Nearly one year after mysterious drones hovered near a top-secret military base in Virginia for 17 days, Sen. Tim Kaine says he is “very frustrated” with “so many unanswered questions” that remain.
The Virginia Democrat said his state delegation will get a classified briefing on the situation Thursday.
For more than two weeks in December 2023, the mystery drones flew into restricted airspace over the installation, home to key national security sites and the F-22 Raptor stealth fighters.
The Pentagon has said little about the incidents other than to confirm they occurred after a Wall Street Journal report in October. If officials know where the drones came from or what they were doing, they haven’t shared it with Congress.
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“We’re kind of at the year anniversary of these incursions at Langley. And I’m very frustrated with the fact that there’s still so many unanswered questions,” Kaine told Fox News Digital.
Lack of a standard protocol for such incursions left Langley officials unsure of what to do, other than allow the 20-foot drones to hover near their classified sites.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., speaks during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., April 27, 2021. (Susan Walsh/AP Photo/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
As defense-minded lawmakers sought more answers, Langley officials referred them to the FBI, who referred them to Northern Command, who referred them to local law enforcement, one congressional source said.
“I’m going to keep pushing the federal agencies to get their act together and have a clear agency that’s responsible for answering rather than all pointing their fingers at each other and telling us that you got to go to some other agency to get an answer,” said Kaine.
The drones over Langley “don’t appear to be armed, but they are there for at least surveillance purposes. And they interrupted training exercises at Langley.”
And during the recent drone phenomenon in New Jersey, unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have been spotted near Picatinny Arsenal and over President-elect Trump’s golf club in Bedminster. Trump said he canceled a trip to his golf club due to the drone sightings.
Drone incursions at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio prompted the base to close its airspace Friday night, and UAS sightings have occurred at U.S. military bases in the United Kingdom and Germany.
A spending bill that must pass before the end of the week includes a reauthorization of the government’s counter-drone authorities. But it is a simple reauthorization of a program many drone experts say is outdated. National security-minded lawmakers and experts have implored Congress to take up legislation that would grant the government greater detection capabilities and give state and local law enforcement the authority to deal with unauthorized drones.
An F-22 fighter jet takes off from Langley Air Force Base to shoot down China’s spy balloon. (USNORTHCOM)
U.S. capabilities offer many different ways to take down a drone, including shooting them, zapping them with heat lasers and jamming the frequencies so they stop working and fall out of the sky.
Whether Congress needs to change laws is a point of contention, but one thing that is clear is incursions like the one at Langley prompt confusion over legal authority.
“This is a little bit of a problem of too many cooks. And it’s not clear who is the chef,” said Kaine. “The FAA is looking at it. The FBI is looking at it. DOD looking at it.
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“This is a lot clearer if there’s a drone incursion over a base in a war zone like Syria, for example, or Iraq at a base where U.S. military personnel are positioned. The authorities to knock these drones down in that setting are much clearer than if there’s a drone incursion over a base on domestic soil. OK, not going to drone down over the city of Hampton, where the debris might fall into neighborhoods. The authorities on that aren’t so clear.”
A drone (Jens Büttner/picture alliance via Getty Images)
When drones encroach near bases overseas, the rules of engagement give service members more leeway to engage with them.
However, U.S. law does not allow the military to shoot down drones near its bases unless they pose an imminent threat. While Langley has the authority to protect its coastal base, the Coast Guard has the authority to protect the waters and the Federal Aviation Administration has authority over U.S. airspace, some of the most congested with commercial airliners in the world.
Last week, a Chinese national was charged with flying an unauthorized drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. In October, Chinese national Fengyun Shi was sentenced to six months in prison for capturing drone footage over Huntington Ingalls Industries Shipbuilding in Newport News, Virginia, 10 miles from Langley Air Force Base.
Two months prior to Langley, in October 2023, five drones flew over the Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site, which is used for nuclear weapons experiments. U.S. authorities were not sure who was behind those drones either.
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A Chinese surveillance balloon traversed over the U.S. for a week last year before the Air Force shot it down off the coast.
The U.S. Air Force’s Plant 42 in California, home to highly classified aerospace development, has also seen a slew of unidentified drone incursions in 2024, prompting flight restrictions around the site.