Interview with Lt. Col. Adam Scher, Strategic Communications Advisor for the Joint Interagency Task Force-401

Lt. Col. Scher discusses how the Pentagon’s counter-drone task force is organizing its cross functional teams to quickly meet warfighter needs, including a focus on hiring experts and giving them authority to “inform decisions.”

Defense Daily’s Cal Biesecker interviewed Lt. Col. Scher on July 8, 2026, at Fort Benning, Ga., during an operational assessment of Perennial Autonomy’s Bumblebee V2 quadcopter drone that is equipped with automated target recognition (ATR) software for autonomous kinetic defeat of small adversary drones.

JIATF-401 brought together its own officials, operators from the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, and Perennial Autonomy engineers and technical representatives to assess BV2 performance in various scenarios and against different types of small drones to continually upgrade the capabilities of the ATR software.