FPV Drone Attack Risk Sinks Future Navy Infrastructure At U.S. Border

Navy Base San Diego is at risk of FPV Drone attack.

The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images

Audacious Ukrainian First Person View (FPV) drone attacks on Russia’s Kronstadt naval base and dark fleet cargo vessels this month are hammering home a lesson the U.S. Navy has been slow to accept. American naval bases and other waterfront industrial support facilities on the U.S. mainland are no longer safe havens. In particular, small, shorter-range FPV drones are making maritime-related infrastructure investments within 100 miles of the border obsolete. As America shifts to a wartime footing, all waterfront less than 100 miles from U.S. border is a no-go zone for new critical maritime infrastructure investments.

On a larger scale, America’s entire approach to maritime basing and support infrastructure requires a thorough strategic rescrub, prioritizing defendability, resiliency and dispersal potential over longstanding naval habits, peacetime preferences and ease of use.

This is a big lift. Shifting near-border Navy and associated maritime industrial base facilities to more defendable areas of the West and Pacific coasts will be unpopular. Take the sprawling Navy Base San Diego, located a few miles north of the Mexican border. It is a fabulous harbor, home to the largest concentration of U.S. naval power in the Pacific. Sailors love the surf and San Diego’s sunny climate. Retirement-bound Admirals are loathe to let some pesky risk assessments interrupt their enjoyable afternoon golf scrambles. A long-ingrained perception of invulnerability has made dispersal of the fleet farther north to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Humboldt or to rougher, more easily secured ports in Alaska a non-starter.

The Pentagon’s war-fighting ethos demands action. The near-border Navy Base San Diego, along with the rest of San Diego’s massive maritime infrastructure, is at real risk. Rather than take action, a hopeless form of inertia has set in. Years of studies and analysis have spurred little more than admiration of the threat. The sun, surf and golf-besotted base is not growing harder, and, as of now, San Diego is unable to adequately deter modern threats with cohesive and layered drone defenses. The Navy still cannot provide specialized battle damage recovery assets there, or offer valid, well-worked contingency operation and dispersal plans from the port city.

The cross-border drone threat to San Diego is real. In the last six months of 2024, the Border Patrol detected 27,000 drones operating within 1,600 feet of the southern border. Central and South American drug-smuggling cartels, harried by almost a year of lethal attacks on their maritime smuggling networks, are unlikely to sit idly by for much longer. With three nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and at least 61 more Navy ships moored barely 11 miles from the Mexican border, this “target-rich” environment is well within range of simple attack and “Kamikaze” FPV drones. Today, a drone-driven assault from the rabbit warrens of Tijuana is not just a plausible idea, but a likely hazard.

Even worse, the U.S. is, as of now, involved in two wars and should be on a battle-ready footing. The far-away Iranian conflict may dominate the headlines, but the fight on drug smuggling routes to the Southern border pose a more immediate local threat. Kinetic strikes have transformed cross-border drug smuggling from a relatively chivalrous cat-and-mouse chess game into a gritty fight. The body count is stacking up, and, with at least 200 smugglers dead, the risk of a commensurate cartel-driven retaliation is cranking higher and higher. But the Navy, the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Northern Command have effectively sat on their hands, unwilling to make tough long-term decisions about port security and overall risk from armed cross-border FPV drones.

Barring real action from the U.S. Navy, a passive defense, driven from the highest levels of the Department of War, offers the only viable option. America’s appetite for defensive hardening (layered air defense, obscurant deployments, local water deluges, and other active anti-drone security measures) is rather limited and almost entirely absent from base community discussions. In passive defense engineering, the first step is to simply claw for distance. That can be done by incentivizing investment in critical maritime infrastructure that is located 100 miles or more from America’s border zones.

De-incentivizing has a role as well. Near-border investment in anything outside of base and facility hardening must cease. With hostilities underway, it is far too dangerous for the U.S. government to continue building, awarding big military contracts, or investing in unhardened facilities that are (or soon will be) within easy reach of armed, cross-border FPV drones.

The final step is to begin moving key assets out of threatened near-border zones. Ships, commands and key production facilities need to move farther from the U.S. border, operating instead from island areas or other places with clear and defendable approaches.

Ukraine is showing that FPV drones are no longer exotic, remote threats. Capable of deploying from the hard-to-monitor rabbit warrens of industrial Tijuana, a basic FPV drone traveling at the leisurely speed of 80 miles an hour gives Navy Base San Diego less than 10 minutes to detect the intrusion and respond. On the east Coast, the Port of Brownsville is just a few feet from the Mexican border and only about 8 miles from the busy industrial zones and maquiladoras of the Mexican border city of Matamoros. Both Brownsville and San Diego are well within range of the basic fiber-optic controlled drones operating in Ukraine, the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is only the beginning. More sophisticated heavy-lift drones currently in service have longer ranges, are far faster and can be tougher to stop. The only way to reduce risk is to pull back from the border and incentivize maritime investment in safer, newer and more defendable facilities, 100 miles or more from at-risk border zones.