Inside The $1.4 Billion Program The US Air Force Just Stood Up At Grand Forks To Defend Its Own Bases

Published Oct 4, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT Luke Diaz is a freelance military writer with experience with active duty experience in the US Navy as well as defense and industrial engineering. He is a former Naval Flight Officer who performed tactical air control on the carrier-based E-2 Hawkeye. In its budget for 2027, the US Air Force (USAF) has asked Congress for roughly $1.4 billion for a mission the service spent nearly 80 years delegating to the Army. The multi-billion-dollar request is roughly double the previous year. At the Air, Space and Cyber Conference this month, Chief of Staff General Ken Wilsbach announced the service is standing up its first point defense career specialty. This will give airmen a permanent role in defending air bases from drones and missiles instead of borrowing the mission from the Army as a 'side hustle.' However, budget planning and new enlisted specialties don't explain on their own why a service that has historically leaned on the Army for ground-based air defense suddenly decided to make this a major mission. For decades, the Air Force treated point defense as an additional duty for existing security forces. This sudden shift highlights a growing institutional realization that the nature of modern aerial warfare has fundamentally changed. The rush to reprioritize an outsourced tactical role has been directly driven by the recent conflict in both Ukraineand Iran. The Attack That Forced The Issue Credit: Department of Defense On March 27, Iranian ballistic missiles and drone swarms struck Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia as part of a broader conflict known as Operation Epic Fury. The strike badly damaged an Air Force E-3G Sentry early warning aircraft valued at $250 million, along with several KC-135 Stratotanker refueling jets parked on the flight line. This devastating attack marked the third major strike on the base since the war began, which had already seen five KC-135s damaged on March 13. Reports indicated that the base hosted six E-3 Sentries before the strike, reducing the critical surveillance fleet at a dangerous moment. The barrage also wounded around ten US service members, leaving two of them in serious condition. Losing a high-value AWACS platform does far more than remove a single airframe from inventory. It severely compresses a theater's early warning and battle management coverage right when an adversary is demonstrating it can destroy American assets on the ground. This physical vulnerability is what turns an abstract budget request into an urgent one, forcing the Air Force to reconsider its entire base defense strategy. A Side Hustle Becomes A Career Field Credit: Department of Defense Wilsbach said the service is advancing two connected initiatives to protect forward airbases. The first brings together kinetic and non-kinetic weapons systems to secure installations from incoming threats. The second doctrinal change establishes a dedicated career field of point defense airmen. He was quoted by Air & Space Forces Magazine as saying: “We can no longer treat point defense as a side hustle. We must make it a core function of air and space power.” Task & Purpose reported that Wilsbach described the change as an effort to turn installation defense into a core Air Force mission. To underscore the urgency, he noted that two airmen recently tracked an Iranian drone swarm and shot down ten approaching aircraft themselves. This career field arrives alongside new contracts, including a July award to Tandem Defense worth up to $90 million for aerial denial interceptor drones. Major General Frank Verdugo, the Department of the Air Force’s top uniformed budget official, was quoted by Air & Space Forces Magazine in April: “This investment is fundamental to our core mission of defending the homeland and protecting our forward-deployed assets. The substantial increase [would] ensure our forces can operate securely from anywhere in the world.” What The Money Actually Buys Credit: Department of Defense Financially, the fiscal 2027 request breaks down to $318 million for ABADS-MD, $518 million for the SUADS drone-defeat variant, and $85.3 million for research and development. Procurement is ramping up accordingly, climbing from 11 ABADS-MD systems bought in the first year to 18 planned for the year ahead. The Air Force has leveraged a ten-year, $953 million contract awarded to Parsons Corp as well. The program to introduce organic ground-based air defenses to the USAF is collectively known as the Air Base Air Defense System. It is a program split into two distinct variants. The first, the Small Unmanned Aircraft Defense System, or SUADS, pairs a command and control system with electronic warfare tools designed to detect, track, and defeat small drones. The second variant, ABADS-MD, is built around a passive sensor that listens for the radio frequency emissions of incoming targets rather than transmitting a radar signal. That sensor feeds directly into the Tactical Operations Center-Light, a relocatable command and control node that the Kansas Air National Guard's 134th Air Control Squadron. Since testing began in 2024, troops have described this mobile hub as central to defending both major airfield hubs and the smaller, dispersed sites favored under Agile Combat Employment. This dual-variant system forms the primary technological shield for forward airbases. Grand Forks Becomes The Test Bed Credit: Department of Defense In October 2025, Air Combat Command selected the 319th Reconnaissance Wing at Grand Forks Air Force Base, supported by the Kansas Air National Guard's 184th Wing, to lead the newly created Point Defense Battle Lab. This hub is built specifically to develop the tactics, techniques, and procedures airmen will need to defend military installations against small drones. The laboratory runs monthly exercises and has issued multiple requests for information to private defense industry partners as the wing works to rapidly advance air defense systems. Master Sgt. BreeAnn Sachs, a spokesperson for the 319th, told Air & Space Forces Magazine in July: “The team is gaining a lot of really valuable data. They have a whole data analysis team that’s developing the tactics, techniques, and procedures, like what do Airmen do if they see a drone, what does that process look like?" " We have a dozen different forms for different kinds of technology that vendors can fill out. If a vendor doesn’t perfectly fit either one of those, we do have a way for them to apply. And then if we have an exercise that's more specialized than those two RFIs, we have their information.” The lab opened its permanent facility on April 9, with Senators John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony. The event is also used as a platform to highlight the lab's mission to develop broader uncrewed aircraft ecosystem technology for the Air Force. Base commander, Colonel Alfred Rosales, also reaffirmed that the wing is actively committing more troops and funding to its new mission. A Mission The Army Has Always Held Credit: Department of Defense In practice, the Army fields the higher end of the layered defense protecting US bases abroad. This includes Patriot batteries, Avenger systems, and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems against ballistic missiles. It also covers shorter-range tools like the Centurion Counter-Rocket, Artillery, Mortar system and the Coyote drone interceptor. Addressing the scale of the threat, Brigadier General Jason Cantwell told Air & Space Forces Magazine that point defense alone will not solve the problem. A determined adversary can now launch hundreds or thousands of drones at an airfield to stop it from generating combat sorties. Cantwell noted that the military simply lacks the mass arsenal of weapons to stop all these incoming aircraft. He argued the Air Force also needs offensive counter-air capabilities to destroy drones before they launch, a mission the service has already tested through Task Force Scorpion Strike's Low-cost Unmanned Combat System. Task & Purpose reported that the Air Force is now seeking its own ground-based, medium-caliber gun. This is meant to fill a tactical gap that those Army systems were never built to cover cheaply. The gun will be deployable en masse and provide the kind of protection necessary when a Patriot interceptor is far too expensive to fire at a target like a commercial-grade quadcopter. Counter-Drone Tech Being Tested Downrange Credit: Department of Defense In April, US Air Forces Central awarded Skydio a contract worth more than $9 million to install its Dock and X10 autonomous drone systems at bases across the Middle East. DroneXL reported that the system, built in Hayward, California, launches a drone in under 20 seconds when a base's sensors flag a threat. It then streams live video back to a Base Defense Operations Center without requiring troops to scramble to a launch site to deploy reconnaissance drones. That kind of fast, cheap, and expendable capability is exactly the layer the Army's higher-end systems were never designed to provide. It is also the sort of tool the new point defense airmen at Grand Forks will eventually be trained to operate as a matter of routine duty rather than an emergency add-on. Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink gave a statement on the urgent need for the USAF to push ahead with air defense programs in May: “Nuclear deterrence and cyber are some of the biggest threats that we face, but defending our air bases, not only overseas but in the homeland, has become an increasingly high priority. I think we agree 100 percent that Airmen and Guardians have a responsibility to defend our air bases and defend our forces, regardless of where they are. We are focusing on electronic warfare to direct energy to kinetic capabilities to defend our Airmen and Guardians.” Wilsbach's two-year timeline for standing up the career field, and the Air Force's pending decision on an anti-drone machine gun, mean the next real test of this buildup will not be a budget hearing. Instead, it will be whether the airmen, sensors, and interceptors being stood up under ABADS will actually be in place at a forward airfield the next time an adversary tries what Iran already did to Prince Sultan.