Autonomy and Affordable Mass in Latin America and the Caribbean

On April 21, 2026, General Francis L. Donovan, commander of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), established the command’s first-ever Autonomous Warfare Command. As detailed in a press release, the SOUTHCOM Autonomous Warfare Command (SAWC) will be dedicated to fielding autonomous, semi-autonomous, and uncrewed systems for “disrupting and degrading narcoterrorist and cartel networks, and responding to life-threatening crises caused by large-scale natural disasters.” The announcement was also a recognition that, in order to make good on the commitments to the Western Hemisphere outlined in the new National Defense Strategy and National Security Strategy, the United States would need to rethink its force posture in the region.

To date, Washington has signaled its reprioritization of the Americas through assets that are at hand, particularly naval forces. In March 2025, the destroyers USS Gravely and USS Spruance deployed to the Caribbean and eastern Pacific on counternarcotics and border security missions. In August 2025, the United States commenced a massive military buildup in the Caribbean as a part-counternarcotics, part-pressure campaign against Venezuela. The latter component of that mission would be fulfilled on January 3, 2026, when U.S. forces captured dictator Nicolás Maduro as part of Operation Absolute Resolve. The mission involved the largest concentration of U.S. forces in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) since the overthrow of Manuel Noriega in Panama during Operation Just Cause. At its height, roughly a quarter of the deployed U.S. surface fleet was stationed in the Caribbean, while more than 150 aircraft were used the night of Absolute Resolve. Such overwhelming force was warranted given the operational demands associated with a complex and contingent special forces raid like that which seized Maduro, but the sheer size of the force assembled imposed trade-offs for U.S. defense posture elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. Perhaps most notably, the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford executed a redeployment from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean in November 2025, where it remained through Operation Absolute Resolve. The carrier then redeployed quickly to the Middle East to support Operation Epic Fury, only to suffer a potentially disastrous onboard fire, highlighting the heavy toll imposed by months of high-intensity operations.

As operations in the Western Hemisphere shifted toward countering organized crime through the ongoing Operation Southern Spear, and more recently supporting earthquake recovery in Venezuela, the equipment and capabilities needed in theater have also changed. Exquisite systems such as aircraft carriers, stealth jets, and precision-guided munitions have less impact on the LAC’s most pressing security threats than distributed, reliable, and networked intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms. Indeed, the region stands to be one of the primary beneficiaries of the U.S. military’s push for “affordable mass,” and there are significant opportunities for large numbers of relatively low-cost autonomous and uncrewed systems (UxS), including airborne, surface, and subsurface, to provide a robust operational picture for SOUTHCOM while reducing the human resources demands presented by LAC’s vast and variegated geography. However, while the announcement of SAWC is a step in the right direction, more can be done to leverage renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere to prepare the United States for future defense threats. SOUTHCOM, and the Pentagon more broadly, must seize this moment to help partner militaries develop their own uncrewed and autonomous capabilities, as well as lean in on confronting the rise in criminal adoption of the same technologies.

Lifting the Fog

The threats facing LAC thrive in obscurity, and the region provides ample cover for illicit actors. Geography alone—arid deserts, dense jungles, and vast oceans—makes total visibility difficult across the region difficult for any single state to achieve. The first step is therefore to bring these activities into the light, but this is easier said than done. During the inaugural Shield of the Americas Summit in March, President Donald Trump exhorted the assembled leaders to “just tell us where they [the criminals] are.” The problem, in many cases, is that LAC countries do not have the ability to find and track criminal activity.

In South America, vast and sparsely populated interior regions offer safe havens for clandestine airstrips, coca fields, and wildcat gold mining operations. For instance, the Ecuadorian military detected 1,095 illegal fuel taps in the country in the first nine months of 2025, which are used to siphon off oil from pipelines and put money into criminals’ pockets. In the Caribbean, extensive coastlines and territorial waters simply cannot be policed by individual navies and coast guards. While the United States provides critical capabilities through Joint Interagency Task Force South, Joint Task Force Counter Narcotics, and now SAWC, the territory in question is difficult to police without either drawing away too many U.S. assets from other regions or enlisting allies. These challenges are also not going away. Contrary to the Trump administration’s claims, drug seizures by U.S. authorities have not meaningfully declined since the beginning of lethal strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, suggesting that traffickers remain undeterred from moving their product by sea and have likely shifted their routes to employ lower-profile methods.

Recent criminal experiments with uncrewed semi-submersibles represent a potential new phase in the constant race between smuggling routes and interdiction efforts, allowing traffickers to move their product without exposing personnel. Searching for these kinds of criminal activities by hand is time consuming for humans but is an ideal use case for long-endurance UxS. Integrating these drones with AI can also help dramatically increase domain awareness and the fidelity of data governments can collect on illicit economic activity. To this end, the United States and Argentina recently inked an agreement to conduct joint patrols in the southern Atlantic and facilitate the transfer of maritime patrol aircraft as well as “vertical takeoff drones suitable for operation from offshore patrol vessels.” This partnership offers a model for U.S. collaboration with other like-minded governments in the region, including Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, which struggle to achieve domain awareness over their extensive coastlines and exclusive economic zones in the face of drug trafficking and illegal fishing.

Rolling out more autonomous and uncrewed ISR platforms could also be a boon to U.S. defense technology startups. Both legacy “prime” contractors and a host of younger startups are vying to be the ones to provide new technological solutions to the United States’ most pressing defense challenges. Many of these groups have focused on providing autonomous or uncrewed capabilities, ranging from the high-end “loyal wingman” prototype jets under development by Anduril and General Atomics, to Saronic’s drone boats recently used to rescue the downed crew of an Apache attack helicopter off the coast of Iran.

One challenge facing U.S. policymakers from this proliferation of defense tech firms is the need to test how new systems perform under real-world conditions. LAC provides an ideal environment for such hands-on testing. SAWC could present a testbed for new ISR platforms, permitting experimentation against the environmental and tactical realities of the region. At the same time, LAC represents a comparatively forgiving tactical environment. While the capabilities of major transnational criminal organizations should not be underestimated, their electronic warfare capabilities and air defenses are a far cry from those U.S. forces have confronted in the Strait of Hormuz, for instance. Thus, while success in the Western Hemisphere should not be taken as the sole metric when evaluating new systems, the region can provide an initial acid test, allowing both the Pentagon and private industry to iterate rapidly to meet operational needs.

Winning the Innovation Battle

Another vital priority for LAC countries is bolstering their defenses against weaponized drones. Mexico and Colombia in particular have experienced a surge in criminal drone use, with both countries reporting hundreds of attacks in 2025 alone. This threat is metastasizing to other regions as well. During a bloody clash in the crowded urban confines of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Comando Vermelho gang used drones to drop explosives against police forces. As a result, Brazil and Colombia are currently making major (by regional standards) investments in unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and counter-UAS (C-UAS) capabilities. In Colombia, outgoing President Gustavo Petro announced a $1.68 billion investment to procure C-UAS technologies, while the country has also begun production of a domestically designed UAS. This is one program that incumbent Abelardo de la Espriella is likely to preserve and expand upon as he pursues a more hardline approach to Colombia’s nonstate armed groups. More recently, the Brazilian army submitted a plan to invest 456 billion reais ($88.7 billion) between now and 2040 to shore up the country’s air defenses and counter the threat posed by armed drones.

The United States is also undergoing a massive reevaluation of its C-UAS strategy, led internally by Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF 401). The effort enlists both legacy prime contractors such as RTX and Lockheed Martin as well as new entrants such as Epirus and Anduril to accelerate C-UAS capability deployment. Here again, greater focus on LAC may pay dividends for the United States in other theaters. Especially with respect to homeland defense, Washington’s partners in the Americas are already confronting the kinds of threats against which JIATF seeks to provide protection. Pushing emergent C-UAS capabilities to LAC militaries would therefore not only help the region contain the growing drone menace, it could also provide the United States with further insight into how these technologies work in the field against irregular opponents.

However, LAC countries face serious budget constraints when it comes to new equipment procurement, while the kinds of drone, counter-drone, and advanced ISR capabilities LAC countries need to fight modern transnational criminal organizations cannot always be purchased secondhand. In many cases, the best answers to the challenges LAC countries face in the security domain are themselves systems the United States military is just now beginning to roll out. In other cases, doctrine has not caught up with capability. For example, directed energy air defense systems harbor promise for cost-effective C-UAS, but as recent events in El Paso and along the U.S.-Mexico border show, these systems can be highly disruptive if they are not paired with updated domestic legal authorities and interagency coordination. LAC countries will be understandably reluctant to invest limited resources in equipment that remains relatively unproven and requires substantial training to integrate into their forces.

If the United States is serious about reprioritizing the Western Hemisphere, it needs to think creatively about building partner force capacity. Simply transferring legacy defense articles, or even providing greater foreign military financing, will not be enough to address the emergent security threats LAC partners face. To this end, the United States’ authority to approve direct commercial sales (DCS) of defense articles and services by private industry to partner countries without a government-to-government agreement could be a starting point. The United States, under the auspices of an America First Arms Transfer Strategy, should consider expanding the use of DCS to allow countries to enter service-forward agreements with U.S. defense technology firms. Under this arrangement, U.S. defense contractors would not only provide a capability such as aerial ISR or C-UAS, they would train partner forces in the use of this technology. At the end of the period, partner governments would have the option to either allow the contract and the capability to lapse, renew it, or purchase the now-depreciated equipment directly at a discount. This would have the advantage of enabling LAC militaries to acquire new capabilities quickly, but without locking them into a specific platform.

While often overshadowed by more headline-grabbing developments around Cuba or Venezuela, the United States’ pivot to the Americas is driving critical tactical and technological innovation. Building on this momentum to test new autonomous and uncrewed systems and strengthen partner nation capacity will not only help advance security and stability in the Western Hemisphere, it will prepare U.S. forces to confront the changing character of future combat around the world.

Henry Ziemer is a fellow with the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.