When mystery drones swarmed Langley Air Force Base for weeks starting on the evening of December 6, 2023, the general responsible for defending American skies wasn't surprised — he was validated. "There were no surprises, at least for myself and the team at NORAD/NORTHCOM and others," retired Gen. Glen VanHerck, former head of NORTHCOM (U.S. Northern Command) and NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), told a panel at the Space and Missile Defense (SMD) Symposium in Huntsville this week. "We've been articulating — my predecessors had been articulating — that this threat was here, it was real, it was now, and we weren't ready for it." VanHerck disclosed that two full years before Langley, on December 16, 2021, he had personally told then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that he lacked the domain awareness to do his mission, warning that the U.S. was "not set up to fight in and from our own land" because military planning assumed conflict would happen somewhere else.
What actually paralyzed the response at Langley wasn't a missing sensor or interceptor, it was a jurisdictional dead zone. VanHerck explained that individual services' authority to act against drones "stopped at the fence line at the base, and immediately thereafter, it was really unclear to everybody whose responsibility and authority was it just outside the base." Installation commanders, he said, didn't feel empowered to act even when they detected a threat, caught between uncertainty over whether shooting down what might be a hostile drone, or might just as easily be a hobbyist's quadcopter, would get them covered or court-martialed. That paralysis persisted even as public pressure mounted following the so-called "Jersey Drone" panic of November 2024, a monthslong wave of sightings across New Jersey that VanHerck's own command later found showed no visual evidence of any real mass drone incursion at all, with most reports traceable to misidentified aircraft, stars, and planets.
This is precisely the same structural failure that shows up in VanHerck's separate remarks at the same SMD panel regarding the reported Iranian F-5 bombing run against Camp Buehring in Kuwait, where he described "two services pointing fingers at each other, and nobody made a decision on whose mission and role responsibility that was." Langley in December 2023 and Camp Buehring in March 2026 sit more than two years and an ocean apart, involve completely different threat types, and produced very different consequences, but they trace back to the identical root cause: a defense architecture where individual installations' authority ends at the fence line and nobody owns the space just beyond it. That the same general is describing the same organizational gap at both incidents, separated by over two years, suggests the fixes applied after Langley didn't fully close the seam VanHerck had been flagging since 2021.
Some of that gap has genuinely narrowed. Under VanHerck's successor, Gen. Gregory Guillot, NORTHCOM was given a formal role synchronizing the military's domestic drone response across bases like Wright-Patterson and Picatinny Arsenal, INDOPACOM received a similar mandate for the Pacific, and VanHerck credited current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with clearing up "a lot of the responsibility [and] authority" issues, pointing to the military's expanding use of directed-energy lasers against cartel drones along the southern border and the federal Safer Skies law, which extended limited domestic drone-mitigation authority to DHS (Department of Homeland Security), DOJ (Department of Justice), and select state, local, and tribal agencies. Those are real institutional changes, not cosmetic ones, and they represent exactly the kind of policy work VanHerck says he was pushing for in the memos he described writing years before Langley ever happened.
What VanHerck's own closing assessment makes clear, though, is that the authority question the Langley incursions exposed domestically is the same one still surfacing overseas: "We still have gaps and seams, and we need an integrated, layered approach driven by specific policy on what you must defend," he said, adding that "we're seeing some of this play out not only in our homeland. We're seeing some of it play out forward as well." Read alongside his Kuwait remarks from the same event, that's a direct acknowledgment that the fence-line authority problem never fully resolved, it just relocated. Fixing sensor coverage and fielding more counter-drone hardware, the technical half of this problem, is visibly underway across the services; fixing who is actually allowed to pull the trigger before or after a threat crosses an arbitrary boundary is the harder, slower half, and VanHerck's account suggests it's still being worked out in real time, incident by incident, rather than settled once and for all.
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