Droning On About Drones

 If you have been following the news, over the last several weeks there has been an inordinate number of drones appearing over or in the vicinity of Langley, military installations along the East Coast (particularly New Jersey), facilities on the West Coast, and even ships at sea.

    While state and local officials have been concerned, the response from the federal government has been the normal denial and obfuscation of the issue. For instance, "On Friday’s broadcast of CNN's 'Situation Room,' Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated that 'We haven’t seen anything unusual. We know of no threat' with the reported drone sightings on the East Coast but Congress needs to give more authority to counter drones." More specifically:

    “Let me calm those nerves. We have not seen anything unusual. We have not seen any unusual activity. We know of no threat. We know of no nefarious activity. I want to repeat that. We have not seen anything unusual. We know of no threat or of any nefarious activity. And let me explain, people are reporting sightings of drones. It is very common for individuals who think they see drones to actually see small aircraft and we have a case of mistaken identity. Also, we have six different people reporting what they think is a drone, and all of a sudden, we have reports of six drone sightings. So, there’s some duplication. I have been in touch with Gov. Murphy (D-NJ) every day. Our experts have been in touch with the New Jersey State Police every day. What we have done is we have deployed our state-of-the-art technology. We’ve deployed our experts to New Jersey. That technology has not confirmed any drone sightings. In addition, it has confirmed that some reported drone sightings are, in fact, small aircraft. Pilots have not reported seeing drones. That’s not to say that there aren’t drones flying in the air, but we have no concern, at this point, with respect to a threat or any nefarious activity. The reality is, you can have a 15-year-old kid who buys a drone off the shelf and puts it up in the sky. We have not seen drones turn their lights off in the dark. We have not seen drones penetrate restricted airspace. Those are two indicia that would give us a cause for concern.”

    He added, “We haven’t seen anything unusual. We know of no threat. Secondly, we have gone to Congress, repeatedly, asking for more authority to counter drone activity and we have also asked for more authority to give to the state and local officials under our supervision, because…those authorities need to be expanded.”

     So he saying a few different things here. First, Mayorkas denies that people are seeing drones by stating that people aren't actually seeing drones, but something else that they are mistaking for drones. This flies in the face of reports from military and Coast Guard personnel confirming the unusual number of drones, including shadowing ships and flying in restricted air space.

    It also doesn't match the messaging from White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby's comments on Fox News on Friday. Asked about other officials essentially saying that witnesses were nuts or didn't know what they were seeing, Kirby responded:

    No, not at all, Martha. That’s the farthest thing that I would ever do. I was simply reiterating what the FBI and what the Department of Homeland Security have relayed to us about what they’ve been able to corroborate. We haven’t been able to corroborate everything. I said many of the corroborated sightings have turned out to be piloted aircraft. I didn’t say all of them.

    And what I said was those are the ones we were able to corroborate. There’s certainly ones that we have not been able to, and we don’t know the answer to it. And I strongly recommend that for folks that are seeing these things and documenting them to share that as they can with Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, the investigator.

    Back to Mayorkas, though, his second point was that there was nothing unusual going on and that the DHS knew of no threats. These comments are the equivalent of "don't worry, everything is under control." This again is contradicted by Kirby who admitted that the government did not know what was going on:

But I can tell you that we are working on it very, very hard to know because we want to answer those questions the same as those folks in New Jersey want answers to them. We are working on this very, very hard. We are now applying.

There was an inter-agency conversation this morning about this topic where we have now to employ some additional technology to New Jersey and some additional personnel to try to get a better sense of what these things are.

Kirby, however, ruled out shooting down a drone to find out what was going on because the government did not yet know enough about the drones, but later switching to a public safety argument: "You’re not going to want to shoot something down where it could hit somebody’s house or hurt somebody.” This sounds suspiciously like what we heard when the Biden Administration delayed shooting down a Chinese spy balloon until after it had completed it mission, a point raised by the Fox News interviewer. 

    MacCallum then cut in to ask, “Well, the Coast Guard says that there are 30 of them following one of their ships in the ocean. So, would that work?”

    Kirby answered, “Again, we have to develop the policy options based on what we know we’re dealing with here and we just don’t know enough to make those kinds of — to take those kinds of actions. But, my goodness, we’re going to do everything we can to find out and we’re going to share as much as we can. I understand it’s frustrating for folks. It’s frustrating for us. We want to know as well.”

Similarly, "[t]he Pentagon claims there is no threat to national security but has not been able to explain the spate of drone sightings across the country in recent weeks. The vast majority have been in New Jersey but mystery aircraft have also been reported across the country from Washington DC to California." In short then, Kirby and the DoD have essentially shot down most everything Mayorkas had to say about why there were no unusual drone activity as well as his assurance there was no threat. Saying that we don't know if there is a threat is fundamentally different from saying there is no threat.

    Of course after everything, Mayorkas said that DHS has been seeking greater Congressional authority to counter drone activity (although. This is a combination of the old "never let a crises go to waste," and a call for the public to give up yet more freedom for (dubious) security.And perhaps DHS and the military are lying about all of this, and it is a manufactured "crises" to further restrict the public's right to own and operated drones. In fact, it has been suggested that this is all "psyop against you to manipulate Congress into passing the new H.R.8610 (Counter-UAS Authority Security, Safety, and Reauthorization Act of 2024)" allowing the government to develop and deploy anti-drone technology in the United States including in cooperation with law enforcement and certain private entities.

    Interestingly, in the interview with Kirby, the interviewer noted that at least some of the drones appeared to be "Taradynamics transwing drone XP-4, which is being developed by the US Navy as a recon and logistics drone, capable of picking up and dropping off packages between land and moving ships in high seas and winds." That is, the craft can fold its wings and land, takeoff, or hover, like a standard quad-motor drone, or fold its wings out to be like a fixed wing aircraft with four engines. This might explain reports where the mystery drones were easily able to outrun drones sent up to intercept them.

    In the same vein, it appears that the majority of drone sightings have been in "a prototype dual-use U.S. East Coast test and evaluation corridor for the demonstration, development, and evaluation of military, commercial, academic, and Federal Government UAS and AAM technologies with future application to strategic airlift capabilities of the U.S. Air Force" announced in 2023. 

The availability of the UAS/AAM evaluation corridor between Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst (JBMDL) in New Jersey and Dover AFB in Delaware allows AMC and USTRANSCOM to rapidly assess technical and operational concepts for UAS and AAM, and to develop measures of value in operational scenarios. What makes the designated airspace a “dual use” corridor is that the CRADA facilitates the launching and landing of civilian craft from non-DOD sites within the corridor, including the NARTP. Many of the tests and experiments envisioned would only be possible with a dedicated corridor.

    In short, the most likely explanation is that there are drones being sighted, although the number may be exaggerated; and that the drones are part of a development and training programing. We have seen in Ukraine and the Middle East how effective drones can be in warfare, and so it makes sense that the U.S. military is working over time to learn how to deploy and operated drones, particularly drone swarms. That the government would lie about it or cover it up is just par for the course.

    But if you believe that the drones are being operated by a hostile power, you will then need to ask: "How Many of Those Thousands of Illegal Chinese Young Men Biden Let into America Are Drone Operators?"