Truth has taken wing

Posted 12/31/24

A re you tired of being lied to? I am. All right, let me qualify that. I am tired of deception, manipulation and misstatements in public forums. Not every provable falsehood is a deliberate lie. …

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Truth has taken wing

Posted

Are you tired of being lied to? I am. All right, let me qualify that. I am tired of deception, manipulation and misstatements in public forums. Not every provable falsehood is a deliberate lie. Sometimes they are simple mistakes and misunderstandings. 

Some people adopt a viewpoint that they “want to believe” but cannot support with evidence, logic, and critical thinking. That’s easy and tempting in this age of instant gratification and short attention spans. They don’t set out to deceive; they start by fooling themselves, or by uncritically accepting on faith the views of others. They believe what they say; they just get it wrong. Good hearted folks remain openminded enough to look at all sides of an issue, engage with others who disagree, stop generalizing from inapplicable past experience, and reconsider. It’s uncharitable to call such people “liars.” Mistakes can be acknowledged and corrected.

But as the saying goes, charity to the guilty can be cruelty to the innocent. There are people and institutions with no regard for the truth, and unfortunately that now includes the federal government that I once worked for.

Case in point is the ongoing drone crisis peaking now in New Jersey, New York, and elsewhere along the middle Atlantic seaboard. Many of the reported sightings can probably be discounted. We tend to see what we want to see, and when roused enough to step outside and actually watch the night sky, anything that’s lit and moving goes into the hopper. No doubt some of these sightings really can be dismissed as airplanes in a traffic pattern; or law enforcement, commercial or hobbyist drones legally operated; or, as is the case even here among level-headed Wyomingites, a string of Starlink satellites. 

But while there may be perfectly conventional, benign explanations for a lot of what people are seeing, given the number and nature of reports from reliable sources like law enforcement, the Coast Guard, aviators and other trained observers, there’s cause for concern and a call for truthful answers. It’s reasonable to expect something other than outright and deliberate lies, from the president on down, telling us there’s nothing unusual going on. 

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires a Remote ID onboard every UAS operated in U.S. airspace. The Remote ID broadcasts location and a serial number registered in an FAA database. Recent sightings of registered UAS are easily identified and accounted for; there’s no need for guesswork. If that’s all we’re seeing, the government would know it and could say so; case closed and mystery solved. That is not a plausible explanation for what is happening.

There remain three possible explanations for what is happening. The government presently denies all three.

Since we know that Iranian and Chinese agents have crossed our porous border by the thousands, it’s possible that they or other hostile entities present in the U.S. might be operating systems bought from Amazon or Sharper Image without a functioning Remote ID, or registered with falsified and untraceable information. That is Scenario 1.

Scenario 2 involves foreign UAS based offshore — which could account for the apparent size, range, and performance of some of the observed craft — or even clandestinely operating from U.S. territory. How many disassembled UAS could you fit in a shipping container that will never be inspected at a port of entry? By definition, these would be hostile in nature, violating U.S. airspace. The “Iranian mothership” is unlikely, but then so was a Chinese spy balloon floating across our country. Submarines or small craft lost in the maritime traffic clutter are not impossible. Do you remember when the Iranians were testing the launch of ballistic missiles out of the holds of commercial freighters, in the Caspian Sea under the eyes of our satellites? This would be far less of a challenge.

Both of these adversary scenarios are denied by our government, perhaps to avoid showcasing their impotence and incompetence. They won’t control our borders; why should we expect them to protect our airspace? We also need to recognize the placating lies they tell about the supposed capability of counter-UAS systems protecting all our sensitive facilities. These do not exist; if they did, we’d be recovering downed drones and know what is really happening. 

Scenario 3 is that the U.S. government itself is operating large numbers of UAS in our own airspace for purposes they are unwilling to reveal.

Coming from a background in national security, I understand the necessity for classification of national security threats, and for the protection of ongoing investigations, but the current administration has lost my trust. It hides incompetence and ill intent behind a veil of secrecy.               

I don’t know which of these three scenarios would be worse, or which is true, but I suspect we all will know, soon enough. 

 

(Bill Tallen earned a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College in 2007.)

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