Federal records show CBP is moving from testing small drones to making them standard surveillance tools, expanding a network that can follow activity in real time and extend well beyond the border. US Customs and Border Protection is quietly doubling down on a surveillance strategy built around human-portable drones, according to federal contracting records reviewed by WIRED. The shift is pushing border enforcement toward a distributed system that can track activity in real time and, critics warn, may extend well beyond the border. New market research conducted this month shows that, rather than relying on larger, centralized drone platforms, CBP is concentrating on lightweight uncrewed aircraft that can be launched quickly by small teams, remain operational under environmental stress, and relay surveillance data directly to frontline units. The documents emphasize portability, fast setup, and integration with equipment already used by border patrol.

On 1 June, Ukraine stunned the world with an audacious attack against Russian airbases. Using cheap, small drones concealed inside trucks that had penetrated deep into Russian territory, Ukraine was able to hit dozens of nuclear-capable strategic bombers, taking out 7 billion of military hardware. The drone-smuggling attack, codenamed Operation Spiderweb, was an incredible feat of military planning – but it also highlighted a vulnerability that has defence chiefs around the world concerned that their assets could be hit next. "The risk potentials of small drone attacks to US or UK air bases right now are 100 per cent," says Robert Bunker at US consultancy firm C/O Futures. "You simply need a group with the intent and capability, which is a very low bar to overcome."

A routine training flight over Arizona in January 2023 took an unusual turn when a U.S. Air Force F-16D was struck by what was initially reported as an unidentified object, but now U.S. defense officials say was a small drone. Fox News confirmed that the incident, which occurred near Gila Bend, Arizona, on Jan. 19, 2023, was a routine training mission and was witnessed by the instructor pilot seated in the rear of the two-seat aircraft. According to a U.S. defense official, the pilot observed a "mostly white and orange object" collide with the left side of the aircraft canopy, the transparent covering over the cockpit. Initially, the object was thought to be a bird, a common hazard for aircraft. But after conducting checks during the flight and a detailed inspection upon landing at Tucson International Airport, the crew found "zero evidence" of a bird strike.

The Pentagon has said the mass production and deployment of systems to detect, track and neutralize small drones will be the next focus of its Replicator initiative as it seeks to better protect the "most critical" U.S. installations and forces around the globe. "My expectation is that Replicator 2 will deliver meaningfully improved C-sUAS (counter-small unmanned aerial system) protection to critical assets within 24 months of Congress approving funding," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote in a memorandum published Monday in which he also charged his deputy, Kathleen Hicks, with spearheading the new effort. "I am confident the Replicator Initiative will complement and advance the significant C-sUAS work already underway in the DoD (Department of Defense)," Austin said in the memo.

Reliable detection, localization and identification of small drones is essential to promote safe, secure and privacy-respecting operation of Unmanned-Aerial Systems (UAS), or simply, drones. This is an increasingly challenging problem with only single modality sensing, especially, to detect and identify small drones. In this work, a multi-stage fusion architecture using passive radio frequency (RF) and electro-optic (EO) imagery data is developed to leverage the synergies of the modalities to improve the overall tracking and classification capabilities. For detection with EO-imagery, supervised deep learning based techniques as well as unsupervised foreground/background separation techniques are explored to cope with challenging environments. Using real collected data for Group 1 and 2 drones, the capability of each algorithm is quantified. In order to compensate for any performance gaps in detection with only EO imagery as well as to provide a unique device identifier for the drones, passive RF is integrated with EO imagery whenever available. In particular, drone detections in the image plane are combined with passive RF location estimates via detection-to-detection association after 3D to 2D transformation. Final tracking is performed on the composite detections in the 2D image plane. Each track centroid is given a unique identification obtained via RF fingerprinting. The proposed fusion architecture is tested and the tracking and performance is quantified over the range to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches using simultaneously collected passive RF and EO data at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) through ESCAPE-21 (Experiments, Scenarios, Concept of Operations, and Prototype Engineering) data collect

Last year, DJI showed what was possible in a small drone with the Mini 3 Pro by fitting tons of technology and a high-quality camera into a sub-250 gram drone. Following that up was never going to be easy, but now (after numerous leaks) it's unveiled the Mini 4 Pro with a long list of new features. Aside from one improvement, the camera is largely the same. However, it has new omnidirectional obstacle sensors that eliminate the blind spots on the Mini 3 Pro. It also comes with a new feature called ActiveTrack 360 that lets you program camera moves when tracking a subject.

Drones attacked a military plant in Iran's central city of Isfahan, Tehran said on Sunday. "An explosion has occurred in one of the military centers affiliated to the Ministry of Defense," the deputy head of security for Isfahan Governorate Mohammad Reza Jan-Nesari told the semi-official Fars News Agency. Jan-Nesari said the explosion left some damage, "but fortunately there were no casualties." The state news agency IRNA later said the explosion had been caused by "small drones." "There was an unsuccessful attack by small drones against a defense ministry industrial complex and fortunately with predictions and air defense arrangements already in place, one of them (struck)," IRNA said in a post on Twitter, citing the country's defense ministry.

"The significance of drone swarms is that they can be conceivably applied to virtually any mission." Many nations are working on such swarms, including China, Russia, India, the UK, Turkey, and Israel, which in 2021 became the first nation to use swarming drones in combat. The US Navy has always been a leader in this field, and while they did not respond to requests to discuss their work, the budget documents that MIT Technology Review has read reveal ambitious plans for swarms vastly bigger than anything yet seen. Buried in hundreds of pages of budget numbers are details of several projects not previously revealed, which involve drone boats and submarines as well as uncrewed air vehicles. Together they fall under a project named Super Swarm.

With every release, DJI seems to pack more features into smaller and smaller drones. The Mavic 3 that launched last year was a relatively small drone with a mirrorless camera sensor, pro video quality and more. Now, it has brought a lot of that technology to an even tinier drone, the Mini 3 Pro. At 249 grams (8.8 ounces), the Mini 3 Pro is light enough to avoid most drone regulations. But DJI has managed to fit in a sensor larger than most smartphones, and it can detect obstacles all around.

In the snowy streets of the north Ukrainian town of Trostyanets, the Russian missile system fires rockets every second. Tanks and military vehicles are parked on either side of the blasting artillery system, positioned among houses and near the town's railway system. The weapon is not working alone, though. Hovering tens of meters above it and recording the assault is a Ukrainian drone. The drone isn't a sophisticated military system, but a small, commercial machine that anyone can buy.