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Line illustration of an industrial site with tanks and pylon, a drone at the fence inside a blue perimeter band

Drones over power plants, refineries, pipelines and military-adjacent sites stopped being hypothetical in 2024. US official reporting put numbers on what operators had long suspected: the incursions are frequent, often unattributed, and most sites still cannot see them coming.

The numbers officials have put on record

  • 350+ drone incursions over more than 100 US military installations in 2024, per NORAD and US Northern Command testimony to Congress, including swarm activity at Langley Air Force Base. (NORAD/NORTHCOM, reported by CSIS and others)
  • Official drone sightings at US nuclear power plants nearly doubled in a single week (10 to 17 December 2024), based on operator reports compiled by The War Zone.
  • 11 confirmed sightings over Picatinny Arsenal from 13 November 2024 onward, part of the New Jersey wave that drew a joint DHS, FBI, FAA and DoD statement and more than 5,000 public tips. (FAA newsroom)
  • What organised attack looks like at scale: Ukraine’s campaign against Russian refining capacity has struck 16 of 38 large refineries, cutting throughput by over a million barrels per day at its peak. (Kpler analysis, 2025)

The defence-relevant wave matters to civilian operators for one reason: it is the largest live dataset on what drones do when they probe protected sites, and the consistent finding is that surveillance comes first, interference is possible, and most facilities cannot currently produce a flight history for their own airspace.

What detection has to do for critical sites

  • Persistent, not patrol-based. A weekly security drive misses everything. Continuous RF monitoring builds the pattern-of-life record that tells you whether Tuesday’s drone was the first, or the fifteenth.
  • Layered sensors. Non-compliant drones never broadcast Remote ID, so RF-spectrum detection is the floor; radar and optical add confirmation where weather and clutter demand it.
  • Audit-grade logging. Regulators, insurers and police will ask for your airspace history after any incident. Systems that cannot export evidence fail the visit that matters.
  • Attribution support. Controller fingerprints and launch-point estimation are what let investigators connect flights across weeks. That is a procurement question, not an afterthought.

How Ridfinder evaluates systems for critical infrastructure

We review candidate systems against your site’s RF clutter, perimeter geometry and reporting obligations, and we score the boring things that decide real incidents: uptime, evidence export, and how quickly a new operator can read the picture. We take no vendor commissions, and our shortlists come with the trade-offs stated in plain language.

Start with the technology: RF-spectrum detection explained, key terms, and what each detection layer sees and misses. For a site review, discuss requirements.

Sources