About a month ago, a flock of unidentified drones swarmed over Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, a facility that houses nuclear-capable Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers. The news made headlines for a couple of days, then disappeared under an onslaught of other important breaking news. The following is an update on where matters stand today.
The Barksdale swarm was the first publicly reported instance of such incursions over a U.S. base, but it certainly wasn’t the first one. The first known incident swarmed Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Va., in December 2023 and brought the issue to the attention of Congress. Republican members of the House Oversight Committee’s Military and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee later documented more than 350 drone incursions at 100 different locations during 2024 alone.
In essence, someone has been swarming drones over sensitive U.S. military sites, ranging from Air Force bases to weapons depots, an average of one a day, and our government apparently does not know who is sending them or why they’re sending them.
And it’s not only happening in the United States. U.S. Air Force bases in the United Kingdom and Germany have reported drone incursions, sometimes forcing officials to pause flightline operations. ABC News reported that officials in England noted “waves of 12 to 15 drones operating over sensitive areas of the installation, including the flight line.”
The network reported that the drones had features and behaved in way suggesting they were not operated by hobbyists because they included “non-commercial signal characteristics, long-range control links, and resistance to jamming.” The sheer volume also suggests these are either foreign adversaries, domestic actors or commercial operators. If the military knows who they are, it isn’t saying. But the major suspects are China and Iran.
According to publicly documented reporting and government analyses, China would spy on U.S. military bases for strategic, military and political reasons. China could learn U.S. military capabilities and readiness, such as what U.S. forces have, how they operate, and how quickly they could respond to an attack. They also could learn the types of aircraft, ships, missiles and weapons systems we have. They could even learn personnel levels, unit rotation patterns, training schedules and readiness levels.
Iran’s ability to build spy drones in the United States is unquestioned; after all, drones are inexpensive to build, easy to construct, and using them would fit in perfectly with Iran’s asymmetrical warfare strategy. And its motives to spy on the bases are readily apparent. Pew Research Center estimates that roughly 750,000 people in the United States are Iranian-American, and that number includes people born in Iran, people who report Iranian ancestry, and U.S.-born people with at least one Iranian parent. It’s easy to see why Iranians would hate Donald Trump for killing their friends, neighbors, children and family members for no understandable reason, and be willing to form cells to study American militarism to prepare effective attacks inside the U.S. borders.
But regardless of who is responsible, the obvious question looms: Why can’t the almighty U.S. military stop all these swarms of drones?
The House Oversight Committee’s Military and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee members, led by Rep. William Timmons (R-S.C.), tried to answer that question. They sent formal requests for information to the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice and the Department of Transportation, pressing each agency on its authorities and operational posture.
And what they learned was that the statute that governs military counter-drone action on domestic soil, 10 U.S. Code Section 130i, spells out what actions commanders may take against unmanned aircraft. On paper, the law permits detection, tracking, and, in some cases, destroying drones that threaten protected sites. But in practice, it imposes coordination requirements with civilian law enforcement and federal agencies that slow response times considerably.
The statute also carries reporting requirements and, critically, sunset provisions that place its authorities on a timer. Legal scholars at Cornell University explain that that expiration risk means military planners cannot build long-term counter-drone programs with confidence that the legal backing will persist.
In the real world, they say, that means bases can watch drones overhead, catalog them and file reports, but disabling or capturing them requires clearing procedural hurdles that give the drones time to escape untouched.
The Department of Defense has responded to all this by establishing Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401), which is charged with delivering an affordable system that can allow military bases to counter the drones. The idea is to centralize research, procurement and coordination under one body, thus replacing the patchwork of responses that are leaving military basis without any effective tools.
The task force has committed more than $600 million to counter-unmanned aircraft systems capability across three distinct missions: active combat support, homeland event security, and critical infrastructure defense. And some of its work is beginning to take effect.
It’s a start.
If you like this newsletter, please consider forwarding it to your friends, and especially to your enemies.
You are also invited to support the author with a cup of coffee:
Thank you.
A FEW RELATED RESOURCES curated by the folks at GrowPurpose.com
- Drone swarms over key U.S. military bases raise concerns
- ‘Multiple waves’ of unauthorized drones recently spotted over strategic US Air Force base
- $500 Drones Shut Down the U.S. Nuclear Bomber Hub in Louisiana
- America Needs to Get Serious About Drones
- ICYMI:
