Mysterious Drones Swarmed Langley AFB for Weeks | Hacker News Reader

Mysterious Drones Swarmed Langley AFB for Weeks

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159 pointspeutetre105 comments

When I hear that this military base on US soil, with dedicated security and surveillance, can't recover one drone, or get photos to trace who or what sent the drone, I think of the London airport shutdown from 2018. There is no super drone swarm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident

Where did it mention that they were unable to get imagery of the drones or recover one? If the thesis is that this may be a foreign incursion, I very much doubt that they’d broadcast that they’d captured one.

This doesn't make sense to me. The government is more than thrilled to stir negative sentiment against every geopolitical competitor we have via the media, if this is one of said competitors drones then they obviously would know if it had been captured, and if you're concerned about public 'panic' - you already released the information anyhow.

You also have government planes doing loopity-loos around Langley with their public transponders turned on which shows a desire to make such actions publicly visible and available to literally anybody and everybody on the planet.

Sure, after the public circus with the spy balloon, the government is eager to have a round two, this time with off-the-shelf consumer drones. Be honest, a picture of a $1000 drone would leave you totally unfazed.

There's one country they've not been so thrilled to publicize when they've acted against us in the past.

See: The USS Liberty Incident.

Not saying that's what's going on here. But it is the exception to the rule you posit.

Bragging about it is a good PR and inspires confidence in your citizens -- even if you didn't actually capture anything. It's rather mystifying that they didn't try to present a strong face after this incident.

That’s how you lose trust, if it later is revealed that they didn’t.

I wish this effect would be lasting long enough for the next round of finding weapons of mass destruction or defending nation building overseas.

Any information given would reveal what they can do, and by extension also what they can't, so to me it's perfectly understandable if they keep everything under wraps.

It escalates tensions for no readily identifiable reason. Like we’re not looking to pick a fight with China or Russia right now, and saying “hey y’all we captured a Chinese drone” sounds like a great way to push public opinion over a precipice and create a crisis that serves the interests of quite literally no one.

Back during the cold war, Daily Mail wrote a completely made up article about communist spies infiltrating sleepy English countryside villages, and people started calling up to report the spies they have seen on the streets. It became such a big deal that the government pressured MI5 to go and do something about it, so they "captured" and kicked out of the country a dozen or so communist spies found across the landscape of Britain, to a huge fanfare and celebration in the newspapers. Only years later it came out that that operation was entirely made up too, no one was actually ever found, captured and extradited anywhere, it was entirely just to satify the government and the public(who were riled up by a completely made up story in a trash newspaper).

agreed, this seems like a 15 page nothingburger of stock photos and conjecture.

the likelyhood swarms of UAV's loitered in and out of the military airspace with no photos, no pursuit, or capture seems like a dubious claim. That no single civilian seems able to corroborate this also seems to suggest the events simply didnt happen.

since these things might be dangerous to the general public you might release photos of them? or enlist help from the public/OSINT? sounds more like we're creating a story to help justify the use of expensive NASA resources for a budget review.

It could be a covert test by the US itself. This would explain the aggressive location and the negative findings. The media report could be used later to paint enemies or just to keep the acceptance of military expenditure up.

If they didn't enter the base or break any FAA rules, it would be illegal to interfere with the drone.

I would be surprised if it was not controlled airspace, if not restricted airspace they would have had protocols to follow even just being near the base.

They were flying in restricted airspace.

FAA rules don't cover military airspace.

Last I heard, dedicated security wasn’t even military anymore at Langley. It could have changed depending on fpcon levels or how many MP’s we have at home now instead of deployed.

Surveillance is one thing, then cameras pointing up, and then having someone to monitor all of it is another entirely. tracking down the alleged drone before it leaves is yet another. Think cop response times.

There’s zero reason they should release photos identifying the quality of their surveillance. Basic opsec. All they probably did is get proof, track them, get rid rid of them. No public knowledge necessary until it’s over.

I’m enjoying the armchair radar enthusiasts. The more misinformation the better for adversaries.

The military has equipments and people to trace a radio signal to its source. If they wanted to find the owner, they would have found the owner.

The assumption that these things use radio signals is not supported by any evidence.

Exactly! It could store and forward (later, after landing, with radio), it could use laser, some kind of very directional radio, it could dead drop a memory card somewhere before diving into a lake, there are so many posssibilities depending on what it is.

It could also have been there just to test what the response would be, without recording or doing anything else but hanging around for a while.

Nice; that's something I didn't even think of.

Maybe it didn't use a radio signal.

> 170 drone sightings were reported, 115 of which were deemed "credible" by police.[3] No videos or photographs of the drone were given to the police.

Wow. All that trouble, and absolutely no hard evidence of anything. What an incredible waste.

You can probably screw with a lot of places by strapping a solar powered 2.4ghz radio transmitter to a bunch of birds and letting them roam around. Actually it doesn't even need to be solar powered if it could be low-power enough, just enough battery for a couple of weeks of intermittent signal.

You can buy commercial drones off Amazon capable of flying miles high with firmware mods. The hardware's more than capable, it's just the software that's crippled.

Can't speak to the issues of security or surveillance, but the aerial shot included in the article does reveal a moderately challenging golf course immediately to the north of the main runway.

My personal surveillance suggests it might be more difficult to line up an approach shot on that par 4 (5?) dog leg right than it is to line up an approach vector to the main runway.

Just sayin'.

officers love to golf with other officers

For those unaware, a drone attack killed three American soldiers a few weeks ago [0]. The early findings are that the military base that was attacked never detected the drone at all—possibly because it flew at too low altitude for its radar.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/06/... ("Drone that killed U.S. troops in Jordan likely went undetected")

The explanation I've heard was that the drone came around the same time they were expecting a friendly drone to return.

They are shooting down drones all the time in the Middle East, it just doesn't make the news. Very similar for Israel iron dome. It only makes news when it doesn't work

That was early speculation that's been contradicted by subsequent reporting, like the Post story I linked,

- "Taken together, the preliminary findings appear to undermine previous assertions that U.S. air defenses mistook the attacking aircraft for an American drone returning to the base about the same time"

It sounds like there is no clear answer either way, certainly nothing official at this point

Glass half full thought: someone is red teaming US installations and we’ll be more secure for it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Years ago, somewhere in Northern California, there was attack of (I think) power substation.

Someone was shooting at parts of the station. As described it was a very well run, very knowledgeable operation. The shooting was quite precise.

Far as I know it’s unsolved.

And I, too, thought it was some kind of red team style thing to test who knows what. It was very direct action, seemed a bit much for an exercise. But it can also be thought of what the attack didn’t do, how far they didn’t press even with the evidence that they probably could have.

Yeah, it was power substations.

Probably this one?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

And there was a still unsolved one in North Carolina two years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_atta... Which killed at least one person.

There were also a few others in the SeaTac area around the same time: https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/two-charged-attacks-fou...

But they caught those, and the suspects said they had planned to use the power outage to commit a burglary.

Yea, Metcalf.

My understanding (if it’s the right one) was the NC attack struck a pair of stations that were particularly important to the network. That the loss of those two stations had a much higher impact in contrast to the loss of two arbitrary stations. Those were selected for a reason.

I think this attack was used as an argument against having things like details of the electric grid being public knowledge.

There’s been a string of these attacks for a decade now. One of the various neonazi/Patriot movements (Idaho flavor iirc) espouses infrastructure attacks and disruption as being the kickoff for their RaHoWa, and they keep trying to pop off every couple years.

There hasn’t been a ton of coverage about it because of a desire to avoid copycats and avoid publicizing or popularizing the ideology in general. But like, occupying that nature preserve didn’t come out of nowhere, just there’s not a lot of benefit for centrists/sympathizers in pushing this particular culture war, with how many Americans are touchy about guns etc.

https://news.yahoo.com/unsealed-warrant-provides-closer-look...

https://myfox8.com/news/investigations/power-grid-attack/neo...

(afaik the Facebook lady idea has been essentially discarded, she seems to be a moron but not involved. And then there’s this other guy with ties to a patriot group who supposedly started and then aborted plans for a similar attack… or perhaps not aborted after all?)

(also, the patriot/militia movement is heavily involved with RNC and Russian funding in general… Maria Butina was attached to the NRA after all etc. The leader of one of these groups (literally “The Base”) has a Russian wife and lived in Russia etc. Generally speaking these groups are one of the tools Russia uses to inflame local tensions - whatever is most disruptive etc.)

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/jan/23/report-leader-...

It was the Metcalf substation.[0] I believe they found the rock cairn(s) used for the sniper rest on the hill across the highway.[1]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

[1]https://www.google.com/maps/search/metcalf+substation/@37.21...

What do you mean by “well run” and “precise”?

Well, they cut communication lines in advance. They apparently used signaling to coordinate the attack. They knew exactly what they were shooting at, it wasn’t a bunch of yahoos blasting away at highway signs.

It would be interesting to hear a discussion about the shot placement on the transformers. Were they grouped tight, target right where they need to be, etc.

What do you mean communication lines? And what do you mean signaling?

You don’t really need to be precise with shooting a transformer to damage it.

I’m far more concerned with the “not a missile” than the power stations. I don’t believe it was ever solved.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mystery-missile-launch-seen-off...

This has a distinct red / blue flavor to it.

Sounds very much like an exercise to me.

What I wonder is if a radar is watching drones, what is it missing?

Could a drone swarm be used to draw attention away from another incursion or are radar systems able to handle slow and low things at the same time as higher and faster objects?

Normally radars are configured to detect aircraft faster than a small drone. They just filter that out as noise. Now the military could obviously afford multiple radars to fill this gap, but they haven't focused enough attention on this.

A bird and a drone are pretty similar. Heck you could make a drone look and fly similar to a bird. Slow small object detection brings its own challenges.

The realistic aspect though is a small drone by itself can’t do huge damage. And a swarm would surely be detected.

Well, considering FPV drones in Ukraine are destroying aircraft, tanks, IFVs etc, that could be an issue. Langley houses F-22s that are basically priceless.

A battlefield front line in Eastern Europe is a far cry from a USAF base surrounded by 3 letter agencies.

I would bet that the people who invented drone warfare have some awareness of the risks.

Sounds like the perfect place to drop some biological weapons.

>Crazy that Covid 2025 was first detected in Langley isn't it?

What's worse is that this won't take more than a garage bio lab to do.

Makes me want to move to Antarctica.

I wouldn’t worry about theoretical garage bio labs. It’s hard enough doing microbiology, molecular genetics, and bioinformatics even with a real lab full of experienced scientists and technicians. The idea of one or two people doing anything threatening even with millions of dollars ignores the fact that nobody has the requisite expertise to not only perform all the experiments and analyses, but somehow keep the equipment running without service contracts.

Good luck getting an Illumina or Agilent tech to your clandestine garage operation to set up and calibrate your gear.

You sound exactly like the old sysadmins who were saying why mysql is a toy that you should never use for your website.

Open source science is real and has a barrier to entry that's just your time. Anyone with a biology degree can set up a garage lab today that would have been state of the art in 2010 for under $20k.

With all due respect, you sound like someone with little to no experience with the topic at hand.

Having set up a state of the art labs in 2011 and 2015 and having what you’re imagining is the required education, I can assure you there’s nothing myself or anyone else can do with 20k today that’s even in the same arena as the former.

And if you’re basing this solely on marketing claims for nanopore… I was a beta tester.

The fentanyl crisis should serve as a warning here. Precursors can be made in labs elsewhere and smuggled in and assembled in a lab of nearly arbitrary quality if a hostile nation state was motivated. Perhaps $20k isn't enough but $20M is tiny for a government sponsored program and more than enough to cause catastrophic damage.

Because the US definitively do not have prior experience of being hit by surprise from the air on their own soil…

Drone warfare isn't invented though. Warfare tactics are ever evolving, the same as an MMA fighter can do whatever it takes to win. So it's not like there's an inventor of drone warfare, who wrote the rules and derived the consequences, and could predict the outcomes. Especially when warfare economics starts to go back to individuals/small entities having asymmetrical advantages over state actors. And when development in this space is incredibly rapid, accelerating and available to anyone with a laptop, a DIY CNC cutter and some off the shelf chemicals.

Defending against these types of threats isn't something the traditional military orgs are equipped for. They are slow to move, react, plan. They have established doctrine to counteract a simulated opponent's doctrine.

One would also bet that some discarded “allies” from the Cold War operating from a cave in Afghanistan couldn’t pull off a surprise attack on American soil, killing thousands. And yet they did.

For the record, that attack did include an aircraft slamming into the pentagon itself.

Bloated intel agencies aren’t run by gods, they’re run by bureaucrats. They have, and will, fail.

> One would also bet that some discarded “allies” from the Cold War operating from a cave in Afghanistan couldn’t pull off a surprise attack on American soil, killing thousands. And yet they did.

One would have to have been pretty ignorant then. It’s not like 9/11 was an isolated event. The same target was hit 8 years prior.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bomb...

Totally. Multiple agencies were aware of the plot in full or in part, and it was utterly down to mismanagement of national defense.

The “inside job” has always really been distraction from the mundane truth it was a massive fuckup by the people in charge.

So I’m very open to the possibility there are a lot of adversaries walking around the permitters of US bases with little drone kits having a blast.

And the very near miss of the White House or other nearby target https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93

Considering how poor the DoD response outlined in this article has been, they may have awareness, but that doesn't mean they're appropriately addressing the risk.

There’s a good reason why birds and drones are so similar.

https://birdsarentreal.com

There’s search radars, which is the ones you see in movies that spin in a circle or arc and continuously scan the whole area with updates for all returns every second or so. These are also what all ATC towers have.

Then there’s tracking radars which point at one thing and track it continuously.

This is a simplification, and some radars can switch between track and scan.

In other words, a scan radar can and does track many objects at once, but at lower update frequencies.

The other thing to keep in mind is that every plane on that air force base has its own radar, in addition to multiple ground units and most can be interlinked for a more complete picture.

Modern radar systems (note, not all of the radar systems currently being used even by the US military would be considered 'the most modern') should be able to handle a wide variety of targets at a variety of sizes, altitudes, ranges and speeds all at the same time. That being said, radars still fundamentally work by spewing radiation into specific regions of the sky - the more things that a radar needs to track, the more it needs to spread its power around.

Aside from the hard hardware limitations of the radar, what is more likely to be overwhelmed is either the attention and focus of human operators, or whatever software is being used to support the human operator.

It's exactly what happen to the Moskva as far as we can tell: use a Bayraktar TB2 at max range to draw attention of the crew and sneak an anti-ship missile in the mean time (that's what the Ukrainians said they did, at least, there's always fog of war…)

> Could a drone swarm be used to draw attention away from another incursion or are radar systems able to handle slow and low things at the same time as higher and faster objects?

Ukraine has been running this playbook the last 6 months or so. Drones in one area or direction to distract, scalp/Taurus on a high value target elsewhere. Sometimes this plays out over days.

Current air defense systems are insufficient for the new drone paradigms. They won't scale to meet the needs. We need lasers and microwave based systems.

The US army really doesn’t use enough cheap, small drones. All the drones we use are large and expensive.

Not at all. There are a number of small drones (field launchable by a single person) used for surveillance and delivering kinetic payloads.

This is one of many that are publicly acknowledged

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Switchblade

The RQ-11 is a hand launchable drone used by the US (among others) with more than 19k airframes having been delivered.

That says unit cost is $52,914. Not cheap by most standards. Yes, cheap compared to military aircraft, but the interesting changes around doctrine are happening at cheap enough to be disposable.

I think this might be considered disposable by military prices. Missiles, torpedoes etc are very expensive

I am aware that missiles and torpedoes are very expensive. Disposable drones are changing doctrine in ways that more expensive missiles and torpedoes do not.

Isn't that much, much cheaper than most missiles?

Yes. Disposable is different from “cheaper than most missiles”.

So you mean cheaper than the disposable missiles as well as the re-useable ones?

I used Polaroid cameras, which had disposable consumables. I find I use modern digital cameras in different ways.

Cheaper than a missile, which are launched in the thousands in any operation, without any expectation that one specific missile will do any one specific thing, should be plenty cheap enough to consider each of these drones disposable.

The lived experience in Ukraine makes clear that there is a difference between disposable drones and contemporary missiles.

...and that's for the smaller version!

The Switchblade has been a failure in the most recent conflict in Ukraine, the Ukrainians themselves have come up with much better and, more importantly, much cheaper alternatives.

CIA is probably teaching the Ukrainians to build cheap, small drones and presumably they're building prototypes in a lab somewhere.

I don't know why you would need "cheap small" drones when the US has the most advanced bombs on the planet.

You don't even need planes to launch them anymore. A HIMARS on the ground is enough and you get 150 km range.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_Launched_Small_Diamet...

I don’t know. Personel carried cheap disposable drone grenades sound very useful.

the main benefit probably lies within a 'saturation attack' aka overwhelming defenses by numbers. cheap drones are a gamechanger

Probably just the aliens…

At least this is a step from "Chinese weather balloons have invaded the contiguous territory of the United States!". I wonder what they'll come up with next.

You should question your certainty of chinese origin. Maybe it saves your or your sons life by not fighting in a distant war based on propaganda.

I was commenting it from the other side, i.e. I see this as a "fear campaign" (for lack of a better expression) carried out by Western intelligence services.

All of the sudden we should trust the CIA that there are unidentified drones surveilling their Langley home-base, there were times when the Western media would have at least tried to get to the bottom of this story but nowadays they're just forwarding it to us, the mostly unsuspecting public, with no relevant questions asked.

What claim is there that it was not Chinese? China claimed it as their own, ableit not a military one.

Probably testing new reconnaissance capabilities to see how effective it is.

Level the playing field. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KX0ji1sAXl8&pp=ygUNQW5kdXJpbCB...

Remove tracking info when you post links please.

This is a fair request and nice thing to do to fellow users of this forum, people should not downvote this person.

Also on this, it looks like Brave's "copy clean link"[0] doesn't work on this particular URL. I wonder why.

[0] https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/9982188779405-Wh...

pics or it didn't happen

Wouldn't be surprised if this was being done by one of the U.S. defence contractors so that they can convince politicians to buy their anti-drone products.

What's most disappointing about this article is it has no actual details.

What size drones? How fast were they going? How many total? How many at a single time? Did they catch any? What models? Let's see a photo of one... and so on...

or using hedgefunds infinte ftd failure to deliver assets as collateral to deploy such an operation that is not as traceable/trackable. where's Jonathan Frakes? https://youtu.be/GM-e46xdcUo

There's absolutely no need to stage an incident to convince anyone of the need for anti-drone products. The utilitarianism of drones employed en-masse, cheaply and without deep technical knowledge on both sides in Ukraine proves that point just fine.

> Wouldn't be surprised if this was being done by one of the U.S. defence contractors so that they can convince politicians to buy their anti-drone products.

No way they could do that without the military’s knowledge. That can have serious consequence. Anti drone is a hot area that the US is very interested in. All a vendor needs to do is to ask nicely.

> What's most disappointing about this article is it has no actual details.

That’s because the US military was intentionally ambiguous about their anti-drone capabilities:

"To protect operational security, we do not discuss impacts to operations," the statement added. "We don’t discuss our specific force protection measures but retain the right to protect the installation …”

Ah yes, a white collar CEO at a private US company just decided one day that his company was going to start committing felonies and sending swarms of drones to accost a US military installation. And the CEO ordered everyone involved to be somehow threatened into complete silence about the operation. That's totally something that would happen in the real world and not a deranged conspiracy theory.

>a white collar CEO at a private US company just decided one day that his company was going to start committing felonies

This part seems pretty normal, actually.

There’s business fraud and then there’s attacking military installations. The two carry very different penalties.

That's true, but lately it seems like at least one of the most well-known CEOs is really a fruitcake, so this difference in penalties might not matter that much.

There’s always fruitcake CEOs. Having crazies at the top isn’t a modern issue.

If you had connections to be a defense contractor, you would just red team it with at least a relatively high level military official on the inside.

Nothing in this article supports the idea that these are man-made drones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com