A veteran soldier and national defense expert believes that if the Pentagon is refusing to reveal the source of a recent flurry of drone activity, it’s likely because they are involved.
“Usually when they don’t say anything it’s because the information will embarrass them in some way,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Colonel who is an expert on defense and security for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan think tank in Washington DC.
“It’s entirely possible that they tested UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] out and created public hysteria, and are now embarrassed to say, ‘it was us’.”
At a Monday press briefing, a spokesman for the Department of Defense said that there was no evidence the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety risk, but refused to explain the rash of drone sightings in the Tri-state area and beyond.
Cancian added the military could also be testing new technology.
“One conceivable thing is that they [the Department of Defense] are using some mechanism that they don’t want to publicize,” he added.
Cancian, who has held positions with both the Department of Defense as well as the Office of Management and Budget overseeing budget strategy and military procurement, told The Post Tuesday drones fall into three risk categories, with most ‘benign’ or ‘semi-benign’, and a small percentage classified as ‘malign’.
“[Malign] would be the equivalent of aerial vandalism,” he said. “They could be people snooping around or hobbyists trying to disrupt communications. It’s conceivable that some small number of them are foreign intelligence drones.”
But most foreign powers have satellite systems in place, Cancian said, and don’t need to rely on drones. These include manned aircraft on legitimate flight patterns.
He described semi-benign drones as those belonging to “the hobbyist who is curious to see what is on the other side of the fence and is not trying to be malicious but still doing something they shouldn’t be doing.”
Last week, The Post revealed one of the sites where many of the mystery drone sightings have been reported is a military installation in New Jersey that has been helping develop robotic drones that can counter weapons of mass destruction.
The US Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, located at the Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County, awarded a Maryland company a $50 million contract in 2018 to develop robotic drones, which can generate three-dimensional maps of urban areas and engage in surveillance to counter WMDs.
However, a spokesman for the Picatinny Arsenal said the military installation has nothing to do with the recent drone activity over the state — which has resulted in over 5,000 reports made to the FBI since the beginning of the month and has many local residents on edge.
A New Jersey mayor added to the drone panic Tuesday when he said that the drone sightings might be linked to missing radioactive material.
Belleville Mayor Michael Melham proposed the drones flying in a grid-like pattern over his Essex County township may be “looking for something.”
“What might they be looking for? Maybe that’s radioactive material,” Melham told Fox TV’s “Good Day New York.” Federal officials said the material poses no serious threat.
“The truth will come out in the new administration if only to embarrass the Biden administration,” added Cancian.
“One conceivable thing is that they [the Department of Defense] are using some mechanism that they don’t want to publicize. But this is going to be an increasing problem, of drones flying over airfields.”
President-elect Donald Trump on Monday accused President Biden and the Pentagon of hiding information about mysterious drones.
“The government knows what is happening,” Trump said after Biden representatives pleaded ignorance despite thousands of Garden State and New York City residents seeing — and in some instances video recording — the unidentified aircraft.
“Look, our military knows where they took off from — if it’s a garage, they can go right into that garage. They know where it came from and where it went, and for some reason they don’t want to comment,” the once and future president said during a wide-ranging, 70-minute press conference in Palm Beach, Fla.
“And I think they’d be better off saying what it is. Our military knows and our president knows. And for some reason, they want to keep people in suspense.”
