The US military has collectively reported hundreds of drone flights over Pentagon installations on American soil in the past few years, and that’s just the ones US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) knows about.
“I have no doubt that there’s significantly more incursions that we don’t see, either with a system or with our eyeballs,” Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of NORTHCOM and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), said during a roundtable today with a small group of reporters at Peterson Space Force Base, the dual headquarters for both commands.
Unmanned aircraft system (UAS) sightings over US military bases have raised alarm at the Defense Department, as incursions at sensitive installations like Langley Air Force Base — where the Air Force keeps F-22s — have mystified officials, as the Wall Street Journal previously reported. According to data shared by NORAD, drone sightings in 2022 numbered 250, but that figure has dipped somewhat in recent years, numbering 202 in 2023, and 163 so far this year.
Guillot said the events are likely gaining more attention due to the spread of systems that are able to detect and track UAS with greater “fidelity.” The UAS sightings at places that contain highly classified programs have also raised questions about the drones’ provenance, including whether they reflect operations of an adversary nation, though Guillot said today that he has not yet seen evidence of any “organized or unorganized foreign nexus.”
Instead, he said “the overwhelming majority of them are probably local hobbyists that are just flying too close to the base.”
And while he said there are certainly more events that have gone undetected, Guillot cautioned that many observed phenomena could be duplicate sightings, such as multiple servicemembers calling in the same event. Others could be a case of mistaken identity, like if a servicemember mistakenly identifies blinking lights on a civilian airliner miles away as a closer UAS. Several reports could even concern the same drone flying back and forth over a base repeatedly, he said.