All The Pretty Airplanes Lined Up In A Row - Will America Get Serious About Force Protection From Drones Before It's Too Late?
As a member of the Pentagon Press Corps, we have raised this issue with USAF management and look forward to their response on measures taken to address this serious threat.
UPDATE: Anduril Founder Palmer Luckey:
The United States really since the end of the Cold War has erected these ideas that the things that we're spending money on are going to keep us safe and that they're going to help our allies win any potential war that comes along.
And then we've been confronted with this stark reality. Things like the Ukraine invasion where we realize that actually a lot of these tools are sitting ducks.
You're going to have $50 million bombers blown up by $500 drones, and we don't have the tools that we need to stop them.
Originally published January 5, 2026
If I was a domestic airbase commander, or overseas theater commander, this would give me nightmares -- an 18-wheeler pulls up a click from an airbase, the top opens, and scores of armed drones fly out, targeting your aircraft lined up on the ramp. Think billions in American force projection capability destroyed in a few minutes...at home, or abroad...irreplaceable.
Operation Spider Web by Ukraine* (aided by the West obviously) against the Russian Federation last year destroyed 30% of Russia's strategic airpower in minutes.
Americans are known throughout the decades to be not focused in peacetime on force protection. We can no longer afford that luxury.
Trump loves his B-2s, F-35s, and SOF helicopters, but they take years to build, and it would require money we don't have to replace them.
They must be protected at least to a minimal level.
The Ukraine war has seen the development of inexpensive, and relatively quickly deployed countermeasures to FPV drones (first person view). Netting, to prevent drones from impacting close enough to targets to do damage has proved somewhat effective.
However, as always with war, countermeasures are developed quickly.
Chinese buying land near U.S. strategic home bases is a shocking reality and shows lack of American attention to emerging threats.
It's not like Biden brought in 20 million people we can't identify or anything. In all seriousness, there are likely Mack trucks filled with drones already in the homeland, stored away for future use if conflict breaks out with China or Iran.
Come on, build some netting, make me feel better, at least till more hardened solutions can be found.
History rhymes...
Public Domain
It's just like Democrat election theft. We KNOW the threat is real...but blatantly refuse to do anything to fix it.
Stop advertising the locations .......
Shades of December 7th...
The US had better wake up, and I mean NOW! After importing millions of American-hating migrants, we have never been so vulnerable. EVERY SINGLE MILITARY INSTALLATION AND SUPPLIER FACILITY IS A SITTING DUCK! IF somebody had the will and connections, along with a highly trained, very small team traveling quickly and accessing propositioned supplies, they could cripple every single base and contractor campus in the US within a week! The US would then be impotent for at least a decade.
Thanks to the efforts of the radical democratic/socialist/communist left.