Drones of Unknown Origin Fly Over U.S. Military Base for 17 Days
The restricted airspace over a stretch of land around Langley Air Force Base in Virginia has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the country.
In a chilling breach of military security, a swarm of drones has been violating air space over Langley Air Force base in Virginia for 17 days since last December, and the Pentagon appears clueless as to who is controlling these vehicles.
U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly wasn’t sure what to make of reports that a suspicious fleet of unidentified aircraft had been flying over Langley Air Force Base on Virginia’s shoreline.
Kelly, a decorated senior commander at the base, got on a squadron rooftop to see for himself. He joined a handful of other officers responsible for a clutch of the nation’s most advanced jet fighters, including F-22 Raptors.
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 U.S. The show usually starts 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, another senior leader told Kelly.
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 lawn mowers.
In such a swarm, each drone is a highly mobile, high-tech unit equipped with cameras, sensors, and maybe even arms or tools designed for specific tasks. Algorithms choreograph these vehicles to move and function for a particular purpose. Drones in a swarm are directed to fly in a pattern and communicate on a designated frequency band.
What is particularly troubling about these drones is that the mystery drones used bands are not ones used by hobbyists or commercial interests.
The origins of the drones were unknown, though suspicions were raised that they came from Russia or China. Few believed the flights to be the work of hobbyists.
Analysts discovered that the smaller quadcopters didn’t use the usual frequency band available for standard commercial drones, further evidence that hobbyists did not fly the drones.
It is interesting to note a Chinese national was arrested for using drones to spy on a UN Navy shipyard.
On July 8, a Chinese citizen and graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Fengyun Shi, pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act for photographing classified U.S. Navy ships with a drone in Virginia.
The FBI said Shi, who was arrested in January, photographed Navy vessels at multiple shipyards. A Newport News shipyard was manufacturing next-generation aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. Both contain classified components.
A statement of facts accompanying Shi’s plea agreement said he flew the drone only around the shipyards and did not take any photos that did not contain U.S. Navy vessels. He was arrested trying to board a one-way flight to China from California.
Furthermore, two months before the Langley incident, five mysterious drones reportedly crossed into restricted airspace over a federal nuclear weapons experiment site in Nevada.
Four of the drones were detected by the Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site outside Las Vegas, while the fifth was spotted by employees, according to the Journal. The facility has reportedly since upgraded its detection system, but officials have not determined who was behind the breach.
Interestingly, the Associated Press recently examined how U.S. and Chinese military planners are gearing up to utilize air and sea drone swarms for military operations. It’s the new Cold War, but it features weapons that are easier and cheaper to build than nuclear bombs.
The planners envision a scenario in which hundreds, even thousands of the machines engage in coordinated battle. A single controller might oversee dozens of drones. Some would scout, others attack. Some would be able to pivot to new objectives in the middle of a mission based on prior programming rather than a direct order.
The world’s only AI superpowers are engaged in an arms race for swarming drones that is reminiscent of the Cold War, except drone technology will be far more difficult to contain than nuclear weapons. Because software drives the drones’ swarming abilities, it could be relatively easy and cheap for rogue nations and militants to acquire their own fleets of killer robots.
The Pentagon is pushing urgent development of inexpensive, expendable drones as a deterrent against China acting on its territorial claim on Taiwan. Washington says it has no choice but to keep pace with Beijing. Chinese officials say AI-enabled weapons are inevitable so they, too, must have them.
For those of you interested in the military aspects associated with drone swarms and a comparison of US and Chinese capabilities, The Wall Street Journal has a video report.
On a slightly less grim note, and as this is the Year of the Dragon, this video will give you a good idea of China’s drone programming capabilities.
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Comments
I don’t know about anybody else but it just makes me sleep real well at night to know we haven’t such incompetence at work for us.
Watch this you won’t sleep
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1845343182458061298
I am pleased that Pres. Trump is pointing out the glaring differences.
It is just a shame that he has to.
It must be an artist’s conception. Aerodynamically they make no sense.
It’s an AI picture, you moron. How can you not understand that?
The VAST majority of our most sophisticated/lethal air assets stationed in CONUS are stored in unhardened hangers with many simply sitting on the tarmac. Given the increased sophistication in drone war over the last 48-months (due in large part to the Ukraine War), it doesn’t take a lot of imagination or capability for a reasonably competent adversary to plot a surprise attack on those assets.
One of the things you’d want to posses prior to such an attack is the best topographic maps of the bases possible in addition to a better understanding of what detection capabilities we have and counter-measures we can use. We are WOEFULLY unprepared as the earlier balloon incident proved and these more recent incidents highlight.
Anyone who believes China – perhaps working with Russia, Iran & DPRK – wouldn’t attack us unprovoked, would have fit in comfortably at the Pentagon circa 1940.
Don’t forget that Biden, and by extension, Kamala, work for China.
So our military is unable to locate the origin and destination of a 20 foot drone that has flown 17 times in restricted airspace an unable to triangulate the position of the transmitter? Un believable.
Musk would be able to help
To be fair triangulation for a radio signal isn’t as easy as seen on TV. It takes time, equipment and training so I can understand the first couple. That they haven’t figured out the source of the transmission with 17 repeated intrusions since December is very concerning. IMO its a failure of leadership to grasp the serious of the issue and/or to back up reports by subordinates or at least get trained personnel and equipment in place to verify and locate the source of the transmission.
If they put an AWACS in the air they’d have look-down radar capability. They’d see where the larger drones come from and where they go. A 20 foot drone is not a toy, and stealth technology only means “low observability,” not “invisibility.” The AWACS can come as close as it needs to to pick up a return from the targets because there are no anti-air assets in the area of operations that might threaten the AWACS (AWACS usually stand off because they’re fairly well defenseless in a hot tactical environment).
Using an AWACS would probably work. Though that would mean putting it on station airborne for weeks maybe months in between intrusions and might ‘tip the hand’ so much that the folks responsible for the drones delayed until the 24/7/365 AWACS flights halted. At minimum that would certainly deter intrusions.
They’ve been doing this for most of this year, or longer. There’s several NatSec twitter accounts that do nothing other than track Air Force/Navy assets and since at least January (when I first started noticing it), the Navy has been routinely flying E2-Hawkeys out of Norfolk to cover Langley and out of Point Magu to cover the western bases. They’ve never done this before, not even during the height of the post-9/11 period. Interestingly, they’ve also also been flying the E-4 NAOC (the so-called ‘Doomsday’ planes) almost everyday. This is something that was largely stopped when Obama was early in his tenure.
Spread spectrum is very hard to triangulate or snoop on. Still, why can’t these be shot down.
I have advocated for years now the use of drone swarms for border control.
These certainly could be shot down. The Air Force/Navy have chosen to not shoot them down for reasons they won’t disclose. I suspect some of it can be explained by the hesitancy to let surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles loose in one of the heaviest air traffic lanes in the country. There may be other explanations as well.
But, you can’t discount the possibility of incompetence. They did, after all, allow a spy balloon to transverse the entire continent before finally taking it down….after its mission was completed.
Oh, it’s just the Chinese, no problem, they are buying up our farm lands next to military bases for a reason
Put a Tranny and some People of Color in charge of figuring this out.
Throw some EQUITY at it!!
Diversity is our strength!!
Only if we can throw out the unserious upper echelon pansies that are ruining the military.
They are the ones endorsing/supporting Harris by wearing dresses.
… which Harris herself doesn’t even do….
Once elected, I’m confident that VP Walz will address it personally with President Xi. They are, after all, old buds.
There’s a simple solution….shoot them down and do an autopsy.
Ha ha ha. We can’t even do that with a frikkin balloon.
Apparently, there is a law against that. Go figure.
Or at least blind them with those lasers that some fools use to mess up landing airliners.
I am sure that the military, or Musk, could come up with some quite debilitating ones….
As long as the Dhimmi-crats control and exert their pernicious and cancerous influence over the White House, DoD, State Department and our intelligence agencies, this type of outrageous and indefensible ineptitude, negligence and dereliction of duty will be par for the course.
Cleaning that mess up is going a bitch.
imagine if they’d been carrying ordnance / explosives–3,000 feet altitude–lord– 25 or 30 secs to impact ?–not much time
that it was some sort of recon operation is questionable given the advances in aerial / satellite photography / resolution over the last 20 years or so–more likely a test of our ” defenses ” over a high-security site
” restricted airspace “–right
who IS minding the store ?
They are minding the store
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1845343182458061298
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Someone said “Aerodynamically they make no sense.” And I’m looking at all the curious people looking up and thinking the whole picture looks fake.
And that’s how distraction works…..
Of course, a whole bunch of shiny objects here, while a small single drone is elsewhere….
“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.”
Dammit, apparently my Sam’s Club doesn’t even carry those!
Aren’t unauthorized aircraft in sensitive areas supposed to be shot down?? General Kelly goes on a roof and watches them like a rubbernecker at a gapers block, then goes back to his couch??
The enemy has infiltrated US!
Nope. Not allowed. It’s the law
Have illegal aliens shoot them down then…
Nope. Not allowed. It’s the law
____________________________
am not certain that’s correct–there are multiple sites in the US where you WILL be shot down if determined to be a threat–of course, that presumes the security boys are dealing with a present / human pilot and can communicate with you in some fashion to ” clear ” you–otherwise, kaboom
you WILL be challenged / intercepted / escorted away at a minimum
I suspect that any deliberately non responsive large aircraft flying on a low altitude course to intersect our DC masters in the Congressional buildings would be shot down. Same for Pentagon, WH and probably for a major metro.
There’s a law against civilians shooting down drones. There is no law that prevents the DoD from taking kinetic action against an aircraft – of ANY kind – operating in restricted air space….like over/near a base. Try to fly a Cessna 180 into the Groom Lake airspace and let me know how it goes (pro-tip: it’s going to go fiery.)
Why aren’t these drones being shot down?
By Marines in helicopters with shot guns. That’s an oversimplification, but come on for Pete’s sake!
Alejandro Mayorkas comes to the United States Air Force. It is so bad that the people behind this are unlikely surprised any longer at what they can get away with. The catastrophe that the Biden administration is will be unfolding for years, decades. What a disgrace.
Just like Jimmy Carter, father of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the man who gave away the Panama Canal.
The government can take a picture of my tag at 80 mph and send me a ticket via USPS but cannot halt infiltration into secured airspace?
My ass is a moon pie!
“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 lawn mowers.”
And they couldn’t figure out where they came from? Hmm, there’s a word for that… “bullshit.” That’s not the deep wilderness, not the middle of nowhere. And for 17 days? Yeah, OK.
You’re right. A one-time incursion likely would be difficult to track because drones easily possess the capability to dip beneath radar coverage. But, after the 2nd night, they CERTAINLY would have had airborne radar assets that could have tracked the drones almost to the deck and out to a distance of 100+ miles. It’s clear we’re not getting the whole story.
There is an urgent need to convene a long series of additional meetings over this.
What is most believable about this, particularly after the balloon debacle is that these incursions are deliberately being ignored or *sanctioned.*
It is not possible that incompetence is the only factor.
our best weapon against the drones???
keep the lefty in power in america
the takeover wont have to involve violence
On Day 2, a security-conscious Commander in Chief would mobilize sufficient inquisitive aircraft to positively identify these intruders, or wreak whatever havoc on them would be appropriate.
Wish we had one.
And it’s crickets from moron headquarters. What a bunch of losers.
If the Biden/ Harris Administration didn’t want these drones gathering information over military bases they would have be taken down. Biden is a traitor.
How many Chinese Infantry Divisions have been allowed to enter the country? All they have to do is report to pick up their weapons and equipment and attack whatever target the CCP assigns.