Guest post: Dawn Zoldi on “Aligning Law and Reality in the Drone Age: A Ground‑Level View”
Lawfire® contributor Dawn Zoldi (Colonel, USAF, Retired), one of the nation’s very top drone law experts, returns today to give us an update on the challenges of governing the rapidly increasing numbers of small drones.
She contends that “we must align federal authority, local capability, community expectations, the technical systems that connect them, and training for operators and the attorneys that advise them,” and, of course, we need to get the necessary funding. Here’s her insightful essay:
Aligning Law and Reality in the Drone Age: A Ground‑Level View
By: Dawn Zoldi (Colonel, USAF Ret.)*
The Cipher Brief’s “American Drones” piece rightly highlights the rapid proliferation of small uncrewed aircraft and the structural gaps in how we govern them.
From my vantage point working with state, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) agencies, tracking recent U.S. legal reforms, and working with dozens of industry experts as publisher for Autonomy Global, I see a complementary challenge. While our authorities are finally starting to catch up, our funding, training and local political will are not.
The Awareness Gap No One Wants to Pay For
I share the authors’ view that we urgently need affordable, scalable low‑altitude airspace awareness and management tools for safety, security and operational visibility. Those tools actually exist today—UTM‑adjacent platforms like the Virginia Flight Information Exchange (FIX), commercial systems from companies such as Airwayz, Airspace Link, Speedbird Aero, Flight Insight and a growing ecosystem of supplemental data and Remote ID services.
What is missing is not technology so much as demand at the local level. Agencies repeatedly tell us they have neither the discretionary dollars nor the political support to invest in “invisible” infrastructure that only becomes salient when something goes wrong. Even where state aviation departments or DOTs pilot visionary models, those efforts are exceptions, not the rule. And they are often dependent on short‑term grants.
New Authorities, Old Budget Realities
On Lawfire I have argued that the real danger in counter‑UAS is constitutional confusion, not the technology itself. Congress has now taken a major step toward resolving at least part of that confusion. The 2026 NDAA’s SAFER SKIES provisions extend carefully cabined counter‑UAS authority to trained and certified SLTT law enforcement and certain correctional officers, giving them a lawful path to detect, track and, when necessary, mitigate credible drone threats. The FBI, for its part, has stood up a National Counter‑UAS Training Center at Redstone Arsenal and has already begun training its first cadre of state and local officers.
This is real progress, but only half the equation. These tools sit on top of a complex web of surveillance, wiretap and aviation statutes, and they require sustained investment in training, legal guidance, oversight and technology refresh. Outside of special events funded with FIFA, FEMA or similar grant dollars, most local jurisdictions still lack the resources to procure counter‑UAS as a service, hire subject‑matter experts or field automated monitoring platforms at scale.sites.
Federal Authority vs. Local Capability
The Cipher Brief authors are right to emphasize the widening divide between federal authority and local capability. A small set of federal agencies—DoD, DOE, DHS and DOJ—continue to hold the most robust counter‑UAS powers, and even those are tightly controlled, time‑limited and subject to extensive interagency coordination. SAFER SKIES begins to narrow the gap by allowing properly trained SLTT officers to “break the law within the law” when dealing with rogue drones, but those authorities are still new, procedurally complex and operationally fragile.
On the ground, sheriffs and police chiefs confront very practical questions: Who will write our policies? Who will train our operators? Who will stand up 24/7 legal and technical support so our people are not forced to make split‑second counter‑UAS decisions in a vacuum? Until we answer those questions with concrete funding and resourcing mechanisms, expanded authority risks remaining more aspirational than operational.
The 250‑Gram Problem and the Privacy Mirage
The article’s discussion of the 250‑gram threshold surfaces another blind spot: the sheer number of sub‑250‑gram aircraft that fall below registration requirements and, in practice, below meaningful oversight. When Congress mandated registration for recreational flyers after earlier legal challenges, the original “toy drone” rationale largely evaporated, but the technical and enforcement realities remained.
Some have suggested that what we need is not more regulation but smarter, localized monitoring combined with privacy protection for smaller, unregistered aircraft. In theory, that sounds attractive; in practice, it runs into two hard facts. First, the FAA does not regulate privacy, which means any privacy guardrails around drone monitoring must come from other statutes, policies and oversight frameworks.
Second, passive RF monitoring and related tools raise nuanced Fourth Amendment questions that courts and policymakers are only beginning to work through, as I have written in assessing counter‑UAS testimony and case law. “Monitoring plus privacy” is a worthy goal, but achieving it will require far more than a simple technical overlay on today’s rules.
Geography, Infrastructure and the Coming Urban Aviation Wave
Where I strongly echo the Cipher Brief authors is on geography. Rural and urban America truly are different markets, with different risk profiles, political dynamics and infrastructure baselines. But the same low‑altitude awareness backbone that can help a rural sheriff track a drug‑running quadcopter will also underpin dense Urban Air Mobility corridors, advanced air mobility services and complex, overlapping drone operations in our largest cities.
Industry groups like the Commercial Drone Alliance, AUVSI, DRONERESPONDERS and others have been sounding this alarm for years: without deliberate investment in shared infrastructure, standards and training, we risk hard‑coding inequity into the future of aviation.
The challenge before us is not solely regulatory. It is fundamentally an infrastructure and funding problem, tied to public trust and local political will. If we want millions of drones, and eventually new classes of aircraft (think: air taxis) to integrate safely into American skies, we must align federal authority, local capability, community expectations, the technical systems that connect them and training for operators and the attorneys that advise them. And then we must make the necessary funding available to actually pay for all of this.
About the Author
Colonel Zoldi, USAF (Ret.)
Dawn M.K. Zoldi (Colonel, USAF, Retired) is a licensed attorney with 28 years of combined active duty military and federal civil service to the U.S. Air Force. She is an award-winning and internationally recognized expert on uncrewed aircraft system law and policy, CEO & Founder of P3 Tech Consulting and Publisher of Autonomy Global. Ms. Zoldi has been featured on Fox News, CNN, Forbes and Newsweek, on the PBS television network (episode show host, Emmy-nominated series) and hosts the weekly Dawn of Autonomy podcast. She is the author of the textbook Unmanned Aircraft Systems Legal and Business Considerations: A Modern Primer for U.S. Drone Programs. For more information, follow her on social media and visit her websites at: https://www.p3techconsulting.com and https://www.autonomyglobal.co.
The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect my views or those of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, or Duke University. (See also here).
Remember what we like to say on Lawfire®: gather the facts, examine the law, evaluate the arguments – and then decide for yourself!
