The Drone Threat to America’s Cities | Lawfare
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This past March, the FBI warned state law enforcement that Iran might be planning to attack targets in California using drones launched from vessels floating offshore. As it turned out, the threat wasn’t real. The warning was based on “unverified” intelligence, and there was no evidence of an actual plot. Californians could breathe a sigh of relief.<br>But we shouldn’t get too comfortable. While the FBI might have been wrong about the specific Iranian plot, the threat of a serious drone attack is growing. And we’re not even remotely prepared for it—or the public panic that would likely ensue.<br>The FBI’s warning came to mind when I was in Ukraine recently as part of a delegation with the Renew Democracy Initiative to meet with senior Ukrainian government and military officials, drone manufacturers, and defense technology companies. While there, our delegation saw firsthand how the Ukrainians have used drone warfare asymmetrically against the Russian Army and ground President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression to a bloody standstill.<br>Few expected this when Putin launched his invasion four years ago. At the time, most intelligence and military analysts believed that Russia—a nuclear-armed country with a powerful military, five times the population, a much bigger economy, and China’s backing—would easily overwhelm Ukraine in a matter of days or weeks. As recently as 2025 and as President Trump famously put it, Ukraine still supposedly didn’t have the “cards” to resist Russia. But Ukraine has doggedly held on and is arguably turning the tide of the war in its favor, in large part by mass-producing millions of cheap drones and using them to wreak deadly havoc on the Russian war machine. Russia has suffered over 1.3 million casualties on the battlefield, its oil refineries and other infrastructure are in flames, and Moscow itself is now subject to Ukrainian drone attacks.<br>Unfortunately, the Ukrainians aren’t the only ones who’ve figured out how to produce cheap drones and use them to deadly effect against a theoretically more powerful adversary. Iran is, of course, doing this in the Persian Gulf—using its Shahed drones to restrict passage through the Strait of Hormuz. And if the FBI’s alert from March 2026 has any kernel of truth to it, Iran may have contemplated a drone attack on the U.S. homeland.<br>Could Iran have launched Shaheds at targets in California from vessels floating offshore, as the FBI warned? Maybe, although it would have been challenging for Iranian agents to smuggle the Shaheds and launchers to North America, load them onto vessels in a port, and then get them into position offshore—all without the complex plot being foiled or detected by bystanders, law enforcement, customs, border, or Coast Guard authorities.<br>But make no mistake, a few dozen Shaheds launched from fishing trawlers 15 miles offshore would do serious damage. Traveling at 115 mph, Shaheds could hit targets near the coast—for instance, three of Los Angeles County’s four oil refineries—in about 10 minutes. The results could be devastating: death and destruction, environmental damage, toxic plumes over urban areas, and severe fuel shortages that would hammer the Golden State’s economy. The drones would fly below radar coverage, making them hard to detect—and neither California’s coastline nor the refineries are defended with the kind of interceptors Ukraine uses to block 95 percent of the Shaheds that Russia launches every day. Under current law, only the military is allowed to have that kind of capability—and it’s unclear whether military bases in California would actually have the ability to intercept several dozen Shahed drones just minutes away from hitting their targets.<br>And oil refineries aren’t the only infrastructure that’s vulnerable in California. There’s also the power grid, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), or the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where 40 percent of all oceangoing containerized trade enters the U.S., along with most of the oil imported from the Middle East or brought from Alaska to supply California’s economy. As Port of LA Executive Director Gene Seroka noted at the time of the FBI’s warning about the supposed Iranian plot, “these ports, airports and utilities are soft targets for the bad guys.” And the same could be said for coastal cities and infrastructure in other parts of the United States and around the world, such as the dense network of oil and gas infrastructure in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi along the Gulf Coast or major...