Be careful what you wish for.
800 miles inland from the USA’s seashore covers WAG 80% of the population and 90% of the productive infrastructure. What’s left is the mostly uninhabited intermountain West and the upper Midwest. And Chicago.
And we have neither sea nor air defenses against such attacks.
>Takes notes in Canadian<
You know, just in case…
Attacks launched from where? Canada? Mexico? Russia’s submarine fleet? For the last threat, who needs drones when you have nukes?
We live in open societies. Attacks can come feom anywhere. For all we know, there are warehouses somewhee near cities and strategic targets, just full of drones waiting to be launched. You don’t need 800mi range to attack America. You just need to walk a few hundred operatives across a big open border, then have them use commercially available hardware to build drones. I’ve got several myself I built from parts.
Why have any military when you have nukes? Because launching a nuke takes war to a whole nuther level, and because if you use nukes to threaten people, eventually your bluff will be called and you either start a nuclear war or lose.
Drones are precision attack weapons. They are used surgically. Nukes are blunt insteuments you use as a very last resort when all else is lost.
It would have to be Canada and Mexico, anything launched from the sea would need a mothership, and taking those out would be rather trivial for the US Navy. You’d maybe get one good surprise attack wave, and that would be it.
Canada has a lot of territory to launch drones from, but rather fewer people. Mexico would be the real threat. Still lots of room, a population more evenly distributed than Canada, and a much larger population than Canada as well. I mean, if you can’t shut down the drug trade, the Drone trade is probably going to be a problem as well.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Russia invades Ukraine {2022-02-24} (Part 2)
Moving back to my point in what’s now the OP of this thread (Thanks again @What_Exit) …
I was cautioning @aceplace57 that the opportunities for “terrorists” to make such attacks is only growing. And nowadays most “terrorist” organizations are not angry people having a beef with their current sitting government. They are simply irregular clandestine proxies for other hostile governments.
As an example Hezbollah in Lebanon can reasonably be described as an Iranian proxy mercenary military force, not as homegrown terrorists. They may once have been such, but are not now. In that condition they are little different today from what Wagner was before Prigozhin fell from grace (and then from the sky). Just not quite as transparently funded and directed.
Arguments can be made about how far along Hamas is in the transition, but they’re somewhere along the way.
I do not want to hijack my own hijacking thread into a generic Middle East argument.
My point, both here in the new OP and in this post is simply:
The idea of drone attacks on the US mainland, probably from ordinary ships offshore, is not farfetched, will inflame / scare Americans all out of proportion to the actual pinprick damage caused, but (ref @DesertDog) will not be readily and reliably attributable to a sponsoring country whose capital we can promptly nuke.
@Sam_Stone’s idea of the same thing arising from random warehouse(s) across the land is almost equally plausible. Drones are easy in the USA. Bunches of munitions-quality explosives is hard(er).
Quadcoptors can be launched from anywhere, but these super-long-range drones aren’t coptors; they’re basically airplanes (in some cases, literally GA planes with modified controls). You need some sort of a runway to launch them from, and buildings with wide enough doors to accommodate wings to build or store them in. I’m sure it’s not difficult to set up a suitable facility, especially not in places where land is cheap, but you wouldn’t be able to do it secretly. As @Horatius says, you might be able to get in one surprise attack before anyone cares that you’ve set up a private airfield, but then you’ll be shut down. All you’d be able to accomplish would be to take out a few soft targets, and make things more inconvenient for all the folks with legitimate reasons for small private airfields.
Drones are incredibly easy to buy or make. You can make a deadly drone out of cardboard and a few parts you buy at the hobby store. In fact, the Ukrainian drone corps was originally made up of a bunch of hobbyists making war drones in their spare time.
I’m not sure the attacks would be trivial, though. The precision nature of drones means they can hit critical pieces of infrastructure, like the chlorine tanks at a water treatment center, or a jet taxxiing on a runway, or into an open air stadium… A drone detonating a 5kg explosive filled with nails or other shrapnel would be mass casualty causing if exploded over any large group of people.
Drones could be the ultimate terror weapon. They are hard to see, hard to avoid and can get you at any time you are exposed. And they are cheap enough to be made by the thousands, or hundreds of thousands for a state actor. And all of the hardware needed to make them is generic commercial stuff tyat’s cheap and easy to get and not easily sanctioned or regulated.
A terrorist could drive up to the outskirts of a city, launch 50 autonomous drones from the back of a van, each programmed for a specific target, then drive away before anyone knew what happened. And it could be done almost daily in cities around the country at the rate drones can be put together by a determined team.
Now here’s a nightmare scenario: An RC (or autonomous) fixed-wing drone that can be packed into, and launched from, a standard shipping container. Maybe with a small JATO for take-off. Any large containership could become a drone Q-ship, and launch an attack any time up until it docks. More advanced to build, but also much harder to stop.
Yeah, if we are talking 800 km range, that’s true. But for the purposes of attacking America from within, a range of 20 miles or so is all you would ever need. And a fixed wing drone carrying a 3kg high explosive could be hand-launched, or launched from a simple rail system a few feet long. A quadcopter could even do that.
Captain’s log, stardate 9522.6. I’ve never trusted the Canadians and I never will. I can never forgive them for the death of my boy…
What was the hijack?
Stranger
Why walk a few hundred people across a border, open or otherwise?
We’ve got plenty of native-born terrorists right here; many of them from families who immigrated way back when the borders actually were open.
Yes, but why would those guys attack Trump’s MAGAmerica?
As discussed, such an attack would be best delivered from Canada and Mexico, and the only way we’d gang up on you like that is if we felt we had no other choice. It won’t be Biden invading Toronto, after all.
So those MAGA terrorists would be the ones we’re trying to terrorize.
Sure, and you can do all of that without the drones, too.
They wouldn’t. They’d attack the places they think aren’t MAGA enough.
Which are America too.
But then, why would they need drones? They’ll be in charge, they can just kill you the old fashioned way.
They’re not in charge. They’re trying to be; but they haven’t pulled it off (yet).
Just not as easily. Smuggling a bomb into a stadium and detonating it in a crowd would not be as easy as flying a drone over a game. That’s the whole reason drones are scary: not their ultimate lethality, but that they can be deployed en masse, can hit anywhere at any time, and the terrorists can escape, meaning they can do it many times.
It’s the ease of use and the anonymity that makes them scary. And as they say in the military, quantity has a quality all on its own. An individual drone may not be that scary. Five thousand of them launched at random at people and high value rargets routinely, with the perps continually at large, is scary.
The ease of use (for bad actors) is about to go up:
Luis Wenus, an entrepreneur and engineer, incorporated an artificial intelligence (AI) system into a small drone to chase people around “as a game,” he wrote in a post on March 2 on X, formerly known as Twitter. But he soon realized it could easily be configured to contain an explosive payload.
Collaborating with Robert Lukoszko, another engineer, he configured the drone to use an object-detection model to find people and fly toward them at full speed, he said. The engineers also built facial recognition into the drone, which works at a range of up to 33 feet (10 meters). This means a weaponized version of the drone could be used to attack a specific person or set of targets.