Tactien Group launches CAST platform to test counter-drone systems at critical infrastructure sites

TLDR

• The Tactien Group launched CAST, software for planning, running and scoring counter-drone evaluations at a customer's own site.¹
• CAST scores detection feeds against red-team drone telemetry, including probability of detection and false positives.¹
• Tactien says CAST support for ground, maritime and underwater unmanned systems is planned for Q1 2027.¹

The Tactien Group, an aviation advisory firm that serves critical infrastructure and says it holds no financial interest in the technologies it evaluates, has launched CAST, short for Counter-UXS Assessment & System Testing.¹ Industrial Cyber reports that Tactien's advisers use the software to plan, run and grade counter-drone evaluations at a customer's own sites, so every vendor is judged by the same standard.¹

Founder and president Nate Ernst said most end users buy on published specifications and staged demonstrations, which "tell you a system can perform" but not that "it will perform in your environment."¹ CAST compares each vendor's detection feed with telemetry from red-team drones, and Industrial Cyber lists its measures as probability of detection, track continuity, track loss, track accuracy, classification accuracy, Remote ID match, time to classification, multiple-target handling and false positives.¹ Scoring is deterministic, so the same raw test data can be re-scored under different operational standards.¹ CounterUASWorld, summarising Tactien's announcement, says the approach uses blind red-team flight tests so the systems under test do not know the scenarios in advance.²

Neither article names a customer, a test site, a price or an availability date.¹²

Why it matters: operators of utilities, refineries and data centres have few independent ways to compare counter-drone sensors at their own sites, but this is a vendor launch reported from Tactien's announcement, and no customers or results have been named.