From Pearl Harbor to the drone age: Are we ready for the next wave of war?

Neither President Franklin Delano Roosevelt nor British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, nor any of their senior military or political advisors, saw the Japanese attacks of late 1941 coming. The forces of Imperial Japan achieved total surprise across the Pacific.

The intelligence failures in the U.S. leading up to Pearl Harbor were catastrophic. So was Great Britain’s general underestimation of the threat from Imperial Japan. The U.K.’s fortress outpost in the Pacific at Singapore was thought to be, if not impregnable, than as close to it as possible.

Almost all Americans know the disaster of December 7, 1941. The Battle of Singapore lasted seven days. The British forces surrendered Singapore on February 15, 1942. No one had thought to fortify the peninsula’s “back door,” assuming the Malayan jungle to be impenetrable. It wasn’t.

DRONE INCURSIONS ON US BASES COME UNDER INTENSE SCRUTINY AS DEVICES PROVE LETHALITY OVERSEAS

Surprise at this level wins battles, but does not guarantee success in a war, of course, as the defeat of Imperial Japan by the Allies in 1945 demonstrates. Still, this scale of intelligence failure has proven catastrophic again and again, as on 9/11 and 10/7.

Ukraine awakened the world to the far-reaching implications of new technology for warfare when, on June 1 of this year, it launched a surprise drone attack targeting multiple Russian airbases deep inside Russian territory, including locations in Siberia. More than 100 small, commercially available drones were smuggled into Russia and launched from trucks near the airbases, striking and damaging or destroying many bombers in Russia’s fleet of strategic bombers. Ukrainian drones attacked airfields in five regions stretching across five time zones: Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan and Amur.

Less than two weeks later, Israel activated drones smuggled into Iran in parts over a long period of time by its Mossad intelligence agency. When assembled inside of Iran, the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) were launched from inside Iran in tandem with Israel’s opening decapitation strikes on Iranian regime targets on June 13. Sources familiar with the operation told the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies that Israel utilized suitcases, trucks, and shipping containers to clandestinely ship the parts into Iran.

Welcome to the new surprise attack —one that comes in the shape of small projectiles fired from within a country not from outside of it. Russia and Iran are, of course, closed societies that are authoritarian tended towards the totalitarian.

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The United States is, by contrast, an open society which as recently as January 19, 2025 —the day prior to President Trump’s Inauguration— had a wide-open Southern Border. Drones wouldn’t even need to be smuggled across that border so much as hidden in plain sight in boxes marked “drones.”

What the United States’ domestic counter-terrorism forces, as well as the United States military, is doing to prevent such attacks within the United States isn’t known. What is known in bits and pieces is alarming. The New York Post, for example, reported in June 2024 that Chinese-owned farmland is located next to 19 U.S. military bases, including Fort Liberty in North Carolina and Fort Cavazos in Texas.

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An illegal, Chinese-owned biolab was discovered in Reedley, California in late 2022. Within the lab’s dozens of freezers and blast coolers, capable of reaching negative 80 degrees Fahrenheit, were biological agents like HIV, COVID, chlamydia, rubella, malaria, and about sixteen other infectious agents, all of which were identified by the CDC. The owner of the lab was subsequently charged with distributing adulterated and misbranded COVID-19 test kits and with making false statements to authorities about his identity and involvement with the biolabs.

Sometimes farmland is acquired for farming, drones are just recreational drones, and labs are just testing facilities. It would be nice to know, however, that the feds are on top of the threat and are treating the formerly improbable as not merely the stuff of thrillers and streaming services but the future of warfare.

Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor, and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives America home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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