Parrot ANAFI USA to Patrol Skies at 2026 World Cup

The U.S. Coast Guard is deploying the Parrot ANAFI USA as part of a new domestic counter-drone mission this summer, with the FIFA World Cup and America’s 250th anniversary celebrations as the first real operational test, as reported by Defense Scoop.

Service officials confirmed they’re surging counter-UAS capabilities to high-security events across the country, a mission the Coast Guard is calling an entirely new chapter for the branch.

It won’t be guarding coastlines. It’ll be watching the skies over packed stadiums.

A Whole New Mission Set

“The Coast Guard is far more focused on a home game,” said Capt. Roberto Herrera, who manages surface and underwater portfolios for the service’s Robotics and Autonomous Systems Program Executive Office. “Most of the interest is domestic. It is the World Cup sites, it is domestically-hosted events that are nationally significant security events.”

Herrera made those comments at the Sea-Air-Space conference this week. The framing was direct: “That’s a whole new mission set for us.”

The threat backdrop is real. The FAA has designated all FIFA World Cup 2026 stadiums and surrounding event spaces as strict No Drone Zones. Civil penalties run up to $75,000 per violation, criminal charges are on the table, and the FBI is authorized to use specialized mitigation tools to intercept drones on the spot.

With 11 U.S. host cities spread across the country and matches running from June through July, protecting that much airspace demands a mobile, capable platform that can deploy fast.

The Coast Guard’s answer is a roving team model. “It’s not like every site will be covered 24/7,” Herrera said. “It’ll be a mobile team that moves throughout the country to support the events.”

That kind of rapid-response operation is exactly what the ANAFI USA was built for.

Parrot ANAFI USA: The Drone Doing the Work

The Parrot ANAFI USA is a compact, foldable sUAS manufactured in Boston, Massachusetts. It’s NDAA and TAA compliant, listed on the Defense Innovation Unit’s Blue UAS Cleared List, and has an established deployment history with the Coast Guard dating back to at least 2024, when Parrot confirmed the service was using the platform as part of a strategy to extend operators’ reach from cutters to monitor air, land, and sea.

The airframe weighs just 1.1 lbs and deploys in under 55 seconds. For a mobile team moving between cities, that matters.

The payload is where it earns its keep. The ANAFI USA carries a triple-sensor system on a 3-axis stabilized gimbal: a wide-angle visual camera, an electro-optical tele-camera, and a FLIR Boson 320×256 thermal imager.

The zoom system is built around two 21-megapixel sensors and delivers 32x continuous zoom, with 5x lossless zoom available in 4K UHD and 10x lossless zoom in 1080p. At full zoom capability, the optics can resolve details roughly 4 inches wide at a distance of just under a mile. That’s enough to identify an individual or read markings on an unauthorized drone from a significant standoff distance.

Flight time comes in at 32 minutes per charge, with a maximum transmission range of 2.5 miles using the Skycontroller 3. Top horizontal speed is 33 mph. The airframe carries an IP53 weather resistance rating and operates in temperatures as low as -31°F, well outside the conditions you’d expect at any U.S. stadium in June.

Data security is built in at the hardware level. All links between the drone and controller use WPA2 encryption with AES-CCMP, and the system generates a unique encryption key for each drone-controller pairing. The ANAFI USA GOV variant adds AES-XTS 512-bit encryption on top of that baseline.

$150 Million and No Specialists Yet

The Coast Guard used $150 million in reconciliation funding to purchase its initial tranche of counter-drone equipment, which personnel are currently training on. That figure sits within the service’s broader Force Design 2028 framework, a modernization program funded by a $25 billion allocation with plans to obligate 75% of those funds by end of fiscal year 2026.

Here’s the catch: the Coast Guard currently has zero Robotics Mission Specialists. The RMS rating was announced in November 2025 and is designed to create a dedicated enlisted pipeline for drone operators, maintainers, and robotics innovators. But the pipeline isn’t producing people yet. So existing enlisted rates are being cross-trained: yeoman, engineers, boatswain mates.

“It’s very tech-centric, and you have to be able to speak the language to know how to do it,” Herrera said. “It’s not something you can just ask any Coast Guard member to go to.”

The long-term target is 2,000 to 3,000 RMS-designated personnel, as part of a service-wide growth goal of 15,000 new members under Force Design 2028, with a target date of January 1, 2029. In FY25, the Coast Guard exceeded 110% of its active-duty enlisted recruiting goal, the best performance since 1991.

The drone threat picture at these events is not theoretical. Congress approved $500 million specifically for counter-drone technology, with World Cup host cities first in line for the funding. Florida cleared $105 million in federal dollars for Miami’s seven matches alone at Hard Rock Stadium.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what I find genuinely significant: the Coast Guard deploying the ANAFI USA for this mission isn’t a random procurement choice.

This is a platform with an established Blue UAS pedigree, a track record with the service itself, and a sensor package that was designed exactly for the kind of rapid-response, standoff-observation work that a mobile counter-UAS team needs to do. You can’t script a better fit for this mission than a sub-2-pound drone that’s airborne in under a minute and can read a license plate from nearly a mile away.

What I keep coming back to is the workforce gap. The ANAFI USA is ready. The money is there. The threat is documented.

The part that’s still being built is the human side: trained operators who know how to integrate counter-drone surveillance into a chaotic multi-agency security operation spread across 11 cities over six weeks. Cross-training boatswain mates on drone ISR is a workable bridge, but it’s a bridge.

The Coast Guard is being honest about that. Herrera didn’t oversell the readiness picture, and that kind of institutional candor usually signals an organization that knows what it’s doing. Whether the summer plays out cleanly is another question.

The skies over Miami, Los Angeles, and New York are going to be watched more closely than ever before. The ANAFI USA will be doing a lot of that watching.

Photo credit: Richard Uranga U.S. Coast Guard