One can attack with a drone and escape.
It’s real. I’ve seen multiple videos from ISIS bomb drones. They mostly use what looks like 40mm grenades like are used in M203/320 grenade launchers and the Mk 19 (or the Russian equivalent). The grenades only weight half a pound but can have decent shrapnel damage. It is certainly a weapon that is being used by ISIS as well as drones being used for reconnaissance.
Here is a video of what an ISIS drone attack looks like from the ground. Warning, there is a wounded person shown in the second half of the video, with blood etc.
Ah OK, thank you, that’ll teach me to read the entire thread, I thought the drone attack in Caracas was being referred to.
Thanks!
That video shows what a hard target a small drone is to spot, never mind hit.
I wonder how many misses they filmed before they had an explosion to show.
The drones are cheap and the grenades are plentiful. They can afford to miss.
That doesn’t seem to be a major concern wrt to terrorist attacks.
For causing damage theyre probably no good but for causing terror they could be fantastic, if you get a couple to explode & hurt people, you could just send unarmed drones flying around and scare the crap out of people with the buzzing.
Depends on the terrorists really, many Islamic Fundementalists don’t really care about being caught or killed, other groups would prefer to remain free to live and fight another day.
A suicide bomber can only attack once, someone setting off bombs remotely can do so many times.
How many terrorist attacks have you been in? I’ve been in a few myself. The major concern is inflicting casualties. One way they do it is with devices detonated by suicide attackers. That is not the only or even most prevalent method of attack. Adapting commercially available materials to make weapons is very common.
Which ones were those? How were you involved other than being a member of a larger agency that was part of the investigation?
Obviously it’s entirely feasible. It wouldn’t even be hard. Basically just buy an off the shelf commercial drone with a decent carrying capacity and add a bomb. If the goal is to just kill random people, and not anyone specific who is high value, it’s not like there are going to be any defenses at all. Only way the terrorist can fail is if they blow themselves up when wiring the bomb on the drone or the drone crashes shortly after launch. Autopilot drones are the obvious way to do this, so the terrorist could set up a number of drones ready to launch somewhere away from the target, and then launch them remotely much later.
The drawback is cost. Prosecutors Add Up Cost of Bomb: $5,000
The Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and injured 600, cost $5000 in materials to make the bomb. About $8k today. Plus labor, it was a DIY effort obviously.
The DJI Agras, a drone with a 22 lb capacity, costs $15,000. The Oklahoma City truck bomb weighed 7000 pounds.
As you can see, while feasible, if a terrorist wanted to kill the most people per dollar, drones are far too expensive.
Now, if their goal was to, well, spread terror, that’s harder to quantify. The freakonomics authors suggested the terrorists train many teams of snipers and have them target people in random locations at random times of day or night. Using ordinary rifles fired from the inside of cars, as this turns out to be extremely hard for the police to solve. (because the shot can be hard to hear and the evidence drives away when the snipers move the car after, and the shot can be fired from hundreds of meters away)
The idea being that terror isn’t about killing people, it’s about creating doubt in the minds of the target populance that *they *might potentially be next. Anyways, the thought that a robot from the sky might potentially kill you is possibly pretty scary.
I mean, I guess. Terrorists aren’t rational because historically, even in mass bombings that decimated populations, the survivors don’t give up. If a terrorist wanted to stop the USA from helping Israel, murdering a few US citizens - heck, if the terrorist could somehow find a way to kill hundreds of thousands with a biological device or nuke - isn’t going to make the U.S. give up. If anything, it would harden their resolve.
I agree it wouldn’t be hard to use drones as a terror weapon. Never mind adding bombs–fly a dozen over a large event and just cut power so they fall into the crowd. Doesn’t matter if no one is killed or seriously hurt. I’m sorry if this seems like a prescription for a criminal activity but this speculation isn’t out of line with what’s been discussed above. As SameulA says, it’s the randomness that causes terror.
I disagree with SamuelA about “hardening resolve,” though. That is EXACTLY what terrorists want. Since 9/11, our hardened resolve has resulted in the entire might of the US “fighting terrorists.” The result–no more 9/11s, but many thousands of soldiers dead and wounded, trillions of dollars spent on the U.S. military which is now sucking fumes, and the Middle East burning down.
Perhaps the reason we don’t see major (or major panic-inducing) attacks in the U.S. any more is that those who would commit terrorism on US soil have concluded that they’ve won.
I’m more surprised that we haven’t seen trolls just using drones to cause chaos in sports games without necessarily hurting anyone. There’s nothing stopping someone from flying a drone right into a baseball game and fucking with everyone on the field; if you were hiding somewhere outside the stadium out of view, you could do this without anyone seeing you, and you could probably get the drone back out of the stadium, but even if not, drones aren’t expensive enough that a group of a few people wanting to do this couldn’t easily pool some money together and buy one or more of them for the purpose.
I think the reason is that there never were very many terrorists. It’s basically just an act of suicide. No rational person would do it - and the problem with suicidal people is they don’t exactly have an incentive to conduct a long, drawn out plan because they plan to die. Getting a visa, getting funding, getting into the USA, obtaining the materials to commit a terroristic act - this is a very long and drawn out mental process that takes months to years. Most probably come to their senses or kill themselves first.
Now, sponsored terrorists - as part of a larger organization, who have formal training, etc - that’s viable. But, apparently, no country is doing this.