Why can’t the US stop drone swarms from penetrating restricted airspace?

Over the past few years, drones have reshaped the way warfare is playing out in Ukraine. Yet, last December, the United States was given a forceful reminder that this threat is not relegated to far-flung battlefields but is already right here on U.S. soil. Now, America is struggling to overcome a combination of bureaucracy and technological limitations to address it. 

For more than two weeks last December, swarms of drones of various sizes, flying at different altitudes in well-orchestrated formations, violated the strictly controlled airspace over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, which sits directly across the Chesapeake Bay from Naval Station Norfolk – the largest naval base on the planet.

These drones, some with wingspans of over 20 feet, would begin arriving about 45 minutes after sunset, cruising at roughly 100 miles per hour thousands of feet above the ground. They would cruise over the hangars that house America’s F-22 Raptors, then out over the bay toward the headquarters of the Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6, and past the most dense collection of national security facilities on American soil. 

But despite the drone swarms returning night after night in a slow procession that U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly described as a “parade of lawnmowers,” the American Defense apparatus could do nothing them from penetrating its secure airspace. 

There are lots of systems employed by the U.S. military that could have turned large swaths of these drone swarms into smoldering heaps of rubble. And this prompts the question many have been asking for nearly a year now: Why didn’t they?

Drone swarms are a growing threat to US bases and critical infrastructure on American soil

Despite wave after wave of large, seemingly non-commercial drones penetrating the protected airspace over Langley Air Force Base throughout December 2023, the first official acknowledgment of these incursions didn’t reach the public until March of this year, when the commander of NORAD and NORTHCOM, U.S. Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, publicly testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

“As part of my 90-day assessment, … to tell the truth, the counter-UAS [uncrewed aircraft systems] mission has dominated that so far in the first month,” the general explained. “Of course, I knew it was an issue coming from another combatant command [CENTCOM], where we faced that threat in a very different way because of the environment. But I wasn’t prepared for the number of incursions that I see. [I’ve] gone into the events at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, and I’m using that as the centerpiece of my 90-day assessment.”

Based on the above, these drone incursions may have been most severe over Langley.

There have been hundreds of reports of drone incursions over military installations on U.S. soil in recent years, and while many of these incidents involved hobbyist drone operators accidentally entering into restricted airspace, not all can be so easily dismissed.

In October 2023, four drones were detected entering the airspace above the Nevada National Security Site, where experiments related to things like the disposition of damaged nuclear weapons are conducted. A fifth drone, seemingly not detected by local systems, was said to be spotted by personnel on site. 

Between December 2019 and January 2020, law enforcement officials in Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas were bewildered by waves of large and small drones flying in carefully coordinated grid-pattern formations that seemingly didn’t violate any federal laws, but raised serious security concerns because of the mystery surrounding their origins or operators. 

“I think this shows a significant gap in our understanding and national security understanding of the threat drones pose. If we can’t find out who they are, how they are being controlled, who is controlling them, what is to keep a nation like Iran or North Korea from looking at this instance and saying, ‘Boy now we should come out and do the same thing with cameras and sensor equipment to find out the kinds of things that would help with international security’ so I think it is a concern,” Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner said of the swarms at the time. 

In September 2019, drones violated the airspace over the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, seemingly focused on the area around one of the plant’s pressurized water reactors. Between five and six drones were reported in the power plant’s restricted airspace two nights in a row. Their incursions ended as mysteriously as they had begun. 

But the incursions over Langley, according to former NORAD/NORTHCOM commander Gen. Glen VanHerck, were unlike any previously reported. 

How the Langley drone incursions played out

According to U.S. officials who spoke with the Wall Street Journal, the military doesn’t believe the drones flown over Langley last December were owned or operated by hobbyists. The drones were too large and the formations they flew in were deemed to be too complex. The larger fixed-wing drones, witnesses report, would fly as low as just one hundred feet off the ground while smaller quad-copters, said to be the size of standard 20-pound commercial drones, would accompany them a few dozen feet below. However, officials quickly determined that these quad-copters were not operating on the same frequency bands that are available for commercial drones of that type. 

(This sort of formation, whereby a large “mother ship” drone is orbited by smaller ones, was also reported in the 2019-2020 sightings over Colorado.) 

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The drones would approach Langley from the north, usually within 45 minutes to an hour after sunset. They’d fly over the base and then south across the Chesapeake Bay toward Naval Station Norfolk. The drone swarms would then loop around and repeat the pattern, usually until around midnight, when they’d disappear into the darkness once again. 

Air defense radar arrays in the area reportedly didn’t even always pick up the smaller drones, as they’d been set to filter out anything that appeared to be small and slow enough to be a bird. This prompted the adjustment of radar screens to better track these potential threats.

After days of repeated incursions, the base command chose to postpone all nighttime training over concerns that their aircraft could collide with the incoming drones. F-22s were relocated elsewhere, and military and law enforcement personnel started combing the area for anyone close enough to be controlling the drones. When a ship was spotted floating in international waters just off the coast, the U.S. Coast Guard closed in and boarded the vessel, hoping to catch the drone operators red-handed… But instead found nothing linking the ship to the drones. 

And then, on December 23, 17 days after the first mysterious drone swarm arrived in Langley, they departed for the last time and never returned. 

None of these drone aircraft demonstrated any threatening behavior, but their mere presence could nonetheless be interpreted as a threat. Not only could they be collecting valuable intelligence data to be transmitted to adversary forces, but could also be identifying potential vulnerabilities, establishing tactics, and maturing concepts toward large-scale drone attacks to be mounted against American defense assets and critical infrastructure in a large-scale conflict to come. 

Which all further presses the importance of the question… Why aren’t we shooting these drones down?

The federal law that prevents the US military from shooting these drones down

Despite the hyperbolic headlines about America’s defenses failing to stop these incursions, what really stopped the U.S. military from playing duck hunt with these slow targets is a long-standing federal statute passed all the way back in 1878 known to most as the Posse Comitatus Act. 

This law bars the use of the U.S. military for enforcing civil laws inside the United States unless expressly authorized by an act of Congress. The law is seen as vital to preserving civil liberties and separating military and civilian authority within the American government. It essentially bars the use of the American military against the American people. 

Military installations like Langley Air Force Base are authorized to defend themselves when someone or something poses an imminent threat, so, had these drones been armed with explosives, for instance, the Air Force would be within its legal right to shoot them down. However, because all these drones were doing was flying overhead, they did not meet the legal criteria for a self-defense engagement, even if they were likely to be collecting sensitive intelligence data – a facet of the legal implications of drone defense that’s likely to see a great deal of discussion in the years ahead. 

As a result, despite the military being best equipped to address these threats, the job of handling them is legally mandated to fall instead to federal and local law enforcement agencies.

“The threat, and the need to counter these threats is growing faster than the policies and procedures that [are] in place can keep up with,” General Guillot said earlier this week.

Related: Smashing drones with a standard rifle may be the best way to counter them

Challenges beyond the law

But there are other concerns as well. Launching interceptors from ground-based air defense assets or air-to-air missiles from fighter aircraft over a densely populated area in Virginia could create very real risks for military personnel and the civilian population. 

Not only do you have to worry about debris from missiles and their targets falling on people’s homes, schools, and shopping centers, but also about ordnance missing its target entirely and striking something on the ground. 

It’s also possible to use jamming equipment to disrupt the drone’s control or access to GPS without shooting them down, but using these systems in densely populated areas can have detrimental effects on a wide variety of other civilian, commercial, and law enforcement operations. Using these sorts of tools requires strict coordination with the FAA, which NORAD says can take days to put together – meaning it can’t be done on the fly when a drone swarm appears on the horizon. One step NORAD officials have proposed to address this issue is to establish preset approvals for the use of some systems under specific parameters to expedite the military’s response.

America having the hardware systems necessary to engage these drones doesn’t necessarily mean that these systems were present at Langley Air Force Base last December, and even if those systems were present, that’s no guarantee that all of these drones could be shot down before any of them could engage a target for instance. Air defense is never a certainty, and mounting an effective intercept of a large volume of targets is among the biggest challenges air defenders could face. Nonetheless, an effort to shoot these drones down never happened. If it had, there’s a good chance we’d have more answers about their origin by now. 

Where did the drones come from?

These drone swarms reportedly approached Langley Air Force Base from the north. By looking at platforms available on the commercial market similar to the smaller drones, we can make some general assumptions about the range and endurance these systems were likely to have and thus the distance traveled. 

Among the more capable and popular 20-pound class quadcopters on the commercial market are systems like the DJI Matrice 350 RTK, which can offer roughly 3.3 hours of operating time on its internal batteries alone, or as much as six hours with external batteries. These drones have publicly listed maximum ranges of 10+ miles, and according to the manufacturer, control can be transmitted as far as about 12 miles (roughly 20 km) in a low-interference and unobstructed environment like the seaside. Other quadcopters touted for their long-range capabilities, like the Autel Robotics EVO Max 4T, claim similar ranges. 

Some of the longest-ranged similar FPV drones in military use over Ukraine are said to be able to operate as far out as roughly 25 miles (~40 km). 

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Even assuming these drones may be more advanced than your standard commercially available systems, we’re still talking about a fairly short-range asset that requires control elements to be relatively nearby – all but certainly under 25 miles.

The drones were likely commercially available assets, even if they were indeed used for espionage. 

Many real clandestine intelligence operations leverage off-the-shelf technology since comes with plausible deniability. If you’re an American spy in Moscow, for instance, the last thing you want to do is run around the city carrying an Agency-issued heart-attack gun or, in this case, a highly classified and supremely capable spy drone – because the minute that gear is found tucked into your jacket, it becomes impossible to maintain your cover. But, if you buy your spy gear off the shelf at Costco, you can claim you’re just an enthusiastic amateur who’s not great about reading signs and just happened to find yourself in a place you weren’t supposed to be. 

It might not be a great cover, and it may not get you out of trouble, but it does insulate the country you’re spying for, and ultimately, that’s the name of the game in these situations… And as luck would have it, that seems to be exactly what happened over Langley Air Force Base last year. 

Drone swarm theory #1: Chinese espionage

On January 6, 2024, just two weeks after the last drones swarmed over Langley Air Force Base, 26-year-old Fengyun Shi, a Chinese on a Foreign Student Visa to attend courses at the University of Minnesota, parked his rented Tesla just outside a shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, some 1,200 miles from his home in Saint Paul and 10 miles from Langley Air Force Base. The shipyard belonged to Huntington Ingalls Industries, the firm responsible for the construction of America’s new Gerald R. Ford-class supercarriers and for supporting a wide variety of other sensitive and classified Navy programs. 

According to a Department of Justice affidavit, people who lived nearby noticed Shi flying his drone around the secure facility despite bad weather. When the drone got stuck in a tree on a residential property, one resident approached him as he was attempting to get it down. 

That resident, who was not identified in the affidavit, called the police. When the Newport News police arrived and questioned why Shi was flying his drone in that area, especially in such bad weather, and he reportedly grew visibly nervous. Nonetheless, police gave him a phone number to contact the fire department for help, and apparently, Shi opted to leave instead, leaving the drone on the tree. 

Less than 60 minutes after his initial interaction with law enforcement, Shi returned his rental car and boarded an Amtrak train to Washington D.C. where he boarded a flight the next morning, not back to Minnesota, but to Oakland, California. There, he purchased a one-way ticket for a flight to China. Shi was arrested on January 18, just before boarding the flight. 

The morning after Shi had visited Newport News his drone fell out of the tree on its own, and that same resident called the police back, who turned it over to NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) who then subsequently turned it over to the FBI. The drone, they soon came to find, was full of photos and videos of drydocked U.S. Navy vessels and ships under construction at the Newport News Shipbuilding yard and BAE Systems shipbuilding in nearby Norfolk, Virginia.

Shi pleaded guilty of unlawfully taking photos of a classified installation, though he maintains that he was just flying drones over Navy installations in the middle of the night for fun during his vacation from school. He had purchased the drone, the hearing revealed, at Costco the day before going to Virginia. 

There is no publicly available evidence that ties Shi and his drone escapades to the rash of drone flights over the same area a few weeks prior, but it doesn’t take a great deductive leap to see a correlation. 

Yet, there is another possibility that has thus far gone largely undiscussed and may have mirrored the intelligence collection efforts of Chinese assets like Shi by design. 

Related: China’s new Fujian carrier reignites the Great Aircraft Carrier debate

Could recent drone swarms over US bases be a modern ‘Red Cell?’

Within the Defense Department, the term “Red Team” is often used to describe those tasked with playing the part of adversary forces in war games and military exercises. These groups, some formal, others informal, are tasked with attacking existing plans, assumptions, tactics, procedures, equipment, training, and more to identify vulnerabilities in American defenses in need of shoring up. Red Teams are often meant to operate outside the standard purview of domestic military operations and instead function as a surrogate for adversary action. 

The Pentagon’s 2003 report entitled, The Role and Status of DoD Red Teaming Activities explained that Red Teams playing the role of adversary forces are sometimes tasked with emulating the known capabilities and tactics of an opponent, but in other instances, these teams may be “given wider latitudes to discover technological counters to U.S. systems.” In other words, Red Teams aren’t always just substitutes for Russia or China, and at times, they can get very creative with the ways they go about circumventing American defenses. 

Perhaps the most infamous of red teams, and an excellent example of just how creative these endeavors can get, came in the form of Richard Marcinko’s chaos-inducing unit known to most as “Red Cell.” A legendary special operator, Richard Marcinko led SEAL Team 2 until he was tasked with establishing a new team that could take on rapidly developing terrorist threats. Marcinko hand-picked a group of elite operators ha would come to be known as SEAL Team 6, the Navy’s most elite special operations group, now called DEVGRU. Upon leaving SEAL Team 6 in 1984, Marcinko stood up a new team officially called OP-06D that was made up of former SEALs and a single Force Recon Marine.

This team, formed at the request of commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, was tasked with testing the Navy’s vulnerabilities to terrorist attack… by becoming the terrorists themselves. Marcinko’s team reportedly infiltrated bases, stole top-secret documents, kidnapped civilian security personnel, and even allegedly planted a fake bomb near Air Force One.

There is no evidence to suggest that a modern iteration of Red Cell is now repeating history to demonstrate how vulnerable American defenses can be right here at home. But, there is precedent for it… And if that’s what the drone swarms over Langley and elsewhere ultimately proved to be, I wouldn’t be particularly surprised. 

Feature Image: Sandboxx News

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