This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Bill Whitaker reports on drone incursions that have pierced the skies above significant military and infrastructure sites around the United States over the last six years. No one seems to know where the aircraft are coming from or who is operating them, including three four-star generals, a senior member of Congress, and a Biden White House senior administration official that 60 Minutes spoke with.
“We should be concerned that we don’t know what these are,” said Gen. Glen VanHerck, the former chief of NORAD and NORTHCOM, the agencies that protect U.S. airspace. “And the question that needs to be asked is ‘Why don’t we know what these are?’ And I think you’ll see that there are gaps in capability, there are gaps in policy, and there are gaps in law that need to be addressed.”
One of the most significant recent drone incursions happened in December 2023, when dozens of what the military calls unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, invaded the skies above Langley Air Force Base in Virginia over 17 nights. The incursions were so persistent, the Air Force moved some of the F-22s stationed at Langley to a nearby air base to protect them from being damaged.
The nightly incursions at Langley were just one of many recent brazen drone swarms over military sites. In 2019, dozens of drones shadowed naval warships training off the California coast for weeks. Since then, the defense news website The War Zone has documented dozens of similar intrusions at sensitive military and civilian installations, including over the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona and over the U.S. Air Force’s secretive Plant 42 in southern California, where defense contractors are building the next generation of stealth bombers.
The Army also confirmed 11 drone sightings late last year over the Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, where they are designing and building advanced weaponry. That preceded numerous drone sightings over New Jersey over the following weeks.
With so many incursions over sensitive military areas, why has it been so hard to stop these drones?
The answer, in part, lies in the capability of modern drones. Today’s drones are ubiquitous, in the hands of American adversaries and citizens alike. Sophisticated drones can be bought on the internet for a few thousand dollars, and some can fly or hover for up to 10 hours, carrying a 30-pound payload.
They also can be modified to fly at extremely high or low altitudes that are not trackable by the standard surveillance radars used by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) or NORAD.
“If you can’t detect them, and track them, and identify if they’re potentially a civilian airplane, then it’s really challenging,” VanHerck told Whitaker.
Shooting drones down
Even if the drones are determined not to be an aircraft carrying civilians, VanHerck said, the problem with stopping drones over mainland America is not as easy as simply knocking them out of the sky, as the U.S. military might do on a battlefield abroad.
“People calling for ‘shooting them down’ over very populated areas need to understand that a fighter, or a land-based missile, or a missile off of a ship, is going to accelerate to two to four times the speed of sound and have large exploding titanium rods that come out of the warhead at thousands of feet per second,” VanHerck explained. “So that’s not safe, either.”
A safety concern would also result from the debris field scattering in a civilian neighborhood, with pieces of a missile and drone that both potentially weigh several hundred pounds.
A second issue is one of jurisdiction. Which organization would oversee downing the drones? Depending on where an incursion occurred, numerous entities would have a stake, including local law enforcement, the FBI, the FAA, and the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.
“I believe we’d be in a better position if we had one organization that was resourced, that was empowered, that was tasked with working this problem for the nation,” said retired Air Force General Mark Kelly, who was the highest-ranking official at Langley Air Force Base to witness the drone incursion there in December 2023.
Jamming drone frequencies
The military could jam the frequency the drones use to communicate — but that comes with complications, as well.
Most commercial drones operate on the 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz radio frequencies, which are the bands typically used for Wi-Fi, wireless LAN applications and networks, and video systems. Jamming those frequencies knocks all of those services out in the surrounding area, Kelly explained.
Similarly, the military could deny a PNT service, or precision navigation and timing, which is what most people think of as GPS. According to Kelly, rendering PNT unusable to stop drones also takes navigation ability away from commercial pilots and civilians.
VanHerck agrees that blocking drone communication is complicated. “If you jam those frequencies, and they reside in a spectrum that may be for TV, or transportation such as airplanes, then you’re going to have interference with those,” he said. “And that’s the concern about using the electromagnetic spectrum.”
VanHerck noted that it is possible for the military to issue a so-called “Notice to Airmen,” which could notify commercial airlines not to fly in a particular area while the military jammed frequencies. He revealed for the first time that during the incursion at Langley, there was an attempt to jam frequencies that was approved and coordinated by the FAA, which used NASA and Coast Guard assets. But that effort came up short.
“I’m not aware of any success that they had,” VanHerck said.
Fly-away kits to stop future incursions
To fight drone incursions, the military is now working on fly-away kits, which are prepackaged bundles of technology that can be deployed to different military installations when there is a persistent incursion of drones. The kits will include systems that would allow the military to see these low-flying aircraft that today’s radar misses.
“We would have several pre-positioned at various parts of the country, where we could rapidly respond not only with the equipment, but with the authority to operate that equipment to defeat that incursion,” said Gen. Gregory Guillot, the current commander of NORAD and NORTHCOM.
Guillot said flyaway kits will eventually include equipment that will be able to bring drones down and estimated they will be ready to be distributed within a year. That means, were an incursion like the one at Langley Air Force Base to happen again in 2026, the military would have some ability to respond.
“That’s my goal,” Guillot said. “And we’re well on our way, partnering with industry to get there.”
Videos of drones courtesy of Jonathan Butner and Paul Gerke.
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.
