The U.S. Air Force is studying how to tap into the agility, speed and other advanced capabilities of small unmanned aerial vehicles that have proliferated in the private sector in recent years, a service official said April 12.
For example, Lt. Gen. Mark Nowland, deputy chief of staff for operations, mentioned the new sport of drone racing, in which pilots navigate fast-moving aircraft through sprawling obstacles courses, such as football stadiums and abandoned buildings. Drone racers typically wear goggles that display live video from their small UAVs. 
“They’re flying them through buildings, and some of these are flying up to 100 miles an hour, and you’ve got people controlling these,” Nowland said. “As an airman, how do we take advantage of this? We’re not sitting idly by. We’re thinking about how do we do it and where do we go with it.”
The Air Force’s “Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (SUAS) Flight Plan: 2016-2036,” released last April, says the service “finds itself behind the power curve” with SUAS and should “take significant steps to integrate and institutionalize an airmen-centric family of SUAS systems as exponential force multipliers across the air and cyber domains.”
Nowland, who spoke at the Air Force Association headquarters in Arlington, Va., mentioned drone racing at the end of his answer to a question about the service’s efforts to counter small UAVs used by adversaries, such as the Islamic State. In October, then-Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James called hostile drones an “emerging danger.”
Nowland said that two Air Force officials — Maj. Gen. Scott Vander Hamm, assistant deputy chief of staff for operations, and Rowayne “Wayne” Schatz Jr., associate deputy chief of staff for operations — meet every other week to discuss counter-UAV efforts, and that a “top colonel” is coordinating activities. The Air Force efforts involve Air Force Materiel Command, the Air Force Research Laboratory, warfighters and defenders, and non-Air Force entities, including the Joint Staff and the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization.
“We are trying to think holistically, across the entire spectrum, about how do you get after this threat,” Nowland said. “This is going to be a never-ending, new reality.”