On a warm August morning, a team of Marines watched the sky, waiting for a hostile drone to buzz by. Their task was to stop it if it did.
The team sat in a pair of small tactical vehicles resembling wartime golf carts, chained tightly to the deck of a Navy warship. The vehicles, together known as a Light Marine Air-Defense Integrated System, or L-MADIS, were packed with detectors and sensors for finding and tracking hostile drones.
None ever came.
The uneventful defense played out off the coast of California aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island as part of deployment preparation training with the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a…
