The South Dakota Wing’s latest contribution to homeland defense was to arrive, on schedule, as the airspace violation. Members flew 10 drone flights for the South Dakota Air National Guard’s 114th Fighter Wing during Operation EDGECRUSHER, a Combat Readiness Inspection near Joe Foss Field in Sioux Falls in which unpaid auxiliary pilots provided the unauthorized aircraft and the fighter wing was graded on appearing to mind.
U.S. Northern Command counts unmanned aircraft among the evolving asymmetric threats to military installations. Some incursions, the briefing notes, are hobbyists. Some have been drug cartels and foreign agents. For one inspection week in South Dakota they were Maj. Tyler Gross, an FAA-licensed commercial drone pilot, and 1st Lt. Travis Robinson, who later debriefed the simulated UAS scenario as both the problem and the visiting experts on having been it.
First Air Force, which manages Civil Air Patrol’s federal auxiliary missions in support of homeland defense, oversaw the arrangement. Homeland defense, in this instance, required volunteers with spare batteries.
A Contested Environment With a Mission Number
The weeklong inspection tested the 114th’s ability to shift from normal operations to a wartime posture and to generate, defend, and sustain combat airpower in a contested and degraded environment. Civil Air Patrol supplied the contest. The wing launched small remote-piloted aircraft near the installation. The fighter wing evaluated coordination, communication, and response procedures. For operational security reasons, those procedures are not described, which leaves EDGECRUSHER on the public record chiefly as an event in which CAP successfully took off.
Capt. Kurt Johnson, a CAP drone technician, called the work unique and exciting. Launching a drone over a National Guard base and knowing that within minutes the base was responding to the simulated threat was, he said, “a great feeling,” even though everything carried the caveat “exercise, exercise.” The great feeling of being noticed by people assigned to notice you is not a new line of work for the wing. South Dakota CAP airplanes have long served the 114th as targets for F-16 intercept training and as survey traffic along Air Guard low-level routes. EDGECRUSHER merely updated the airframe. The volunteers are still the thing the jets are supposed to deal with. They are just smaller now.
Maj. Gross found it fulfilling to combine a passion for drone flying with “realistic training scenarios in the rapidly evolving world of unmanned aerial systems.” The realism consisted of an actual drone, an actual airfield, and a shared understanding that nobody involved was a cartel.
Preferred Partner, on Account of Already Owning the Problem
Civil Air Patrol was an early user of the small photography drones that later became a homeland-defense talking point. The South Dakota Wing flew CAP’s first missing-person search-and-rescue drone sorties in September 2019. Nebraska inspected a damaged dam with a UAS the same year. South Dakota has since tracked wildlife for Game, Fish and Parks and collected more than 786,000 multispectral images for the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. That résumé — lost hikers, cracked concrete, deer, and academic vegetation — made the wing a preferred vendor for simulating the sort of incursion otherwise attributed to foreign intelligence.
The aircraft on the pad was a Skydio X10D, the same machine Maj. Donny Weiand supervises on automatic landing after it has mapped a hiking trail for a simulated missing hiker, taking hundreds of visible-light and infrared photographs along a pre-programmed course. Automatic landing is a useful skill in a mission whose operational peak is remaining airborne long enough for an inspected unit to record that it responded.
The wing’s other recent partners include the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Global Strike Command after a crash, and the FAA, which requires an escort when Air Force MQ-9s move through civilian airspace. The through-line does not vary. When the Air Force needs an extra airplane that does not count as the Air Force, the auxiliary is free. When it needs an unauthorized drone that will still file a mission report, the auxiliary is free for that as well.
Gross called the inspection one of the unique opportunities membership has afforded him: doing the things he loves while helping his community. The community, this week, was a fighter wing that needed someone to play the drone it is supposed to stop, and then to wait politely for the words “exercise, exercise.”