Why is the U.S. Government Deploying Drones in its Own Skies?
In the week before Donald Trump took office in January, he met with a group of Republican governors to hear their concerns. You'd expect immigration or jobs to take center stage. But one of the biggest topics of the meeting was unidentified swarms of drones.
Just a month before, the nation was captivated by mystery drones over New Jersey, including sightings above the U.S. Naval Weapons Station Earle. President Biden assured the country "nothing nefarious" was going on - that the drones were all approved and accounted for, with no foreign or alien actors behind them. We still weren't informed what the government-controlled drones might be doing. We were simply told not to fear alien invasion, and just move on with our lives.
But New Jersey was far from the only state experiencing drone swarms.
During the January meeting with Trump, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin complained drones were flying over his state's secure military airspace, including Langley Air Force Base and Fort Belvoir. He said these incursions had been occurring for two years without sufficient explanation, calling the situation "absolutely unacceptable."
Trump had an answer, but it only added to the mystery. The President-elect said the government knew exactly what they were, but "they don't want to talk about it."
Two civilians, John Knight and his son Benjamin, were among the first in Virginia to report them. They were driving in John's truck one night in Virginia Beach when they spotted a drone hovering, about the size of a small truck. Knight said it flew like a helicopter but made no noise. The unidentified flying object slowly moved over the East Coast master jet base. A spokesperson for the base insisted "nothing unusual or unscheduled was detected" in their air space.
By mid-December, Virginia State Police had received over 150 reports of drone activity. "Nothing unusual" was quickly turning into a major concern.
Naturally, Governor Youngkin was concerned. On December 19, 2024, Mr. Youngkin met with the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and the FBI to express dissatisfaction with the lack of information he was getting about these drones. Clearly, since he was still concerned in January, he wasn't given a satisfactory explanation.
What was it the Federal Government seemed to know but wanted to keep secret, even from state governors?
Reddit groups and Facebook pages devoted to the drone mystery were alive with theories. One posited that drones were being used to track the fallout from weapons of mass destruction, or biological tests gone wrong.
This is actually a use for drones the government has long been studying. Anywhere drones can be deployed where human lives don't have to be put at risk is a big draw for government research. Sampling biological agents in the air has long been a focus. Drones equipped with specialized sensors and collection devices can take air, water, and soil samples to detect biological agents. They can use imaging to detect unusual heat signatures from infected individuals or vegetation caused by biological contamination. Even better, a swarm of drones could map large areas and track how biological agents spread.
More than just a theory on Facebook, it turns out the government has actively sought out drones able to do just that. In 2014, the Department of Defense issued a Request for Information asking private companies to develop unmanned arial systems that had chemical and biological detection capability, as well as the more disturbing request for drones that could carry chemical or biological weapons payloads to counter those threats. Under the Thunderstorm Technology Demonstration Program, the Department of Defense tested unmanned aerial systems that could remotely detect and collect biological data and transmit it at least one kilometer away from the target location.
Of course, the official stance of the United States is that it does not possess biological weapons. The country is a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention, ratified in 1975, which prohibits the development, production, and acquisition of biological weapons. But that doesn't mean the U.S. has its head in the sand when it comes to Weapons of Mass Destruction.
In 1998, the Department of Defense combined two military agencies devoted to biological and chemical weapon defense into the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Thousands currently work there, with the goal of reducing threats of weapons of mass destruction, and, notably, working on detection systems and countermeasures -- exactly the capabilities tested with drones.
Is the DTRA deploying swarms of drones to track biochemical clouds from experiments gone wrong, or attempted foreign attacks kept secret? Let's hope not. Of course, it's hard to ignore that the DTRA is headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Exactly where the Governor keeps seeing them hovering in the night.
