Should We Be Worried About the Recent Drone Swarms? Pt. II

As we discussed in our previous post, there are two sides to the recent drone swarm reported over New Jersey and other East Coast states.

More evidence is coming out that the majority of the reports are normal objects: airplanes, stars and planets, and even Christmas lights displays.

A cloudy night on Sunday, December 15th, 2024, saw a remarkably low number of drone reports. That’s likely because the low-lying clouds, rain and fog prevented people from seeing stars and airplanes, reducing the number of false identifications.

Meanwhile, other mistaken reports, from former Maryland governor Larry Hogan claiming the constellation Orion was a drone swarm to Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano’s falling for a meme of a Star Wars TIE-fighter on a trailer have shown how easy it is even for government officials to make mistakes.

Despite these false reports, there are still many sightings made by trained observers, as well as numerous and continual drone sightings involving military assets and bases. This includes incursions over CIA headquarters in Langley in Virginia, the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, the top-secret air facility at Nevada National Security Site, and U.S. destroyers 100 miles off the coast of California.

We know the U.S. government is taking such incursions over military sites seriously. Two Chinese nationals have been arrested in the past year in separate incidents where they were using drones to violate such locations.

The first incident came in late 2023, soon after the drones spotted over Langley, Virginia in December 2023.

A few weeks after that rash of sightings, a 26-year-old Chinese citizen and U.S. grad student was arrested after taking photos of classified naval installations at Newport Naval Base with a commercially available drone. He had purchased the drone from a Virgina store just days before.

His prosecution was the first under a law dating back to just after World War II that makes it illegal to photograph military sites ‘using aircraft.’

The second incident came more recently, as a 39-year-old Chinese citizen was caught photographing Vandenberg Space Force Base with a drone that he was flying from a public park a few miles away. Both these Chinese nationals were arrested just as they were attempting to board one-way flights back to China, and both nationals have since pleaded guilty to the charges.

But it’s not just military bases and assets that concerns the government. In the summer of 2024, the Department of Homeland Security issued a classified warning to state and local law enforcement that has since been revealed to the public.

In the statement, DHS warned of the growing use of drones for what they considered ‘illicit’ purposes. DHS further recommended that state and local agencies needed to conduct what they called ‘exercises to test and prepare response capabilities.’

The fact that the DHS has advocated for testing exercises using drones can be seen as part of the same federal position of being more prepared, when earlier in 2024 NORAD commander Air Force Lt. Lt. General Guillot testified in the Senate that ‘This emerging capability outstrips the operational framework that we have to address it.’

These statements make it clear that elements of the U.S. government are aware that we are unprepared for a drone incursion on a par with what’s occurred in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where hundreds of drones are being used in massed attacks and Ukraine believes they’ll be able to manufacture 4 million drones a year, beginning in 2025.

The question then becomes, how will the Pentagon convince the American population that we need a better defense against so many drones. In a country that has as much territory as the U.S. to protect. That’s where one possible answer to these drone waves begins to make sense.

During the Vietnam War, a young Marine began to make a name for himself with his bravery, his cunning, and his leadership skills. That Marine was Richard Marcinko, who went on to create the famous unit SEAL Team Six, which he commanded for three years.

Nearing retirement, Marcinko was asked in 1986 by Navy Admiral James Lyons to create a new unit that was tasked with testing base security. This new unit was dubbed Red Cell, named after the enemy aggressor squadron often called the Red Team in Western military combat practices, and was also known by the official designation OP-O6D.

Marcinko selected members from SEAL Team Six and Marine Force Recon, and proceeded to test Navy and Air Force base security in a number of novel ways.

The unit’s purpose was to challenge base security and expose defense vulnerabilities, by infiltrating those locations without detection, while recording their intrusions on video to later share with base personnel in order to improve overall security and readiness.

Those Red Cell goals – to identify and exploit vulnerabilities within military bases and installations by simulating real-world threats through aggressive tactics, and to test security measures and improve overall preparedness against potential enemy actions – sound exactly like what’s been happening with various drone incursions at sensitive military bases over the past five years.

One of the reasons the U.S. military hasn’t admitted that they’re executing the current drone missions is because they may not be: Red Cell was defunded at the end of Marcinko’s tenure. In part, Marcinko claimed, because his unit was ‘too good,’ and exposed lax base security allowed by too many higher-ups.

After Marcinko’s Red Cell was disbanded, it appears that the CIA picked up their portfolio, and began their own, much more secretive version of Red Cell in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001.

Their ability to classify and compartmentalize their activities provides government officials with plausible deniability. While the CIA claims their Red Cell are only analysts, there is no way to prove their involvement doesn’t extend to running the kind of drone incursions that we’ve seen at military facilities across the U.S.

In fact, the CIA is responsible for much of the classified drone attacks that the U.S. government employs overseas, including Predator attacks on enemies in the Middle East.

It’s also relevant that a December 17th joint statement on the drone swarms over the Northeast was underwritten by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA and the Department of Defense, but did not directly contain any statement or denial by the CIA.

While a definitive answer to who’s behind these incursions might never be made known to the public, you can be sure several things will happen in the wake of these drone swarms:

- New laws will be written to allow the military to better protect their bases,

- New funding will be enacted to create better defenses against drones of all types, and

- The CIA and other covert agencies will continue to test America’s defenses without being caught, and without admitting to their actions.

This story still has much longer to run.

Stay tuned for more as we continue to dig into this story!