Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s 12 drones violating Langley Air Force Base’s airspace in Virginia. That’s right, up to a dozen drones were seen flying over East Coast military installations for approximately 17 days in December 2023. As of yet, there is no good explanation for the squad of aircraft that orbited a major military base, which is home to the Air Combat Command and its complement of the stealthy F-22s.

Of course, the first inclination is to think of UFOs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), as they are now called. However, those who witnessed the parade of flying craft identified them as drones – unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the drone incursions into Langley airspace, the commander then of Air Combat Command, Gen. Mark Kelly, US Air Force (Ret.), was not confident about explaining the mysterious craft. The WSJ explained:

“For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the US … The first drone arrived shortly. Kelly, a career fighter pilot, estimated it was roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour, at an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet. Other drones followed, one by one, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawnmowers.”

Interestingly, there was little concern about the 17-day infiltration of drones until October 2024, when the WSJ report was published. In December last year, the White House held meetings for a couple of weeks after the UAVs were first reported, including participants from the Defense Department, the FBI, and the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Nothing was decided about the drones flying over sensitive military installations.

The challenge for the Department of Defense in countering UAS incursions at military bases is exacerbated by federal regulations prohibiting shooting down the eavesdropping machines except where there is a direct threat to the installation. As described by those who saw the drones over Langley, a drone 20 feet long is not your backyard hobbyist’s commercial toy. Nonetheless, the proliferation of all sorts of unmanned aircraft of various sizes and shapes has resulted in lower costs and more capable machines. The Defense Department’s love affair with all things unmanned has driven an expanded market in aerial drones. Cameras have higher resolutions, and battery life has improved for longer flights with greater distances.

The panoply of available aircraft that are controlled remotely and autonomously opens the floodgates for US adversaries to observe and disrupt the activities, among them Russian, Chinese, and more. It is disturbing that unfriendly nations’ drones are flying around US military facilities at will. More troubling, the WSJ report revealed, “[The drones] also were nearly impossible to track, vanishing each night despite a wealth of resources deployed to catch them.”

Let’s get this straight: Drones are flying over an Air Force base where the most sophisticated supersonic fighter aircraft are stationed, and the government cannot catch them. Shouldn’t the average US citizen expect more from the most powerful nation on earth?

The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliate.