NDAA directs Pentagon’s UAP office to team with new counter-drone task force

The conferenced version of the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act would require the Pentagon office charged with investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) to partner with a new counter-drone task force that lawmakers want the U.S. military to establish.

UAP is the modern term for UFOs and mysterious transmedium objects.

The bill, released Saturday by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, includes provisions aimed at beefing up the Defense Department’s capabilities for detecting and defeating unmanned aerial systems — which are a growing threat in the United States and abroad.

Just last month, U.S. and U.K. military personnel were actively monitoring installations around and airspace over Royal Air Force Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall, RAF Feltwell and RAF Fairford for mysterious small drones that have been repeatedly spotted near those bases. Law enforcement agencies have also been responding to public reports about strange drone sightings in New Jersey, according to news outlets.

Section 925 of the NDAA would task the secretary of defense, no later than 30 days after the enactment of the legislation, to establish or designate from existing organizations and personnel of the department a “C-UAS Task Force.’’

“Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acting through the C-UAS Task Force, shall review and, if necessary, consolidate and update all Department of Defense memoranda and directives related to the countering of unmanned aircraft systems in United States airspace to provide clarity to and an expedited decision-making process for commanders with respect to effectively countering unmanned aircraft systems or unmanned aircraft incursions at military installations in the United States,” the bill states.

In addition to issuing new guidance related to authorities to counter drones, the head of the DOD would be responsible for ensuring that such guidance is included in pre-briefings for any officers that assume command of a military installation in the United States on or after July 1, 2025.

“Not later than 60 days after the issuance of the memoranda, directives, and guidance required by [this legislation] … each commander of a military installation shall issue operating procedures specific to their military installation for countering unmanned aircraft systems at the installation,” the bill states.

The Pentagon chief would also have to provide a report to the congressional defense committees, within 120 days after the date of the enactment of the NDAA on the U.S. military’s counter-drone training efforts.

After the task force is stood up, lawmakers want it to partner with the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which investigates reports of UAP. That organization recently reached “full operational capability,” officials told DefenseScoop.

Section 1089 of the NDAA would mandate cooperation between the UAP office and the task force.

“The Director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office of the Department of Defense shall designate one or more employees of the Office to act as a liaison with the Counter Unmanned Aerial Systems Task Force … to improve coordination of efforts and support enabling capabilities of mutual benefit,” the bill states.

The liaisons would be responsible for conducting information-sharing between AARO and the task force on identified or suspected drones, including incident reporting, incident responses, and data on the technical characterization of the known or suspected threats; coordinating the development of technical capabilities for sensing and response to threats; and developing coordinated tactics, techniques and procedures for incident response.

The NDAA must be passed by the full House and Senate and signed by the president to become law.

The bill is moving forward amid concerns among lawmakers and others that some UAP cases could be advanced drones developed by foreign adversaries.

Officials are hoping that sensor technologies built to aid AARO’s work can be used to detect unmanned aerial systems. That office has a prototype system called Gremlin that is being deployed. The Georgia Tech Research Institute developed the Gremlin architecture, which has “several sensing modalities to detect, track, characterize and identify UAP in areas of interest,” officials wrote in a recent AARO report.

At a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities hearing last month, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., chair of the subcommittee, noted her concerns about drone incidents near sensitive national security facilities, such as Langley Air Force Base.

“UAS continue to pose significant threats to our national security. In addition to safety of flight issues, these UAS create for our own pilots and air crew, the UAS present clear and undeniable counterintelligence concerns around some of the most sensitive airspace. While standard UAS are not part of AARO’s mission, your work on sensors at military installations across the country will be critical to making sure that we have the domain awareness necessary to accurately identify and track these objects,” she told AARO’s new director, Jon Kosloski. “I expect your office to also pay close attention to any anomalous characteristics that these systems could present in the future.”

Kosloski was asked how his organization might assist the U.S. military and intelligence community with analyzing and identifying drones.

“We are generally going to be supporting them through an advisory capacity as an organization that naturally needs to conduct baseline experiments of the environment to see what normal looks like, whether it’s balloons, birds, anomalous activity, or drones flying through an environment. We’re going to gather a lot of data that will allow us to characterize an environment very well, and then detect and follow those tracks, hopefully rather efficiently. There’s also a lot of overlap in the type of sensors that are going to be used for the counter-UAS mission and the UAP mission, whether that’s active detection, like radars or passive like cameras. And so as AARO is trying to push the bounds on detectability for UAP, we’re hopefully going to have best practices that we can also provide to the counter-UAS [community], and potentially we might have additional technologies that we can offer them to support,” he said.

Last week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a new classified strategy for countering uncrewed systems. An unclassified fact sheet about the strategy did not explicitly mention AARO.