US Security Officials Prepare for LA28 Olympics After One Drone Appeared as Three at World Cup
The US Department of Homeland Security has begun planning security for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, including counter-drone defenses. The summer World Cup showed that systems from different vendors still lack software to reconcile their data.
Officials at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Thursday that security planning for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics has already begun, with drones and counter-drone systems among the missions they are preparing for. Planning started right after this summer's World Cup, which was held in US cities. A key lesson is that systems from different vendors still cannot understand one another.
One drone, three detections
Ryan Riccucci, a senior adviser at Customs and Border Protection (CBP), said in October that he saw nine screens in a World Cup command center. One showed the same drone detected three times, while another carried the only vendors able to tell whether one or three drones were airborne. He said the cause is language: agencies, vendors and data sets use different terms for the same object. He compared the missing software to a translation app for data and said he does not want ten dots on a map for a single drone, FedScoop reported.
DHS officials have described the tournament's drone mitigation and command center hubs as successes. The Department of Transportation counted more than 700 drones seized across the 11 host cities.
The $1.5 billion counter-drone contract
In August DHS opened a counter-drone contract worth up to $1.5 billion that runs into 2031. It has two tracks: hardware and software with a ceiling above $1 billion (seven vendors, including Fortem and D-Fend), and services with a ceiling below $500 million (seven vendors, including Anduril and GDIT). Minimum requirements include detecting a drone at 2 km (1.2 miles), tracking at least three at once and stopping one at 500 meters (1,640 feet).
Costly single-use drones
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on November 9 that one of the attack drones his department uses costs $40,000 to produce, flies once, and is not economically feasible. He urged industry to build more affordable systems.
Brian Cavanaugh, DHS under secretary for management, said the exact cost of top-level Olympic drone security is hard to pin down. California will receive $18.7 million from FEMA's second counter-drone funding round, 46% less than it got for the World Cup.
