More than 150 people packed the University System of Maryland at Southern Maryland’s SMART Building on June 18 for a daylong symposium on military drone technology, one of several events The Patuxent Partnership organized during the run-up to this year’s NAS Patuxent River Air Show.
The symposium, titled “Evolving Warfare: Rise of the Drones,” ran from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the California, Maryland, campus and brought together military officers, defense contractors and government officials to discuss how unmanned and autonomous systems are reshaping military operations. The event fell just two days before the 2026 Pax River Air Show, held June 20-21 at Naval Air Station Patuxent River and headlined by the Blue Angels, capping a busy stretch of aerospace- and defense-related programming in Southern Maryland.
Bonnie Green, executive director of The Patuxent Partnership, opened the symposium by framing the event around what she described as fast-changing guidance, restrictions and threat scenarios facing the Navy and its coalition partners as drone and autonomous technologies mature. Retired Rear Adm. Scott Sanders, who helped organize the symposium and line up speakers, moderated the day’s sessions.
Retired Vice Adm. Jeffrey Hughes, former deputy chief of staff for capability development at NATO’s Headquarters Supreme Allied Command Transformation, delivered the symposium’s opening address, covering investment strategies in cost-effective innovation, supply chain resilience, maritime operations centers and autonomous systems. Hughes later joined a panel on allied cooperation alongside Air Vice Marshal Chris Mullen, the British Embassy’s military attache, who discussed British-U.S. cooperation on drone operations in Europe and Ukraine.
A panel on the Navy’s “Drone Hedge Strategy,” moderated by Sevan Mehrabian of Deloitte’s robotics and autonomous systems and national security practice, examined how the Navy is tailoring scalable, rapidly deployable and cost-effective autonomous systems for counter-drone missions. Panelists included Larry Branthoover of NAVAIR’s Chief Technology Office; retired Lt. Col. Matt Friters, a former director of technology strategy and transformation for the U.S. Space Force; retired Lt. Col. Gregg Skinner of the Marine Corps; and Rear Adm. Douglas W. Sasse III, director of the assessment division within the office of the Chief of Naval Operations.
One of the day’s more prominent speakers was Christopher C. Miller, founder and chief executive of FPF-Defense, a counter-drone startup. Miller served 34 years across the Army and the national security apparatus, a career that culminated in his role as acting secretary of defense from November 2020 to January 2021, when he oversaw the Pentagon’s roughly $720 billion budget and a workforce of about 2 million service members and 700,000 civilian employees. Before that, he led the National Counterterrorism Center and spent decades as an Army Special Forces officer, including leading initial operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001.
The afternoon session opened with a “UAS Show & Tell,” giving representatives from four companies — Platform Aerospace, OAG, LeVanta Tech and Chase Defense Partners — six to eight minutes each to describe their drone programs. Platform Aerospace and OAG are both based in Southern Maryland, reflecting the region’s growing cluster of small aerospace and defense firms tied to the testing and engineering work done at nearby Naval Air Station Patuxent River.
A separate panel on counter-UAS technology, moderated by former Air Force fighter and test pilot Robert “Juice” Newton of Newton Engineering, featured Lt. Col. Paul Lushenko, chief strategist for the Army’s Joint Interagency Task Force; Cmdr. Josh Wofford of the U.S. Coast Guard’s robotics and autonomous systems program; Mark Butkiewicz, vice president of the applied technology sector at SURVICE Engineering; and open-source intelligence analyst Ryan McBeth.
Sanders closed out the symposium, which was followed by a reception at AeroPark. Sponsors for the event included KBR, MIL Corp, Platform Aerospace and Chase Defense Partners.
The Patuxent Partnership, a nonprofit that connects government, industry and academic partners in Southern Maryland, has increasingly focused its programming on unmanned systems and autonomy as those technologies take on a larger role in military planning. The symposium’s timing alongside the Pax River Air Show underscored organizers’ broader goal of showcasing Southern Maryland’s position as a regional hub for aerospace innovation, defense technology development and workforce training tied to NAS Patuxent River, one of the Navy’s principal centers for aircraft testing and evaluation.
