Northcom’s next counter-drone demo will be its first in an urban area
YUMA PROVING GROUND, Ariz. — U.S. Northern Command’s next Falcon Peak exercise will focus for the first time on safely integrating and demonstrating counter-drone capabilities in a dense city setting that’s bustling with human activity, Brig. Gen. Jason “Ox” Rueschhoff told DefenseScoop on Thursday.
“Homeland defense is not about protecting from outside, it’s also protecting inside,” said Rueschhoff, Northcom’s director of operations. “We could do one without taking care of the other, and that’s not the right answer.”
Responding to questions from a small group of reporters who were invited to cover the command’s Falcon Peak 26.2 experiments on America’s southern border this week, he previewed plans for the fifth major drone-fighting test that’s forthcoming in the ongoing series.
“For us, this is all about experimenting to win,” he said. “And that’s kind of how we like to look at this — getting the right capabilities to the warfighters.”
Falcon Peak is a recurring joint military exercise designed to prove and refine rapidly maturing technologies that can sense, monitor, and mitigate rogue and hostile small unmanned aerial systems.
Northcom initiated these counter-UAS trials in October 2024, immediately after its appointment as the U.S. military’s lead synchronizer to set baseline domestic testing procedures.
Broadly, the first three iterations of this exercise prioritized ready-to-use defense platforms to help the services make faster and more informed purchasing decisions. The ultimate aim was to accelerate the adoption of in-demand equipment to get after drone intrusions increasingly escalating across the nation.
Over the last month, in its fourth instance, Falcon Peak 26.2 was the first to home in on directly defending against drone threats targeting America’s assets, airspace and critical infrastructure around the sprawling U.S.-Mexico border.
“We took the opportunity here for a southern border kind of operational environment. You’ve seen a lot of UAS incursions across the continental United States, so that is the next focal point that we’re looking at — it’s how do we have a better engagement sequence [and] how do we have better capabilities? It’s a different problem set inside an urban environment,” Rueschhoff told DefenseScoop. “And so, the big things for us to be focused on will be collateral damage issues.”
As he suggested, a combination of legal and regulatory restrictions, technical detection limitations, and severe cost and safety imbalances in domestic airspace make it much more complex for the joint force to take down drones over the continental United States.
“Some of the things that we were able to do out here — if you looked out sitting on the runway,” Rueschhoff noted, “you could see that there’s not a whole lot of interference possibilities from buildings, facilities, or radars out there.”
There will be some, he said. However, he expects that once structure size, local capacity and metropolitan congestion are introduced, there will be new problem sets for the command to creatively work out.
“So that will be the focal point for the next [Falcon Peak] — more of an urban environment,” Rueschhoff said. “I think that’ll be really telling for capabilities, and this will get at more than just our borders, but it’ll be about how we defend inside of the United States, as well.”
He did not indicate when or in what city the urban-focused counter-drone exercise would take place. “We’re working on that,” Rueschhoff said.
