In recent decades Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) have been employed by adversaries to gain an asymmetric advantage over United States (US) Border Patrol (BP). While US Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) capability gap for defending against threat SUAS is large, other US agencies such as Department of Defense organizations and civil law enforcement also desire increased counter-SUAS (C-SUAS) capability. In this work, research was conducted with U.S. CBP to understand the magnitude of the C-SUAS issue. Their needs for a C-SUAS system and the respective rankings of those needs were recorded. While CBP was the primary end-user considered in this study, other US federal agencies were also questioned, providing similar results. The primary methods of data collection included one-on-one interview and surveys. The results of the data collection revealed that reform of federal C-SUAS policies is needed in the interest of national security and more-capable technology is needed to adequately counter the growing and varied threat. This work serves to clarify the C-SUAS technology requirements for effective border security, derived from first-person accounts of CBP Agents in the field.
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