New DIRT Program Trains Personnel on Grounded Drones

A Virginia-based counter-UAS training company has launched a program built around the part of a drone incident that most training programs skip entirely: what to do after the aircraft is on the ground. 38 Sierra announced Drone Incident Response Training, known as DIRT, on May 5, as Defence Blog reported.

The Gap Most C-UAS Training Leaves Open

Counter-UAS training in the United States has grown significantly since 2022. Most of it focuses on detecting drones in the air, monitoring airspace, jamming control signals, and physically intercepting or downing the aircraft. That’s the part of the problem the defense and security industry has invested the most in addressing.

DIRT picks up where that training ends. A drone that has crashed, been shot down, been abandoned, or been found near sensitive infrastructure is a fundamentally different problem than a drone in the air. The guidance system may still be active.

The payload may be intact. The battery may be unstable. The device may carry forensic evidence. And in many cases, the person who encounters it first has no specialized training for any of those scenarios.

The first responder to a grounded drone is rarely from a specialized unit. It’s a patrol officer responding to a call, a corrections officer finding something in a yard, a stadium security employee noticing something near a gate, or a port worker flagging an unusual object near a restricted area. Those people need actionable procedures, not a course designed for EOD professionals.

What DIRT Actually Covers

The program is structured around five functional areas: safe assessment of grounded or suspicious drones, hazard recognition and risk-informed decision-making, reporting and scene control, evidence preservation, and operational continuity during drone-related incidents. 38 Sierra also develops inert UAS threat training aids used in scenario-based exercises, allowing personnel to build hands-on familiarity with grounded drone situations without introducing actual risk.

DIRT is built as a mission-specific program rather than a generic course. The content adapts to the environment the trainee is most likely to face. The sectors currently served include critical infrastructure, law enforcement, executive protection, aviation and airport security, maritime and port security, event and stadium security, corrections, military facilities, and bomb squads and EOD units.

Each version of the course is built around the specific incident types and escalation pathways relevant to that environment.

The corrections sector is worth singling out. Drone contraband delivery to prisons has become one of the most consistent and difficult-to-stop supply routes for narcotics, weapons, and communications devices across the United States.

Corrections officers encountering a drone that’s crashed on prison grounds face a layered problem: the payload may still be intact, the device may have been operated by someone with knowledge of prison routines, and standard evidence preservation for a drug interdiction is not the same as evidence preservation for a UAS incident that could support a larger investigation.

The Founder’s Background

Patrick McCrone, co-founder of 38 Sierra, brings direct authority to this curriculum. He’s an EOD professional with more than two decades in counter-IED operations, weapons technical intelligence, and grounded UAS response. B

efore launching 38 Sierra, he served as a Technical Lead at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s C5ISR Center, where his work included developing the initial doctrine for U.S. military EOD response to grounded small unmanned aircraft systems.

That doctrinal work matters as context. When McCrone’s team was building those initial Army procedures, there was no formal playbook for what a soldier, security officer, or first responder should do when an enemy drone came down in their area of operations.

DIRT is a civilian and multi-sector extension of that same doctrinal gap-filling work, now applied to the full range of security environments where grounded drones are a live operational problem.

The EOD parallel is deliberate and worth taking seriously. IED response doctrine took years to mature after the Iraq war forced the issue at scale. Drone incident response is at an earlier stage of that same maturity curve, and the range of actors who will encounter grounded drones is far broader than the range who dealt with IEDs.

Why the Timing Is Right

Drone incidents at sensitive facilities have moved from an occasional news story to a routine operational concern. The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2027 budget request includes more than $70 billion combined for drone and counter-drone programs, a figure that reflects how seriously the U.S. government is taking the problem at scale.

Joint Interagency Task Force 401, the Pentagon’s counter-drone clearinghouse, has been explicit that commercial drone technology evolves faster than annual acquisition cycles can track. The threat adapts in weeks. Training has historically adapted in years.

DIRT is a targeted attempt to close a specific slice of that gap. It doesn’t solve airspace monitoring or interdiction. It solves what happens in the minutes and hours after the drone is already down, which is exactly when untrained personnel are most likely to make consequential mistakes.

DroneXL’s Take

DIRT is filling a gap that should have been filled years ago, and the corrections sector application is one of the most immediately relevant use cases on the list.

DroneXL has covered Georgia prison drone contraband since October 2025. The pattern is well-documented: drones drop payloads into prison yards, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. When a drone crashes in a prison yard, corrections officers are currently working without a standardized playbook for what to do next. That’s not a hypothetical scenario. It’s happening regularly across multiple states.

McCrone’s EOD background is what makes 38 Sierra credible here rather than another training company selling awareness content. The person who built the Army’s initial doctrine for this exact problem is now delivering that doctrine in a form accessible to corrections officers, patrol cops, and airport security personnel. That’s a meaningful credential.

The multi-sector delivery model is also the right call. A patrol officer finding a downed drone outside a power substation needs different guidance than an EOD technician at a military facility. DIRT appears to treat those as genuinely different problems rather than running every audience through the same course.

Photo credit: 38 Sierra