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Last Sunday, the World Cup was played in New Jersey, capping a summer in which American stadiums have hosted the largest sporting event on earth. Federal planners saw the airspace problem coming: the executive order that reorganized America’s counter-drone posture names the 2026 World Cup explicitly as an event to protect. What the planning has not yet produced is an answer to the question that will matter most if a drone crosses the stadium fence: whose call is it?

The debate over U.S. autonomous weapons policy is dominated by concerns over moving too fast. Detractors warn that we may risk losing control of the systems themselves or the escalation dynamics they will impact. But, as we argue in a recent report, the reality is that the Pentagon is moving too slow owing to funding, procurement, organizational, and oversight systems that are poorly suited to fielding and continuously updating the most decisive capability on the modern battlefield. While increasingly autonomous systems are not preferable in an ideal world, they are being developed in the real one. If the U.S. neglects to develop them proactively, it risks having to develop them reactively in a crisis, with far less time to conform with our ethical standards.