The Bug-Zapper Grid Is Aging Out
Bug zappers were mandated after people got tired of learning what a fifty-gram autonomous aircraft could do to a face, a windshield or a crowd. The mandate worked. For years, the casualty curve bent down.
Now the infrastructure is aging faster than replacement budgets. Our February aggregation of federal and state incident ledgers found 3,417 hostile or unauthorized microdrone incidents, 782 reported injuries and 41 fatalities. The counts are imperfect. The direction is not.
Emitters are drifting out of spec. Neighborhood units are running past certified life. Municipal spares are cannibalized. Private buildings defer replacement because the old boxes still light green.
This is not an argument against the grid. It is an argument for maintaining the thing that works.
Refresh the national system. Standardize health telemetry. Fund replacement before failure, not after the first funeral in a ZIP code. “Government program” is not a synonym for “bad idea.” Sometimes the stupid part is refusing to maintain the good one.