The federal government repeatedly failed to identify drones flying over sensitive U.S. military bases last year, the Wall Street Journal reported last weekend. There is no getting around the fact that this is a significant national security failure, as many in the military and intelligence community concede.
At the center of the story is Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, which hosts two F-22 fighter jet squadrons and an important Air Force intelligence unit. The intrusions were revealed last month by Christopher Sharp, an independent journalist who filed a freedom of information request. This brought to light military witness reports about drone sightings, including of some drone swarms flying over and spying on the base. The reports included eyewitness sightings of drones with cameras and rotors.
As usual, in cases of serious national security breaches, the chief concern is that drones were being used to develop information for China. The outlet story implied this with the mention of a Chinese man convicted of flying drones against a naval base. As the Washington Examiner reported in March 2023, Congress was briefed about China’s airborne spying on U.S. territory long before a Chinese balloon crossed the country in early 2023. That spy balloon was shot down by an F-22 from Langley.
Three other sources with direct knowledge have told me that the FBI and Defense Department are trying to disrupt spying on U.S. territory, military activities, and bases by aircraft, drones, and seacraft. Much of this multiyear effort has focused on Chinese intelligence operatives working without diplomatic cover who have been flying drones and sometimes aircraft into protected airspace to monitor U.S. military training operations. This sort of snooping fits precisely into Chinese military spycraft. The People’s Liberation Army doctrine even refers to references of UFOs as a useful cover for spying
China has focused particularly on the Navy’s carrier strike groups and air wings. This has probably included clandestine spying by civilian Chinese ships. Chinese intelligence services have also mounted successful operations from land sites within the U.S. The FBI has conducted raids associated with these activities and, at least on one occasion in recent years, the Navy recovered a spy drone that had been involved in the spying. Chinese spies have had their visas revoked and been thrown out of the U.S. for carrying out these operations.
The FBI refused to confirm or deny any investigation, and the Pentagon did not respond to a Washington Examiner request for comment.
The Chinese surveillance activities appear designed to gather information about how U.S. forces position, train and operate. Precise surveillance would also help China be more precise in identifying and destroying targets with cyber, human, or nuclear attacks in war. Similar drone activities have been reported at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in California, War Zone reports. The Washington Examiner has previously reported on unidentified airborne incursions at U.S. government nuclear laboratories.
Incursions underline the complexity of air defense.
The U.S. military is able to confront airborne incursions by foreign adversaries and intercept hijacked or non-responsive aircraft. But it is not as good at detecting and disrupting small drones. Military bases are often near civilian towns and cities where more and more people fly drones legally. Because drones are small and fly low, it is hard to distinguish them from radar “clutter” caused by birds, other animals, ground reflections, and weather phenomena. This sea of echoes makes it complicated to single out a target. A radar system, operator, and ground/air surveillance team needs to decide quickly whether an apparent drone or drone swarm is a real threat or just a flock of birds. Drones flying at night, as at Langley, pose an especial detection challenge.A
fter the Chinese balloon sailed serenely over the continental U.S. last year, the U.S. military temporarily increased the sensitivity of its radar detection software to identify smaller objects of interest. This led to a surge of detections and fighter jets shot down many small airborne objects on Feb. 10, 11, and 12. At least one appears to have been a hobbyist or commercial balloon. The key point is that U.S. air defenses focus mostly on enemy aircraft and missiles, not on drones. They are looking for the wrong things. It is very difficult to detect or intercept a drone, or find out quickly where it is being operated from. A drone operator has likely to have packed up his equipment and disappeared before a security team can find him. If he is on his way home, he becomes just another civilian on the road.
The risk of these incursions doesn’t extend simply to espionage concerns. The war in Ukraine has spurred a drone revolution. While larger combat drones built for that purpose are proving their worth for both sides, so also are smaller civilian drones. It is not complicated to load a crude explosives payload onto a hobbyist drone to transform it into to a kamikaze drone. The ease with which Chinese intelligence operatives have generally been able to avoid capture for their operations on U.S. soil further exacerbates the threat here. The FBI’s China-focused counterintelligence resourcing is significant but utterly insufficient to grapple with the vast scale of Chinese human intelligence operations on U.S. soil. Notwithstanding the significant concern of terrorist infiltration across the Mexican and Canadian borders, too many FBI agents remained assigned to counter-terrorism investigations and not enough to China and Russia related counter-intelligence squads.
This is no small concern. In the event of a war with China over Taiwan or the Philippines, the U.S. military would face a credible threat of drone attacks on U.S. bases deep in the homeland. These attacks might or might not cause many casualties but they would fit well with China’s broader strategy of disrupting the U.S. economy and civil society with cyber-attacks. The intent would be to degrade the public and political appetite for escalation, and, at the margin, weaken American means of military action.
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Neither is the drone attack threat limited to single drones. China has successfully hidden larger drones and control nodes on commercial ships off the U.S. coast. Taking advantage of U.S. concerns over avoiding civilian casualties, it might see a combat utility via which to launch drone swarms in surprise attacks designed to debilitate the U.S. Navy before it could be deployed to the Pacific, and/or national infrastructure. The emergent power of Artificial Intelligence, which China is absolutely attempting to harness for military purposes, only exacerbates this concern. The potential for U.S. military bases deep inside the United States to be saturated by small drone swarms is a problem.
Put simply, while the drones at Langley AFB might be mysterious this time, next time they might be explosive.