The extraordinary situation of drones over US bases

ONE of the most intriguing stories to come out of the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran was a report about drones operating over military bases in the US.

No, it is not one of those fake news stories flooding social media. This event was reported in mainstream American outlets ranging from the liberal ABC News network to Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing Fox News.

On Mar 9, 12 to 15 drones hovered over Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, home base of a B-52 bomber wing. The Shreveport Times, a news portal based in a nearby town, reported that aircrews were ordered to move to air-raid shelters after sightings of unmanned aircraft within the base’s airspace.

The report was followed up in the Air & Space Forces Magazine, a defence industry monthly, which confirmed the incident via the written testimony of US Northern Command’s General Gregory M Guillot to Congress.

The magazine highlighted the “persistent, vexing threat” that drones present to military installations. In another incident, mysterious drones swarmed another base in December 2023. The US Air Force declined to disclose further information, citing national security concerns.

So far, so interesting to aficionados of conspiracy theories. Indeed, some commentators have dismissed the sightings as the work of amateur hobbyists or domestic drone readiness tests.

Others are not so sanguine. For instance, a former US deputy undersecretary of defence, Stephen Bryen, argued in his well-regarded blog that the drones operated in ways suggesting they were equipped with multiple sensors that told each drone what to do over the base. They hovered over the base for more than four hours and flew with their lights on.

Bryen wrote: “The drones that operated over Barksdale were far more sophisticated than anything seen in Ukraine, where drones are used heavily, and well beyond Iranian capabilities.”

He added that they “had extraordinary range, could resist broad spectrum jamming, and featured non-commercial signal characteristics. Even more provocatively, the drones used various ingress and egress routes and operated in dispersed patterns, making traceability (via trying to triangulate on signals) virtually impossible”.

Bryen’s analysis carries weight. He argued that only China would have the technological prowess to build and mount this kind of operation, hewing to current orthodoxy and showing a unfortunate penchant for binary thinking.

A case can be made that several other nations also have the skills to build and operate such drones, including Ukraine, Russia, Israel and North Korea. But apart from the drones’ origin, other questions remain.

The implications of the Barksdale incident are stark. It means that another – potentially hostile – power could be operating in the American heartland, while Washington’s mighty security apparatus can do nothing. That is a truly extraordinary situation.

This begs another question: What else is there?

In the 2000s, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, some US commentators used to warn that the next attack on their homeland would be by hostile groups who would smuggle in nukes in small parts and reassemble them in every major city or unleash a virus to trigger a pandemic. The Covid-19 pandemic revived those fears.

Clearly, Washington’s problems are not confined to West Asia or the Pacific.