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.
The drones headed south, across Chesapeake Bay, toward Norfolk, Va., and over an area that includes the home base for the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port.
Officials didn’t know if the drone fleet, which numbered as many as a dozen or more over the following nights, belonged to clever hobbyists or hostile forces. Some suspected that Russia or China deployed them to test the response of American forces.
Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the U.S. unless they pose an imminent threat. Aerial snooping doesn’t qualify, though some lawmakers hope to give the military greater leeway.
Reports of the drones reached President Biden and set off two weeks of White House meetings after they first appeared in December last year. Officials from agencies including the Defense Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Pentagon’s UFO office joined outside experts to throw out possible explanations as well as ideas about how to respond.
Drone incursions into restricted airspace were already worrying national-security officials. Two months earlier, in October 2023, five drones flew over a government site used for nuclear-weapons experiments. The Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site outside Las Vegas detected four of the drones over three days. Employees spotted a fifth.
U.S. officials said they didn’t know who operated the drones in Nevada, a previously unreported incursion, or for what reason. A spokeswoman said the facility has since upgraded a system to detect and counter drones.
The sightings revealed the dilemma of defending against drones on U.S. soil compared with the ease of deploying or battling them abroad. Drones have become a deadly and cost-effective tool of war, capable of carrying surveillance gear, explosives or lethal chemicals. Yet shooting down suspicious aircraft over the U.S. risks disrupting or endangering the lives of Americans the military is sworn to protect.
Early last year, a suspected Chinese spy balloon crammed with electronic surveillance gear floated across the country for eight days, while military leaders waited for it to reach a spot isolated enough to shoot it down safely. After the balloon made it to the Southeast coast, an F-22 jet from Langley punctured it with a missile.
Ten months later, the phalanx of drones appeared at Langley.
Over 17 days, the drones arrived at dusk, flew off and circled back. Some shone small lights, making them look like a constellation moving in the night sky—or a science-fiction movie, Kelly said, “‘Close Encounters at Langley.’” They also were nearly impossible to track, vanishing each night despite a wealth of resources deployed to catch them.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, at the time commander of the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said drones had for years been spotted flying around defense installations. But the nightly drone swarms over Langley, he said, were unlike any past incursion.
___
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/drones-military-pentagon-defense-331871f4