In early March, Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana was visited by a swarm of mysterious drones. The drones proved resistant to electronic warfare measures. They artfully evaded attempts to approach or neutralize them and lingered over the base for four hours—an astonishing display of negligence by the U.S. military.
It is obvious that they were not simply hobby drones belonging to some unusually adept pranksters. They were almost certainly the property of one of the very few countries with the motive and means to pull off this sort of operation. The top suspect would have to be China, the world’s leading producer of drones. At least one expert has suggested that the drones were satellite-controlled, which would help explain the resilience of their communications—and narrow the probable candidates down to China and Russia.
In early March, Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana was visited by a swarm of mysterious drones. The drones proved resistant to electronic warfare measures. They artfully evaded attempts to approach or neutralize them and lingered over the base for four hours—an astonishing display of negligence by the U.S. military.
It is obvious that they were not simply hobby drones belonging to some unusually adept pranksters. They were almost certainly the property of one of the very few countries with the motive and means to pull off this sort of operation. The top suspect would have to be China, the world’s leading producer of drones. At least one expert has suggested that the drones were satellite-controlled, which would help explain the resilience of their communications—and narrow the probable candidates down to China and Russia.
By loitering over the base, the drones likely harvested valuable intelligence about its counterdrone defenses (such as they were), including reaction times and system characteristics. And note: Barksdale is not just another military base; it’s the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command, the organizational backbone of the United States’ strategic bombers. If Beijing ever finds itself confronting Washington and its allies over a grab for Taiwan, knowing how to disrupt the operations of bases like Barksdale could come in handy.
You’d think that a lapse on this scale would have prompted a broad debate about the U.S. Defense Department’s astonishing failure to protect one of the country’s most sensitive security assets. You’d think that the American media and public would demand to know why its military decision-makers are so shockingly inept at dealing with the drone revolution that has upended the nature of warfare over the past five years. Last year, Ukrainians hid dozens of attack drones in shipping containers, which they then used to blow up Russian bombers that were parked on runways thousands of miles from Kyiv. You’d think that the possibility that a hostile power might be positioning itself to unleash similar destruction on the United States would prompt national indignation.
Yet the only discernible reaction to the Barksdale story has been a collective shoulder shrug, as U.S. journalists largely contented themselves with channeling the Trump administration’s bland assurances that the culprits behind the incursions remain mysterious. (Reporters are generally far too willing to give the U.S. military the benefit of a doubt—a shyness perhaps reinforced by the Pentagon’s recent restrictions on journalists that it deems insufficiently loyal.) The lack of indignation seems even odder because the Barksdale scandal is far from the first of its kind. Mysterious drone incursions over U.S. military bases date back to at least 2023.
A few days ago, it was revealed that a drone incursion had taken place over Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.—where U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and several other Trump administration officials reside. The skies over central Washington are the most heavily protected airspace in the United States. That a possible adversary managed to penetrate it with such apparent ease should have sent alarm bells ringing all over the country. Instead, leading politicians and the media quickly moved on, seemingly all-absorbed by the war in Iran.
The peculiar lack of attention to this threat mirrors the treatment of another pressing national security challenge involving technology: China’s yearslong cyberwar against the United States. In February, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell demanded public hearings with the CEOs of Verizon and AT&T to address lingering questions about the scale of Salt Typhoon—the name given by cybersecurity specialists to the Chinese campaign to plant exploits in U.S. telephone networks, which has been underway since 2019. Last year, FBI cybersecurity chief Brett Leatherman described Salt Typhoon as “one of the more consequential cyber espionage breaches we have seen here in the United States.”
The implications are vast. Investigators suspect that at least 200 businesses and organizations have been targeted by the hackers, who have apparently been trying to plant software in public networks that could sabotage communications infrastructure when triggered. U.S. legislators who follow cybersecurity issues, most notably Sen. Mark Warner, have spent years trying to draw attention to the dire state of U.S. cyberdefenses—which should have been obvious at the latest in 2013, when a Chinese hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel and Management compromised the personal data of millions of Americans. Yet the magnitude of the Salt Typhoon breaches suggests that U.S. institutions—and, indeed, the broader American public—have learned little in the interim.
It is hard to escape the sense that many Americans—not only government officials and high-ranking military officers—simply do not grasp the geopolitical implications of new war technologies. The notion that the United States can conduct its wars remotely, sheltering behind the protective barrier of two oceans, has, since the end of the Cold War, been seriously challenged only by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Few Americans seem to understand how new technologies are collapsing space. You no longer need a sophisticated ballistic missile to attack an enemy on the other side of the world. Now you only need to bring together a few engineers in an inconspicuous workshop to assemble a drone force that could, at a moment’s notice, swarm a U.S. Air Force base and put critical assets out of action.
That is exactly what happened in Saudi Arabia on March 27. That’s when Iran managed to destroy an E-3 Sentry plane parked at an air base in a combined drone and missile attack. The plane, commonly known by the acronym AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System), is a critical and essentially irreplaceable asset for conducting air campaigns. It appears to have been parked out in the open with little in the way of protection—yet another glaring example of the Pentagon’s failure to take the new threats seriously. Iranian drones have had remarkable success at getting close to U.S. targets. To destroy the E-3, Tehran reportedly received the targeting information from Moscow—another threat that the highest levels of the U.S. government have chosen to ignore.
Iran also apparently used drones in strikes that heavily damaged vital radar systems for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile batteries in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Several Gulf governments quickly enlisted the help of Ukraine, which has years of experience fending off mass drone attacks; as a result, Ukraine (along with Israel) today has the most advanced anti-drone defense in the world. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, even the United States has asked for advice. He said that Ukrainian specialists have been invited to Jordan to shore up the U.S. military’s counterdrone measures.
U.S. President Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, begs to differ. On March 13, he declared: “We know more about drones than anybody. We have the best drones in the world, actually.” Ukrainians see it differently. They have pointed out that Iranian drones, which are the same slow and noisy designs used by Russia in its attacks on Ukrainian cities, are effective precisely because they’re cheap, relatively stealthy, and easy to produce in large numbers—in stark contrast to pricey, over-engineered U.S. designs. Ukrainian advisors deployed to the Gulf have expressed amazement at the U.S. military’s willingness to use expensive and exquisite systems to down low-cost Iranian drones. One Ukrainian told a reporter that the United States was using high-end missiles at $6 million apiece to shoot down Iranian Shahed drones that cost roughly $70,000. Another bemoaned the United States’ failure to absorb lessons in drone warfare from Ukrainian battlefields. There’s a lot to learn from Ukraine, but Trump keeps insisting, “We don’t need their help in drone defense.”
But perhaps this is one case where we shouldn’t blame Trump alone. The myopia is bipartisan: His predecessor, Joe Biden, dismissed mysterious drone swarms in late 2024 as “nothing nefarious”—even though there were at least two confirmed cases of drones over military bases. It doesn’t seem like Biden administration officials ever got to the bottom of the issue—at least, not to an extent that has ever been shared publicly. Nor did Biden’s team appear to have developed an effective strategy against Salt Typhoon.
Regrettably, it looks as though only some major setback—far more than the destruction of an E-3 plane—will be enough to jolt Americans out of their ingrained complacency. We can only hope that the price will not be too high.
