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.<\/p>\n
The Barksdale swarm was the first publicly reported instance of such incursions over a U.S. base, but it certainly wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s Military and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee later documented more than 350 drone incursions at 100 different locations during 2024 alone.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re sending them.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s 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 \u201cwaves of 12 to 15 drones operating over sensitive areas of the installation, including the flight line.\u201d<\/p>\n
The network reported that the drones had features and behaved in way suggesting they were not operated by hobbyists because they included \u201cnon-commercial signal characteristics, long-range control links, and resistance to jamming.\u201d The sheer volume also suggests these are either foreign adversaries, domestic actors or commercial operators. If the military knows who they are, it isn\u2019t saying. But the major suspects are China and Iran.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n