Some of the hundreds of drones flying over U.S. military bases and other sensitive areas last year were likely operated with nefarious intentions, the general coordinating the response to domestic incursions told a Senate hearing today. As a result, U.S. Air Force Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, commander of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), testified that he needs increased authority to better protect these installations.
“The primary threat I see for them in the way they’ve been operating is detection and perhaps surveillance of sensitive capabilities on our installations,” Guillot explained to a Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) budget request hearing. He was responding to a question about the numerous drone incursions over U.S. military facilities, like the ones over Langley Air Force Base in 2023 that we were the first to cover. Guillot was not asked, nor did he volunteer information about who was operating these drones. A NORTHCOM spokesperson later declined to elaborate.
The limits on defending against drones are, at best, relegated to electronic warfare countermeasures, with simply providing awareness largely being the extent of the counter-drone systems deployed at installations in the United States. At this time, directed energy weapons, like lasers and high-power microwave systems, let alone kinetic capabilities, remain off-limits. This is a glaring issue we raised after our trip to see Guillot at his headquarters in Colorado Springs last year.
The threat, Guillot told the committee, is widespread.
“There were 350 detections reported last year on military installations, and that was 350 over a total of 100 different installations of all types and levels of security,” Guillot pointed out.
Last month, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told reporters that “an aspect of this is our adversaries, it just makes sense that they would do this.”
“When I was stationed down at the Pax River Test Center, we used to have North Koreans on the fence,” Kelly explained. “So how do you get better video of something? You get better video from a drone over the field than you can by standing at the fence of a military base.”
As we previously reported, in the wake of drone incursions like those over Langley, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Picatinny Arsenal, and others, NORTHCOM was given the role of synchronizing the U.S. military response. U.S. INDOPACOM was given a similar role for the Pacific.
This new role ensures “standardized training, response, tactical techniques and procedures,” stated Guillot. “And if the base and the service aren’t able to handle the incursion, we can bring in help from across the interagency and DOD to support and, perhaps most critically, is we can work closely with the interagency to give them the authority to operate the systems once they arrive, due to our close relationship with the FAA.”
In addition, “in the near future, I think we will have our own capabilities to bring in from NORTHCOM once we procure them to assist if the service and the installation cannot handle the incursion.”
However, the responsibility for defending these installations still rests with the local commanders.
Often confusing legal and regulatory hurdles limit how and when many counter-drone systems can be employed within the homeland. Concerns about risks of collateral damage resulting from the use of active anti-drone capabilities factor very heavily, too, into this equation.
Guillot told the senators that only about half of the 360 bases in the U.S. – considered “covered installations” – even have permission to defend against drones.
There are nine criteria allowing bases to be covered, Guillot explained.
“It ranges from nuclear deterrence, missile defense all the way down to if it’s a test facility,” he said.
Given all these issues, Guillot said he wants to see an expansion of anti-drone authorities under the U.S. law known as “130i.” That’s a reference to subsection of Title 10 of the U.S. Code (10 USC 130i), covering current authorities for the “protection of certain facilities and assets from unmanned aircraft.”
Under 130i, the U.S. military has the authority to take “action” to defend against drones including with measures to “disrupt control of the unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aircraft, without prior consent, including by disabling the unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aircraft by intercepting, interfering, or causing interference with wire, oral, electronic, or radio communications used to control the unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aircraft” and to “use reasonable force to disable, damage, or destroy the unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aircraft.”
The law, however, does not go far enough, Guillot explained, saying it should be expanded to pertain to “all military installations and not just those that are covered,” he urged.
Guillot also asked senators to expand the distance from a base that countermeasures can be employed.
“I’d also like to see the range expanded to slightly beyond the installation, so they don’t have to wait for the threat to get over the installation before they can address it,” he proposed. That’s because “many of these systems can use side-looking or slant range [sensors]. And so they could surveil the base from outside the perimeter, and under the current authorities, we can’t address that.”
An expansion of authority under 130i is being considered. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) explained that he and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced legislation that would “give these commanders the legal authority they need, plus the capability required to protect their bases from these kinds of incursions and then hold them accountable for doing so.”
Any change in Section 130i authorities would be on top of the Pentagon’s new counter-drone strategy it released in December, which you can read more about here. Among other things, it builds upon a number of existing efforts, including the establishment of the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office (JCO) in 2020. It is also set to tie into a new Pentagon initiative to help speed up the acquisition and fielding of new counter-drone capabilities dubbed Replicator 2. The first Replicator effort has been focused on getting more uncrewed systems into the hands of U.S. warfighters.
Because they took place outside the continental United States, the incursions last November over four U.S. Air Force bases in England, which we were also the first to write about, were not addressed by Guillot.
The general also did not bring up the thousands of drone sightings that took place at the end of last year that were not over U.S. military installations or sensitive facilities. Biden administration officials downplayed that, saying those drones posed no threat nor had any foreign nexus. In addition, most of the sightings were likely not even drones. However, the incidents sparked an FBI investigation and spurred the FAA to issue scores of Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs), mostly over power facilities. We reached out to the FBI today to find out the status of that investigation. Last month, the FBI told us that they had no suspects and recovered no drones.
U.S. President Donald Trump has taken a strong interest in drone incursions and declared he would tell the public what was actually happening in the first days of his administration. However, his press office later claimed that the so-called New Jersey drones were largely FAA authorized or research-related. TWZ saw no evidence of large scale drone incursions over New Jersey, with a chronic issue of people reporting normal aircraft as mysterious drones being glaringly apparent.
For years, The War Zone has raised concerns about dangers posed by drones, and had laid out a detailed case through dozens of reports that adversaries were taking advantage of the lack of aerial domain awareness over and above the homeland. The issue of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, is also tied up in this deeply, which is problematic in its own right. You can read all about this here. Guillot’s testimony is a clear acknowledgment of this reality and the challenges of defending against it. Whether it spurs Congress to give him greater authority to deal with the problem is something that we will know more about in the coming months.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com