Anti-Assassination Drones

Next level drones fleets will be a significant part of securing cities and events against assassination and enhancing regular policing.

There needs to be balance of effective nuanced safety while embedding technical, societal and institutional controls to avoid dystopia. This will need to calibrated via annual referendums and citizen involvement in oversight, transparency and communication.

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in DC had 3,188 sworn officers as of early September 2025. The National Guard surge represented a roughly 72% increase in on-the-ground security personnel relative to the existing MPD force (calculated as 2,300 surged troops divided by 3,188 existing officers). The National Guard surge in Washington, DC, initiated in early August 2025 as part of a 30-day crime emergency declared by President Trump (which expired around September 10 but was extended through November 30 for some troops), involved deploying approximately 2,300 troops alongside federal law enforcement agents.

Violent crime declines ranged from 15-50%, with specific estimates including 23% shortly after deployment, 25% overall, 45% in the first 19 days, or up to 50% in some analyses. Carjacking declined 66-88%. Troops were primarily deployed to high-crime areas, which had above-average rates of violent and gun-related incidents, contributing to targeted deterrence.

There is across the US an overall understaffing and underbudgeting of police. These declines are relative to past decades. The calibration is to restore previously attained safety levels and effectively increasing modernizing policing and national guard to match current threats and problems. The argument that it would be dystopian is to say that the known experience and budgets for policing that people lived through and better public safety and felt were not dystopian.

Have referendums. If we restored budgets and staffing levels and used some effective combination of technology and had policies and public engagement and transparency with the goal of achieving some high level reductions in crime. This seems like getting back to a better safer society while maintaining the public connection and involvement with policing. Get something effective, matching the levels of problems while being affordable and not creating the right checks and balances.

Current US Spending on Policing and National Guard

Total US law enforcement spending (federal, state, and local) in 2025 is estimated at approximately $250 billion. This includes:Federal component: ~$60 billion, with the Department of Justice (DOJ) allocating $37.8 billion overall, of which $21.2 billion goes to core law enforcement activities (e.g., FBI, ATF, U.S. Marshals) and $3.7 billion in grants to state/local agencies for hiring, violence intervention, and tech upgrades.

State and local component: ~$190 billion, primarily for operational costs like salaries and patrols, up from $176.8 billion in 2023 due to rising demands for body cams, mental health response teams, and cyber units.

The US National Guard (NG) budget for 2025 is estimated at $25 billion, embedded within the broader Department of Defense (DoD) $849.8 billion request. This covers the Army National Guard ($18 billion, including $8.6 billion for operations and maintenance) and Air National Guard (~$7 billion). It supports ~432,700 personnel across readiness, domestic response, and overseas missions.

Spending on Police and Guard Gear
Police equipment spending is estimated at ~$10 billion in 2025, roughly 4% of total policing budgets. This includes ~$2 billion in federal transfers/military surplus via programs like 1033.

Gaps in Addressing New Threats and Budget Shift Scenarios
Traditional policing/NG focuses on ground-based response (patrols, riot control), but threats like terrorism, foreign drone infiltration, citizen assassinations and rising violent crime/murders (~20,000 homicides annually) demand proactive, tech-layered defenses. Current DoD counter-drone spending is ~$10 billion (part of uncrewed systems), but it’s fragmented and insufficient for domestic scalability, with reports noting US defenses as “insufficient” against swarms.

There was already the deployment of national guard in DC. There were about 2000 guard deployed and violent crime was halved in a City of 700,000.

20% Shift (~$55B total, ~$2.2B from gear, ~$40B from staff via automation/efficiency)

Deploy 10,000+ Fortem DroneHunters for urban perimeters (radar-net capture at $50K/unit, 85% efficacy against infiltrators) integrated with Anduril’s Lattice AI for anomaly detection (e.g., spotting radical assemblies via thermal/behavioral cues). Current systems like Skydio X10 add autonomous surveillance; future (2027+) Anduril Roadrunner-M variants enable reusable intercepts for assassination drones. Cities get partial TiVo monitoring(50% coverage via fixed cameras + drone swarms), $1B/year for a major metro. SpaceX could layer Starshield satellites (~$500M for 1,000 low-orbit imagers) for real-time vehicle/human tracking.

50% Shift (~$137.5B total, ~$5.5B from gear, ~$100B from staff)

Transformative—full city-wide persistent vision via 50,000 drones (e.g., Anduril Ghost for stealth patrols) + AI hubs processing 1PB/day data for real-time alerts (e.g., flagging weapon anomalies or foreign UAS signatures). Fortem scales to swarm defenses; future systems like Anduril’s Altius-700M add loitering munitions for active threat neutralization (non-lethal variants for civilians). Affordable TiVo-style archiving ($5B/year nationwide) via edge computing. SpaceX deploys 10,000+ orbital assets ($2B) for 4K global monitoring, fused with ground layers.

Drone companies Fortem and Anduril have interesting systems with more capable drones and AI added for more intelligent control.