DJI told the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday that the seven “military-grade” categories at the center of its proposed drone sales ban appear in no national security determination, were endorsed by no national security agency, and were invented by the two FCC sub-bureaus that wrote the proposal. The 26-page filing in PS Docket 26-189 landed September 2, the day comments closed, and asks the bureaus to rescind the notice outright.

The comments are signed by Travis LeBlanc, who ran the FCC’s own Enforcement Bureau under President Obama, and Elizabeth Prelogar, the 48th Solicitor General of the United States, both now partners at Cooley LLP. DJI puts its losses from the December 2025 Covered List action and the follow-on set-asides at more than $1.5 billion.

I filed DroneXL’s own comments in the same docket hours before DJI’s arrived, and I spent Tuesday and Wednesday photographing DJI’s booth at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas, where every aircraft on the stand meets the definition this filing attacks.

DJI Says No Security Agency Ever Endorsed The Seven Categories

The FCC’s July 21 notice defines military-grade drones by seven capabilities: 55 pounds or more at takeoff, economic-poison spraying, thermal imaging, LiDAR, docking stations, defense-article integration, and swarming. DJI argues the December 2025 National Security Determination behind the notice mentions none of them and never uses the phrase military-grade.

The determination, as DJI’s comments describe it, runs entirely on provenance. Every drone and every critical component produced in a foreign country poses an unacceptable risk, unless the Department of War or the Department of Homeland Security later clears a specific component. Nothing in it separates a drone with a thermal camera from one with a plain RGB sensor. The filing calls the seven categories a post-hoc creation of the bureaus with no foundation in the document they cite.

That gap matters because the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act lets the Commission add equipment to the Covered List only on a “specific determination” that particular equipment from a particular entity poses an unacceptable risk. A determination that covers an entire product category by country of origin is the opposite of specific, DJI argues, and the FCC’s four earlier Covered List updates all named companies. That changed when the Bureau swept every foreign-made drone onto the list on December 22, 2025.

The notice itself says the bureaus built the definitions from other agencies’ rules on high-risk UAS and from discussions with national security partners. DJI’s answer is that none of those partners put a determination on the record. Eleven days after the notice ran in the Federal Register, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security went the other way: its August 14 final rule loosened drone export controls and defined the capabilities adversaries could exploit differently from the FCC’s seven categories.

The Filing Argues Drones Are Not Communications Equipment At All

DJI’s second argument attacks the FCC’s jurisdiction. The Secure Networks Act reaches only equipment “essential to the provision of advanced communications service,” meaning high-speed broadband. A drone connects to the internet the way a laptop does, the filing argues, and a battery is essential to no one’s network.

DJI is running the same argument in the Ninth Circuit, where it sued the FCC in February over the December listing. The filing cites West Virginia v. EPA on the major questions doctrine, and it cites the Supreme Court’s February 20 decision in Learning Resources v. Trump, the ruling that struck down the IEEPA tariffs, for the proposition that an extraordinary assertion of regulatory power needs an explicit statutory hook. It also raises the Appointments Clause: every step from the December listing to this notice was taken by bureau staff under delegated authority, without a vote of the Senate-confirmed commissioners.

Prelogar argued the government’s side in Loper Bright in January 2024 and lost; the filing now cites Loper Bright against the FCC. Lawyers change clients, and the doctrine stays where the Supreme Court left it.

DJI Turns The FCC’s Own Rulebook Against The Notice

Section 2.939(e) of the Commission’s rules lets the bureaus limit an existing authorization only when the notice identifies the affected devices well enough for a manufacturer to know what is covered, and assesses the prohibition’s impact. DJI argues the July notice does neither, and uses its own questions as proof.

The thermal category sets no threshold for sensitivity or resolution. “Specially designed to incorporate a defense article” is never defined. The FCC’s July 17 notice in the companion docket, which named nine DJI-linked brands, identified equipment by company. This one identifies capabilities and leaves manufacturers, and in the end enforcement staff, to work out which products qualify. A notice that asks the public whether its own definition is over- or under-inclusive has by its own admission not identified the devices, the filing says.

On impact, the notice tentatively concludes the ban “would not have substantial economic and supply chain impacts” because recreational pilots are unlikely to fly military-grade drones. It supplies no data, then encourages commenters to provide evidence of economic costs. DJI’s response: “An agency cannot outsource its analytical obligation to the public it proposes to regulate.”

The bureaus denied three requests to extend the comment period on August 28. Fewer than 3,000 comments were in the docket the day before it closed, from an industry of nearly half a million certificated pilots.

Two exemptions in the notice anchor DJI’s arbitrary-and-capricious argument. A domestically produced drone with the same thermal sensor stays on sale while the foreign one comes off. Federal agencies may keep buying the foreign version while a county sheriff may not. The notice explains neither line.

If the risk is the capability, as the military-grade label implies, it should not depend on where the airframe was assembled. If the risk is provenance, as the determination says, thermal and LiDAR are irrelevant and the seven categories collapse into the plain foreign-drone ban the bureaus already have. DJI also argues the notice ignores reliance interests: the authorizations were lawfully granted, the inventory lawfully imported, and the notice would pull those authorizations retroactively without counting how many devices or manufacturers it reaches.

The footnotes cite comments from the Ohio chapter of the Law Enforcement Drone Association, the Blair Police Department, Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue, and the Drone Service Providers Alliance. The public safety agencies describe thermal, LiDAR and dock missions flown where visibility is limited; the DSPA covers mapping and surveying. The Matrice 4T and Dock 3 I photographed on Booth 903 this week are the hardware those departments describe.

DJI Asks For Rescission First And An 18-Month Transition Second

The fourth defect is constitutional. DJI says it received no advance notice of the December 22, 2025 listing, no chance to present evidence about its products, and still no statement of the factual basis for the determination. A follow-on limitation built on that listing inherits the flaw, the filing argues.

DJI is pressing the same point in its petition for reconsideration, filed January 21, 2026, and in the Ninth Circuit, where its April opposition brief put 25 unreleased products in regulatory limbo. If the bureaus issue a new notice anyway, the filing lists four minimum conditions: product-specific or class-specific national security determinations, a transition of at least 18 months instead of the proposed 180 days, preserved access for state and local public safety agencies, and capability definitions built on objective, measurable technical thresholds.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the first document in the docket written by people who know what a judge will do with it. Most comments filed before Wednesday, mine included, tell the FCC the proposal hurts. DJI’s tells the FCC it lacks the power, in the language courts use to vacate agency action.

The bureaus did not pull the seven categories from the air. The 55-pound line is the FAA’s own Part 107 boundary, and economic poison is the FAA’s Part 137 term for pesticide. Thermal and LiDAR do make a drone more useful to a military; nobody serious argues otherwise. But the statute does not ask whether a capability has military uses. It asks whether a named agency determined that this equipment poses an unacceptable risk, and the record contains no such determination for thermal cameras, LiDAR, docks or light-show swarms. When a notice asks the public whether its own list adequately captures military-grade drones, the bureaus are telling you they were guessing.

The federal exemption is where the security story falls apart, and I don’t think DJI’s lawyers needed a former Solicitor General to spot it. If a Dock 3 were a threat to the homeland, the last customer you would keep it available to is a federal agency. Exempting Washington while cutting off the Tualatin Valley fire crews is what a market carve-out looks like, and it fits what DroneXL has reported since the first military-grade notice in July: American operators paying for a security theory nobody has written down.

The record closed at midnight Wednesday, and the bureaus can issue an order whenever they choose, with a 180-day wind-down from Federal Register publication. Two processes could pull the floor out first. The Ninth Circuit case, No. 26-1029, and the pending reconsideration petition both attack the December listing the filing calls this notice’s only jurisdictional predicate; if either narrows or vacates the listing, the military-grade proposal has nothing left to stand on. DJI’s 18-month request reads to me as the tell in an otherwise all-or-nothing brief: the company is swinging for rescission and, in the same document, negotiating the length of the runway if it loses. The Section 232 tariffs that took effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern this morning already put a 100% duty on the same thermal imagers and docks, so that runway is getting shorter either way.

Sources: SZ DJI Technology Co., Ltd. Comments in PS Docket 26-189 (FCC ECFS), Federal Register 91 FR 48870, Federal Register 91 FR 52501, FCC Order of August 28, 2026.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.