How could terrorists use drones to cause harm?

Mapping and Disrupting Emerging Illicit UAS Supply Chains

Project Summary

Mexico-based drug cartels, several of which were designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations in 2025, have adopted commercial drones for smuggling, surveillance, and attack, and the supply chains that let them do so have become more decentralized and harder to distinguish from ordinary commercial drone activity. Defeating individual flights at the border addresses the symptom, so this project works upstream at the network level instead, building on prior NCITE work.

Purpose/Objectives

This project gives CBP National Targeting Center analysts and their DHS counterparts an indicators and warnings framework, a geographic prioritization method, and a working assessment tool that together support risk assessment, targeting, lead development, and upstream disruption of cartel drone procurement and modification networks rather than interdiction of individual flights.

Method

Task 1 conducts structured collection and analysis of open-source material, including academic research, government and policy reports, investigative journalism, online technical repositories, commercial UAS information, and conflict-zone reporting on non-state adaptation of commercial drones, then applies location-allocation methods combining qualitative assessment with geospatial and network logic. Task 2 refines the assessment tool iteratively against synthetic end-user data.