Why the US Military Can't Just Shoot Down the Mystery Drones

A spectre is haunting the United States—the spectre of drone warfare.

Since the middle of November, unidentified unmanned aerial vehicles have lit up the skies above New Jersey, startling residents and baffling military and government officials. The US Army’s Picatinny Arsenal research and manufacturing facility in the state’s Morris County reported 11 confirmed instances of mysterious drones illegally entering its airspace since the middle of the month, while a dozen drones were spotted hovering over US Naval Weapons Station Earle in Monmouth County in early December. Similar sightings were reported in at least six other counties throughout the state; according to the Coast Guard, a group of drones even followed one of the service’s vessels “in close pursuit” near a state park.

The spate of drone sightings in the skies above New Jersey have caused alarm among state lawmakers, prompting one to call for a “limited state of emergency … until the public receives an explanation” regarding the source of the unidentified drones. One Republican US congressman even claimed the drones were originating from an Iranian “mothership” lurking off of the state’s coastline, an assertion the US Defense Department quickly batted down.

“As you know, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst possess [sic] capabilities to identify and take down unauthorized unmanned aerial systems and have utilized this capability to address overflights of the installation,” New Jersey representative Chris Smith told Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a December 10 letter. “I urgently request all capabilities possessed by the Department of Defense, especially those in use by JBMDL to be immediately deployed to identify and address the potential threats posed by [drones] over the state of New Jersey.”

Despite the growing chorus of concern from New Jersey lawmakers, the US military appears relatively unimpressed with the sudden incursions. In a December 11 statement, US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) revealed that the command had “conducted a deliberate analysis of the events, in consultation with other military organizations and interagency partners, and at this time we have not been requested to assist with these events.” The following day, White House national security communications adviser John Kirby stated that many of the alleged drone sightings that had alarmed civilian observers on the ground in recent weeks were, in fact, conventional manned aircraft. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security echoed this assessment in a statement on Thursday, saying, “it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft, operating lawfully. There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted air space.”

“At this time, we have no evidence that these activities are coming from a foreign entity or the work of an adversary. We’re going to continue to monitor what is happening,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters on Wednesday. “At no point were our installations threatened when this activity was occurring." (In an interesting confluence of events, the US Department of Justice that same day announced the arrest of a Chinese citizen for flying a drone over and taking photos of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.)

The alarm over the sudden drone incursions over New Jersey, neighboring New York and Pennsylvania, and near sensitive US government sites in particular, even if overblown, isn’t completely unwarranted: Officials at North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)—the joint US-Canadian military organization tasked with overseeing air sovereignty on the continent—revealed in October that they had received reports of nearly 600 incursions above domestic US military installations since 2022.

The issue is, US law severely limits how the US military can respond to these mysterious drones—even if the number of incidents has been growing for years.

Indeed, for several months earlier this year, unidentified drones repeatedly circled Plant 42 in California, the Edwards Air Force Base installation where defense contractor Northrop Grumman has been working on the Air Force’s vaunted new B-21 Raider stealth bombers. In December 2023, Langley Air Force Base in Virginia was targeted by a wave of mysterious drone overflights, prompting the Pentagon to relocate a contingent of F-22 Raptor fighter jets stationed there to another base. And the New Jersey incidents come on the heels of a mid-November series of drone incursions near RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom, which, while not a US domestic installation, hosts a strategically-important contingent of American fighter jets, among other capabilities.

It appears that Pentagon assets in the continental United States have been subject to such drone activity as far back as 2019, when a fleet of US Navy Arleigh Burke-class destroyers was shadowed by a swarm of drones for several days during maneuvers at a training range off the coast of southern California. Later that year, a series of mysterious drone sightings in eastern Colorado and western Nebraska and Kansas confounded not just local law enforcement and federal agencies, but alarmed Air Force officers at nearby F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, home to one of the Pentagon’s many Minuteman III ICBM fields.

These incidents aren’t limited to US military facilities. In October 2023, several drones were detected in the airspace above the US Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site, which is used for nuclear research and development, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. And back in 2019, the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona—the most powerful nuclear power plant in the United States—was subject to a series of mass drone incursions that Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials would later characterize as a “drone-a-palooza,” albeit with grave concern over the potential vulnerability exposed by the incursion, according to email correspondence obtained by The War Zone in 2020.

“I would point out that restricted airspace will do nothing to stop an adversarial attack and even the detection systems identified earlier in this email chain have limited success rates, and there is even lower likelihood that law enforcement will arrive quickly enough to actually engage with the pilots,” one senior NRC security official at Palo Verde wrote in an email regarding the incident. “We should be focusing our attention on getting Federal regulations and laws changed to allow sites to be defended and to identify engineering fixes that would mitigate an adversarial attack before there our [sic] licensed facilities become vulnerable.”

While unmanned aerial vehicles have been in military use for generations for surveillance and reconnaissance, the US military is largely responsible for transforming modern drones into vehicles of precision violence during the early years of the Global War on Terrorism, a policy especially expanded under US president Barack Obama. In more recent years, the rise of cheap, commercially-available unmanned platforms like those used by hobbyists has turned the small drone into the weapon of choice for both nation states and irregular forces abroad, from militant groups like ISIS In Iraq and Syria and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen to the Russian and Ukrainian militaries. With a potential conflict with China over Taiwan looming on the horizon amid the US military’s pivot to “great power competition,” the Pentagon is itself in the midst of a major surge in both unmanned capabilities and technology to defend against weaponized drones belonging to foreign adversaries.

The US military has been slowly but surely adjusting to the sudden spike in mysterious drone incursions near sensitive sites across the United States with an expanded counter-drone strategy. In early December, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed the Pentagon’s new Strategy for Countering Unmanned Systems, which seeks to unify disparate DoD efforts to address the rise of drone threats both at home and abroad into a single coherent framework, one that implicitly acknowledges the potential for the rising tide of domestic drone threats to grow from intrusive surveillance risks to something more damaging.

“From the Middle East to Ukraine and across the globe—including in the US homeland—unmanned systems are reshaping tactics, techniques, and procedures; challenging established operational principles; and condensing military innovation cycles,” the unclassified fact sheet on the new Pentagon strategy states. “The relatively low-cost, widely available nature of these systems has, in effect, democratized precision strike.”

The Pentagon has been working overtime to field fresh counter-drone capabilities to US forces deployed overseas in recent years, including traditional firearms outfitted with computerized optics and remotely operated vehicle-mounted heavy weapons turrets, laser-guided rocket and missile systems, AI-assisted kinetic interceptors, radio frequency- and Global Positioning System-jamming electronic warfare suites, and even exotic directed energy weapons like high-energy lasers and high-powered microwaves, among others. As recently as late October, NORTHCOM was working in conjunction with the Federal Aviation Administration to demo fresh counter-drone tech as part of its Falcon Peak 2025 experiment at Fort Carson in Colorado.

“By all indications, [small unmanned aerial systems] will present a safety and security risk to military installations and other critical infrastructure for the foreseeable future,” NORTHCOM boss Air Force general Gregory Guillot told reporters at the time. “Mitigating those risks requires a dedicated effort across all federal departments and agencies, state, local, tribal and territorial communities, and Congress to further develop the capabilities, coordination and legal authorities necessary for detecting, tracking and addressing potential sUAS threats in the homeland.”

But US military officials also indicated to reporters that the types of counter-drone capabilities the Pentagon may be able to bring to bear for domestic defense may be limited to non-kinetic “soft kill” means like RF and GPS signal jamming and other relatively low-tech interception techniques like nets and “string streamers” due to legal constraints on the US military’s ability to engage with drones over American soil.

“The threat, and the need to counter these threats, is growing faster than the policies and procedures that [are] in place can keep up with,” as Guillot told reporters during the counter-drone experiment. “A lot of the tasks we have in the homeland, it’s a very sophisticated environment in that it’s complicated from a regulatory perspective. It’s a very civilianized environment. It’s not a war zone.”

Defense officials echoed this sentiment during the unveiling of the Pentagon’s new counter-drone strategy in early December.

“The homeland is a very different environment in that we have a lot of hobbyist drones here that are no threat at all, that are sort of congesting the environment,” a senior US official told reporters at the time. “At the same time, we have, from a statutory perspective and from an intelligence perspective, quite rightly, [a] more constrained environment in terms of our ability to act.”

The statute in question, according to defense officials, is a specific subsection of Title 10 of the US Code, which governs the US armed forces. The section, known as 130(i), encompasses military authorities regarding the “protection of certain facilities and assets from unmanned aircraft.” It gives US forces 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.”

As The War Zone points out, 130i limits when and where the US military can actually deploy counter-drone assets outside of immediate self-defense in the face of an imminent threat. Notably, it requires the defense secretary to “coordinate” with both the US transportation secretary and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) administrator regarding any counter-drone implementation that “might affect aviation safety, civilian aviation and aerospace operations, aircraft airworthiness, or the use of airspace.” Not only that, but 130i authority is only applicable to a specific list of installations, mainly those dealing with nuclear deterrence and missile defense functions of the US national security apparatus.

This, in turn, limits what kinds of counter-drone systems the US military can actually employ domestically. Service members may be up to their eyes in fresh counter-drone tech overseas, but the regulatory environment at home is rigid enough that “hard kill” solutions like missiles, guns, and other kinetic interceptors aren’t even considered potential options because there’s simply too much risk that they might end up inflicting collateral damage on innocent, unsuspecting civilians in nearby neighborhoods. Even “soft kill” solutions like RF and GPS jamming require coordination with the FAA and other federal agencies to prevent potential harm to civilian air travel, approvals that could slow down the reaction time among base security forces amid a potential drone incursion.

“Given the impact of GPS denial, just across infrastructure and all that stuff, it is a very, very difficult capability to get permissions to utilize,” as one official told The War Zone at Falcon Peak.

While the Pentagon’s broad new counter-drone strategy is a step in the right direction when it comes to bolstering domestic drone defenses, Congress is taking action as well. In the compromise version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act defense budget legislation unveiled in December, lawmakers included language calling upon the Pentagon to not just conduct an assessment of the counter-drone technology landscape at large, but generate recommendations on how policy changes could reduce the amount of burdensome bureaucratic coordination between federal agencies required to address the growing number of drone incursions—and, in an ideal world, allow the US military to move quickly and decisively to counter intrusive drones at sensitive installations before they become dangerous.

“We agree that US troops have the inherent right of self defense, including from [drone] attacks, wherever they may be,” the explanatory statement accompanying the compromise NDAA says.

At the moment, the Pentagon seems unconvinced that the Northeast drone sightings and earlier incursions are connected to a foreign adversary. But with lawmakers increasingly concerned with the potential threat to sensitive installations and critical infrastructure in their states, the US military’s renewed approach to counter-drone defense can’t come soon enough.