Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr. said the United States should not be “surprised” if there is a drone attack within the country due to the growing threat that they pose across the globe.
The federal government has worked to improve the country’s counter-drone technology, but the proliferation and evolution of drone technology make staying ahead of the threat a game of cat and mouse. In particular, there have been recent unauthorized drone sightings over outdoor sporting events and military bases, though there has yet to be any sort of domestic drone attack.
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“You have this drone activity that hasn’t become kinetic, and so we can use hope as a course of action that we hope this will never happen, but when it does, you should not be surprised, and we’re not trying to put a lot of fear in here,” Brown said in reference to those sightings on Thursday at the Center for a New American Security conference.
His comments came as the World Cup has begun, which the U.S., Mexico, and Canada are jointly hosting. All 11 U.S. stadiums that will host World Cup matches have counter-drone technology, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told lawmakers last week.
“Drones are my biggest concern too. We have spent a tremendous amount of ability and money to be able to be very offensive with drones, but on the counter-drone measures, everybody’s a little behind,” he acknowledged in response to a question about the security surrounding the international soccer tournament.
Mullin also revealed there were a dozen drones that entered the restricted airspace over the Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia, while there were eight that entered the airspace over the Miami Grand Prix F1 race in recent months.
Counter-drone operators have to take into account the population around them when determining how to intercept a potential threat. Shooting down a drone, whether that’s with another drone or a missile, would likely create falling debris if the interception is successful, posing a risk for people on the ground.
There are non-kinetic alternatives like using directed energy, electronic warfare, or having counter-drone netting over an area.
“Well, I think the thing that differs particularly for us in areas that we’ve operated is you’re out in very open areas, mostly desert in the Middle East, lot of ocean out in the Indo-Pacific, where you don’t have major population centers,” Brown added. “That’s going to be a challenge here in the United States.”
“We want to make sure that we become a hard target in certain areas and also identify those critical areas that we need to protect over time to make it more difficult for an adversary to be able to do something like a Spiderweb or anything else that will impact whether it’s a military facility, or something that’s important to the nation from a national security perspective or something from an economic perspective as well,” he said, referencing Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb” from last year.
The Ukrainians, in this mission, snuck drones into Russian territory on a truck bed, and when they got close to multiple Russian air bases, the Ukrainians activated those drones, hitting and destroying Russian fighter jets. Russia did not have defenses ready to stop such an attack, and it demonstrates a vulnerability for sophisticated and expensive systems that are hard to defend.
U.S. authorities have spotted unauthorized drones flying over multiple domestic military bases in recent months, posing threats to the personnel and equipment on those bases. But no threats have materialized from those incidents.
There were multiple instances of unauthorized drone incursions in March over Barksdale Air Force Base, the home of the B-52 Stratofortress bombers, in Louisiana. There was also a drone incursion detected at an unspecified location in late February as the U.S. was beginning its opening attacks against Iran, according to Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of U.S. Northern Command.
US LAW ENFORCEMENT INTERCEPTED UNKNOWN DRONES OVER THE MASTERS AND MIAMI GRAND PRIX: MULLIN
Abroad, the Iranians used missiles and drones to hit a pivotal U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft, which coordinates theater air operations.
Brown acknowledged the threat to the U.S. homeland, whether from drones or otherwise, has become more “prevalent” because “the threat can reach us much more now than previously.”
