Five years after the Pentagon created an office to coordinate its counter-drone efforts, it’s trying again.
The new Joint Interagency Task Force 401 will spearhead the acquisition and integration of air defense systems to take down small unmanned aerial systems, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday in a video first posted to X.
The group will “rapidly deliver Joint C-sUAS capabilities to America’s warfighters, defeat adversary threats, and promote sovereignty over national airspace,” Hegseth wrote in a memo dated Wednesday.
The memo also shuts down the existing Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, which has been around since February 2020. It will also integrate the department’s Replicator 2 efforts.
“The JCO had great intentions but struggled to compel the different services and organizations to participate,” an Army official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told Defense One. “Whereas the JIATF will have a lot more ability to coordinate and compel.”
Hegseth’s “priorities for transformation and acquisition reform include improving C-sUAS mobility and affordability and integrating capabilities into warfighter formations,” he wrote in the memo.
Hegseth’s memo lays out several guidelines for standing up the new task force:
- It will have a director with acquisition authority, who will submit unfunded requirements for the 2026 fiscal year within the next 30 days.
- It will immediately begin recruiting a technical lead and four personnel from the military services “with operations, acquisition, electronic warfare (EW), intelligence, or other C-sUAS competencies to include one officer in the grade of O-5 or higher who will have access to his or her Military Service’ s decision-making officials.”
- The under secretary of defense for research and engineering has 30 days to make recommendations on establishing a designated c-sUAS test and training range.
- The Army has five days to submit requirements to the Pentagon building’s management for office space required to house the JIATF.
- The Army has 30 days to submit its full implementation plan to the defense secretary, and will update the secretary on progress monthly.
In addition to this new DOD-wide effort to procure and employ counter-drone capabilities, the services have been working on their own acquisitions, which will continue, according to the memo.
The Marine Corps this summer began fielding counter-drone systems to every infantry squad, while the Army is working on its own solutions.
The JIATF, the Army official said, can coordinate some of those efforts across the services.
“If we’ve got a good solution to a problem that everybody has, let’s scale that solution, vice everybody trying to solve the problem independently,” the official said.
