A specific accusation arose during the student-led demonstrations on the Virginia Tech campus late last month.
Protesters accused the university, through its drone program, of complicity in Israel’s war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
“Virginia Tech is the drone capital of the world,” one student said in a video posted to X, the site formerly called Twitter. “Every single drone that is in Gaza, targeting civilians right now and killing them, has Virginia Tech engineering ware in it.”
The social media post received more than 1,000 engagements, including more than 400 repostings. Multiple news sites reported that protesters handed out flyers that read “tech funds drone research and is a part of the Virginia Israel advisory board.”
A Virginia Tech spokesman said the statement was “not accurate” and declined to comment further.
It is nearly impossible to know what happens in secret, and there could be documents that aren’t public that would tell a different story. A Cardinal News review of public sources for ties between the Israeli Defense Forces and Virginia Tech found nothing. In fact, the only public connection between Tech’s drone program and Israel is a Federal Aviation Administration issue related to an insurance company that sought permission to have drones fly over moving vehicles.
That said, the university’s deep military history and continuing ties to national defense and defense contractors leaves room for assumptions in a national defense world full of confidential information.
Raphael Cohen, director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program at nonprofit research organization RAND’s Project Air Force, said by email that he did not know of any “direct connection” between Virginia Tech and Israeli drones.
“Israel has a fairly robust domestic drone industry,” wrote Cohen, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, whose work on defense and foreign policy issues includes Middle East and European security. “It’s possible that there is technology there that was done in collaboration with American defense contractors and research institutions, but I have no first-hand knowledge of this.”
The world’s ‘drone capital’?
The statement shared on X during the protests came almost verbatim from one sentence in an open letter that recent Virginia Tech PhD graduate Jack Leff addressed to the university community.
“We are the drone capital of the entire world, and consequently every drone being used to drop missiles in Gaza right now has a piece of Virginia Tech hardware or software inside of it,” the letter reads in part.
Virginia Tech has achieved a spot among the leaders in drone research, but multiple other universities might dispute a “drone capital” claim. U.S. News & World Report, a famous university ranker, lists Tech at No. 13 this year among aerospace engineering programs.
The FAA in late 2022 invited Virginia Tech to join its Alliance for System Safety of UAS through Research Excellence, or ASSURE, which includes 29 research institutions.
Virginia Tech was selected in 2013 to be one of the FAA’s six drone test site locations. Others include Texas A&M University, University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of New Mexico.
In a phone interview last week, Leff acknowledged that he inferred his conclusion about Virginia Tech’s involvement with attack drones, and that he did not have direct evidence of it.
His inference was based on Virginia Tech’s history. The university began in 1872 as an agricultural and mechanical college with an all-cadet student body, and service in the Corps of Cadets was mandatory until 1964, according to Virginia Tech records. The corps remains one of only six military colleges outside the five federal military academies (Virginia Military Institute is another), according to the university.
The university reported in November that 26% of its federally funded, sponsored research dollars came from the Department of Defense. About 90% of that money goes to research, including to the Virginia Tech National Security Institute, formed in 2021 as a sister organization to the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. It is focused on security research and development and is based at the Hume Center for National Security and Technology, according to the university.
“It’s sort of inarguable that Virginia Tech is deeply invested in drone research,” said Leff, who was among those arrested and charged in the protests.
While much of that research is related to commercial and recreational use, some is tied to the U.S. Department of Defense.
In March, U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Montross, visited his alma mater and its Drone Park, where he learned about the university’s research on both airborne and underwater drones, according to a Virginia Tech news item.
“Unmanned systems will continue taking an increasingly prominent role in our defense strategy, providing the flexibility our military needs to ensure our national security,” said Wittman, who was in the Corps of Cadets and chairs the House Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee.
It’s all part of a deeply intertwined history between the military and Virginia Tech, where cadets have played prominent roles in war and where defense contractors recruit engineering students and partner with the university for projects. But does that mean that VT drone tech is in Israeli Defense Forces’ drones?
According to The Jerusalem Post, the IDF Air Force in September received the new Spark drone, part of what it calls its “Storm Clouds” UAV array. Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, an Israeli company, built it.
Other IDF attack drones — the Hermes 450 (Elbit Systems Ltd.) and Heron 1 (Israel Aerospace Industries) among them — are Israeli-manufactured. Israel has been using attack drones for at least 20 years, though its government did not acknowledge it until 2022, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Elbit Systems has a Roanoke facility best known for night vision systems. Protesters have gathered there in recent months, as well.
Leff, 30, from North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham area, said that he has had conversations with students in drone-related programs, and with professors, too, and they have told him about research going on. But he cannot draw a direct line from there to Israeli drone technology.
“With the grants, it’s difficult to get anybody on the record to testify to that fact, just because it could threaten not only their livelihood, but it could also mean jail time for leaking classified documents,” said Leff, who last month defended his dissertation on the use of tear gas against social movements in the United States for the interdisciplinary Department of Science, Technology and Society. “That’s not a concrete connection … because the information is not publicly available. I don’t have any insider info, unfortunately.”
A Congressional Research Service paper from March 2023, U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel, only mentions cooperation between the two countries on “anti-drone” measures.
A recent paper from the think tank Center for a New American Security, titled A Perspective on Israel, states: “Most of Israel’s UAV technology comes from local military industries, with limited imports of UAV parts from industries in allied countries in Europe and the United States.”
Managing public discourse
The only publicly available information about a drone project between Virginia Tech and Israel involved a commercial concern.
An Israeli company, ParaZero, provided a drone parachute for testing to Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering and the university’s Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership. Allstate used the research in 2019 to receive FAA permission to cross traffic from above as the insurer filmed claims investigations. The drone itself came from a Chinese company, DJI.
The Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership has since expanded that work to establish protocols for FAA approval to those requesting to fly uncrewed aerial vehicles over people.
As for the statement on flyers that Virginia Tech is on the Virginia Israel Advisory Board? That board, a Virginia agency, formed in 1996 to facilitate “economic, cultural, and educational ties between Israel and Virginia,” according to its website. The site lists “partners” including the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corp., Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership and the Virginia Economic Development Partnership.
So that statement could at least fit under the umbrella of students’ larger demands for the university to divest of any investments tied to Israel.
One of two reasons spark claims that circulate in times like these, said Rachel Spencer, vice president of strategic communications at Roanoke-based education consulting firm AccessU.
“One, groups either feel like this is the fastest way to get attention to a topic, or two, there is a sense that they have not been heard or listened to in previous efforts to voice concerns,” Spencer said. “And a balancing act for the university is to remember that even in the current landscape, universities are not in a position of taking one side or the other. They’re in the education business, right?
“So, trying to provide space for the different freedoms of expression while not assuming ownership of that particular topic is really important. These conversations are going to crop up … for a college or a university, as the situation evolves. … They’re going to see claims, rightly or wrongly, on social media about different aspects of any conflict.
“You can see a lot of conversation and chatter happening on social media. It’s a great way to get information out quickly; it’s not always trusted. Even if people are sharing it and seeing it in a vacuum, often folks will see it, and then everybody’s attention span moves on to the next thing.”
If an institution feels that, for example, protesters are spreading misinformation about it, a high-profile pushback would not necessarily be the way to address it, Spencer said.
“If there is an opportunity to correct this information or provide additional education, that’s also the best way to go about it rather than trying to take that conversation public,” she said. “Get folks in a room and start talking through what the concerns are, so you can resolve it that way.”