The aircraft that worries American air base commanders most in 2026 is not a Chinese stealth fighter or a Russian bomber. It is a battery-powered quadcopter that costs less than a used laptop, and there is nothing to stop a hostile one from buzzing the fence line of a base full of billion-dollar jets.

So the U.S. Air Force has set up a lab whose entire job is to figure out how to kill it — and this month it put out a call to industry for better ways to do so.

The message, roughly: bring us anything that can find a small drone and knock it down, and bring it fast.

Red Air, With Quadcopters

The lab is deliberately unglamorous. Based at Grand Forks and run under Air Combat Command, it pits teams of Airmen playing “Red Air” — flying small Group 1 and Group 2 drones, the commercial and light-military classes — against competing counter-drone systems to see what actually works when a swarm shows up over the flightline. Roughly six such exercises have already run this year.

The point is not just the hardware. It is the human choreography of base defence: who spots the drone, who is allowed to shoot, and how fast the whole chain moves.

That question sounds simple until you remember that until very recently, defending an air base against something flying meant fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles — systems designed to kill other jets, not to swat a hobby drone out of the traffic pattern without putting a missile through a hangar.

Everything That Kills a Drone

The lab is asking for two things: sensors that detect, identify and track incoming drones, and effectors that destroy them. The effector wish-list reads like a catalogue of the entire counter-drone industry — guided rockets, drone-on-drone interceptors, high-energy lasers, and high-power microwave weapons that fry electronics across a whole formation at once.

It does not exist in a vacuum. The Pentagon has already begun fielding laser and microwave systems to five installations, stood up dedicated air base air defence units, and — after replicating a Ukrainian-style drone raid at a Florida range — concluded that its bases at home are far more exposed than anyone was comfortable admitting. The Battle Lab is where those lessons get turned into a shopping list.

A snapshot of how fast the counter-drone industry is multiplying, from a 2026 defence exposition.

The Clock Is a Shahed

The urgency is not theoretical. Cheap one-way attack drones like Iran’s Shahed have shown that a few thousand dollars of airframe can threaten targets that used to require a cruise missile, and mysterious drone incursions over U.S. strategic bases have repeatedly gone unpunished for lack of a good way to respond. Every base full of parked aircraft is, from the air, an enormous and largely undefended target.

Industry has until the end of July to answer. The winning ideas get thrown into the August and December exercises, and a report lands on the Air Combat Command commander’s desk by year’s end. For once, the arms race the Air Force is trying to win is measured not in Mach numbers but in dollars per drone killed — and it is racing to get that number down before someone else drives it up.

Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine; DefenseScoop; Defense One; U.S. Air Force.