Playbook or Rental? U.S. Counter-Drone Defense and the 2026 World Cup

Introduction

“Drones are my biggest concern . . . but on the counter-drone measures, everybody’s a little behind,” Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin testified before the House Homeland Security Committee on June 3. He was speaking with the World Cup days away: 78 matches across 11 American host cities over six weeks. Every stadium is inside a federal no-fly zone backed by fines of up to $100,000 and a zero-tolerance policy. While successful drone takedowns at recent sporting events have demonstrated the technology works, the World Cup is testing many more parts of a nascent U.S. counter-drone strategy, including the authorities and command architecture across sustained operations spanning a continent.

Counter-drone authority has been a federal monopoly. Until December 2025, no state or local officer in America could legally bring down a drone. That power belonged to a narrow set of federal agencies, principally the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Justice Department, and they could not keep up. Since 2018, stadiums and venues have asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and DHS for counter-drone help 121,000 times and only received it in 77 instances. Congress acted on December 18, 2025, by passing the SAFER SKIES Act. For the first time, trained state and local officers can take down a drone. But the authority arrived faster than the rules to use it. The training standards and equipment list that make the power usable arrived only as an interim final rule, effective July 1, mid-tournament, and in force before the public could comment. For its opening weeks, the largest sporting event on Earth ran under a counter-drone authority whose rulebook was still being written.

The nation’s counter-drone defenses were assembled fast against a deadline that could not move. Sixty state and local officers, spread across all 11 host cities, completed a two-week FBI course in Alabama and were sworn in as temporary federal officers, operating on borrowed federal authority. The money moved faster still: The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) awarded $250 million to the 11 host states 25 days after the application deadline, the fastest non-disaster grant program in its history. The command network assembled for the summer runs through the FBI, DHS, a Pentagon task force, and state police in each host city—synchronized across the country, coordinated nationally, and commanded locally.

While the technology is proven, its implementation at scale is uncharted territory, and the drone threat to the World Cup is just the beginning. After the World Cup, the United States will need to decide whether it keeps a counter-drone playbook it can carry forward or whether to merely return a six-week rental when the crowds go home. 

The Test That Hasn’t Been Run

It is tempting to file the World Cup under things the country has already done. The United States hosted one in 1994 that featured 52 matches in nine cities over 31 days. But 1994 had no drones, and none of the same stadiums are in use this summer. The Super Bowl is the other reflexive comparison, but a Super Bowl involves one metropolitan area for one day, run under a federal playbook nearly three decades in the making. The World Cup involves 11 metropolitan areas over 39 days and has featured matches running in parallel. It has been overseen by a White House task force that is itself a multiagency arrangement without precedent. Andrew Giuliani, the task force’s executive director, described the challenge as “78 Super Bowls over 39 days.”

Consider the airspace alone. Stadiums are only part of the map: No-fly zones extend three and a half miles around each venue and rise to 3,000 feet; smaller rings, a mile out and 1,000 feet tall, cover the fan festivals; and team hotels, base camps, and training sites carry their own restrictions. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has drawn an archipelago of closed sky nearly 3,000 miles wide, and the drone defenses have to hold over all of it at once.

The likeliest threat during the World Cup is not a sophisticated attacker at all—it is carelessness at volume: hobbyists chasing photos, not adversaries chasing targets. NFL stadiums logged about a dozen drone incursions in the 2017 season; by 2023, the league tracked 2,845 incidents. The tournament’s own numbers bear out the threat from so-called nuisance fliers: DHS logged 145 incursions across eight host venues in the opening days, and by early July the FBI put the number of drones seized tournament-wide at more than 500, very few of whom qualify as malicious actors.

But volume is not danger: The defense exists for the rare, deliberate drone. During Ukraine’s Operation “Spider’s Web,” small drones launched from concealed positions inside Russia struck strategic bombers far from any front line. Distance from a conflict no longer protects a target, and the drone that reaches a target need not be a sophisticated one. That threat has already brushed the tournament. Within a week of the opening match, an Iran-linked hacker group claimed to have penetrated the FBI’s own counter-drone feeds. The cybersecurity company that surfaced the claim also debunked it, determining that the purported evidence was recycled marketing footage from 2024. Regardless of the details, an adversary publicly named the World Cup as a target. The same week supplied a case that needed no caveat. On June 16, federal prosecutors unsealed a complaint charging five men with plotting to fly explosive-laden drones over the White House Ultimate Fighting Championship event marking America’s 250th anniversary.

The Stadium Is Not a Battlefield 

Bringing drones down is not new. The United States built the skill on battlefields in the deserts of the Middle East, the open oceans of the Pacific, and along the southern border, which General Gregory Guillot, who commands both U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), calls a “literal and figurative sandbox” for counter-drone technology. Through the Pentagon’s counter-drone task force, Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF 401), the military tests hundreds of systems against cartel drones that, in his words, cross “all the time.” And not all of the learning is firsthand: Three years of watching Ukraine’s drone usage in the Russia-Ukraine war has shaped what American planners buy, instructed how they train, and taught them what cannot be copied at home.

However, this experience was gained, as former Joint Chiefs Chairman C.Q. Brown noted days before the tournament, “where you don’t have major population centers.” A stadium is neither a battlefield nor a border.

On a battlefield, a drone can be shot down with minimal concern of what may be below; over a packed stadium, anything kinetic—a projectile, an interceptor, or the drone itself—risks raining debris on the crowd. This places a heavy preference on capturing a drone rather than destroying it. Jamming is no easier. Flooding the airwaves to sever the link between pilot and drone runs straight into a stadium’s spectrum, already saturated with friendly signals, and a jammed drone still has to come down somewhere. And unlike a battlefield, the sky over an American city is full of aircraft that belong there, requiring real-time deconfliction. The margin is thin: Officials running the tournament’s air defense put their decision window at roughly 90 seconds from detection, and in a crowd, there is nowhere to push the intercept away from people.

What was fielded aligns with those civil constraints almost line-for-line. Publicly, at least, the kinetic role went to Fortem, whose system fires a tethered net and tows the drone away intact—the only kinetic interceptor among the systems chosen. The spectrum problem went to nonkinetic tools such as the Sentrycs system, which reads a drone’s control link and lands the drone in a set spot rather than jamming the air around it. Only at the detection layer—radar, radio sensors, and cameras—did the battlefield’s equipment carry over largely unchanged.

How the buying happened is its own contrast; to keep pace with the war, Ukraine has built a sprawling commercial marketplace, an “Amazon for the military” where units pick from thousands of competing systems. But that marketplace took the better part of three years and an existential threat to build. The host cities were, in the words of one DHS official, being “bombarded with vendors” with none of that procurement system maturity and only months to navigate the same sprawl. DHS stood up a dedicated office for counter-drone purchasing only in January, five months before kickoff, and in May its science directorate was still promoting a tool to help host agencies decide what to buy, weeks before the first U.S. match.

Then there is who runs the equipment. On the battlefield, operators are forged by combat. When Ukrainian air defenses downed more than three-quarters of the drones in a recent attack, the decisive edge was not the hardware, but the humans behind it whose proficiency had been built under fire. The American homeland has no such crucible. Its operators come through a single new schoolhouse, the FBI’s National Counter-UAS Training Center, which graduated its first class only last December and has certified about 60 state and local officers for the entire tournament. Demand already outstrips the seats. The Homeland Security secretary told a House panel in June that more people want into the school than it can hold, and the World Cup is only the first claim on it. The NFL, the 2028 Olympics, the southern border, critical infrastructure, and a host of other entities and activities the threat touches will drive future demand for these trained personnel. The scale and effectiveness of counter-drone capabilities will be determined not only by procurement but by the pace at which qualified operators can be trained and certified.

Finally, there is how long the country expects to need the defense. Even an army—which now burns through counter-drone systems and replaces them constantly, as the invasion of Ukraine has shown—operates inside a standing, funded mission it plans to run for years. The host cities have no such footing: Their systems and operators were purchased with one-time preparedness funding built around the tournament. Los Angeles is the exception. Its venues have been booked again for the 2028 Olympics, and the FBI has justified the entire national training effort by pointing to both events together. It is unclear whether states such as Missouri will carry its $14.2 million in equipment and its certified operators forward—to protect the next major event or critical infrastructure—or let the capability lapse when the funding expires.

Synchronized but Not Unified

The systems can be bought and the officers deputized, but the World Cup’s harder test is organizational: There are 11 different venues on U.S. soil that need effective air defense. Three tests present themselves, and the tournament is running all of them: whether the systems at each venue can work together, whether every officer on the ground knows who makes the call when a drone appears, and whether the authorities to act are clear. None of these are settled, and the 2026 World Cup is the first place they are meeting under load.

Whether systems bought separately can be made to work as one gets its first real test at the tournament. Each venue concentrates equipment from multiple makers and agencies, bought fast and independently, and owning it all is not the same as operating it together. DHS warned in May that, left uncoordinated, the counter-drone systems the agencies are bringing “can interfere with each other and leave critical gaps in coverage.” One agency’s jammer can step on another’s first-responder network, or two agencies’ sensors can blind each other. The platforms do not deconflict themselves. Integrating them is the work, and it was still unfinished when the matches began.

Command has to be clear at both ends: who makes the call to bring a drone down at each venue, and whether the national tier can supply the fused picture and standards that no single city can build alone. The layers exist on paper: U.S. Northern Command is the Pentagon’s designated “synchronizer”; JIATF-401 coordinates the military’s role; the FBI holds direct command in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York; DHS components cover the other eight cities; and state and local officers work under FBI supervision. U.S. counter-drone planners are wargaming these layers. At a Colorado Springs tabletop exercise in January, Rear Admiral Gregory Newkirk, director of Strategy, Policy & Plans for U.S. Northern Command and NORAD, said the goal was to avoid a crisis in which agencies were “looking around the room” asking “Who’s the decision maker?” The civilian version of that architecture is months old, assembled across agencies that rarely operate together at scale, and so far has been tested only against hobbyists rather than a hardened threat.

Authorities are the hardest piece: Who may act over a city, and on what basis? On a military installation, the answer is settled: The commander is empowered to make the hostile-act determination and act on it. Over an American city, there was no equivalent until this month. The deputization that put local officers into the fight was deliberately narrow, carrying federal authority, by the Justice Department’s own description, only while acting under federal supervision. The codified authority that replaced that workaround took effect July 1, mid-tournament, and has yet to be tested under pressure. Officials frame the sequencing as deliberate; Andrew Giuliani, the task force’s executive director, calls the fallback authority a “backup plan.”

None of this is to say the arrangement will fail. The World Cup is simply the first time the three are being tested together. However the tournament ends, it will leave the first working record of how an American counter-drone defense runs at this scale: which arrangements held, which need improving, and what a permanent version would keep.

After the Final Whistle

Major General Gent Welsh, who commands Washington state’s Army and Air National Guard, assesses the drone threat as one the country will be living with “for the rest of our lives.” Against a threat measured in decades, the World Cup’s real value is as an accelerant—months of capability, coordination, and hard-won experience compressed into a single summer. The question is how much of it the country chooses to keep.

Some of what has been built is temporary by design. The FEMA grant that paid for the host cities’ equipment runs through September 2028 but funds no upkeep past it. Other pieces look built to last. The DHS purchasing office stood up in January 2026 consolidates counter-drone buying that had been scattered. The FBI’s Alabama schoolhouse now has a military twin: the Pentagon’s standing counter-drone university. And FEMA’s grant program will reach every state and territory in its second year, aimed at a nationwide capability rather than a single event.

That is why the summer is worth watching for more than a world champion. It can teach three lessons that would anchor any domestic counter-drone playbook worth keeping: whether systems bought separately can be made to work as one at each venue; whether a layered command holds up under sustained strain; and whether pushing the authority to act down to local officers delivers the multiplier it promises.

Alexei Hoffman is a research associate with the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.