NPR on the Lawfare Drone Smackdown

Carrie Johnson had this piece about the Smackdown on NPR’s “All Things Considered” yesterday. It begins:

National Security Experts Go Rogue For 'Drone Smackdown'

It started as trash talk between two contributors to a national security blog. They decided to host a drone smackdown to see if one guy's machine could take down another.

Unarmed drones, of course. The kind you can put together with a toy-store model and $200 in modifications. But the game turned out to have some serious undertones.

First, a word about the location. For a moment last week, the whole drone smackdown was up in the air.

A park in Washington had been ruled out after the Federal Aviation Administration warned that machines not much bigger than your kid's toy helicopter didn't belong in D.C.'s restricted airspace.

"Rather to my surprise, I got a phone call from the FAA informing me that they considered it improper and illegal to run drones in Washington," says Ben Wittes, an architect of the drone competition. That includes even little rinky-dink, unarmed drones like these Parrot AR models.

So the race was on to find a new location, only days before the event. They settled on a grassy area in Manassas, Va., bordered by a pond, leafy trees and a patch of poison ivy.

Five contestants — aviation buffs and national security experts — arrived Sunday afternoon and began to unwrap their machines.