National security expert says Pentagon likely too embarrassed to admit drone activity

A veteran soldier and national defense expert believes that if the Pentagon is refusing to reveal the source of a recent flurry of drone activity, it’s likely because they are involved.“Usually when they don’t say anything it’s because the information will embarrass them in some way,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Colonel who is an expert on defense and security for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan think tank in Washington DC.“It’s entirely possible that they tested UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] out and created public hysteria, and are now embarrassed to say, ‘it was us’.”At a Monday press briefing, a spokesman for the Department of Defense said that there was no evidence the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety risk, but refused to explain the rash of drone sightings in the Tri-state area and beyond.Cancian added the military could also be testing new technology.“One conceivable thing is that they [the Department of Defense] are using some mechanism that they don’t want to publicize,” he added.Cancian, who has held positions with both the Department of Defense as well as the Office of Management and Budget overseeing budget strategy and military procurement, told The Post Tuesday drones fall into three risk categories, with most ‘benign’ or ‘semi-benign’, and a small percentage classified as ‘malign’.“[Malign] would be the equivalent of aerial vandalism,” he said.“They could be people snooping around or hobbyists trying to disrupt communications.

It’s conceivable that some small number of them are foreign intelligence drones.”But most foreign powers have satellite systems in place, Cancian said, and don’t need to rely on drones.These include manned aircraft on legitimate flight patterns.He described semi-benign drones as those belonging to “the hobbyist who is curious to see what is on the other side of the fence and is not trying to be malici...