The recent arrest of five men near RAF Fairford Airbase in the United Kingdom as part of a suspected Iranian terror plot against the base and an “unspecified new threat” to use drones to attack U.S. assets stationed at Fairford prompted the United States to remove all 12 of its B-1 Lancer bombers from the base. The incident serves as yet another example of the growing risk drones pose to deployed U.S. military assets.
Estimates for the cost of a B-1 Lancer are upwards of $300 million per bomber. If the cost of the drones deployed by Ukraine against Russia during Operation Spiderweb is a fair gauge, then the United States was forced to remove over $3 billion dollars’ worth of strategic assets being used in critical long-range and ongoing operations against Iran due to the potential threat posed by relatively unsophisticated aerial vehicles, flown by what were only relatively skilled operators, costing fewer than $1,000 apiece. When considering the cost of an offensive drone capability (several hundred or thousands of dollars) against the cost of the assets potentially put at risk by drones (hundreds of millions or billions of dollars), this represents a staggeringly lopsided calculus in favor of an attacker. In the RAF Fairford B-1 case, it was the threat, rather than an executed attack, alone that achieved this favorable outcome.
But the fear generated by a potential drone attack is not unwarranted. Besides the successful Ukrainian attacks on Russian airfields and the damage caused to 40 high-value aircraft as part of Operation Spiderweb, drones have been used by states (e.g., Iran, Russia, the United States, and others) and Violent Non-state Actors (VNSAs) to great effect around the globe. Iran has successfully targeted U.S. assets throughout the Middle East with a combination of drone and ballistic missile strikes, and according to an Orion Policy Institute report, VNSAs like the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, and others have used drones to attack targets in Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iraq, Burma, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, and Mali. Drones have featured prominently in the brutal war in Sudan and, more broadly, are now a widely accepted feature of almost every modern conflict.
While the threat posed by drones to U.S. forward operating bases and foreign military installations is increasing, it is expected given the offensive utility and low cost of building and deploying drones and the relatively high cost and difficulty associated with defending against them — especially when they are used en masse against troops and equipment in active warzones or foreign countries. What is more of a national security challenge is the increasing risk posed by drones to military installations inside the U.S. heartland and military and civilian personnel deployed to protect against threats within U.S. borders.
Between 2023 and 2024, drone incursions occurred at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, a sensitive Department of Energy site in Nevada, near Edwards Air Force Base, California, in the area near Naval Station Norfolk and the Newport News Shipyard, Virginia, and at military bases in Ohio and Utah. These incidents, combined with Congressional influence — at least in part — prompted the U.S. Air Force to develop its “Point Defense of Air Bases” Doctrine Advisory in 2025.
Also due to the growing threat posed by drones during this period — not just to military installations and assets but to civilian sites as well — and to the United States being behind the curve in both drone defense and production, the White House put forth two Executive Orders (EOs) 14305 (Restoring American Airspace Sovereignty) and 14307 (Unleashing American Drone Dominance) to guide new drone-related policies, with the former designed to promote public safety against a range of potential threats and the latter to scale up production of drone technologies for global markets.
The promotion of these efforts is laudable, if perhaps long overdue. The United States was a pioneer of remote-controlled aircraft in the 1930s, unmanned reconnaissance aircraft in Vietnam, and long-range, high-endurance unmanned aircraft in the late 1980s, and held a dominant position in reconnaissance and armed drone manufacture and use until recent decades. But producing drones and drone technology is likely to prove a much easier task than securing sites across the United States that could fall prey to drone attacks.
First, although EO 14305 created the Federal Task Force to Restore American Airspace Sovereignty under high-level leadership and the National Training Center for Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems to coordinate and train federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement on counter-drone activities, developing and exercising the necessary authorities and coordinating a multi-agency defense against drones is a formidable task.
According to the U.S. Air Force’s Point Defense doctrine, the U.S. homeland “presents a unique and challenging context for PD (point defense) operations. Engagement parameters, authorities, and requirements for coordination amongst various local, state, and federal agencies constitute constraints and restraints for PD capability employment. These factors have the potential to introduce delay into the PD kill chain and risk response effectiveness if not accounted for in advance.”
Even in areas where drone threats are expected and trained counter-drone forces are deployed, mistakes — like an accidental shootdown or the misidentification of a threat — can happen. The February 2026 incident where the U.S. military shot down a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) drone near El Paso, Texas, and the shooting down of a party balloon in the same month and same general vicinity are cases in point.
Deconflicting and responding to air incursions have been a problem for quite some time. Even where air defenses are supposedly at their highest and personnel are trained to respond to a variety of threats, deconfliction and mitigation can prove difficult in the instance of an actual event. Consider that in 1987, a teenage Mathias Rust flew from Helsinki, Finland, through a web of Soviet military and civilian air traffic control points and landed an airplane near the Kremlin in Moscow. And, in the United States in 1994, Frank Corder stole a small airplane and was able to crash-land it on the South Lawn of the White House.
Second, even if the United States government is successful in developing the appropriate policies, coordinating mechanisms, and training necessary to implement an effective counter-drone defense, the sheer — and growing — volume of drone activity in the United States and the overwhelming number of sites that need to be defended are likely to make this effort a Sisyphean task.
According to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), there are nearly 20,000 airports, 837,513 registered drones, and 481,760 certified remote pilots in the United States. Also, according to the FAA, an estimated 38.4 million drone flights were piloted in 2024 by recreational and nonrecreational operators across the country.
When considering that there are hundreds of stadiums, amphitheaters, and other venues capable of hosting large crowds in the United States and hundreds of thousands of schools, shopping malls, houses of worship, and parks where sizable crowds of people congregate, and outdoor sporting or other recreational events occur daily, the potential drone threat is nearly incalculable. And unlike military bases, airports, or major events — like the Olympics, the World Cup, other high-profile sporting events, or large concerts — these areas are not routinely monitored by radar or security services and are generally left unprotected from drone activity.
While we have some understanding of the scale of sanctioned or permissible drone usage rates that occur annually, which is quite large indeed, it is unknown how many unregistered drones and uncertified pilots there are in the United States, let alone how many inimical actors with malign intent, capable of deploying a drone armed with chemical or explosive munitions — like gang members, cartel operatives, terrorists, or even disaffected lone wolves — reside within U.S. borders.
With millions of drone flights conducted annually by hundreds of thousands of operators, many of whom fly their drones near unprotected sites and are relatively unskilled at their craft — the risk of an accident is high. Given the porosity of and difficulties associated with large-scale drone defense, the cheap cost of drone technologies, and the number of capable, hostile actors with an interest in causing harm on American soil, so too is the risk of an intentional mass casualty attack. The greater the vulnerability and the ease of an attack, the more likely the possible becomes the probable.
The risk posed by drones to foreign and domestic military and government sites is only going to grow as drone adoption and usage rates by hostile actors increase. But this risk is certain to be dwarfed by the potential risk posed by drones to softer, more numerous, and more populated civilian targets.
Dr. Chad C. Serena is a Senior Research Fellow at The Soufan Center. His research focuses on military and Violent Non-State Actor (VNSA) operations and adaptation, the influence of technological innovation on conflict, and the role of military force in geopolitics.
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