Drones over Washington military bases – but not ours
Seems someone is taking an unhealthy interest in Langley Air Force base.
A mysterious fleet of drones entered restricted airspace and swarmed a U.S. military base along the Virginia coast for 17 days late last year, stumping the Pentagon, according to a new report.
My first thought was a stream of Amazon-purchased jobbies…nope, this is serious stuff. Seventeen DAYS? Over Langley, Norfolk, and the rest of that area?
Kelly described the first drone he saw as roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour, at an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet. As many as a dozen or more drones followed, flying across Chesapeake Bay, and then traveling toward Norfolk, Virginia, and through a space overlooking the base for the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port, according to the Journal.
20 feet long? That isn’t exactly hobbyist material. But Biden and company weren’t sure. How many hobbyists can launch 340 feet worth of drone at one time?
The report said officials could not determine if hobbyists or adversaries – such as China or Russia – were responsible for the drone fleet. Reports of the matter reached President Biden and resulted in two weeks of meetings at the White House in December 2023, the Journal reported.
Langley/Norfolk isn’t the only area being visited.
Two months before the drone fleet emerged in Virginia, five mysterious drones reportedly breached restricted airspace over a government nuclear weapons experiment site in Nevada.
Whatever happened to “you fly over restricted air space, you are in trouble?” Is this a symptom of “we have all the gee-whiz high-tech stuff at our disposal, but this is low/slow lo-tech” like we ran into with the Chinese balloon. Or just “we have nothing obvious to respond with” – well, why not? Heck, a Huey with a competent door gunner should be able to handle stuff like this.
Oh, and further on Las Vegas:
Four of the drones were detected by the Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site outside Las Vegas, while the fifth was spotted by employees, according to the Journal. The facility has reportedly since upgraded its detection system, but officials have not determined who was behind the breach. Fox News
I’m so glad they can see it coming… that’s pretty open country there – what prevents them from taking them down?
In the years since Russia entered Ukraine, the weather balloon fiasco – is no one paying attention? Gotta be some duck-hunters in the audience – are we so limited by Patriots and the sexy gee-whiz stuff that we can’t handle something functionally equivalent to a nice Cessna?
Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Air Force, Navy
Just like the balloon, I bet Biden and company will say “*DUUUUHHHH!*” until it’s way too late!
Could a drone release transport tocxic materials? A f a f…myself!
Yes, all kinds of nasty stuff…’specially ones that big.
These incidents should be called what they are…probing attacks.
Post/base commander’s had authority, didn’t shoot them down:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/bases-plagued-mystery-drones-chose-174247844.html
And one has to wonder…Why not? Now, I don’t have the capability to shoot down a twenty (20) foot drone flying high over Fire Base Magnolia (not yet anyhow, I admit nothing call my lawer), but if I did I would damn shore do so for…reasons.
If you aren’t out front you are way behind. Gee, I wonder how so many Chinese spies were able to sneak into the country with no one noticing?
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-new-bullet-drones/
Ohh, lots of people noticed. We have pictures of them lined up with their nice new clothes and backpacks, showered and ready to be issued their new phones, and credit cards before they hop on that free flight to wherever they want to go!
Meanwhile, you and I must show a “real id” to fly on a plane in our own country.
Show ID, get groped and told you can only bring x amount of toiletries with you. I’m not leaving or entering the country, I’m trying to get to Peoria.
Yup. And, being from a communist country, they have to have their authorities’ permission/knowledge to be here.
Curious, no? (Chicoms watch Hollywood movies, too.)
The issue is that just like they don’t want police enforcing the law against criminals, the current administration is very slow to enforce its sovereign air and land borders. Instead of saying to the unlucky hobbyist “I am sorry for your destroyed toy, but it should not have been flying in restricted air space.” They have lawyers telling them they can’t shoot it down unless it is an identified threat (meaning it is launching missiles or dropping bombs).
The drone is operating in a restricted airspace. That makes it a credible threat.
You may fire when ready, Gridley.
Get some!
Definitely seems these bases need some AA units stationed around them.. I’m sure there are some quad 50’s around that could be dusted off and put back in service.. they should work famously against such low and slow targets.. not all that dissimilar from the WWII targets they were designed to hit..
“What goes up, must come down”.
I think it was 60 minutes that did a news story of a bunch of Chinese “immigrants ” coming through a hole in a chain link fence, dropping their passports once on us soil, and the news crew filming while our border patrol watched and did nothing.
I saw that too but just assumed it was fake because it was 60 Minutes. After all they did both dossiers for Bush and Trump.
No way the Border Patrol would be ordered not to stop people from entering the country illegally, that’s like their whole job.
One would think it’s their job. And chain link fence is not difficult to repair.
I mean if I knew that hundreds of people were running across in the same place every day I would put someone up there to stop them.
Not familiar with the “someone” model. Is it a NATO reporting name for combloc kit or an acronym for a new antipersonnel device?
I like the way you think Roh… I’ve always figured that a mile wide impact zone all along the border would solve the issue.. somewhere that our military could practice combined fires..
Prepare
Mucho más preparación.
There is no mechanism where peace will place itself before us without painful incentive for that oft desired but seldom sought condition.
The domestic enemies have allowed the foreign enemies in to do what is needed to complete the “…fundamentally change the face of America…” TL Davis gives a very good synopsis of his opinion on where we are and how we got there. Well worth the coupla minutes it will take to read. Ands gives one more reasons as to why one should …Prepare
https://tldavis.substack.com/p/correcting-many-usurpations?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=agepv&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The “fundamental transformation” of America will, unfortunately, not be to an upbeat Socialist utopia:
Hell, yeah! NASAMS or so would be great for this– but it’d never happen here (/sarc, spirit of 9/10) so there’s no contingency plan to put sh*t out in response and stop this.
Someone give Austin his meds yet?
Also, maybe someone should remind him of the General Orders.
I’m thinking the next 9/11 isn’t going to involve airliners. I think this is a test flight for armed drones to start putting ordinance on our bases. There was an article in the AZ paper about drones overflying the usual cartel smuggling routes as well as over both Davis-Monthan and Luke AFB. The one in Tucson was less than a half mile off of the runway of the airbase. Drones were also sighted inside the gunnery / bombing ranges near Casa Grande and Gila Bend, also a prime smuggling route.
I hope your wrong.
So, a student pilot flying a Cessna 150 gets lost, gets too close to a military base, and gets intercepted, tracked, and arrested. But a fleet of drones is just “Oh, no worries. No need to try to intercept them”. I do not understand our Department of (no) Defense.
Oh, definitely, if these were Americans, the FBI would’ve SWAT-teamed them in the early morning already.
This is nothing new. twz.com has a whole tab dedicated to this very subject. I hope somebody somewhere in the defense establishment is paying attention(DARPA maybe?)
a directed EMP weapon should work just great for this. They make something similar for cops to use against vehicles, I’m sure the tech came from DARPA / military, no reason they couldn’t use it against drones, of they don’t want to actually go kinetic..
“…entered restricted airspace and swarmed a U.S. military base along the Virginia coast for 17 days…”
The knee-jerk anti-Biden idiots will blame this on Biden, of course. And Democrats will find a reason to blame it on Trump. And our military “leaders” will breathe a sigh of relief that nobody is looking at them and will continue awarding each other Legions of Legions of Merit, Achievement medals, and various other shiny bits for being awesome warriors. Hoo Ah!
I literally just watched information on Newsmax and Fox on this not to mention this specific detail that you guys may may not have caught.
Graduate student Fengyun Shi Fengyun Shi, a Chinese citizen and graduate student at the University of Minnesota, was arrested in January after a drone he was flying got stuck in a tree in Newport News, Virginia. A suspicious resident called the police and Shi was questioned before abandoning the drone and fleeing. After the FBI seized the drone and pulled the images off it, investigators discovered that Shi had photographed Navy vessels at multiple shipyards in Virginia. One of those shipyards, in Newport News, was actively manufacturing next-generation aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. Both of these types of vessels contain classified components.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/12/24197356/chinese-national-graduate-student-espionage-act-drone-navy-shipyard-plea-guilty
Dude should be in a nice warm cell somewhere, like Leavenworth.. or supermax.. But that of course would require the feebs to do their job, instead of lawfare against conservative Americans.
I will bet good money that he was not seeking a degree in Gender Studies.
Well, gee whiz. We only have about 50,000 military-age Chinese males who crossed into the country illegally in the past four years. But nah, they couldn’t’ have anything to do with this occurrence.
I have no way of knowing, but I wonder if this is Red Team stuff.
Maybe they can’t use bullets to knock these drones down. But Now would be a good time to try those lasers out. Melt some metal…
I understand 12 ga. shells with #6 shot still work well on drones– practice those skeet skills, folks!
Family lore says my grandpa had a single shot 8 ga. goose gun. Might be just the thing.
OUCH
A punt gun?
Although 00 buck or slugs might be good for some.
3,000 to 4,000 feet up?
Whoever if flying them isn’t making much of an effort to keep them invisible.
Why should they? Obviously, TPTB have approved these overflights..
Prepare…