This work investigates the oriented-covert attacks and corresponding defense strategies on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a GPS sensor and an Ultra-WideBand sensor in single and double base-station scenarios. The attacker drives the UAV away from its nominal path and causes a high-velocity collision while remaining stealthy to base station detection. The attack is formulated as a constrained optimal control problem that trades off terminal deviation and impact velocity, subject to oriented-covert constraints that decompose the control input into detectable and undetectable components. To defend against the above attacks, the defender should enable the UAV to avoid collisions while reaching its nominal destination with minimal energy consumption. Essentially, the attacker–defender interaction is modeled as a Stackelberg game with the defender as the leader and the attacker as the follower. The existence and sensitivity of the game equilibrium are analyzed. Moreover, when the defender adopts the optimal strategy in the sense of a Nash equilibrium, the above game reduces to a unilateral defense optimization problem that aims to compute the optimal control inputs that minimize terminal deviation, impact velocity, and energy consumption simultaneously. Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle is used to derive the optimality conditions and theoretically validate the proposed attack and defense strategies. Finally, the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed attack and defense strategies are demonstrated through two simulation examples and one experiment.

