Why the Air Force is buying Chinese drones to train against Chinese drones

The squadron guarding America's Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming is preparing to fly refurbished DJI drones at its own perimeter. Not to surveil. As targets for counter-drone training.

The Air Force's own justification document calls DJI an "absolute operational necessity" for the 90th Missile Security Operations Squadron, the unit whose mission is protecting missile silos, launch facilities, and other strategic assets from ground and airborne threats. Federal solicitation FA461326Q1042, posted in August, seeks two refurbished DJI Mavic 2 Pro drones, two Mini 3 Pro drones, two Avata 2 Fly More Combos, and six payload-release devices. The payload-release hardware is the giveaway: the refurbished targets are not just being flown past radar. They are being used to simulate an adversary profile, dropping simulated payloads inside the perimeter.

DJI is on the Pentagon's entity list and effectively banned from operational use by the Defense Department. The training rationale runs straight through the limitation that ban imposes. The Air Force's own document argues that no approved US-made "Blue" drone can replicate DJI's radio-frequency signature, communication protocols, or flight characteristics. "Blue" is the Defense Department's label for drones cleared through its secure-and-trusted supply-chain process. Computer simulations also fall short, according to the justification.

DJI controls an estimated 80% to 85% of the global commercial drone market, by the Air Force's own figure. To train crews against the drone most adversaries can actually field, the service argues, the training target has to be the drone most adversaries can actually field.

Samuel Bendett, a military-drone-technology expert, put the same point more bluntly to Task & Purpose: "If you want to train in modern tactical drone combat, you got to train against the technology that's used in that tactical combat, and that's DJI. DJI is like the new AK-47 for combat right now: simple, easy to use, great out of the box."

The procurement is small. Stars and Stripes first reported the contract on August 17, and the Air Force's "absolute operational necessity" language is unusual for a service that has spent the past several years warning US personnel and contractors off the same Chinese-made platform. The Air Force is buying the drones anyway, through a training-target procurement lane that sits apart from the operational-use ban.

Lawmakers and defense officials have scrutinized DJI for years over data-routing and supply-chain concerns. The Air Force is openly weighing that scrutiny against a counter-drone training gap, and the resolution, for this contract, is a refurbished Mavic on a Wyoming flight line. Trade outlets have called this a banned-vendor buy; adjacent defense publications have called it a substitute gap. Both readings are true, and neither is the whole story without the other.

The Blue UAS list, the Defense Department's catalog of approved small drones, is the procurement path the Air Force is pointing at. The first approved entry on that list that flies, talks, and emits like a DJI will be the next F.E. Warren procurement story.