It's vastly more likely that it was a classified US military-intelligence operation/test than a foreign actor operating freely in deepest CIA territory.
There is no doubt in my mind whenever I hear about these things or “tic tacs” and the like that it’s probably one agency testing new tech on another.
Whether or not it’s used for budget inflation, who knows. Looking at the backchannel communications and reactions has value. If you can fool the best military in the world, you can fool the next best too.
From the government as a whole? No. But for some specific department to get funding over others? Yeah, probably that sort of jockeying for funds happens all the time.
Even then, I don't think they would need to create a fleet of drones to buzz around military bases to scare up a pretext for more funding. That's comic book logic.
That's not at all what's happening. I don't think the MIC invests heavily in producing false-flag events.
But they do evidently invest heavily in PR and "think tank" activities to drum up support, including misconstruing harmless events as national security threats.
But threat inflation = bigger budgets.