New Jersey College Adds Counter-Drone Training to Its Curriculum

Warren County Community College has been quietly building one of the best drone training programs in America from a campus in Washington, New Jersey that most people in the industry couldn’t find on a map.

Now it’s adding something no other higher education institution in the country currently offers at scale: a formal counter-drone security curriculum, taught by two of the most credentialed C-UAS professionals available, starting this fall, as Community College Daily reported.

The timing isn’t accidental. A $1,000 drone nearly taking down a $200 million F-22 is no longer a thought experiment. It’s a policy problem that the United States government is actively trying to solve, and it turns out New Jersey got there first.

What WarrenUAS Actually Is

Before getting to the new program, the existing one deserves more credit than it typically receives. WarrenUAS launched in 2018 and has spent seven years accumulating credentials that most four-year universities haven’t managed. It was the first community college in the country to obtain a Part 107.39 waiver to fly drones over people.

It holds a 44807 exception, one of only five in the country, allowing it to train students on drones weighing over 55 lbs.

It has BVLOS waivers, a $500,000 Smith Flight Training Center, 6,000 square feet of laboratory space, a fleet of more than 75 aircraft across more than 30 distinct platforms, $5 million worth of total drone and robotic equipment, and a formal pathway agreement with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

The FAA liked the program enough to host its regional Droning On safety conference on campus. Senator Cory Booker visited and secured $699,000 in federal funding for its precision agriculture curriculum.

AUVSI gave President Will Austin its Member of the Year award in 2022. Graduates are getting job offers before they finish the degree, often at starting salaries above $100,000.

All of this is happening at a community college in Warren County, New Jersey, population approximately 110,000. The lesson here is that institutional ambition and zip code are not the same thing.

The Two People Building the C-UAS Curriculum

The counter-drone program is being designed and overseen by Brandon Youngblood and L. Scott Parker, and their combined résumé reads like someone assembled a C-UAS advisory committee and then accidentally built an entire college course out of it.

Youngblood is a former FAA manager who was directly responsible for UAS security oversight, interagency counter-UAS operations coordination, and security airspace management. He now serves as vice president for government programs at Spatial Persistent Software Air Domain Awareness.

His framing of why this program matters is direct: a thousand-dollar drone could potentially take out a $200 million F-22 fighter jet, poison a water supply, or cripple an airport. He’s not being dramatic. He’s describing scenarios that C-UAS professionals have been modeling for years.

Parker comes from the other side of the same problem. As a senior leader at CISA, he served as chief of UAS security, established the agency’s first dedicated UAS security program, and helped shape the federal approach to managing drone-related cyber and physical risks. He also launched CISA’s “Be Air Aware” public awareness campaign.

More relevantly for anyone who remembers the weeks of mystery drone sightings over New Jersey and New York in late 2024, Parker was the person coordinating flight restrictions over sensitive sites in the region during that incident. He didn’t just study the problem from a desk. He managed it in real time over populated American airspace.

What Students Will Actually Learn

The curriculum will train students to identify drone threats, distinguish between threatening and safe and legal flight, understand the regulatory framework governing drone use, and respond to incidents involving potentially hostile UAS. It is not a hobbyist course repackaged with a security label.

It’s designed to produce professionals who can work with public safety agencies, critical infrastructure operators, and government security programs in a field that currently has more demand than qualified people.

The program requires students to first complete the standard WarrenUAS drone operations training, which means everyone entering the counter-drone curriculum already understands how drones work, how they’re flown, and what their capabilities and limitations are. That foundation matters.

Parker made the point explicitly: a lot of people see footage of drones in conflict zones and assume that’s the only threat model. The domestic threat landscape is different, more varied, and in many ways less understood. Training people to think clearly about that distinction is part of what the curriculum is designed to do.

Beyond the formal credit courses, Youngblood and Parker are developing an ongoing professional development track for first responders, law enforcement, public utility security officials, and infrastructure protection personnel.

A $15,000 FirstEnergy Foundation grant will specifically support training for smaller police departments that lack the budget for advanced drone security education on their own.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ll be direct: the drone industry spent years focused entirely on what drones can do and not nearly enough on what someone else’s drone can do to you.

That gap is closing fast, partly because events like the New Jersey mystery drones of 2024 and the ongoing drone activity around sensitive military installations made it impossible to ignore, and partly because people like Youngblood and Parker have been trying to close it from inside the government for years.

What WarrenUAS is doing is converting that federal expertise into accessible, credentialed education at a price point a community college student can actually afford. A counter-drone certificate from a program built by a former FAA UAS security manager and a former CISA chief of UAS security, backed by $5 million in equipment and a standing relationship with the FAA, is not a piece of paper.

It’s a genuine entry point into one of the fastest growing specializations in national security.

The part that doesn’t make the headline is what this signals about where the workforce pipeline is heading. The Army, the DHS, airports, utilities, stadiums, and critical infrastructure operators all need people who understand drone threats and can respond to them professionally.

Right now those people are extremely scarce, expensive, and mostly trained through government programs that aren’t accessible to civilians. Warren County Community College is about to change that, from a campus in New Jersey that most people in the defense world have still never heard of.

Photo credit: Warren Community College