Reports of multiple unauthorized drones over Barksdale Air Force Base and Fort McNair should alarm every American. Up until now, no threat has been identified. If this were happening overseas, we’d call it pre-operational surveillance. That’s how I was trained. At home, we’re still calling it "mystery." It’s only a matter of time until a credible threat presents itself.
What’s most alarming is that we cannot definitively answer who is flying these drones. All it’s going to take is one single drone to slip through our defenses and kill an American, to cause massive strategic damage to our country. I’ve been advocating for someone to do something about it for years and still feel like legacy bureaucrats and policymakers are just waiting for an American to die before doing something. That’s unacceptable. The American people deserve better.
Unauthorized drone incursions over military installations have been rising for years. All it will take is one drone slipping through our defenses to kill an American and cause massive strategic damage. Waiting for that moment to act is unacceptable.
Drones are not toys. Their ability to operate over sensitive locations is not an inconvenience — it’s a national security failure hiding in plain sight. These are not exotic systems. They are commercially available drones — cheap, accessible and increasingly capable of executing sophisticated missions without triggering legacy defenses.
What concerns me most is the behavior of these drones. They are not hobbyist drones. Reports indicate they entered and exited base perimeters in ways designed to avoid detection, as if testing response protocols.
For decades, we built national security around large, predictable threats. Today’s threats are asymmetric. A drone swarm that costs less than a pickup truck can shut down a strategic airbase. These systems are cheap, scalable and difficult to detect with traditional radar. Billion-dollar defense infrastructure is being outpaced by commercially available technology.
All it would take is one successful drone attack on a military installation or civilian target to cause catastrophic damage — not just in lives lost, but in what it signals to adversaries about our vulnerabilities.
Counter-drone authority is fragmented across agencies and state and local law enforcement are largely prohibited from acting. In some cases, neutralizing a threatening drone could expose an officer to severe federal penalties. Congress has attempted to expand authority without success and the FAA has yet to establish clear rules for drones over critical infrastructure.
1 comment:
How do you we know that these drones are nothing more than our own intelligence agencies with an agenda. There is always something that causes a need for more security and what better way to get legislation passed to fund more security than perpetrate the need. Seems to be a common practice for getting into wars as well. Gulf of Tonkin, weapons of mass destruction, 2 weeks to the bomb, climate change, covid, bank bailouts, etc. the list goes on and on and the taxes keep going up and the fraud and abuse and political corruption is deeper and deeper.
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