For a heated 17 days in December of 2023, a swarm of unidentified drones harassed the Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. They did not attack or interfere with personnel, but the incursion into controlled air space raised a lot of alarms.
'None of the incursions appeared to exhibit hostile intent but anything flying in our restricted airspace can pose a threat to flight safety,' a base spokesperson said.
The drones flew at approximately 100 miles per hour and made noises described as similar to lawnmowers. According to reports, they were also hard to track.
Considering China has exploding kamikaze drone swarms now, similar to the ones used by Ukraine in their war with Russia, you can imagine why the military is so concerned.
But now, here we are over 10 months later, and the Department of Defense still has no lead on where the drones came from or who they belong too.
And this is not the only incident.
Two months earlier, in October 2023, five drones flew over a government site used for nuclear-weapons experiments, the Wall Street Journal reports.
'The Energy Department's Nevada Nuclear Security Site outside Las Vegas detected four of the drones over three days. Employees spotted a fifth.'
It's unclear whether the two incidents are related, but clearly our Air Force has a drone problem.
It sounds like they are looking to install drone netting over the base to protect the planes from a swarm attack, but the netting also needs to be easily retractable, or the planes can't take off, which seems like a problem in an emergency — like say a war.
If they're serious about a solution, I think I've got one that might not be as easy to implement, but it would be loads more entertaining:
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