Can Modern Air Defenses Stop Santa’s Stealth Sleigh?

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Humanity’s long, bitter struggle against Santa Claus continues. 

Over the last two years, the battle against the Arctic Holiday Elf has breached new technological frontiers, changing how we think about preventing chimney intrusions.

The NORAD Santa Claus tracker continues to supply children the world over with data about Santa’s incursions into national air space.

But despite technological innovations, Santa remains an air defense threat. What have we done over the last two years to prevent Santa’s reign of holiday terror? 

What Have the Last Two Years Showed Us?

Air defense has become the name of the game in terrestrial warfare, and the technologies and techniques developed in the Wars of Humanity have clear implications for the struggle against Claus. Advances in air defense technology have made efforts to deliver presents at close range without stealth nearly suicidal for elves and reindeer alike. Conventional aircraft and sleighs simply cannot operate without substantial risk in contested airspace. 

This has left Santa with some unappealing options. Glide bombs launched at stand-off ranges can reduce the danger to Santa’s sleigh, but are imprecise and often result in packages being delivered off target. Delivery of packages through long-range precision cruise missiles can solve part of the targeting problem, but at volume the expense is high and even the fastest cruise missiles can be shot down. 

Historically, Santa has demonstrated reluctance to go ballistic, given the incapacity of most conventional roofs to receive a sleigh traveling at terminal velocity. Nevertheless, precision-targeted ballistic missile delivery of packages has increasingly become an attractive option for Santa.

However, advances in ballistic missile defense technology mean that even the most lethal delivery systems have only a slim chance of arriving at their targets successfully. Volume helps, of course, and one of Santa’s long-honed strategies of package delivery has been to saturate an air defense system on a single night. However, this still leaves many packages undelivered or delivered to the wrong address. 

Santa poses for a picture in front of an F-35 Lightning II before visiting members of the 419th Fighter Wing Dec. 8, 2019 at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. The wing hosts the children’s Christmas party annually to provide an opportunity for reservists to reconnect after a busy year of multiple deployments around the globe. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Justin Fuchs)

However, there is little room for triumphalism. As Santa has access to advanced stealth technology, he remains a direct threat to conventional air defense networks and to the targets that they protect. Indeed, a properly employed stealth sleigh can blind and defeat an entire air defense system, opening an entire country open to the delivery of holiday packages. Combined with drones and long-range precision munitions, a holiday campaign of terror spearheaded by stealth reindeer can still defeat the best efforts of even a well-constructed air defense network.

Santa and the Drone Revolution

In response to these trends Santa has mightily expanded his use of delivery drones. Guided and carefully programmed drones can, at manageable expense, deliver packages with precision to targets across a country. The best available evidence indicates that Santa has developed a system of drone-control centers below the Arctic ice, manned by specially trained elves and capable of coordinating a multifaceted holiday offensive against a wide array of targets.

Moreover, autonomous and semi-autonomous drones can deliver packages without direct control, avoiding concerns about electronic interference. Drone campaigns are particularly well-suited to the North Pole’s air penetration strategy because of close linkages between Santa’s defense industrial base and his toymaking industries, taking advantage of dual use technologies that have both military and civilian application.  

But drones aren’t the end of the story. Most of the North Pole’s drones travel at speeds and on flight paths that are subject to interception from conventional air defense systems. As with missiles, volume can help by overwhelming defensive capabilities, but this leaves many packages undelivered. Moreover, the development of counter-drone drones have helped to even the holiday aerial battlefield. 

Left of Launch

The war against Santa is a multi-domain conflict. In recent years defenders have made huge leaps in “left of launch” efforts to defeat Santa even before his sleigh takes to the air. It is well-understood that the Jolly Old Elf enjoys the capabilities of a vast surveillance network, allowing his army of analysts to distinguish between the “naughty,” and the “nice.”  Disrupting and corrupting this network has increasingly become the purview of cyber-warfighters around the world.

Patriot Missile. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Passive, defensive countermeasures help to reduce the extent of data that Santa can access during a given holiday period. Active counter-measures help to corrupt the data that feeds the analytical systems at the North Pole, reducing Santa’s confidence in his targeting systems. General attacks across the network help to degrade the North Pole’s “information economy,” reducing overall organizational effectiveness. Of course, the battle is not one-sided; Santa’s capacity for identifying “black hat” and “white hat” hackers and appropriately determining “rewards” for each continues to baffle and terrify the cyber-community. 

What to Expect Next

Over the last two hundred years the elves of Santa’s research and development technology division have run (and often won) a tight race against the national innovation systems (NIS) of the great powers of the world. Located deep under the Arctic ice, Santa’s weapon’s laboratories have spearheaded tremendous leaps in a variety of aviation technologies, including propulsion, stealth, and optical imagery.  We have every reason to expect that these efforts will continue to bear fruit in the future. 

The best available intelligence suggests that Santa continues to work on improving the stealthiness of both sleigh and reindeer. The North Pole has also closely tracked progress on the development of “wingman” drones which would support the mission of the elf-driven sleigh at standoff ranges. Santa’s weapons labs have also maintained cutting edge capabilities in the electromagnetic domain, generating the capacity to blind and defeat air surveillance networks.

Moreover, Santa’s tinkering elves are well-situated to the perfection of drone swarms, given their extensive experience in the civilian electronics and technology markets. 

Parting Thoughts 

The Jolly Old Elf remains a threat to peace and security around the globe. For more than a century governments have been forced to endure an annual violation of their closely defended airspaces at the hands of a bearded extremist and his reindeer henchmen.

Despite massive advances in air defense technology, the sleigh continues to get through at an alarming rate. Nevertheless, with dedication and appropriate levels of investment and innovation, hope remains that the holiday menace can be defeated once and for all. 

About the Author: Dr. Robert Farley 

Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020), and most recently Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages (Lynne Rienner, 2023). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.