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Comment by partialrecall | Hacker News Reader

It should be noted, engineers being well represented in these sort of rebel/revolutionary/terrorist organizations isn't a new phenomenon. Here is an article from a decade ago: https://slate.com/technology/2009/12/why-do-so-many-terroris...

The notion of terrorists as uneducated goat farmers is more a manifestation of western biases than it is an accurate representation of the truth.

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I see this in discussions about 9/11 all the time, where someone will express incredulity that it would be possible for a bunch of "goat farmers" to execute such a plan. But if you actually look at those terrorists, many were educated and from well-to-do families.

Very much the same thing with the Sri Lanka attacks.

I think the American public/media likes to paint everyone from the non-West as extremely backwards, when in reality I feel like everywhere in the non-West has "West"-like pockets of extreme affluence and then just huge amounts of inequality and rural poverty.

Well, those events are anomalies. People usually are surprised by anomalies.

Yemenis defending their country are terrorists?

Of course not, but since Saudi Arabia is the ally of the USA, in the eyes of many the enemy of Saudi Arabia must be a bunch of terrorists instead of liberation fighters who want to get rid of a president that was appointed by Saudi Arabia.

None of the 9/11 terrorists were Yemeni, but if they had been then yes they're a terrorist. Hijacking a plane to kill 1000s of civilians is clearly terrorism.

The specific thing people fail to realize is how much oil money was feeding into terrorist groups. If you understand that, you are no longer surprised that they attracted talented (albeit thoroughly evil) people.

The only distinctive quality I could find was that one has sovereign immunity and “non-state enemy combatants” don’t.

Its just the same 4,000 year old story of nomads wandering the middle east wishing they had a nation, “as it was foretold”.

Without commenting on your larger point, it's doubtful that Yemeni engineers are building these drones.

Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world and presumably their engineering capital is presumably not huge. The Houthis are backed by Iran. Iran (which has far more engineering capital and was accidentally gifted a US military drone several years ago) has military drones.

It sounds far more plausible to me that Iranian support is how the Houthis obtained these drones.

It might not require large technical capabilities as those can be bought commercially. It may not be that hard to fit the "brains" of a commercial drone to a beefier body and communications. Hobbyist stuff really.

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