The news is eating it up because idiots are consuming every bit of garbage information they will put out. TikTokers get thousands of views because people are fooled into thinking something is going on. If there are drones, it’s some ding dongs who are getting a kick out of the attention it’s getting.
Iran is not invading with drones. It’s not aliens from the ocean. It’s not a some secret government program. It’s proof that American education has failed and raised the majority population to be mouth breathing morons.
End rant.
Well a drone isn’t a nuke, they would probably be more liberal about potential testing grounds. They won’t be carrying any bombs on it, just testing the drone’s capability to identify targets. If its an AI system they are trying to build, they’d need as much data as possible. Real data I mean, not a bunch of military dudes roleplaying civillians in the middle of the desert. In a real war, any AI they want to use wouldn’t be used on dudes out of nowhere cosplaying. They could be trying to analyze human behavior and try to distinguish a civillian behavior, apart from, say a cop, or other non-civillians. Potentially, it could be used to identify behavior that indicate someone who is not a civillian, and are potential enemy combantants, and that capability that can distinguish between those different categories of people could be useful in the future of drone warfare.
Back then, if you told people that the US military were testing nukes on the continential US, they probably have the same reaction as you did about the US military potentially testing drones over New Jersey.
(But this is all just theories on why they might want to test this over a populated area. I’m not stating these as facts, its just theories.)