAS technologies. Its three pillars are integrating UAS into the national airspace system through risk-based rulemaking, domestic commercialization of UAS at scale, and strengthening the domestic drone industrial base. The EO calls for the rapid maturing of technologies such as beyond visual line of sight or BVLOS operations, increasingly autonomous UAS operations, electric vertical takeoff and landing pilot program, and delivering low-cost, high performing drones to the nation’s warfighters. The EO also highlights the need to address “the growing threats from criminal, terrorist, and foreign misuse of drones inside U.S. airspace,” often called the dual use challenge.

Given rapid advances and increasing ubiquity of drone technology, addressing the growing UAS threats in the homeland could prove to be a significant challenge. It requires balancing the EOs goal of the proliferation of technology that is inherently dual use with the need to identify UAS technologies operating in U.S. airspace and implement defenses and countermeasures to protect the U.S. and its critical infrastructure, and individuals from actors looking to take advantage of the dual use nature of drone technology.

Recent events have highlighted the growing concerns associated with proliferation of UAS technologies. A 2024 U.S. Government Accountability Offices report identified the major concerns for the 3 million drones operating in U.S. airspace as operations near airports and challenges with identifying the drones in flight. Yet in late 2024, alleged “drone sightings” over several East Coast states and sensitive sites caused great consternation—the flights had been occurring over a period of months with little information provided other than assurances from federal government and state leaders that there was no threat to the public and that investigations into the drone sightings were continuing. If anything, the reassurances caused greater public unease, with some calling for the military to shoot down the unidentified systems.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict demonstrates how UAS systems have matured in real time and could become threatening to the U.S. homeland. They have been used for a variety of missions including surveillance, electronic warfare, and combat operations. Attacks against frontline troops, as well as strategic targets such as Ukraine’s energy and nuclear facilities and Russia’s bomber fleet in Ukrainian Operation Spider’s Web have demonstrated new systems, tactics and capabilities that continue to evolve.

Ukraine’s well-planned Operation Spider’s Web demonstrates how illicit actors could adapt the technology to maximize the effectiveness of an operation while overcoming inherent limitations such as range, payload, and survivability. Overland smuggling of the drones to within the vicinity of the targets reduced the flight time to less than a minute. A related approach involving the use of carrier drones to transport smaller drones, provides another approach that is currently being fielded. Relying on first person view (FPV) fiber optic control eliminated the potential for frequency jamming. Both increased the survivability of the armed drones and increased the likelihood of a successful attack.

Ukraine’s UAS development also provides a roadmap for others to follow in establishing similar programs. The capacity of Ukraine’s UAS development demonstrates a “profound transformation” since 2014 and the first Russia invasion. This capacity continues today with UAS indigenous production experiencing an exponential growth with 3,000-5,000 units in 2022, 300,000 units in 2023 and as many as 4 million units in 2024.

The world is witnessing the evolution of a drone war that goes beyond the Russia-Ukraine war. The Houthis have used drones to shut down shipping in the Red Sea. Israel and Iran have engaged in drone warfare to target a range of military targets and infrastructure. UAS operations have evolved from larger platforms to harder to interdict smaller systems. The transitioning of technical control from radio-electronic controllers with a single operator controlling a drone (or multiple drones) to FPV radio-electronic or fiber optic control make them harder to interdict. The shift to greater autonomy “increases mission efficiency and expands operational capabilities in complex combat scenarios.” The future will be “intelligent drone swarms that can communicate among individual drones and respond to external stimuli.”

The challenge for federal, state, and local governments is that the range of homeland security scenarios is vast, but the cost of preparedness, mitigation and response measures are likely to be very costly.

Consider just a small subset of possible homeland security scenarios. Critical infrastructure could provide attractive targets to achieve a range of outcomes: destruction, disruption, electronic intrusion, and theft of data. Large gatherings could be targeted with drone swarms to cause mass casualty events. FPV drones could be used as tools for assassination of high value targets. Drone swarms could be used along the southern border for a variety of illicit purposes including smuggling of contraband across borders and surveillance of law enforcement to avoid detection for those seeking to cross illegally. A micro-drone with destructive or eavesdropping electronic systems could be used to tailgate into a sensitive facility.

Given this range of potential scenarios, government leaders at every level and policy experts should consider a series of key questions. How should resources be allocated for developing “optimum” homeland preparedness, mitigations, and response capabilities? Do the necessary policy and legal frameworks currently exist? And is the U.S. currently organized for the mission at hand?

Daniel M. Gerstein is a senior policy researcher at RAND and professor of policy analysis at Pardee RAND Graduate School. He was the former acting under secretary and deputy undersecretary for the DHS Science and Technology Directorate.