This year’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas has better protections against rogue drones than the many small U.S. bases in the Middle East like Tower 22, where three American soldiers were killed by a kamikaze drone last month due to minimal anti-drone defenses, as I reported at The Intercept.
Unlike Tower 22, this year’s Super Bowl will enjoy a host of “hardened” measures including electromagnetic weapons that can incapacitate drones. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this week declared the area around Allegiant Stadium a “no drone zone,” saying that his agency, together with the FBI and even the military, has been preparing for 18 months to protect the event. All of this effort has gone into protecting the event against drone attacks despite Mayorkas conceding that the intelligence agencies have no evidence of any specific threat.
“To be clear: there are no known, credible, specific threats to the Super Bowl or to Las Vegas at this time — but we are vigilant, and we are prepared,” Mayorkas said at a Super Bowl Security Day press conference on Wednesday.
Compare this hypervigilance with the glib way the Biden administration has discussed the terrorist drone that slipped past military defenses and killed three Americans and injured 41 others.
“For the most part, our air defenses have been able to catch, or been able to destroy, any impact or any incoming, whether it be rockets or drones at bases,” said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh.
For the most part. You know, besides the deaths of three National Guard soldiers from Georgia. Working class people with families — the supposed focus of the Biden administration’s “foreign policy for the working class.” But who cares about them?
This article is full of misinformation and reads like the rantings of an angry and incompetent MAGA propagandist.
Does it make sense to have robust protections for an event that will have 65,000 civilians present - and where the equipment and personnel involved can be deployed to other high profile events afterward, even if there isn’t a specific drone threat? Yes.
“Many small US bases,” huh? And the author thinks that each of them should be better protected than the Super Bowl? That doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. Is this in a heavy casualty zone or something? No - we’ve had 3 casualties, total, across all bases, since this engagement started.
Don’t get me wrong - I think our soldiers should be kept safe. Leave it to me and I’d have every single one of those soldiers back on US soil. That would keep them safe but probably wouldn’t make the author happy.
The bases have anti-drone tech, but they also have drones and one was returning at the same time as the attack, which likely is why a large part of why the attack was successful. Does the author think that the super bowl defenses would have foiled such an attack? He implies as much but gives no evidence in support of that claim.
In fact, the entire region is a no-drone zone. So sure, we can deploy the super bowl defenses to those bases - they just have to understand that their drones will be shot down, too.
To be honest, from my uneducated point of view, the defenses described for the bases sound more sophisticated than the ones in place at the Super Bowl, not less.
That all said, the author’s other article has this tidbit:
So the military is literally in the process of improving their defenses and they just haven’t been built yet? Strange, in this article the author said there hadn’t been any efforts to improve them.
Glib how? This is what I found for their response:
Doesn’t sound glib to me.
I imagine at least the victims of the 85 retaliatory attacks the US made cared.
It’s unclear what the author wants, other than to wave a “Let’s Go Brandon” flag around while getting drunk and posting misinformation.