Review – S 4515 Introduced – Combating Foreign Terrorist Drones

Back in June, Sen Romney (R,UT) introduced S 4515, the Combating Foreign Terrorist Drones Act of 2024. The bill would required DOD to provide to Congress an “intelligence assessment of foreign terrorist organization acquisition of unmanned aerial systems.” No new funding is authorized by this legislation.

Moving Forward

While Romney is not a member of the Senate Armed Forces Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration, his sole cosponsor {Sen Rosen (D,NV)} is a member. This means that there may be sufficient influence to see the bill considered in the Committee. I suspect that there will be substantial bipartisan support for the bill. Unfortunately, this bill is not politically important enough to be considered by the full Senate. This bill, however, would be well suited for consideration as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act which the Senate should take up in September.

Commentary

This bill is primarily aimed at drones that would be likely to be encountered by DOD personnel overseas. Part of the reason for that is the political restrictions on DOD operations in CONUS. In many ways this makes the assessment much more difficult because of the lack of authority (even to gather information) the Federal government has on overseas vendor and manufacturers of drones. While this bill cannot target terrorist drone attacks in this country, the efforts by DOD (and the intelligence community) to prevent foreign terrorist from using UAS on troops stationed overseas will have a potential beneficial affect on countering drone attacks here.

 

For more details about the provisions of this bill, including suggested added language to include UAS control system intelligence in the assessment report, in my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/s-4515-introduced - subscription required.