All articles
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Policy & Regulation
Gatwick's 2018 Drone Shutdown: 33 Hours, 140,000 Passengers, and No Confirmed Drone
In December 2018, a reported drone near Gatwick Airport triggered 33 hours of closure, 800 cancelled flights, and 140,000 stranded passengers — but no sensor confirmed a drone was present, no image was ever produced, and the detective who said so was removed from press duties within days.
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Defense & Combat
How Houthi Drones Closed the Red Sea: Incidents, Weapons, and the Cost Equation
From the seizure of the Galaxy Leader in November 2023 through two confirmed ship sinkings, the Houthi maritime campaign collapsed Suez Canal transits by 58 percent and pushed US Navy munitions expenditure past $1 billion — using drones that, analysts estimate, cost a small fraction of the interceptors used against them.
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Defense & Combat
ISIS Drone Warfare in Iraq and Syria: How Commercial Quadcopters Became a Military Weapon
In 2016, the Islamic State turned cheap commercial quadcopters into a documented, bureaucratized weapons program — the first non-state drone campaign to kill soldiers in combat and force NATO armies to rebuild air defense doctrine from scratch.
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Defense & Combat
The Kremlin Drone Incident of 2023: What Happened, Who Did It, and Why Nobody Knows
On the night of May 2–3, 2023, two drones detonated near the Kremlin Senate dome. Russia called it an assassination attempt, Ukraine called it staged, and U.S. intelligence offered a low-confidence attribution to a Ukrainian unit. Three years on, definitive attribution remains elusive.
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Defense & Combat
Langley's 17-Night Drone Siege: What Happened, What Failed, What DoD Still Doesn't Know
For 17 consecutive nights in December 2023, unidentified drone swarms penetrated restricted airspace over Joint Base Langley-Eustis, forcing the relocation of F-22 Raptors — while the military's C-UAS authorities and tools proved wholly inadequate to respond.
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Policy & Regulation
New Jersey's 2024 Drone Wave: What Federal Investigators Actually Found
In late 2024, weeks of nightly drone sightings across New Jersey and the Northeast triggered a federal investigation, thousands of public tips, and emergency airspace restrictions—before a four-agency joint statement concluded most reports were misidentified manned aircraft, with no foreign nexus and no national security threat.
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Defense & Combat
Operation Spiderweb: Ukraine's Deep Strike on Russia's Strategic Bomber Bases
On June 1, 2025, Ukraine's SBU launched 117 FPV drones from cargo trucks parked near Russian air bases — some 4,500 km from the front — destroying at minimum 12 strategic aircraft that Russia cannot replace.
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Defense & Combat
Abqaiq-Khurais, September 2019: How 18 Drones Erased 5% of Global Oil Supply
On September 14, 2019, a salvo of 18 UAVs and 7 cruise missiles struck Saudi Aramco's Abqaiq and Khurais facilities, eliminating 5.7 million barrels per day — the largest single-day oil supply disruption in history — while billions in US-supplied Patriot air defenses failed to intercept a single weapon.
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Defense & Combat
Venezuela's 2018 Caracas Drone Attack: First Confirmed UAS Assassination Attempt
On August 4, 2018, two commercially available DJI Matrice 600 hexacopters loaded with C-4 targeted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro at a military parade in Caracas — the first confirmed drone assassination attempt against a sitting head of state, executed for roughly $10,000 in off-the-shelf hardware.
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Counter-UAS
Counter-UAS at Airports: Why the U.S. Still Can't Stop a Gatwick-Style Closure
The 2018 Gatwick drone incident cost airlines £50 million and stranded 110,000 passengers — and the perpetrators were never found. Five years on, U.S. airports face hundreds of incursions annually while the FAA still cannot neutralize a drone on its own. Here's how the technology and authority fit together.
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Counter-UAS
Drones Over the Wall: How Aerial Contraband Became a Global Prison Crisis
In a single year, Georgia's Department of Corrections linked drones to $7 million in contraband and 876 confiscated cell phones. Drone sightings at UK prisons rose 770% in four years. This is the legal, technical, and operational battle to stop aerial smuggling — and why it took so long to begin.
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Counter-UAS
Counter-UAS for Stadiums and Mass Events: How the U.S. Closes the Airspace Gap
Federal no-fly zones have covered NFL stadiums for years, but local police could only watch unauthorized drones — not stop them. Here's how the legal authority gap developed, how the World Cup became a live test for the workaround, and what still isn't solved.
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