REBECCA GRANT: America has a drone problem, and no one is in charge

President-elect Donald Trump wants to create an Iron Dome missile shield over the United States.

But what about the drones flying underneath it? ‘Mystery Drone sightings all over the Country. Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge. I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!’ he wrote Friday on Truth Social.

Couldn’t agree more, except please don’t get your shotgun out of the closet and start rooting around for a box of shells. It’s illegal to interfere with any aircraft in flight, manned or unmanned.  Maybe its deer season where you live, but alas, it is never drone season. Right now, statutes limit even the military’s ability to intercept drones in the U.S.

America’s got a drone problem.  Some are actually airplanes. Some drones are legal and no threat to you and me. Some are flown by drug cartels dropping off fentanyl in San Diego. Gen. Greg Guillot, Commander, U.S. Northern Command, told the Senate more than 1,000 drones per month cross the southern border. Other drones belong to the police, or to the military. Don’t forget the NYPD has 110 drone operators qualified by the FAA. I also expect some of the drone sightings connect to military experiments and operations.

But without question, the U.S. is vulnerable to a national security threat from drones in a way we’ve never experienced before. While many U.S. military installations have anti-drone systems, the rest of the country doesn’t. A new plan for countering drones in U.S. airspace should be top priority for President-elect Trump’s incoming Cabinet: Homeland Security, Defense, and Transportation, with the FAA.  Find a conference table at Mar-a-Lago and get key Cabinet nominees Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy started now. 

What worries me is the pattern emerging of sightings of multiple drones, operating at low altitude, with persistent and coordinated overwatch, near military bases and critical infrastructure. Of course, New Jersey has a lot of cool stuff: the aircraft carrier electromagnetic catapult test infrastructure, Picatinny Arsenal, Naval Weapons Site Earle, which stores and loads munitions for the Navy’s Atlantic fleet. 

While the New Jersey sightings date from Nov. 20, drone incidents started years ago. Back in 2017, an Air Force F-22 Raptor stealth fighter encountered a drone over the runway while landing at Langley AFB in Virginia. Yeah, I can see why the Chinese might want a close-up view of the engine intakes and stealth panel seals on that. In California, drones regularly drop inside the fences at the sprawling factories in Palmdale that build top secret military planes like the B-21 stealth bomber.  It’s a stew of attempted surveillance – whether by military aircraft aficionados or the Chinese or somebody else. 

‘Some of it, I’m pretty sure, is our adversaries. Why wouldn’t they?’ Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., commented to Breaking Defense at the Reagan National Defense Forum Dec. 7.

Here are my four biggest concerns. 

 It doesn’t feel like this last-gasp Biden White House is working the problem. Ever since the Chinese spy balloon traipsed from Montana to South Carolina in 2023, Americans have realized that our skies are not always safe.  

We are a low-trust society. The lack of transparency is almost worse than the drones.

 At the heart of the drone mystery is a very disturbing problem: We do not defend the interior airspace of our vast nation. That was apparent on 9/11, when it took 175 Air Force fighter jets launched all over the nation with their air refueling tankers to patch together linked interior radar coverage and communications. Many improvements have been made, but the 2023 spy balloon intercept took effort, and the drone challenge is a whole new chapter.

 This is a job for NORTHCOM but ‘at this time, NORTHCOM does not have a formal role in defending against UAS,’ Guillot said in March. He’s ‘making proposals to see if there is an increased role in the UAS fight.’ Mind you, NORTHCOM is busy with defending against China and Russia in the High North and upgrading West Coast missile defense. The Pentagon signed off on a counter-UAS strategy on Dec. 2 and the defense bill for Fiscal Year 2025 helps, but a lot of that is focused on overseas operations.  

 On Friday, German officials confirmed drone operations around the U.S. airbase at Ramstein. In Britain, drones were sighted over Royal Air Force bases, where the U.S. stations F-35s and keeps nuclear weapons storage sites. Villagers at Beck Row, Suffolk, had the same shocked reaction as New Jersey. ‘They were really noisy and had lights. They looked official to be honest,’ villager Casseem Campbell told the BBC on Nov. 29.  ‘You get more information off Facebook than you do the base,’ griped another resident. Both German and British officials suspect the drones may be part of an ongoing Russian espionage and disruption campaign to weaken NATO support for Ukraine.  

I don’t want any of Putin’s drones here. Time for the Trump team to figure this out.

Fortunately, the U.S. is awash in counter-drone systems. The Coyote is a counter-drone rocket launched from a tube on a truck or helicopter. The DroneHunter throws a net over drones weighing several hundred pounds, and has been tried out in Ukraine. U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopters shot down drones with Hellfire missiles during an exercise in Saudi Arabia this fall. Another great method is electronic disruption of the drone’s flight controls and guidance. The list goes on, but none of it can work without coordinated surveillance and revamped command and control authorities.  

America’s drone problem comes down to this: leadership. Big decisions need to be made within the first few months of Trump’s new term. For as citizens in New Jersey will agree, we are out of time.