It happened over multiple days starting three weeks ago today, but the fallout from it continues now.

At Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, a swarm of more than a dozen high-tech drones – apparently impervious to high-tech jamming – showed up and lingered over the base for as much as four hours or more.

Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, in Bossier Parish not far from Shreveport, was attacked by drone swarms during the week of March 9. The attack disrupted B-52H aircraft launches in support of Operation Epic Fury against Iran. It is the first time a US airbase was temporarily put out of operation in wartime, something that never happened even in World War II.

Each wave forced the Air Force to halt operations and send its personnel to shelters. Barksdale is the command hub of the US Air Force Global Strike Command. Not only are B-52s based there, but the base is part of America’s nuclear triad. It shelters long range nuclear cruise missiles (such as the AGM-86B) and will soon house a new Long Range Standoff cruise missile. Shelters and storage sites for the new missiles are under construction.

The only other significant US airbase for B-52s is in Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Both bases are supporting Epic Fury. The aircraft can either fly to the UK and then on to Iran, or (as they did during the period when the UK blocked them) fly directly from Barksdale to Iran, a very long mission requiring eight in-air refuelings.

The drone waves lasted around four hours each day, an extraordinarily long loiter time for a drone. It is not known if the drones were fixed wing or quadcopter types, or how they were powered (liquid fuel or electrical). Each wave consisted of 12 to 15 drones, and the drones flew with their lights on, intentionally making them visible.

Barksdale AFB does not have air defenses, nor does it have fighter jets that can take down drones.

The airbase does have some electronic countermeasures that were designed to disable GPS and the datalinks between the drones and their remote operators. The electronic countermeasures failed to work.

It’s thought that this incident is related to the other drone swarms we’ve seen elsewhere – at military installations along the East Coast and in California between December 2023 and earlier this month. Nobody seems to think this is an Iranian thing. More likely, it’s China.

What’s problematic, though, is that our military bases don’t seem to have the ability or will to knock these things out of the sky. You’d think an old-fashioned flak gun would make pretty short work of a drone swarm; we don’t have those at our facilities, or anything else it appears.

We don’t even have the ability to observe and follow these drones, which is worse. It’s a crime to disrupt the operations of a military base, and those drones are coming down somewhere to be collected.

Given that for four years we had a wide-open border for enemy operatives to enter and plan attacks, and that open border allowed tens of thousands of military-age Chinese men into the country, and that we’ve had multiple instances of Chinese biolabs storing samples of pathogens like Ebola, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see a scenario where we’ve got a network of Chinese spies mapping out our military installations more or less out in the open and making dry runs at taking out the most important bases we have.

And now Barksdale is on that list.

This is the kind of threat legislators in Louisiana and elsewhere have been trying to address by restricting foreign ownership of land near military facilities. Drones which linger over an air force base for four hours are almost certainly launched and collected somewhere nearby given their limited range.

What happened at Barksdale can’t happen again. There is a hole in our military readiness, and China – we assume it’s China – is exploiting it. So far, nobody has been killed as a result, but that could change.