How come America's so-called premier law enforcement agency isn't stopping the drones buzzing over New Jersey? Why isn't the U.S. military isn't deploying its drone-catching and disabling technology? Great questions for which there are no answers at the moment for the American people. Great job, everybody!
The stakes are high. There are sensitive military operations in New Jersey, not to mention Donald Trump's Bedford, N.J. home. A former U.S. Army soldier who now runs a drone company told Defense One, “I could fly [an off-the-shelf consumer drone] into the White House right now and there’d be nothing to stop me.”
Drones have been buzzing over New Jersey every night for weeks. Residents are told to relax; there's nothing to worry about as drones, some the size of a Mercedes Benz sedan, fly over their heads. The New Jersey governor didn't even bother to attend a meeting of officials receiving a briefing on law enforcement's response. Something's up. Is this another episode of Joe Biden's don't-worry-your-pretty-little-head about that Chinese spy balloon? Or is this an in-your-face top-top-secret skunkworks operation?
The Pentagon has confirmed that it absolutely-without-a-doubt knows that the drones are not from an "Iranian mothership" floating in the Atlantic Ocean. Nor, the Pentagon spokeswoman says, are they from any other foreign country. The Pentagon issued the denial after Congressman Jeff Van Drew told reporters that he'd heard from "high sources" that the drones were from the Iranians.
I'd love to believe them and all, but understand that these are the same people who said that pulling out of Afghanistan and leaving untold billions in materiel was going to work out just fine, white rage rivals climate change as our biggest existential threats and that a movie triggered the Benghazi incident. Color me a little skeptical.
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Stopping drones is a nearly full-time job for the Pentagon. Iran is sending its drones that fly at "114 miles per hour and carry 110 pounds of explosives" at U.S. troops out of Yemen.
There are ways to detect, catch, disarm, and jam drones. We've got that technology right now. You'd think that if the military really didn't know where these drones were from, it would catch one of those bad boys and reverse engineer it or check its electronics to find out where it's been.
Here's what we've got in our arsenal, according to Defense One.
Raytheon's Patriot Missile system is being used in Israel right now to fire at drones. That means it costs multi-millions of dollars to bring down one drone, obviously making it impractical for run-of-the-mill drones but life-saving for drones carrying bombs.
The Navy uses lasers to down drones as it did over the Persian Gulf last year using its LaWS system, which means Laser Weapons System.
Northrop Grumman and Lockheed are changing their radar air defense systems to monitor UAV activity. Here's Lockheed's sizzle reel on the system.
Drone-catching. It's archaic and sounds desperate, but there are ways to literally catch drones in midair. The military has a version of this.
The U.S. Marines use this kind.
Earlier this year, the Marines announced that every squad will be equipped with anti-drone technology.
Defense One has been keeping up with the technologies and hastens to add that if anyone wanted to use these ways to catch drones, they'd "be breaking up to two dozen U.S. laws, dealing with everything from privacy to communications channels to aircraft interdiction."
Jamming, for example, is illegal in the United States as it may jam law enforcement and emergency personnel electronics. The U.S. military's anti-jam drones are currently being used by Ukraine to defy Russian attempts to down them.
All of that technology is available to the military, but what about keeping the homeland safe? It'll take more than patting us on the head and assuring us it's nothing to worry about to bring along a skeptical and mistrustful American public, but someone had better start talking.