October 13, 2025 • 46 mins
Text the ATB Team! We'd love to hear from you!
In this episode of the At the Boundary podcast, GNSI’s Senior Director, Jim Cardoso, led a panel discussion on the JSS article, “Detecting Drone Threats at Stadiums and Public Venues: Overview, Operational Considerations, and Technical Implementation.” Joining him were the article’s authors: Nathan Jones, associate professor of security studies in the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University; John Sullivan, a retired career police officer and an instructor in the Safe Communities Institute at the University of Southern California; and George Javis Jr., a specialist in geospatial information systems and geospatial intelligence.
The discussion focused on the use of drones as a national security threat, both present and future, to public stadiums and other large venues. The authors detailed the range of drone technologies and its expanding development, and how the United States legal system and law enforcement are not currently prepared to regulate drone usage in the way that is necessary for public safety.
Current and future concerns about the potential for drones to be used maliciously were also explored. The authors cited the 2021 Astroworld tragedy as a case study to examine how similar situations occur under a drone-based terrorist attack.
Main points discussed:
- Emerging drone threats to public events and large venues.
- Legal gaps in drone regulation and how law enforcement agencies and security professionals should respond.
- Current and emerging concerns tied to the evolving capabilities and variety of drone swarm technology and the expanding array of unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
Links from the episode:
• Register for the Florida Security Forum: Port and Maritime Security
At the Boundary from the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, features global and national security issues we’ve found to be insightful, intriguing, fascinating, maybe controversial, but overall just worth talking about.
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The mission of GNSI is to provide actionable solutions to 21st-century security challenges for decision-makers at the local, state, national and global levels. We hope you enjoy At the Boundary.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jim Cardoso (00:00):
Jim, hello everyone. Welcome to this week's
(00:14):
episode of at the boundary, thepodcast from the global and
national security Institute atthe University of South Florida.
I'm Jim Cardoso, Senior Directorfor genocide, and your host for
at the boundary. Many of you maybe familiar with. GNSI is
academic journal, The Journal ofstrategic security, or JSs. We
(00:36):
publish quarterly in partnershipwith the University of South
Florida Library as an openaccess journal with global
impact, we acquired JSs inJanuary 2024 and with it, over
15 years of national securityanalysis excellence since last
year, JSs has risen to the top10% of all military journals
worldwide. According to GoogleScholar, we're proud of the
(01:00):
penetrating explorations andinhabit its pages. And for
today's episode, we're bringingall three co authors of an
article in our most recent issueentitled detecting drone threats
at stadiums and public venues.
Quick introduction to ourauthors. Dr Nathan P Jones is an
associate professor of securitystudies in the College of
Criminal Justice at Sam HoustonState University. He is also a
(01:20):
Senior Fellow with small worldjournal and a non resident
scholar for the drug policy inUS Mexico center within Rice
University's Baker Institute. DrJohn P Sullivan is a retired
career police officer withdecades of experience with the
Los Angeles Sheriff'sDepartment, serving in multiple
leadership roles and overseeingthe kinds of situations this
(01:41):
article addresses. He's also aninstructor in the safe
communities Institute at theUniversity of Southern
California, a fellow at smallworlds journal and contributing
editor at Homeland Securitytoday. George W Davis, Jr is a
specialist in geospatialinformation systems and
geospatial intelligence. He hasworked extensively with the
(02:02):
Department of Homeland Security,New York Police Department, FBI,
and the Los Angeles Sheriff'sDepartment, among many others.
Nathan John George, welcome tothe program. So this podcast is
a more like a virtual panel thanan interview, so therefore I
have some specific questions forspecific people, but I really
look forward to the cross talkthat'll happen from whoever has
(02:24):
a good discussion point to bringup. But I'll start with Nathan.
The article spends some timeframing the issue of drones as a
threat to public stadia. Why wasthis framing necessary? And what
key points would you want thereader to draw out?
Unknown (02:40):
Oh, yeah, so that's a great question. I think this
framing is necessary to thinkabout, well, who are the
potential adversaries? Forexample, we're going to be
dealing with threats from drugcartels, lone wolf potential
actors and potential malevolentstate adversary actors So kind
(03:02):
of going through, and that'swhat part of what the framing
does is goes through what kindsof issues and what kinds of
threats may be present atstadiums. And one of the things
that we talk about is theunwittingly malign actor. There
are individuals who are going tobe flying drones over the I
(03:25):
didn't know I couldn't do thatguy, but they're actually
stopping an emergency lifeflight, flight, a helicopter
flight from landing in anemergency situation because
they're blocking the airspace.
And then how do we deal withthose things? And what are some
of the counter drone measuresthat are available, and things
along those lines. And then thatdovetails into the discussion of
the operational considerations,where John is the one who's
(03:48):
really the the man on that line.
Jim Cardoso (03:55):
And definitely we will get them. One other follow
up question, you used the AstraWorld Festival event in November
of 2021 in which eight peopledied during an outside concert
by rap artist Travis Scott. Now,drones had no role in causing
those deaths, so why did thatstill serve as a good framing
(04:15):
mechanism?
Unknown (04:16):
Okay, so this is an example of the kind. It's a
notional case study. IE, this isthe kind of situation where
drones could potentially play arole. And so by going through
this kind of notional case andlooking at the type of data, you
get a sense of the type of datathat drone detection companies
will bring in. And we werefortunate through the Institute
(04:39):
for Homeland Security, samepiece of State University which
provided the funding for thisresearch, they built a
relationship with 911 securityat the time it's now gone
through a transition to air siteand their Air Guard system, they
were not detecting drones overthe stadium, specific.
(05:00):
Specifically, they were atcritical infrastructure all
around the stadium. And so whatthey were able to do is looking
at their existing data frommultiple different sources, give
us a we asked them for kind of ageo fenced area around the
stadium where it actuallyoccurred, and they were able to
give us that data set. And soit's kind of akin, as John P
(05:20):
Sullivan pointed out, it's kindof akin to being able to do an
investigation and get the CCTVfootage from all the surrounding
businesses, and that could solveyour homicide investigation.
It's kind of like that in thesense that you've got the CCTV
footage is not necessarily therelooking at that particular
(05:41):
store, but it's in all thesurrounding areas, and so you
can create essentially a pictureof what was going on based on
that data that was there. And sothat's what we were able to do
with that. What we did find wasthat there were drones in the
area, and as the situationescalated, more drones started
(06:02):
showing up. And in theaftermath, more drones started
showing up. And that could be afunction of, say, personal
injury lawyers who want to getinformation for potential future
lawsuits, they might be hiringdrones, professional drone
pilots, to get footage, to get asense of what's going on there.
(06:23):
So those are the kinds of issuesthat come up, and that's one of
the primary data sources that weused.
Jim Cardoso (06:30):
Appreciate that.
So, John, you've been referencedtwice, so let's, let's turn to
you. So we've seen a lot of veryrecent news highlighting current
drone threat. You know, beyondopen use, the uses in open
conflict. In Ukraine, recentnews of the Russian drone
incursion to Poland, and thenjust this morning, reading about
the Munich Airport getting shutdown last night, uh, for seven
hours due to wave of dronesightings. So how does your
analysis of drone threats tostadia and public venues align
(06:52):
with this, this drone continuumyou've talked about?
Unknown (06:58):
Well, I think it's right dead in the center. Let me
tell you why. One of the reasonswe wrote this paper is we saw
that drone threats were growingin a number of the sectors, and
I'll talk about those in asecond. But along with the fact
that the threat is growing, theawareness that that threat is
(07:19):
there is growing. Now, I willpoint out that when we talk
about drones here, we're talkingabout primarily small unmanned
aerial systems. And these arenot the only drones that exist.
We also have unmanned oruncrewed maritime systems on the
surface of the subsurface. We'realso unmanned ground vehicles
(07:41):
that could come to play. Andthere are some amphibious
various you can buy off theshelf, a Chinese device that
swims underwater, can swim onthe surface, can walk on the
ground and fly in the air, and,oh yes, you could probably
weaponize it. So USS or unmannedsystems of all types are
growing. We see them start togrow in most people's mind in
(08:04):
the Ukrainian conflict and thebattle space in the Ukraine and
Ukraine has been punctuated bydrones used by both parties and
evolutions of drone technology.
You know, first persons viewdrones are coming to play. You
have fiber optic cable dronescoming. You have drones that
(08:25):
have their own internal guidancesystems, that don't rely upon
GPS and use AI to synchronizetheir interactivity. We see the
very early stages of swarmsoccurring there. And swarms are,
I think, an emerging threatbeyond the present, emerging
threat of drones, or what we'retalking about weaponized aerial
(08:47):
drones. Now, my first time Ieven encountered weaponized
aerial drone is nearly 20 yearsago. I hate to say it's that
long ago, working in a LosAngeles County Emergency
Operations Center. I'm thetactical planning Lieutenant for
LA County. I'm handling mutualaid for the Sheriff of LA
County, as well as the Sheriffof Orange County. And we hear a
(09:09):
report that there's a fire onthe border between LA and Orange
County. And some I don't knowwhat the right term to use is,
some individual decides who'sgoing to fly a drone and
interferes with the firefightingin that operation? Obviously,
there have been dozens ofincidents past that where drones
have interfered with rescueoperations. We'll talk about
(09:33):
that in this specific casestudy, but in others, you know.
So we saw that, and the answerto that is what the first thing
people come to mind is, I'll getmy old athaka shotgun for a
rifle slogan, or shoot thatthing down. Now there's
problematic in a lot of ways.
One is it's not lawful in theUnited States. There perhaps are
(09:58):
some exceptions. I say perhaps,because that's a really
contested area of the law. Buteven if there is the the
exception that over over comesthat statutory barrier, what
goes up must come down, right?
And there's a background, so Ishoot at it and I miss, and I'm
going to crowd an area, same ata stadium, right? What's in
stadiums? Well, teams, fields,you know, people, people. I was
(10:23):
gonna say, hopefully, good,good, good, hot dogs on people.
So you need to be very careful.
So the that that led us to startsaying, hey, what comes from
that? Now, I was flying drones,small us for counterterrorism
purposes in the 90s, and largerdrones into early 2000s these
(10:48):
smaller UAS, smaller unmannedaerial systems, are now really
ubiquitous, and they'reinexpensive and they are, you
know, obviously the DJI drone,which we'll see, was The biggest
drone here, is used a lot.
Another beyond the Ukraineexample, a lot of people think
of that and say, well, that'sgoing to cause things to occur
here. That's actually not true.
(11:09):
Criminal armed groups in Mexico,the cartel, who is going to have
Sina Hua cartel and others, havebeen using drones for a couple
decades now, and they startusing them, initially for
smuggling across the border.
They use them for intelligence,surveillance and reconnaissance,
then they start to weaponizetheir drones. And I've actually
(11:30):
published, together with DrRobert Bunker, a book called
criminal drone evolution, and welook at that entire self
weaponization process that thecartels have gone through, and
that's continuing to this day,and as a continuing to this day,
not only in Mexico, but in Peruand in Ecuador and gangs of
Brazil are using drones. Therewas one assassination attempt on
(11:53):
President Maduro Venezuelaseveral years ago, which, in my
mind, alarm bells go off. Sonothing has happened here with
these violent, non state actors,criminal armed groups or
terrorists. In the UnitedStates, there have been lots of
drone attacks in the MiddleEast, you know, in Yemen and you
know in that, you know theater,and obviously Ukraine. And now
(12:16):
you mentioned, we're starting tosee stuff occur in Europe
against Denmark, Germany, Polandhas drone incursions. Can be a
real challenge. I mean, NATO'slike, activated article, you
know, four, which means they'rebeing, like, super aware. And
next step is Article Five getshot, right? And what that means
to Europe and the world isbeyond the scope of this
(12:39):
discussion, but it shows howprofound these issues can be.
Now, when you talk about thisthreat proliferation, drones are
a lot of the drones flown inUkraine conflict are commercial
off the shelf. The drones usedby Mexican cartels and Brazilian
GNSI are commercial off theshelf, adapted. So there's this
threat proliferation. Now wedon't unmanned ground vehicles
(13:03):
are using in armed combat, youknow, and particularly state
state on state combat. But youknow, I wasn't Dublin a few
weeks ago, and I'm watching thislittle robot running around. It
was delivering Brazilian food,right? Well, if you could throw
a little robot around to deliverBrazilian food, you could
probably pack it with a bomb.
(13:23):
I'm not saying it's desirable,but that's a possibility. And
when we talk about drones,people get their single threat
and in complex areas, I'd sayyou need to be concerned with
multiple types of drones, ordrones we were talking offline
earlier, swarms. How do theycome together? And that really
demands a separate discussion,but we have all these issues
(13:43):
coming together. So threatproliferation is growing, and
it's growing unevenly and butthe awareness is there. We will.
I think we're right at the pointwith the evolution of drones in
the civil space, and now inhistorical analogy, going back
to the 19th century, after Drnoble creates dynamite and the
(14:04):
attic, the terrorists of theday, whom they called
anarchists, were starting tothrow bombs. And think socco and
vazetti in the US and otherthings like that. We're at that
point. We're not at the pointwhere, like, explosive terrorism
is like the top of the hitparade. We're not at the point
where that's there, but thiscould be there because it's the
blend. It's making terrorismthree dimensional. Yeah, right,
(14:30):
and that's why criminals usethem, because you see the
Mexican cartels engaging othercartels in combined arms fashion
with, you know, their ownartisanal armored vehicles.
They're using maneuver. Theyhave the drone above for cover.
You see bank robberies like thatin Brazil. So attack like that
would be very, very complicated.
High profile public gatheringsare always at a premium for
(14:54):
terrorists because they're whatyou call soft targets, and they
bring the. People together andsee terrorism that just blows up
buildings. People forget that ina minute, terrorism, as my
colleague Brian Jenkins hadmentioned, terrorism is theater
in oneaspect. Yeah, tension. You need
(15:15):
to be able to see it. Peoplehave to have a visceral
response. That's one of thereasons, I think, we don't see a
lot of biological terrorism, andwhy people prefer explosions,
because it's visceral.
Biological terrorism is slow.
It's insidious. Think of how thecovid epidemic played out. Half
the world didn't believe it wasreal. They still don't want to
believe it's real. Certainlywas.
Jim Cardoso (15:35):
Yeah, you don't get the psychological impact. You
know,
Unknown (15:41):
that's a component, and drones bring that to you. They
also bring you all out of thoseoperational advantages that you
would like on both sides ofconflict. But the good news is,
it's not all bad. There's a lotof good, and we can talk about
drones for good later, but highprofile public gatherings now,
we know sports venues have beenattacked. The first sports venue
being attacked that is reallypoignant in my mind, is the 1972
(16:04):
Olympics, right? And from thatwe see the modern understanding
of terrorism in a lot of ways.
We see the early stages ofjihadi terrorism. And yes, by
the way, jihadists are usingdrones in the Middle East, we
see the development of counterterrorism forces like the GNSI
Nine that developed, and thenyou know, which later on sees
(16:25):
instantiation throughout theworld, like, you know, FBI
hostage rescue team and otherplaces. So you start to see
terrorism change when sportsvenues are attacked. We haven't
seen a drone attack. Thank godto this point, against a stadium
or against, you know, the youknow, against stadia in general.
(16:48):
But we've seen like terroristsagainst against stadia, yeah,
but stab the France, they had amultiple simultaneous, you know,
suicide attack. Luckily, theFrench police and military were
very proficient at counterterrorism. Were able to
minimize, you know, the impactof that attack, but certainly
(17:11):
high profile public gatheringsbecome important for us. We have
a couple really big ones comingin the United States, you have
the FIFA, FIFA World Cup comingup, which is the largest
sporting event in the planet.
And you know that's going to beinvolving the US, Mexico and in
(17:32):
the United and Canada, yeah. Andyou have to have multilateral
intelligence sharing tounderstand how that goes. And we
know how to do that, because the1994 finals for the World Cup.
Were in LA. I was on the intelteam for that, for that
operation, and we, we reachedout, you know, to all the
football violence of cops inEurope, at least, to understand
(17:55):
who was calling, how they came.
And we coordinated rather well.
And there are drone specialresponse capabilities in the US.
There are task forces thatexist. There's the ability to
designate it as a nationalspecial security event. But that
tells me we need to be concernedabout stadia and other public
venues. And I think Nate DrJones laid out, importantly, why
(18:20):
we did this, not that the astralworld attack was a drone or not
that asteroid event was a droneattack. It was an event that we
could use as a proxy, since thishasn't happened yet, and it's
better to figure out how to dealwith it before it happens than
to wait for it to happen. And,you know, become overcome by
(18:41):
events and have tragicconsequences. So we're able to
take good data and say, how dowe detect this? How far can we
see this coming when we detectit, what do we see? You know,
how fast we have it. Are thereways to mitigate and we can talk
about that a bit later. Butstadia, sports events important,
and that becomes important tothe stadium itself, to the teams
(19:04):
playing there, because they haveto have security for themselves.
And to the leagues, because theleagues have to protect people.
They often protect not only thepeople there, but they have to
protect the brand of eachindividual player, you know, the
of the sport itself. And thefinal thing I'll talk about,
we'll probably come back to thislater, is, what does this all
mean? Why is a threat? How isthe threat amplified? Why? How
(19:29):
do you look at that as a risk?
There's a bunch of legal andoperational issues that we don't
understand how to deal with yet,what I call the legal
operational lacuna, and rightnow, there is the existing drone
legislation in the US expired.
It had been operating undercontinuing resolution for a
(19:51):
number of years, and Congresshadn't been able to get together
for whatever reason. For manyreasons, there's a great
political divide and a lot. Ofcases on these types of issues,
and they were not able to reachresolution. Well, just the other
day when we have the governmentshutdown, well, what's that due
to continuing resolution? Thereain't one right now, really,
(20:15):
really murky. What is the legalfoundation for dealing with
drones in the perfect case,there's only four government
agencies that have a legitimaterole in counter drone stuff,
Department of Justice,Department of Energy, because,
obviously they own the nationalnuclear infrastructure to
include weapon systems.
Department of the defense,because, of course, they have,
(20:37):
you know, a defensive capabilityand Department of Homeland
Jim Cardoso (20:42):
Security. Let me, let me real quick interrupt. And
I do, I do want to talk aboutthose authorities, because that
is a big deal. But I want to goahead and hear from here. I got
a question for George, becauseI'm curious about this part, as
we you know, towards the end ofthe article, a key aspect of
counter drone activity is tocapture and map the activity. It
enables an informed, coordinatedresponse, you know, and look and
(21:05):
in this area, it's I stronglyemphasize to our listeners,
download the article, go onthere, look at the maps, look at
the figures that are on there,and that'll really enable you to
understand this. But George, canyou give our listeners a bit of
an overview, maybe a bit of ateaser trailer to inform their
research.
Unknown (21:25):
Okay, so just so happens at November 5 is the
four year anniversary. Theactual event that happened, 10
people passed away, multiplepeople were injured. One of the
takeaways that we took from itwas that we had heard about the
fact that helicopters couldn'tland because of drones being in
the airspace. So what we did wasto take data from like November
(21:49):
3 through November six, sobefore the event, during the
event and after the event, andtracked all the drones. That was
the data that was supplied tous, how it was supplied to us
was just in a common delimitedExcel spreadsheet, but then I
turned that into mapping, notonly on a map, but also with
aerial photography, and that'scritical in a situation like
(22:11):
this, if you need to land ahelicopter Where's enough space
to land that helicopter, youcan't tell that from a map, but
you can tell that from theaerial Photo underlay. You'll
see the examples in the paper ofsome of the mapping
capabilities. What I also didwas a temporal analysis to see
how many drones are in the aireach day, what time of day, what
(22:32):
altitude they were flying at.
That's another thing too, isthat any drone flying over 400
feet is against FAA rules. Sothe pictures tell a lot of
stories. I'll leave it at that,but yeah, take a look at them.
If there's any questions,anybody wants to follow up me.
Follow up with me in the future.
Feel free to do so.
Jim Cardoso (22:52):
Yeah, thank you.
Appreciate that. And obviouslygo to the article or have their
contact information for allthree authors, so you can follow
up with them and even follow youknow, you can follow them, find
them online as well, and finddifferent ways to get, you know,
access and just get insight intowhat they're doing. But, but
yeah. I mean the importance ofturning that into, you know,
graphical data, not just as yousaid, Excel databases, but a
graphical data then reallycreates an overall common
(23:14):
operating pictures, isincredibly important to
understand the environment thatyou're working in. We started to
walk down this road. I want towalk back to it now, talking
about authorities andcoordination challenges across
authorities. I mean, you know,anytime you know any aggressive
counter drone activity within USborders, it's going to bring up
(23:35):
very challenging questions ofwho has authority, who's in
charge? Who can do what can I'lljust throw that open to whoever
wants to take it. Can we discusssome of the highlights of those
themes we've
Unknown (23:51):
talked about the four federal departments that had, or
at least had, at one point,those the counter drone
authorizations. But one of thethings that we discussed kind of
toward the end of the paper, is,should state and local have it?
And we don't really saynecessarily, whether or not
state and local should have someof those authorizations, but we
(24:14):
do say that, hey, the governmentreally should be reviewing these
authorizations and consideringwhether or not state and local
should, and what would be themodel for how to do that. So
I'll defer to John on that one,because he knows far more about
the law related to this.
Yeah, thanks, Nate. I think youhit an important issue there. I
(24:37):
mean, there's a gap in lawauthorities and operational
practice that legal operationallacuna I talked about to correct
that there's the Preventing, youknow, there's a need to
reauthorize the Preventingemerging threats act of 2018
which was set to expire on 30September 2025, and since the
(24:58):
at. Continuing appropriationsand extensions did not occur at
the moment. That's a gap of, isthat going to change things?
That's an unknown question.
Hopefully not. It's reallyproblematic, right? Because you
didn't have a lot of authorityfor, you know, really none for
state and locals, you have someauthority in federal agencies
(25:22):
and appropriately, and thisneeds to be restricted. I mean,
we don't need the Wild West. Wedon't need people shooting down
aircraft, and, you know,disabling aircraft, like, think
of the a bad case. Say it's aweaponized with a chemical,
biological agent, or, you know,radiologically, I'm not sure you
can get a lot of up there to because a real problem, but it'd
(25:44):
be irritant. But, you know, sayit's chemical, biological. You
shoot the thing down. What'sgoing to happen? Are you going
to distribute that agentyourself? You know? I mean,
those are things you have tothink through in the amount of
time you have, there's not much.
So we need to ask ourselves,well, we need authority. We need
to extend the mitigationauthority. And mitigation isn't
(26:07):
just throw, you know, shootdown. Shoot down is a bad is a
bad operational approach. What?
What is it? What is theauthority that comes with
mitigation, the ability todetect, identify and monitor and
track the aircraft now you don'tneed the federal authority to do
that. A private entity could dothat, but you have to choose the
right technology to do that, andyou have, for example, you'll
(26:28):
notice, if you read our report,many of those drones were DJI
drones. Why? Because they're themost common drone in the market.
They're inexpensive, they're outthere. They're also a drone that
gives a, you know, you know,identity, friend or flow. They
Friend or Foe signal. It tellsyou I'm DJI drone. This is me.
The ones that we in a reportthat we say we don't know what
(26:51):
it was, they were probablyeither disabled that, you know,
signaling capability, or they'reanother type of drone that
didn't have that. So you needto, you know, be able to detect,
identify. And that says we needmultiple types of detection. And
some of that's visual, some ofthat's acoustic, some of that's
an electromagnetic,electromagnetic spectrum, you
know, some Lidar and rainbow andall those. Then you need to warn
(27:14):
the operator of the unwantedsystem. Get out of here, right?
And there were ways you couldmaybe automatically do that,
coming flying into a stadiumthat you know, depending upon
where you are, when you see it,how it comes that's you're
constrained by time, then youhave to disrupt the control of
the aircraft. Well, disruptingit could cause it to crash too,
(27:37):
right? So you need to have theability to understand how to
problem solve that you need toseize or exercise control that
aircraft. So if I can't crashit, maybe I can take over
control and fly it and land itsafely. That's nice. Can we
actually have the technologicalcapability to do that? Now
that's another question that'sgoing to require more research,
more more capability, but that'sthere. Can you? Can you
(28:01):
confiscate the material on thething? That's another part of
it. And then the last piece ofmitigation, the one that people
don't like to talk about, that'sthe use of reasonable false
force to disable damage ordestroy the aircraft. And that
would be really in only viableunder in extremis conditions.
Now, in the legislation, it doesmention that it doesn't tell you
(28:24):
what to tactically do very youknow, very little legislation
does because that constrains,you know, but it's what I would
like to the kind of decision youhave if you're armed police
officer and you're at thisstadium and you see somebody who
appears to be a suicide bomber,and they're approaching and
(28:44):
advancing, or somebody with aknife, an edged weapon, and you
have the option to shoot ordon't shoot, use lethal force,
Do you or don't you? And youhave, that's a very hard
decision.
Jim Cardoso (28:57):
Yeah, it's incredibly hard decision for an
individual, and it's even harderfor a process, you know, I
talked, you know, I talked toStacy Pettyjohn from CNAs a few
weeks ago. From a defenseperspective, defending against
drone or drone swarms, the timeallotted to make it to
understand the threat and to actagainst the threat is just
(29:20):
getting very, very short. So, Imean, is there? I mean, are we
getting to a point that there'sgoing to be we're going to be
supremely challenged in havingenough time to make a good
decision.
Unknown (29:31):
We are challenged. But there's ways. See, but with
every challenge, there's thereare countermeasures, right? So
one of the ways that you dealwith that time, closing thing
is, you extend your perimeter,right? You have a rings of
defense you sense earlier. Youmonitor areas where they're
going to take off from. Youcan't shoot it down because all
(29:54):
the reasons we talked about,it's not lawful, it's not
practical. It could, couldexacerbate the situation. Yeah,
you actually, actually have tohit it, you know? But you can
start to sense. You can saywhat's the most likely
trajectory for somebody to fly adrone. Now, some of the more
newer drones can fly beyondvisual control, but that's a
(30:17):
small number of people, right?
And to do that's going to takemore mission planning, but you
can better the odds so you cansurvey the surrounding area. So
that's where the geospatialanalysis comes in. What are the
most likely vectors? What arethe ones that when they come in,
are going to create the mostdamage when they do come in? Can
we defend against those in someother ways, like, think of like
(30:39):
a baseball stadium. If you gobehind home plate, there's a net
to make sure people don't gethit. The same thing, if you go
to a hockey game when I was akid, there was no, like,
nothing. They didn't
Jim Cardoso (30:53):
have nets then, yeah, and then too many people
got hit by pucks that went overthe glass,
Unknown (30:58):
you know. So, so now you start to think of, how do we
do that in the militarysituation. You see, cope cages
they put on top of vehicle. Youknow, of military vehicles to
limit the drone threat. Cartelsdo that too, because they
weren't so you have to askyourself, it's not, it's
difficult, but that doesn't meanthere aren't solutions.
Jim Cardoso (31:14):
That's a layer of defense. You're talking about,
basically layer defense.
Unknown (31:17):
You give yourself defense in depth, then you say,
if we can't interdict, how do wecontain, right? What are our
rapid response procedures? Howdo we safely evacuate people
from the area? How do we givepeople advice without scaring
them beforehand? Now, keep inmind, you can go to a stadium
(31:38):
like go to a basketball game,and they're flying drones around
and dropping, you know,
Jim Cardoso (31:43):
goodies, T shirts and stuff like that. Yeah,
Unknown (31:46):
keep in mind that you know uses and good uses, and
there are delivery drones thatyou know are in use now. I think
just last week, there were twothat crashed by one big, I don't
want to say to vendor, but onebig vendor that delivers to my
house or tries to and alwaysdelivers it to the wrong place,
but they want their books arecheap.
Jim Cardoso (32:07):
No names, please.
No names, trying to avoid anylitigation here and at the
boundary.
Unknown (32:14):
I didn't say their names, but it doesn't matter
that ubiquitous is going to bethere. So what do you do? How do
you get the thing right now, ifthere's an event, you create a
national special security event,and you'll have a task force
capability. The task force willhave different and all of these
big, large like Super Bowl and,you know, Final Four, all these
things like the Academy Awards,things like that. They're not
(32:35):
going to attack a drone inside,necessarily, but you have the,
you know, outside, when peoplepark and come in. So wherever
you're going to go, you can havea task gonna have a task force.
The task force is going to lookat a whole range of things. You
know, bomb squad guys. You'regonna have people, you know,
doing chemical, biological,radiological, nuclear survey.
You're gonna do protectiveintelligence for people all
(32:56):
that. You're gonna have a dronecoordinator, probably from the
FBI, together with their WMDcoordinator, whatever homeland
security elements are engaged,they may well have, like a
secret service plays a role insome of these events and etc,
etc, the Coast Guard, if it's acoastal thing, do you have a
task force with the localpolice? They're always going to
(33:17):
be at the tip of the spear. Thequestion is, how do you devolve
some of this mitigationauthority to local agencies. And
that's a hard question, becauseyou can't have every local
agency having a hostage rescueteam with the quality of the
FBI, right? You know that costsa lot of money. You would be
training people there. Thebudget's Not there. Not everyone
(33:37):
could have it. So you have tolook at regional coalitions,
task forces among agencies,often local, state, federal task
forces are good forintelligence. You're probably
going to need to scale it solike a large agency, something
like NYPD or Chicago PD orHouston PD, or large Sheriff's
Department of LA county may havesome organic capability, and
(34:00):
maybe it would be invested in aTask Force officer who has some
federal authority, stateauthority that's up to the
legislature at the nationallevel in each individual state
to kind of synchronize that. Sothere's going to be legislative,
legislative synchronization for,you know, that intergovernmental
relationship. So you have topull that together. You also
have to think we're talkingabout authority to mitigate you
(34:24):
also have to have the authorityto prosecute people who use
these in a malicious way, likeearly on, when people were doing
laser threats against aircraft.
There was no authority to dothat in California, we crafted
legislation. In fact, I was oneof the people that help draft,
draft that legislation for thelegislature, for, you know,
laser strikes against commercialaircraft and law enforcement
(34:46):
aircraft. So you have to developthe authorities. You have to
make them scalable andappropriate, but you also have
to develop an understanding ofthe civil law ramification.
Situations of impropermitigation or failing to
mitigate, because everybodywho's in that stadium is going
to say, I bought a ticket and Ihave an expectation of enhance
(35:09):
of security, and therefore I'msuing you because your
contractual obligation, thenyour potential become a
tortfeasor Right? So you have tofigure out how to do all that
and synchronize all thosetogether, and that's going to
take a ton of training. Yeah? Soyeah, you have to diagnose the
problem, come up with theanswers. Use technology.
Technology is going to be agreat aid. You talk about the
(35:32):
time to close. I'll end herebecause we could go forever and
ever, ever. Yeah, they learnillegal stuff because that's
varies by jurisdiction andissue, but one of the ways to
close that that gap in a timereaction time may well be AI
Artificial Intelligence thatallows you sense and run through
(35:53):
very quick courses of action andsynchronize. That's one of the
things we can do. But then youhave decisions on the lethal use
of autonomous weapon systems,and those are ethical, and you
have to develop those. I thinkthere's an emerging look at
cyber jurisprudence. What is thelaw in cyberspace? There's a
(36:15):
talk about lethal autonomousweapon systems for at the
battlefield level? Yeah, I thinkthat Russian at the civil level
becomes important. And thenmixing those, when you have
hybrid warfare situations, likeyou mentioned, what's happening
in, you know, Munich right now?
Is that hybrid warfare? I don'tknow for sure, but yeah, we
don't
Jim Cardoso (36:35):
know what it is.
Yeah, it certainly had animpact, though, that's for sure.
I mean, that's and that's whatyou see, it has that impact.
Unknown (36:41):
Yeah, hypothesis to look there, so you can think of
that. The last thing there is,as we do, that it's like, almost
like spy versus spy, see,because right now, Mexican drug
cartels and other criminalenterprises, Brazilian GNSI, are
starting to use AI and agenticoperation, agentic AI to conduct
(37:05):
criminal activity, they willintegrate that into their
drones, perhaps faster than wewill, because they're not bound
by the ethical constraints thatwe are. We can't just take a new
technology and bring it to thebattlefield or use it in the
street, right? Because we haveto test it. They don't have
those concerns. They don't havethose concerns. We have to, we
(37:25):
have to. We should. We should.
Yeah, I'm not saying we don'thave restraint and constraints
on our operations ethically. Weneed to, but we also have to
balance that with operationalnecessity. And I think we
haven't had one of these yet,but the time to work on this is
before we do. Because when wedon't have a crisis, we tend to
overreact or misdiagnose andreact to the wrong thing, like
(37:50):
giving every cop on the streetthe authority to shoot out a
drone is insane. Giving no copsin a large metropolitan area the
ability to have mitigationauthorities when appropriate, or
trained with the appropriatetools, I would say it's equally
insane. Yeah, where? Where isthat balance? And that's the
balance that the legislature, orthe various legislatures that
(38:12):
come to play, has to make.
Jim Cardoso (38:15):
Yeah, as you alluded to, regrettably, a lot
of times in the in America, wesometimes wait for a crisis,
wait for a catastrophe to thentake action. Hopefully, that's
not the case this time, but itit does seem to be our, in our
in our national methodology. Itseems so we're actually at, or
maybe even slightly beyond ournormal times. I would do want to
start wrapping this up, but I dowant to, since this was kind of
(38:37):
like a lesson interview, more ofa panel, I want to give you, all
three of you, one finalopportunity to just, kind of,
you know, inform the audience ofany key points, anything from
the article that you really wantto make sure they they they tie
into. I mean, the whole point ofthis is so the audience does
understand a little bit aboutthis issue. But also says, Hmm,
this is interesting. I want togo to that article, or I want to
(39:00):
see some other types of researchthat you three gentlemen have
done, and they can dig intothat. So kind of we go backwards
from the way introduced allthree of you, George, if you
have any any final thoughts orany things that we didn't cover,
that you just want to hit up onbefore we before we end the
podcast, I
Unknown (39:18):
think the first thing I'll say is that, you know,
drones move at the speed oftechnology. And the policy to,
you know, mitigate all theseproblems, moves at the speed of
government. And again, thetechnology also moves quickly.
Because we're talking this wasback in 2021 when we did this,
(39:40):
the capabilities now withdifferent types of sensor
integration and cameras and AIis changing the drone detection
capabilities way beyond what itwas just four years ago. So it's
a constantly changing,constantly moving, you know, set
of circumstances here. One pointI'd make is that there are.
Millions of DJI drones in theUnited States. A lot of them are
(40:03):
in public safety, and the US aremaking efforts to basically
ground them all right now, andthat, that's one of the policy
issues I think that needs to beworked out sooner than later.
I'll leave it at that.
Jim Cardoso (40:14):
That's a great point in the DJI that's when,
you know, I know the state ofFlorida, where, where I live,
there's a they did put out someregulation against using DJI
drones, and that basically tookthis capability that a lot of
smaller law enforcementagencies, and there's no other
option out there right now, sothey said, You can't use them.
But okay, what do we use? I willget back to you on that. So it's
(40:37):
a challenge when they're soubiquitous and they're even
becoming more So John, over toyou, John, I'll go to you, and
then Nathan to cap this off. Soany final thoughts on anything
we may have missed as we had ourdiscussion today,
Unknown (40:49):
I'm gonna do this real quick, real real high points. We
need to be aware not only thecurrent threat, but we need to
look at future concerns, and theones that I think are really
important are swarms andswarming attacks, the
integration of AI and agentictargeting, the potential for
watering musicians and chemical,biological, radiological,
(41:11):
nuclear integration into thedrones and the big ticket one
and one, I think we really dopoorly any US inter agency And
the Intergovernmental Relationsin general is dealing with
converging threats. We gettunnel vision. We work one at a
time, and our adversaries don'tdo that. To solve that, however,
I think we need to close thatlegal operational lacuna. And
(41:34):
one thing that I call attentionto there's Executive Order
restoring American airspacesovereignty, which was done in
came put in effect in June ofthis year, 2025 and they created
a task force to look at thesethreats. They talk about
restricting drone threats,flights in certain areas over
certain times, and we alreadydo, can do that for designated
(41:59):
national special securityevents, but we might want to
look at more of that. We mightwant to look at accessible
notices to Airmen for geofencing of drones. And we, I
think, the one that, I think isthe most important is that
enhanced enforcement effortsthrough task forces to bring
leverage capabilities fromdifferent parts of government.
But this is going to take somework, and I think we should
(42:21):
start now. Yeah, pass it back.
Jim Cardoso (42:24):
I agree. Yeah, no, thank you. That's, that's a
great, that's a great summaryfrom you. And you know, this is
why we're trying to do thesepodcasts. We're hitting up in
eight at the boundary, doingdrone discussions quite a bit,
because there's so much outthere that we're accounting.
Kind of people feel like we're abit behind. We need to
accelerate a bit and understandthe threat and move towards
solving or finding solutions.
Nate over to you for any finalcomments.
Unknown (42:46):
Yeah, so I'm a big sci fi fan, so I'll pull out a quote
from William Gibson, or at leastit's been attributed to him. The
future is already here. It'sjust unevenly distributed. And I
know kind of people like smileand kind of laugh about sci fi,
but sci fi becomes sciencescience fiction becomes science
backed. We have seen that overand over again. So what I would
(43:10):
say is just a final thought is,don't be afraid to put on your
your science fiction hat andreally think through what future
technologies will be. I mean, ifwe're going to have drone swarms
attacking. Could we have counterdrone swarms defending things
like that? And what would thatlook like, and all those guys
playing around on that TV showbattle box? Is that stuff going
(43:30):
to be adapted into aerialdrones, so that we can defend
against drones and have AI anddoing that? And this is just an
example of like, kind of how toRed Hat this and put on the
science fiction hat, reallythink about what the future is.
I hope everybody does that. AndI know I'm going to be doing
that. We're going to be doingthat in future papers. And,
yeah, I think you know thatthat's a good place for me to
(43:51):
end
Jim Cardoso (43:51):
on. Yeah, I'm smiling as you say this. But I
mean, you're absolutely right.
Some of the things you'retalking about absolutely I mean,
especially what I've learnedrecently in terms of, you know,
drone development and the rapidrise of technology and where the
threats could be, all thesethings you talk about that seems
eminently realistic and not eventhat far out there either. I
mean, in our lifetime, easily.
So this is stuff we got to bethinking about as you guys
(44:13):
continue to do this research.
We're going to be, I'm going tobe tracking that research, and
maybe we'll have you back whenyou write other things and put
out some other research and someother insight. We're going to
have you back to talk more aboutit as these things develop. But
for today, we're going to we'regoing to go ahead and call it, I
really appreciate your time.
Nathan John George, appreciateit. Thanks for stopping by.
(44:33):
Special thanks to our guesttoday. Dr Nathan P Jones,
Associate Professor of securitystudies in the College of
Criminal Justice at Sam HoustonState University. Dr John P
Sullivan, retired career policeofficer and law enforcement
leader, as well as an instructorin the safe communities
Institute at USC and George WDavis Jr, a specialist in
(44:54):
geospatial information systemsand geospatial intelligence with
experience supporting multiplefederal. State and local law
enforcement organizations. Wereally enjoyed talking to them
today about their new articledetecting drone threats at
stadiums and public venues. Thisarticle is freely available in
the latest issue of GNSI,Journal of strategic security. I
(45:14):
strongly recommend you downloadthe article for deeper insight
and to access the maps andgraphics that accompany today's
talk. We'll post a link to JSsin the show notes next week on
at the boundary, our guest willbe Fabio s Van Loon. He's a
graduate of Texas A and M's BushSchool of Government, has worked
in the foreign policy space inWashington for seven years, and
(45:36):
is currently the CongressionalAffairs aide at the Embassy of
Italy. We'll talk about hisrecent GNSI article, trickle
down coordination, the NationalSecurity advisor's role as the
strategic and operationalplanner of the DOD, dos inter
agency relationship. It's afascinating look at how that
role has evolved over the yearswith different presidents and
(45:59):
national security advisors, andunquestionably continues to
evolve today. Be sure todownload and listen in. Thanks
for listening today. Whileyou're here, give us a like and
hit that subscribe button so youdon't miss any of our episodes
and continue to follow alongwith GNSI on our LinkedIn and X
accounts at USF, underscore,GNSI, check out our website as
(46:19):
well at usf.edu/gnsi, at andwhile you're there, subscribe to
our monthly newsletter to keepup with everything we're doing
here.
That's going to wrap up thisepisode of at the boundary. Each
new episode will feature globaland national security issues
(46:40):
we've found to be insightful,intriguing, maybe controversial,
but overall, just worth talkingabout. I'm Jim Cardoso, and
we'll see you at the boundary.
You.
Jim, hello everyone. Welcome to this week's
(00:14):
episode of at the boundary, thepodcast from the global and
national security Institute atthe University of South Florida.
I'm Jim Cardoso, Senior Directorfor genocide, and your host for
at the boundary. Many of you maybe familiar with. GNSI is
academic journal, The Journal ofstrategic security, or JSs. We
(00:36):
publish quarterly in partnershipwith the University of South
Florida Library as an openaccess journal with global
impact, we acquired JSs inJanuary 2024 and with it, over
15 years of national securityanalysis excellence since last
year, JSs has risen to the top10% of all military journals
worldwide. According to GoogleScholar, we're proud of the
(01:00):
penetrating explorations andinhabit its pages. And for
today's episode, we're bringingall three co authors of an
article in our most recent issueentitled detecting drone threats
at stadiums and public venues.
Quick introduction to ourauthors. Dr Nathan P Jones is an
associate professor of securitystudies in the College of
Criminal Justice at Sam HoustonState University. He is also a
(01:20):
Senior Fellow with small worldjournal and a non resident
scholar for the drug policy inUS Mexico center within Rice
University's Baker Institute. DrJohn P Sullivan is a retired
career police officer withdecades of experience with the
Los Angeles Sheriff'sDepartment, serving in multiple
leadership roles and overseeingthe kinds of situations this
(01:41):
article addresses. He's also aninstructor in the safe
communities Institute at theUniversity of Southern
California, a fellow at smallworlds journal and contributing
editor at Homeland Securitytoday. George W Davis, Jr is a
specialist in geospatialinformation systems and
geospatial intelligence. He hasworked extensively with the
(02:02):
Department of Homeland Security,New York Police Department, FBI,
and the Los Angeles Sheriff'sDepartment, among many others.
Nathan John George, welcome tothe program. So this podcast is
a more like a virtual panel thanan interview, so therefore I
have some specific questions forspecific people, but I really
look forward to the cross talkthat'll happen from whoever has
(02:24):
a good discussion point to bringup. But I'll start with Nathan.
The article spends some timeframing the issue of drones as a
threat to public stadia. Why wasthis framing necessary? And what
key points would you want thereader to draw out?
Unknown (02:40):
Oh, yeah, so that's a great question. I think this
framing is necessary to thinkabout, well, who are the
potential adversaries? Forexample, we're going to be
dealing with threats from drugcartels, lone wolf potential
actors and potential malevolentstate adversary actors So kind
(03:02):
of going through, and that'swhat part of what the framing
does is goes through what kindsof issues and what kinds of
threats may be present atstadiums. And one of the things
that we talk about is theunwittingly malign actor. There
are individuals who are going tobe flying drones over the I
(03:25):
didn't know I couldn't do thatguy, but they're actually
stopping an emergency lifeflight, flight, a helicopter
flight from landing in anemergency situation because
they're blocking the airspace.
And then how do we deal withthose things? And what are some
of the counter drone measuresthat are available, and things
along those lines. And then thatdovetails into the discussion of
the operational considerations,where John is the one who's
(03:48):
really the the man on that line.
Jim Cardoso (03:55):
And definitely we will get them. One other follow
up question, you used the AstraWorld Festival event in November
of 2021 in which eight peopledied during an outside concert
by rap artist Travis Scott. Now,drones had no role in causing
those deaths, so why did thatstill serve as a good framing
(04:15):
mechanism?
Unknown (04:16):
Okay, so this is an example of the kind. It's a
notional case study. IE, this isthe kind of situation where
drones could potentially play arole. And so by going through
this kind of notional case andlooking at the type of data, you
get a sense of the type of datathat drone detection companies
will bring in. And we werefortunate through the Institute
(04:39):
for Homeland Security, samepiece of State University which
provided the funding for thisresearch, they built a
relationship with 911 securityat the time it's now gone
through a transition to air siteand their Air Guard system, they
were not detecting drones overthe stadium, specific.
(05:00):
Specifically, they were atcritical infrastructure all
around the stadium. And so whatthey were able to do is looking
at their existing data frommultiple different sources, give
us a we asked them for kind of ageo fenced area around the
stadium where it actuallyoccurred, and they were able to
give us that data set. And soit's kind of akin, as John P
(05:20):
Sullivan pointed out, it's kindof akin to being able to do an
investigation and get the CCTVfootage from all the surrounding
businesses, and that could solveyour homicide investigation.
It's kind of like that in thesense that you've got the CCTV
footage is not necessarily therelooking at that particular
(05:41):
store, but it's in all thesurrounding areas, and so you
can create essentially a pictureof what was going on based on
that data that was there. And sothat's what we were able to do
with that. What we did find wasthat there were drones in the
area, and as the situationescalated, more drones started
(06:02):
showing up. And in theaftermath, more drones started
showing up. And that could be afunction of, say, personal
injury lawyers who want to getinformation for potential future
lawsuits, they might be hiringdrones, professional drone
pilots, to get footage, to get asense of what's going on there.
(06:23):
So those are the kinds of issuesthat come up, and that's one of
the primary data sources that weused.
Jim Cardoso (06:30):
Appreciate that.
So, John, you've been referencedtwice, so let's, let's turn to
you. So we've seen a lot of veryrecent news highlighting current
drone threat. You know, beyondopen use, the uses in open
conflict. In Ukraine, recentnews of the Russian drone
incursion to Poland, and thenjust this morning, reading about
the Munich Airport getting shutdown last night, uh, for seven
hours due to wave of dronesightings. So how does your
analysis of drone threats tostadia and public venues align
(06:52):
with this, this drone continuumyou've talked about?
Unknown (06:58):
Well, I think it's right dead in the center. Let me
tell you why. One of the reasonswe wrote this paper is we saw
that drone threats were growingin a number of the sectors, and
I'll talk about those in asecond. But along with the fact
that the threat is growing, theawareness that that threat is
(07:19):
there is growing. Now, I willpoint out that when we talk
about drones here, we're talkingabout primarily small unmanned
aerial systems. And these arenot the only drones that exist.
We also have unmanned oruncrewed maritime systems on the
surface of the subsurface. We'realso unmanned ground vehicles
(07:41):
that could come to play. Andthere are some amphibious
various you can buy off theshelf, a Chinese device that
swims underwater, can swim onthe surface, can walk on the
ground and fly in the air, and,oh yes, you could probably
weaponize it. So USS or unmannedsystems of all types are
growing. We see them start togrow in most people's mind in
(08:04):
the Ukrainian conflict and thebattle space in the Ukraine and
Ukraine has been punctuated bydrones used by both parties and
evolutions of drone technology.
You know, first persons viewdrones are coming to play. You
have fiber optic cable dronescoming. You have drones that
(08:25):
have their own internal guidancesystems, that don't rely upon
GPS and use AI to synchronizetheir interactivity. We see the
very early stages of swarmsoccurring there. And swarms are,
I think, an emerging threatbeyond the present, emerging
threat of drones, or what we'retalking about weaponized aerial
(08:47):
drones. Now, my first time Ieven encountered weaponized
aerial drone is nearly 20 yearsago. I hate to say it's that
long ago, working in a LosAngeles County Emergency
Operations Center. I'm thetactical planning Lieutenant for
LA County. I'm handling mutualaid for the Sheriff of LA
County, as well as the Sheriffof Orange County. And we hear a
(09:09):
report that there's a fire onthe border between LA and Orange
County. And some I don't knowwhat the right term to use is,
some individual decides who'sgoing to fly a drone and
interferes with the firefightingin that operation? Obviously,
there have been dozens ofincidents past that where drones
have interfered with rescueoperations. We'll talk about
(09:33):
that in this specific casestudy, but in others, you know.
So we saw that, and the answerto that is what the first thing
people come to mind is, I'll getmy old athaka shotgun for a
rifle slogan, or shoot thatthing down. Now there's
problematic in a lot of ways.
One is it's not lawful in theUnited States. There perhaps are
(09:58):
some exceptions. I say perhaps,because that's a really
contested area of the law. Buteven if there is the the
exception that over over comesthat statutory barrier, what
goes up must come down, right?
And there's a background, so Ishoot at it and I miss, and I'm
going to crowd an area, same ata stadium, right? What's in
stadiums? Well, teams, fields,you know, people, people. I was
(10:23):
gonna say, hopefully, good,good, good, hot dogs on people.
So you need to be very careful.
So the that that led us to startsaying, hey, what comes from
that? Now, I was flying drones,small us for counterterrorism
purposes in the 90s, and largerdrones into early 2000s these
(10:48):
smaller UAS, smaller unmannedaerial systems, are now really
ubiquitous, and they'reinexpensive and they are, you
know, obviously the DJI drone,which we'll see, was The biggest
drone here, is used a lot.
Another beyond the Ukraineexample, a lot of people think
of that and say, well, that'sgoing to cause things to occur
here. That's actually not true.
(11:09):
Criminal armed groups in Mexico,the cartel, who is going to have
Sina Hua cartel and others, havebeen using drones for a couple
decades now, and they startusing them, initially for
smuggling across the border.
They use them for intelligence,surveillance and reconnaissance,
then they start to weaponizetheir drones. And I've actually
(11:30):
published, together with DrRobert Bunker, a book called
criminal drone evolution, and welook at that entire self
weaponization process that thecartels have gone through, and
that's continuing to this day,and as a continuing to this day,
not only in Mexico, but in Peruand in Ecuador and gangs of
Brazil are using drones. Therewas one assassination attempt on
(11:53):
President Maduro Venezuelaseveral years ago, which, in my
mind, alarm bells go off. Sonothing has happened here with
these violent, non state actors,criminal armed groups or
terrorists. In the UnitedStates, there have been lots of
drone attacks in the MiddleEast, you know, in Yemen and you
know in that, you know theater,and obviously Ukraine. And now
(12:16):
you mentioned, we're starting tosee stuff occur in Europe
against Denmark, Germany, Polandhas drone incursions. Can be a
real challenge. I mean, NATO'slike, activated article, you
know, four, which means they'rebeing, like, super aware. And
next step is Article Five getshot, right? And what that means
to Europe and the world isbeyond the scope of this
(12:39):
discussion, but it shows howprofound these issues can be.
Now, when you talk about thisthreat proliferation, drones are
a lot of the drones flown inUkraine conflict are commercial
off the shelf. The drones usedby Mexican cartels and Brazilian
GNSI are commercial off theshelf, adapted. So there's this
threat proliferation. Now wedon't unmanned ground vehicles
(13:03):
are using in armed combat, youknow, and particularly state
state on state combat. But youknow, I wasn't Dublin a few
weeks ago, and I'm watching thislittle robot running around. It
was delivering Brazilian food,right? Well, if you could throw
a little robot around to deliverBrazilian food, you could
probably pack it with a bomb.
(13:23):
I'm not saying it's desirable,but that's a possibility. And
when we talk about drones,people get their single threat
and in complex areas, I'd sayyou need to be concerned with
multiple types of drones, ordrones we were talking offline
earlier, swarms. How do theycome together? And that really
demands a separate discussion,but we have all these issues
(13:43):
coming together. So threatproliferation is growing, and
it's growing unevenly and butthe awareness is there. We will.
I think we're right at the pointwith the evolution of drones in
the civil space, and now inhistorical analogy, going back
to the 19th century, after Drnoble creates dynamite and the
(14:04):
attic, the terrorists of theday, whom they called
anarchists, were starting tothrow bombs. And think socco and
vazetti in the US and otherthings like that. We're at that
point. We're not at the pointwhere, like, explosive terrorism
is like the top of the hitparade. We're not at the point
where that's there, but thiscould be there because it's the
blend. It's making terrorismthree dimensional. Yeah, right,
(14:30):
and that's why criminals usethem, because you see the
Mexican cartels engaging othercartels in combined arms fashion
with, you know, their ownartisanal armored vehicles.
They're using maneuver. Theyhave the drone above for cover.
You see bank robberies like thatin Brazil. So attack like that
would be very, very complicated.
High profile public gatheringsare always at a premium for
(14:54):
terrorists because they're whatyou call soft targets, and they
bring the. People together andsee terrorism that just blows up
buildings. People forget that ina minute, terrorism, as my
colleague Brian Jenkins hadmentioned, terrorism is theater
in oneaspect. Yeah, tension. You need
(15:15):
to be able to see it. Peoplehave to have a visceral
response. That's one of thereasons, I think, we don't see a
lot of biological terrorism, andwhy people prefer explosions,
because it's visceral.
Biological terrorism is slow.
It's insidious. Think of how thecovid epidemic played out. Half
the world didn't believe it wasreal. They still don't want to
believe it's real. Certainlywas.
Jim Cardoso (15:35):
Yeah, you don't get the psychological impact. You
know,
Unknown (15:41):
that's a component, and drones bring that to you. They
also bring you all out of thoseoperational advantages that you
would like on both sides ofconflict. But the good news is,
it's not all bad. There's a lotof good, and we can talk about
drones for good later, but highprofile public gatherings now,
we know sports venues have beenattacked. The first sports venue
being attacked that is reallypoignant in my mind, is the 1972
(16:04):
Olympics, right? And from thatwe see the modern understanding
of terrorism in a lot of ways.
We see the early stages ofjihadi terrorism. And yes, by
the way, jihadists are usingdrones in the Middle East, we
see the development of counterterrorism forces like the GNSI
Nine that developed, and thenyou know, which later on sees
(16:25):
instantiation throughout theworld, like, you know, FBI
hostage rescue team and otherplaces. So you start to see
terrorism change when sportsvenues are attacked. We haven't
seen a drone attack. Thank godto this point, against a stadium
or against, you know, the youknow, against stadia in general.
(16:48):
But we've seen like terroristsagainst against stadia, yeah,
but stab the France, they had amultiple simultaneous, you know,
suicide attack. Luckily, theFrench police and military were
very proficient at counterterrorism. Were able to
minimize, you know, the impactof that attack, but certainly
(17:11):
high profile public gatheringsbecome important for us. We have
a couple really big ones comingin the United States, you have
the FIFA, FIFA World Cup comingup, which is the largest
sporting event in the planet.
And you know that's going to beinvolving the US, Mexico and in
(17:32):
the United and Canada, yeah. Andyou have to have multilateral
intelligence sharing tounderstand how that goes. And we
know how to do that, because the1994 finals for the World Cup.
Were in LA. I was on the intelteam for that, for that
operation, and we, we reachedout, you know, to all the
football violence of cops inEurope, at least, to understand
(17:55):
who was calling, how they came.
And we coordinated rather well.
And there are drone specialresponse capabilities in the US.
There are task forces thatexist. There's the ability to
designate it as a nationalspecial security event. But that
tells me we need to be concernedabout stadia and other public
venues. And I think Nate DrJones laid out, importantly, why
(18:20):
we did this, not that the astralworld attack was a drone or not
that asteroid event was a droneattack. It was an event that we
could use as a proxy, since thishasn't happened yet, and it's
better to figure out how to dealwith it before it happens than
to wait for it to happen. And,you know, become overcome by
(18:41):
events and have tragicconsequences. So we're able to
take good data and say, how dowe detect this? How far can we
see this coming when we detectit, what do we see? You know,
how fast we have it. Are thereways to mitigate and we can talk
about that a bit later. Butstadia, sports events important,
and that becomes important tothe stadium itself, to the teams
(19:04):
playing there, because they haveto have security for themselves.
And to the leagues, because theleagues have to protect people.
They often protect not only thepeople there, but they have to
protect the brand of eachindividual player, you know, the
of the sport itself. And thefinal thing I'll talk about,
we'll probably come back to thislater, is, what does this all
mean? Why is a threat? How isthe threat amplified? Why? How
(19:29):
do you look at that as a risk?
There's a bunch of legal andoperational issues that we don't
understand how to deal with yet,what I call the legal
operational lacuna, and rightnow, there is the existing drone
legislation in the US expired.
It had been operating undercontinuing resolution for a
(19:51):
number of years, and Congresshadn't been able to get together
for whatever reason. For manyreasons, there's a great
political divide and a lot. Ofcases on these types of issues,
and they were not able to reachresolution. Well, just the other
day when we have the governmentshutdown, well, what's that due
to continuing resolution? Thereain't one right now, really,
(20:15):
really murky. What is the legalfoundation for dealing with
drones in the perfect case,there's only four government
agencies that have a legitimaterole in counter drone stuff,
Department of Justice,Department of Energy, because,
obviously they own the nationalnuclear infrastructure to
include weapon systems.
Department of the defense,because, of course, they have,
(20:37):
you know, a defensive capabilityand Department of Homeland
Jim Cardoso (20:42):
Security. Let me, let me real quick interrupt. And
I do, I do want to talk aboutthose authorities, because that
is a big deal. But I want to goahead and hear from here. I got
a question for George, becauseI'm curious about this part, as
we you know, towards the end ofthe article, a key aspect of
counter drone activity is tocapture and map the activity. It
enables an informed, coordinatedresponse, you know, and look and
(21:05):
in this area, it's I stronglyemphasize to our listeners,
download the article, go onthere, look at the maps, look at
the figures that are on there,and that'll really enable you to
understand this. But George, canyou give our listeners a bit of
an overview, maybe a bit of ateaser trailer to inform their
research.
Unknown (21:25):
Okay, so just so happens at November 5 is the
four year anniversary. Theactual event that happened, 10
people passed away, multiplepeople were injured. One of the
takeaways that we took from itwas that we had heard about the
fact that helicopters couldn'tland because of drones being in
the airspace. So what we did wasto take data from like November
(21:49):
3 through November six, sobefore the event, during the
event and after the event, andtracked all the drones. That was
the data that was supplied tous, how it was supplied to us
was just in a common delimitedExcel spreadsheet, but then I
turned that into mapping, notonly on a map, but also with
aerial photography, and that'scritical in a situation like
(22:11):
this, if you need to land ahelicopter Where's enough space
to land that helicopter, youcan't tell that from a map, but
you can tell that from theaerial Photo underlay. You'll
see the examples in the paper ofsome of the mapping
capabilities. What I also didwas a temporal analysis to see
how many drones are in the aireach day, what time of day, what
(22:32):
altitude they were flying at.
That's another thing too, isthat any drone flying over 400
feet is against FAA rules. Sothe pictures tell a lot of
stories. I'll leave it at that,but yeah, take a look at them.
If there's any questions,anybody wants to follow up me.
Follow up with me in the future.
Feel free to do so.
Jim Cardoso (22:52):
Yeah, thank you.
Appreciate that. And obviouslygo to the article or have their
contact information for allthree authors, so you can follow
up with them and even follow youknow, you can follow them, find
them online as well, and finddifferent ways to get, you know,
access and just get insight intowhat they're doing. But, but
yeah. I mean the importance ofturning that into, you know,
graphical data, not just as yousaid, Excel databases, but a
graphical data then reallycreates an overall common
(23:14):
operating pictures, isincredibly important to
understand the environment thatyou're working in. We started to
walk down this road. I want towalk back to it now, talking
about authorities andcoordination challenges across
authorities. I mean, you know,anytime you know any aggressive
counter drone activity within USborders, it's going to bring up
(23:35):
very challenging questions ofwho has authority, who's in
charge? Who can do what can I'lljust throw that open to whoever
wants to take it. Can we discusssome of the highlights of those
themes we've
Unknown (23:51):
talked about the four federal departments that had, or
at least had, at one point,those the counter drone
authorizations. But one of thethings that we discussed kind of
toward the end of the paper, is,should state and local have it?
And we don't really saynecessarily, whether or not
state and local should have someof those authorizations, but we
(24:14):
do say that, hey, the governmentreally should be reviewing these
authorizations and consideringwhether or not state and local
should, and what would be themodel for how to do that. So
I'll defer to John on that one,because he knows far more about
the law related to this.
Yeah, thanks, Nate. I think youhit an important issue there. I
(24:37):
mean, there's a gap in lawauthorities and operational
practice that legal operationallacuna I talked about to correct
that there's the Preventing, youknow, there's a need to
reauthorize the Preventingemerging threats act of 2018
which was set to expire on 30September 2025, and since the
(24:58):
at. Continuing appropriationsand extensions did not occur at
the moment. That's a gap of, isthat going to change things?
That's an unknown question.
Hopefully not. It's reallyproblematic, right? Because you
didn't have a lot of authorityfor, you know, really none for
state and locals, you have someauthority in federal agencies
(25:22):
and appropriately, and thisneeds to be restricted. I mean,
we don't need the Wild West. Wedon't need people shooting down
aircraft, and, you know,disabling aircraft, like, think
of the a bad case. Say it's aweaponized with a chemical,
biological agent, or, you know,radiologically, I'm not sure you
can get a lot of up there to because a real problem, but it'd
(25:44):
be irritant. But, you know, sayit's chemical, biological. You
shoot the thing down. What'sgoing to happen? Are you going
to distribute that agentyourself? You know? I mean,
those are things you have tothink through in the amount of
time you have, there's not much.
So we need to ask ourselves,well, we need authority. We need
to extend the mitigationauthority. And mitigation isn't
(26:07):
just throw, you know, shootdown. Shoot down is a bad is a
bad operational approach. What?
What is it? What is theauthority that comes with
mitigation, the ability todetect, identify and monitor and
track the aircraft now you don'tneed the federal authority to do
that. A private entity could dothat, but you have to choose the
right technology to do that, andyou have, for example, you'll
(26:28):
notice, if you read our report,many of those drones were DJI
drones. Why? Because they're themost common drone in the market.
They're inexpensive, they're outthere. They're also a drone that
gives a, you know, you know,identity, friend or flow. They
Friend or Foe signal. It tellsyou I'm DJI drone. This is me.
The ones that we in a reportthat we say we don't know what
(26:51):
it was, they were probablyeither disabled that, you know,
signaling capability, or they'reanother type of drone that
didn't have that. So you needto, you know, be able to detect,
identify. And that says we needmultiple types of detection. And
some of that's visual, some ofthat's acoustic, some of that's
an electromagnetic,electromagnetic spectrum, you
know, some Lidar and rainbow andall those. Then you need to warn
(27:14):
the operator of the unwantedsystem. Get out of here, right?
And there were ways you couldmaybe automatically do that,
coming flying into a stadiumthat you know, depending upon
where you are, when you see it,how it comes that's you're
constrained by time, then youhave to disrupt the control of
the aircraft. Well, disruptingit could cause it to crash too,
(27:37):
right? So you need to have theability to understand how to
problem solve that you need toseize or exercise control that
aircraft. So if I can't crashit, maybe I can take over
control and fly it and land itsafely. That's nice. Can we
actually have the technologicalcapability to do that? Now
that's another question that'sgoing to require more research,
more more capability, but that'sthere. Can you? Can you
(28:01):
confiscate the material on thething? That's another part of
it. And then the last piece ofmitigation, the one that people
don't like to talk about, that'sthe use of reasonable false
force to disable damage ordestroy the aircraft. And that
would be really in only viableunder in extremis conditions.
Now, in the legislation, it doesmention that it doesn't tell you
(28:24):
what to tactically do very youknow, very little legislation
does because that constrains,you know, but it's what I would
like to the kind of decision youhave if you're armed police
officer and you're at thisstadium and you see somebody who
appears to be a suicide bomber,and they're approaching and
(28:44):
advancing, or somebody with aknife, an edged weapon, and you
have the option to shoot ordon't shoot, use lethal force,
Do you or don't you? And youhave, that's a very hard
decision.
Jim Cardoso (28:57):
Yeah, it's incredibly hard decision for an
individual, and it's even harderfor a process, you know, I
talked, you know, I talked toStacy Pettyjohn from CNAs a few
weeks ago. From a defenseperspective, defending against
drone or drone swarms, the timeallotted to make it to
understand the threat and to actagainst the threat is just
(29:20):
getting very, very short. So, Imean, is there? I mean, are we
getting to a point that there'sgoing to be we're going to be
supremely challenged in havingenough time to make a good
decision.
Unknown (29:31):
We are challenged. But there's ways. See, but with
every challenge, there's thereare countermeasures, right? So
one of the ways that you dealwith that time, closing thing
is, you extend your perimeter,right? You have a rings of
defense you sense earlier. Youmonitor areas where they're
going to take off from. Youcan't shoot it down because all
(29:54):
the reasons we talked about,it's not lawful, it's not
practical. It could, couldexacerbate the situation. Yeah,
you actually, actually have tohit it, you know? But you can
start to sense. You can saywhat's the most likely
trajectory for somebody to fly adrone. Now, some of the more
newer drones can fly beyondvisual control, but that's a
(30:17):
small number of people, right?
And to do that's going to takemore mission planning, but you
can better the odds so you cansurvey the surrounding area. So
that's where the geospatialanalysis comes in. What are the
most likely vectors? What arethe ones that when they come in,
are going to create the mostdamage when they do come in? Can
we defend against those in someother ways, like, think of like
(30:39):
a baseball stadium. If you gobehind home plate, there's a net
to make sure people don't gethit. The same thing, if you go
to a hockey game when I was akid, there was no, like,
nothing. They didn't
Jim Cardoso (30:53):
have nets then, yeah, and then too many people
got hit by pucks that went overthe glass,
Unknown (30:58):
you know. So, so now you start to think of, how do we
do that in the militarysituation. You see, cope cages
they put on top of vehicle. Youknow, of military vehicles to
limit the drone threat. Cartelsdo that too, because they
weren't so you have to askyourself, it's not, it's
difficult, but that doesn't meanthere aren't solutions.
Jim Cardoso (31:14):
That's a layer of defense. You're talking about,
basically layer defense.
Unknown (31:17):
You give yourself defense in depth, then you say,
if we can't interdict, how do wecontain, right? What are our
rapid response procedures? Howdo we safely evacuate people
from the area? How do we givepeople advice without scaring
them beforehand? Now, keep inmind, you can go to a stadium
(31:38):
like go to a basketball game,and they're flying drones around
and dropping, you know,
Jim Cardoso (31:43):
goodies, T shirts and stuff like that. Yeah,
Unknown (31:46):
keep in mind that you know uses and good uses, and
there are delivery drones thatyou know are in use now. I think
just last week, there were twothat crashed by one big, I don't
want to say to vendor, but onebig vendor that delivers to my
house or tries to and alwaysdelivers it to the wrong place,
but they want their books arecheap.
Jim Cardoso (32:07):
No names, please.
No names, trying to avoid anylitigation here and at the
boundary.
Unknown (32:14):
I didn't say their names, but it doesn't matter
that ubiquitous is going to bethere. So what do you do? How do
you get the thing right now, ifthere's an event, you create a
national special security event,and you'll have a task force
capability. The task force willhave different and all of these
big, large like Super Bowl and,you know, Final Four, all these
things like the Academy Awards,things like that. They're not
(32:35):
going to attack a drone inside,necessarily, but you have the,
you know, outside, when peoplepark and come in. So wherever
you're going to go, you can havea task gonna have a task force.
The task force is going to lookat a whole range of things. You
know, bomb squad guys. You'regonna have people, you know,
doing chemical, biological,radiological, nuclear survey.
You're gonna do protectiveintelligence for people all
(32:56):
that. You're gonna have a dronecoordinator, probably from the
FBI, together with their WMDcoordinator, whatever homeland
security elements are engaged,they may well have, like a
secret service plays a role insome of these events and etc,
etc, the Coast Guard, if it's acoastal thing, do you have a
task force with the localpolice? They're always going to
(33:17):
be at the tip of the spear. Thequestion is, how do you devolve
some of this mitigationauthority to local agencies. And
that's a hard question, becauseyou can't have every local
agency having a hostage rescueteam with the quality of the
FBI, right? You know that costsa lot of money. You would be
training people there. Thebudget's Not there. Not everyone
(33:37):
could have it. So you have tolook at regional coalitions,
task forces among agencies,often local, state, federal task
forces are good forintelligence. You're probably
going to need to scale it solike a large agency, something
like NYPD or Chicago PD orHouston PD, or large Sheriff's
Department of LA county may havesome organic capability, and
(34:00):
maybe it would be invested in aTask Force officer who has some
federal authority, stateauthority that's up to the
legislature at the nationallevel in each individual state
to kind of synchronize that. Sothere's going to be legislative,
legislative synchronization for,you know, that intergovernmental
relationship. So you have topull that together. You also
have to think we're talkingabout authority to mitigate you
(34:24):
also have to have the authorityto prosecute people who use
these in a malicious way, likeearly on, when people were doing
laser threats against aircraft.
There was no authority to dothat in California, we crafted
legislation. In fact, I was oneof the people that help draft,
draft that legislation for thelegislature, for, you know,
laser strikes against commercialaircraft and law enforcement
(34:46):
aircraft. So you have to developthe authorities. You have to
make them scalable andappropriate, but you also have
to develop an understanding ofthe civil law ramification.
Situations of impropermitigation or failing to
mitigate, because everybodywho's in that stadium is going
to say, I bought a ticket and Ihave an expectation of enhance
(35:09):
of security, and therefore I'msuing you because your
contractual obligation, thenyour potential become a
tortfeasor Right? So you have tofigure out how to do all that
and synchronize all thosetogether, and that's going to
take a ton of training. Yeah? Soyeah, you have to diagnose the
problem, come up with theanswers. Use technology.
Technology is going to be agreat aid. You talk about the
(35:32):
time to close. I'll end herebecause we could go forever and
ever, ever. Yeah, they learnillegal stuff because that's
varies by jurisdiction andissue, but one of the ways to
close that that gap in a timereaction time may well be AI
Artificial Intelligence thatallows you sense and run through
(35:53):
very quick courses of action andsynchronize. That's one of the
things we can do. But then youhave decisions on the lethal use
of autonomous weapon systems,and those are ethical, and you
have to develop those. I thinkthere's an emerging look at
cyber jurisprudence. What is thelaw in cyberspace? There's a
(36:15):
talk about lethal autonomousweapon systems for at the
battlefield level? Yeah, I thinkthat Russian at the civil level
becomes important. And thenmixing those, when you have
hybrid warfare situations, likeyou mentioned, what's happening
in, you know, Munich right now?
Is that hybrid warfare? I don'tknow for sure, but yeah, we
don't
Jim Cardoso (36:35):
know what it is.
Yeah, it certainly had animpact, though, that's for sure.
I mean, that's and that's whatyou see, it has that impact.
Unknown (36:41):
Yeah, hypothesis to look there, so you can think of
that. The last thing there is,as we do, that it's like, almost
like spy versus spy, see,because right now, Mexican drug
cartels and other criminalenterprises, Brazilian GNSI, are
starting to use AI and agenticoperation, agentic AI to conduct
(37:05):
criminal activity, they willintegrate that into their
drones, perhaps faster than wewill, because they're not bound
by the ethical constraints thatwe are. We can't just take a new
technology and bring it to thebattlefield or use it in the
street, right? Because we haveto test it. They don't have
those concerns. They don't havethose concerns. We have to, we
(37:25):
have to. We should. We should.
Yeah, I'm not saying we don'thave restraint and constraints
on our operations ethically. Weneed to, but we also have to
balance that with operationalnecessity. And I think we
haven't had one of these yet,but the time to work on this is
before we do. Because when wedon't have a crisis, we tend to
overreact or misdiagnose andreact to the wrong thing, like
(37:50):
giving every cop on the streetthe authority to shoot out a
drone is insane. Giving no copsin a large metropolitan area the
ability to have mitigationauthorities when appropriate, or
trained with the appropriatetools, I would say it's equally
insane. Yeah, where? Where isthat balance? And that's the
balance that the legislature, orthe various legislatures that
(38:12):
come to play, has to make.
Jim Cardoso (38:15):
Yeah, as you alluded to, regrettably, a lot
of times in the in America, wesometimes wait for a crisis,
wait for a catastrophe to thentake action. Hopefully, that's
not the case this time, but itit does seem to be our, in our
in our national methodology. Itseems so we're actually at, or
maybe even slightly beyond ournormal times. I would do want to
start wrapping this up, but I dowant to, since this was kind of
(38:37):
like a lesson interview, more ofa panel, I want to give you, all
three of you, one finalopportunity to just, kind of,
you know, inform the audience ofany key points, anything from
the article that you really wantto make sure they they they tie
into. I mean, the whole point ofthis is so the audience does
understand a little bit aboutthis issue. But also says, Hmm,
this is interesting. I want togo to that article, or I want to
(39:00):
see some other types of researchthat you three gentlemen have
done, and they can dig intothat. So kind of we go backwards
from the way introduced allthree of you, George, if you
have any any final thoughts orany things that we didn't cover,
that you just want to hit up onbefore we before we end the
podcast, I
Unknown (39:18):
think the first thing I'll say is that, you know,
drones move at the speed oftechnology. And the policy to,
you know, mitigate all theseproblems, moves at the speed of
government. And again, thetechnology also moves quickly.
Because we're talking this wasback in 2021 when we did this,
(39:40):
the capabilities now withdifferent types of sensor
integration and cameras and AIis changing the drone detection
capabilities way beyond what itwas just four years ago. So it's
a constantly changing,constantly moving, you know, set
of circumstances here. One pointI'd make is that there are.
Millions of DJI drones in theUnited States. A lot of them are
(40:03):
in public safety, and the US aremaking efforts to basically
ground them all right now, andthat, that's one of the policy
issues I think that needs to beworked out sooner than later.
I'll leave it at that.
Jim Cardoso (40:14):
That's a great point in the DJI that's when,
you know, I know the state ofFlorida, where, where I live,
there's a they did put out someregulation against using DJI
drones, and that basically tookthis capability that a lot of
smaller law enforcementagencies, and there's no other
option out there right now, sothey said, You can't use them.
But okay, what do we use? I willget back to you on that. So it's
(40:37):
a challenge when they're soubiquitous and they're even
becoming more So John, over toyou, John, I'll go to you, and
then Nathan to cap this off. Soany final thoughts on anything
we may have missed as we had ourdiscussion today,
Unknown (40:49):
I'm gonna do this real quick, real real high points. We
need to be aware not only thecurrent threat, but we need to
look at future concerns, and theones that I think are really
important are swarms andswarming attacks, the
integration of AI and agentictargeting, the potential for
watering musicians and chemical,biological, radiological,
(41:11):
nuclear integration into thedrones and the big ticket one
and one, I think we really dopoorly any US inter agency And
the Intergovernmental Relationsin general is dealing with
converging threats. We gettunnel vision. We work one at a
time, and our adversaries don'tdo that. To solve that, however,
I think we need to close thatlegal operational lacuna. And
(41:34):
one thing that I call attentionto there's Executive Order
restoring American airspacesovereignty, which was done in
came put in effect in June ofthis year, 2025 and they created
a task force to look at thesethreats. They talk about
restricting drone threats,flights in certain areas over
certain times, and we alreadydo, can do that for designated
(41:59):
national special securityevents, but we might want to
look at more of that. We mightwant to look at accessible
notices to Airmen for geofencing of drones. And we, I
think, the one that, I think isthe most important is that
enhanced enforcement effortsthrough task forces to bring
leverage capabilities fromdifferent parts of government.
But this is going to take somework, and I think we should
(42:21):
start now. Yeah, pass it back.
Jim Cardoso (42:24):
I agree. Yeah, no, thank you. That's, that's a
great, that's a great summaryfrom you. And you know, this is
why we're trying to do thesepodcasts. We're hitting up in
eight at the boundary, doingdrone discussions quite a bit,
because there's so much outthere that we're accounting.
Kind of people feel like we're abit behind. We need to
accelerate a bit and understandthe threat and move towards
solving or finding solutions.
Nate over to you for any finalcomments.
Unknown (42:46):
Yeah, so I'm a big sci fi fan, so I'll pull out a quote
from William Gibson, or at leastit's been attributed to him. The
future is already here. It'sjust unevenly distributed. And I
know kind of people like smileand kind of laugh about sci fi,
but sci fi becomes sciencescience fiction becomes science
backed. We have seen that overand over again. So what I would
(43:10):
say is just a final thought is,don't be afraid to put on your
your science fiction hat andreally think through what future
technologies will be. I mean, ifwe're going to have drone swarms
attacking. Could we have counterdrone swarms defending things
like that? And what would thatlook like, and all those guys
playing around on that TV showbattle box? Is that stuff going
(43:30):
to be adapted into aerialdrones, so that we can defend
against drones and have AI anddoing that? And this is just an
example of like, kind of how toRed Hat this and put on the
science fiction hat, reallythink about what the future is.
I hope everybody does that. AndI know I'm going to be doing
that. We're going to be doingthat in future papers. And,
yeah, I think you know thatthat's a good place for me to
(43:51):
end
Jim Cardoso (43:51):
on. Yeah, I'm smiling as you say this. But I
mean, you're absolutely right.
Some of the things you'retalking about absolutely I mean,
especially what I've learnedrecently in terms of, you know,
drone development and the rapidrise of technology and where the
threats could be, all thesethings you talk about that seems
eminently realistic and not eventhat far out there either. I
mean, in our lifetime, easily.
So this is stuff we got to bethinking about as you guys
(44:13):
continue to do this research.
We're going to be, I'm going tobe tracking that research, and
maybe we'll have you back whenyou write other things and put
out some other research and someother insight. We're going to
have you back to talk more aboutit as these things develop. But
for today, we're going to we'regoing to go ahead and call it, I
really appreciate your time.
Nathan John George, appreciateit. Thanks for stopping by.
(44:33):
Special thanks to our guesttoday. Dr Nathan P Jones,
Associate Professor of securitystudies in the College of
Criminal Justice at Sam HoustonState University. Dr John P
Sullivan, retired career policeofficer and law enforcement
leader, as well as an instructorin the safe communities
Institute at USC and George WDavis Jr, a specialist in
(44:54):
geospatial information systemsand geospatial intelligence with
experience supporting multiplefederal. State and local law
enforcement organizations. Wereally enjoyed talking to them
today about their new articledetecting drone threats at
stadiums and public venues. Thisarticle is freely available in
the latest issue of GNSI,Journal of strategic security. I
(45:14):
strongly recommend you downloadthe article for deeper insight
and to access the maps andgraphics that accompany today's
talk. We'll post a link to JSsin the show notes next week on
at the boundary, our guest willbe Fabio s Van Loon. He's a
graduate of Texas A and M's BushSchool of Government, has worked
in the foreign policy space inWashington for seven years, and
(45:36):
is currently the CongressionalAffairs aide at the Embassy of
Italy. We'll talk about hisrecent GNSI article, trickle
down coordination, the NationalSecurity advisor's role as the
strategic and operationalplanner of the DOD, dos inter
agency relationship. It's afascinating look at how that
role has evolved over the yearswith different presidents and
(45:59):
national security advisors, andunquestionably continues to
evolve today. Be sure todownload and listen in. Thanks
for listening today. Whileyou're here, give us a like and
hit that subscribe button so youdon't miss any of our episodes
and continue to follow alongwith GNSI on our LinkedIn and X
accounts at USF, underscore,GNSI, check out our website as
(46:19):
well at usf.edu/gnsi, at andwhile you're there, subscribe to
our monthly newsletter to keepup with everything we're doing
here.
That's going to wrap up thisepisode of at the boundary. Each
new episode will feature globaland national security issues
(46:40):
we've found to be insightful,intriguing, maybe controversial,
but overall, just worth talkingabout. I'm Jim Cardoso, and
we'll see you at the boundary.
You.
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