This month, Ukraine pulled off its own Pearl Harbor, decimating more than 40 of Russia’s strategic bombers worth more than $7 billion. This despite lacking an air force.
The attack was a masterclass in asymmetric warfare. It involved 117 explosive drones, hidden inside wooden sheds, quietly trucked to remote Russian bases from Siberia and the Arctic, then unleashed in coordinated waves.
Flash back to early December 2024, when strange lights hovered over New Jersey skies. Residents flooded 911 and social media with reports. But what followed was worse: government paralysis.
No one — not the Federal Aviation Administration, not the FBI, not Gov. Phil Murphy (D) — could say what the drones were, how many there were or where they came from. Instead, they gaslit the public, blaming the sightings on helicopters and meteors.
We have seen this movie before, most recently in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, when government obfuscation and lack of coordination between local, state and federal agencies generated confusion, outrage and chaos. After the New Jersey drone debacle, we should all be sounding alarm bells about our unpreparedness in the face of this new threat.
Complacency comes in a variety of forms — misplaced hope, denial, fatalism — but the results are always the same. It leaves you flat-footed in the face of imminent threats. It prevents you from doing what needs to be done to avoid a worst-case outcome.
The antidote to complacency is vigilance, that is, having a plan for what we will do if suicide drone attacks start.
Such a plan would start by breaking down the walls between silos such as the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, FAA, FBI and others within the federal government itself. It would hard-wire the broken connections with law enforcement at the state and local level. It would establish accountability: Who is going to keep watch around the clock, assess the threat in real time and notify everyone with a need to know?
The agency with the mandate to build this kind of nationwide, coordinated response is FEMA. That’s what makes the president’s proposal to dismantle it not just misguided, but dangerous. Now more than ever, we need a powerful, professional FEMA to unify efforts across government and industry to confront the asymmetric threats of this new era.
My new 9/11 nightmare begins on another crisp autumn morning in some not-too-distant September, when New York (or Washington, Los Angeles, Houston or Seattle) awakens to the menacing hum of unmanned aerial vehicles hovering in a clear blue sky.
Each is remotely controlled and carries a devastating payload intended for dozens, if not hundreds, of soft targets across the city. The attack is silent, remote and everywhere at once.
It is the responsibility of the federal government to envision and prepare for this worst-case scenario. Innovative solutions are needed, whether to create an impenetrable dome, new jamming technology or high-tech weaponry to shoot drones out of the sky. Only businesses and certain parts of the military have this kind of know-how, and only FEMA can build the public-private ventures we will need to get it done.
I have no doubt that the U.S. will get it done. The only question is whether it does it the easy way, by figuring it out beforehand, or the hard way, in the chaotic aftermath of a 9/11 redux.
Kelly McKinney is a former member of FEMA’s National Advisory Council and a former deputy commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management.