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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

As I read the article, there was not actually a single confirmed death by explosive armed drone.

I suspect that ultimately it’s likely impractical To kill people by drone as compared, on a cost basis, to other more pedestrian means of killing people.

Drones may be cheap, but drones that can lift more than 2 kilos aren’t. The logistics of getting a drone near enough to the intended target to kill them are going to be hard. While the “cool” factor is high, I suspect guns, bombs, hard men, threats and bribes are more efficient.

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High value targets will justify expenditure of more resources. For most targets a few men with AK-47s might do the trick, but for the well protected target this would be a pretty decent strategy.

It certainly would strike fear into the hearts of men otherwise protected against more pedestrian threats, which is probably part of the point.

This is exactly how drones were used in Syria as I understood. To attack otherwise protected targets or strike fear.

To attack Russian bases they even use swarms of suicide planes: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018/01/12/the_poor_man...

Seems like more hassle than a mortar for about the same effect?

You can’t order a mortar on alibaba, and it requires much more training to use it effectively than flying a drone.

Mortars are also large and heavy and require a crew to serve as well as spotters to direct fire which means you need to have people closer to your target and working communications.

All of this complicates the logistics considerably which makes them less effective and more dangerous to their operators.

Effective mortar attacks can be fairly easily countered in the long term by jamming radios, cutting brush and removing other natural hiding spots and by killing experienced mortar crews.

Drones can be piloted by nearly anyone and with basic consumer grade equipment they can also be piloted from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection.

> You can’t order a mortar on alibaba

Well you can’t order C4 on Alibaba either. But if you can get C4 you can likely get a mortar.

A mortar tube without training is nothing more than an exciting way to get yourself and your mates killed.

You can get C4 much more easily than you think plastic explosive has a ton of civilian uses from demolition to mining and oil and gas.

Mortars and mortar rounds on the other hand aren’t as easy to get and require trained crews to employ.

I’m not sure cartels have much trouble finding military hardware or people trained to use it

Believe it or not they do, small arms are much easier to get than heavy weapons they also are much easier to use. The cartels ironically rely on a lot of weapons coming in from the US especially as the remnants of Cold War era proxy wars in central and South America die out and they can no longer benefit from both the US and the former USSR dumping enough weaponry to invade Europe into the jungles.

Weapons don’t grow on trees, they are easy to get as long as there are conflicts in the region which are sponsored by superpowers or other patrons with sufficient resources that facilitate those shipments once those end they become rarer and rare.

Mortars also have the nasty habit of drawing counter-battery fire, which occasionally leaves you short of a mortar and mortar crew. Drones are much lower risk to the operator, which is exactly why the US uses them too.

Smack the back of a mortar round of pavement, and you now have an impact grenade. Hang that under a drone, and you have a way to drop impact grenades on unsuspecting targets from an altitude high enough that the drone can’t be detected visually.

ISIS was doing just that a few years ago. There were/are plans floating around on the Internet for stabilizing fins for common mortar rounds - 3D print those, and you’re 90% of the way there.

So how will a drone attack me in my house? Mind you my house is not a hard target but is air conditioned, so I keep the doors and windows shut. How will a drone attack me in my car? I don’t have a great car, but I’m pretty sure it can outrun an off the shelf quadcopter. So assuming I’m safe in my home and in my car, I guess other opportunities exist to kill me, but you need to have an operator ready with a drone in proximity. It just doesn’t make sense.

Admittedly, drones with IEDs can be used as a terror device, to kill someone in a group of people, but as a targeted means of killing I can’t imagine it being better than a mortar or RPG.

> I’m pretty sure it can outrun an off the shelf quadcopter.

You need to know you're running from something to run from it. Do you have set of mirrors or cameras to conveniently monitor what's happening above your car?

A drone need not enter a home to cause havoc within. I do not believe the assumption that one is safe within a home/car is a viable one.

To discuss specific implementations of an attack would seem to violate both a personal code and what I imagine to be the spirit of HN.

> violate both a personal code and what I imagine to be the spirit of HN.

Thanks for throwing up the Ethics flag.

Discussing/brainstorming this in a public forum is volunteering your brainpower in support of murderers.

> Discussing/brainstorming this in a public forum is volunteering your brainpower in support of murderers.

If you think that you in a few moments on the back of a napkin will come up with something that someone funded and fuelled by an ideology that they are willing to die for can't with months of planning, then that's arrogance of an epic scale. This is as ridiculous as don't talk about hacking/spoofing/phishing because otherwise the bad guys won't figure it out.

A worldwide forum discussion among dozens of creative people out to one-up one another on clever strategies for killing another human may well put an effective idea in front of someone who might put it into practice.

There are occasions for discussing mechanisms by which one might construct such a weapon. I feel that this moment isn't one of them. Just because we can talk about it (and must be willing to defend the right to talk about it) doesn't mean that we should do so in this context.

> A worldwide forum discussion among dozens of creative people out to one-up one another on clever strategies for killing another human may well put an effective idea in front of someone who might put it into practice.

You mean writers forums?

This is absurd. How are we supposed to discuss mitigation strategies for a problem if we can't talk about the problem?

This is a total head in the sand mentality.

For some it will be the perfect terrorist tool, tools that cause terror do not necessarily need to always kill.

>but I’m pretty sure it can outrun an off the shelf quadcopter.

depends which shelf... $544 buys you a drone that goes 145 mph. $322 for 99 mph.

Ask Ukraine how they lost billions in ammunition due to a incendiary grenade dropped with a regular drone.

Someone does not need to kill you in your vehicle or your house -- they can start a major fire while you are in there, drop a defensive hand grenade while you're playing with your family in the back yard, touch you with some high voltage wires, dust you in some ultra-potent synthetic opioid.

A lot of people DO leave their windows open, and it is beyond the point anyway, as windows can be blasted away with the first drone, and while you naturally will inveatigate, the second drone will get you -- just immagine 4 AM, you are sleeping, boom the first drone blasts your windows open, 5 seconds later the next one detonates a defensive grenade in your bedroom.

This is obviously for higher value targets, but I'd say an assasin has a much greater chance of evading capture from a mile away, than doing the deed in person.

>So how will a drone attack me in my house?

With enough explosives to reduce it to rumble from outside?

>How will a drone attack me in my car? I don’t have a great car, but I’m pretty sure it can outrun an off the shelf quadcopter.

It can only outrun it if (a) it can see/hear it coming, (b) it can move freely (e.g. not in congestion)

> so I keep the doors and windows shut

Got armored glass? If no, then two drones will do the trick.

> I don’t have a great car, but I’m pretty sure it can outrun an off the shelf quadcopter.

Not if you stop at stop lights.

More realistically, the thing that gets VIPs assassinated is a predictable schedule. Assassination drones up the ante quite a bit, because one can park a drone in the bushes by your favorite coffee shop in the off chance that you’ve decided to get a latte today, while it’s much harder to successfully hide men with guns in a similar position.

> but as a targeted means of killing I can’t imagine it being better than a mortar or RPG.

I think you’re probably right that an RPG shot at your vehicle is worse for your survival odds, but I think you’re missing the element of risk. The problem with assassinating someone with an RPG is that you’ve got to get within shooting-back range. The chances of you getting shot before or after starting an assassination attempt is pretty high, which means that a successful defensive strategy is to create a wide cordon around the VIP to make attempts too risky. With a drone you don’t have to be anywhere close to the target, which allows for you to make an attempt on a hypothetical VIP with no personal risk whatsoever. If they spot your drone and shoot it down, you’re only out a cheap drone and some explosives, which is much better than getting shot at personally.

Again, for a soft target this is silly, men with guns are used to hurt and terrorize soft targets the world over; they’re cheap and reliable. But as a means to harass hardened targets, drones create new possibilities.

Do you never leave your house or go close to the windows? If you do, there you go.

Do you never run into traffic or stop at red lights in your car? If you do, there you go.

I wouldn't assume you'd always see the drone coming, even if you hear it it can probably strike in just a few seconds, before you realize what it is.

If the attacker wants to avoid being identified a remotely controlled drone is better than an RPG, and probably more accurate as well.

I agree that this article is talking about drones because it's newsish, where bribery and guns are less so.

But, that's not really how the economics of violence works. It's more of a whatever-works, and whatever you can get your hands on element. Guns, bombs, hard men, threats and bribes are still in use. Infantry still exists, even though ICBMs exist. They don't have to choose.

This is quasi military conflict we are talking about. Air power, however meager is a game changer in military conflict. At the fully militarized level, drones have seen a lot of use. They can be deployed everywhere that full air power is impractical, either for tactical or political reasons. A drone base can be orders of magnitude smaller than a traditional air base, even a floating one.

A 2kg payload (or even 200g) is enough to carry a grenade. Grenades kill. It seems likely that drones will be used this way.

There must be a reason then that these drones don’t feature in death tallies? Death by friendly fire far far exceeds lethality of these drones worldwide.

They’ve been in documented use over 7 years at this point. Why are they less effective than Facebook posts at killing people?

Quite likely because the logistics aren’t there yet and even more so because actual weapons are available everywhere.

Drones still require someone to turn them into weapons going after bomb makers is an extremely effective strategy because while there are a million guides on the internet on how to make an IED or a suicide vest the actual amount of people capable of making them is extremely small the world isn’t HN.

What do you mean the logistics aren’t there yet? Drones are used daily by bad guys for recon purposes.

These bad guys are groups with caches of weapons and skilled bomb makers in their numbers.

Why in 7 years havent They just put the two together?

What in our arm chair analysis are we overlooking?

I think you greatly over estimate the number of competent bomb makers considering just how effective taking them out has been.

Much of the military equipment in circulation is decades old, you have RPGs from the 70’s being in use.

The logistics for drones isn’t there yet, the human capital isn’t there yet either I would give it 5-10 more years till these drones will be prevalent in nearly every conflict.

car bombs are an unfortunately regular thing in this world (e.g. Azaz last month). Along with suicide vest wearers (Afghanistan most recently) and of course the IEDs designed to avoid detection and jamming in Iraq.

In each of these theatres we have documented heavy use of drones for recon.

The problem is nothing to do with logistics or skillset.

Hobby grade drones (even the heavy lift types which can manage 20kg payload) are not viable weapons. Their payload is too small, their accuracy too imprecise in practice and the economics of a stolen car’s payload being 1000x that of a medium-large hobby drone renders these a plot line in a movie rather than a real thing.

Age of military equipment has nothing to do with anything.

Hand grenade toting drones more or less came of age during the ISIS shenanigans and Syrian civil war. Both those conflicts are/were hot enough and had enough state resources pumped in that you had guys taking pot shots at each other with AGTMs. Basically the other sources of casualties were too much background noise for drones to be noteworthy.

When a cooler conflict comes around, think whatever the 2020s, 2030s equivalent of the troubles is, drones will certainly rack up a much greater market share of the casualties by virtue of the lower background noise. They just aren't that useful in a "low but still tons of real armaments around for use" intensity conflict.

The Iranians dropped hand grenades from hobby grade remote control planes in the 80s. This idea is definitely not new.

It just doesn’t work very well.

> At the fully militarized level, drones have seen a lot of use.

For sure. ISIS and Syrian insurgents have used them for targeting and dropping what are essentially hand grenades with fins on them.

The "Not-Russians" fighting in Ukraine used them ruthlessly effective artillery spotting. At least one UKR armoured column was halted due to extremely effective on-target artillery fires.

I'm always torn about articles like this. The fact the headline is a lie makes me want to flag it but the content itself is interesting enough I would have read it without a clickbait title. I wish HN had guidance on this topic.

I'm of the opinion that if the headline is a lie, then the thread should be flagged; no matter how interesting the content. Lying shouldn't be rewarded.

But then again, I don't have flagging rights yet, so who am I to judge?

HN guidelines [1] do mention: “please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait”.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> drones that can lift more than 2 kilos aren’t

A M-67 fragmentation grenade weighs 400g, with a lethal radius of 5 meters.

A bullet still obviously remains cheaper than a single-use drone + grenade + modifications to it.

I don't know. How many attacks happen that have a budget in the thousands of dollars (that's what I ballpark the price of a load bearing drone to be)? I presume a lot. Another way to look at it is, how much does personal protection cost? Bodyguards, etc. If your attack methods are cheaper and at least comparably effective, they're good.

Considering IED drone effectiveness, I think it's just a question of developing tactics and maybe custom tech. It doesn't sound complicated to have a drone descend vertically at such high speeds that even if you notice it and disable its motors it's too late; fuse set to airburst. Exciting time to be a narco weapons engineer.

You can give a pistol and a few hundred dollars to many assassins/sicario in Mexico

Drone isn't necessarily a quadcopter. It can be an RC plane, too, and those can be cheap in larger sizes, although they are more difficult to fly accurately. I'm actually surprised this isn't more prevalent - any teenager could do it, if they had access to explosives, which teenagers in war zones (current or past) typically do. And so do adults, of course.

Truly we are blessed with unequal distribution of technical skill between the terrorists and the rest of us. If a real, world class engineer took up terrorism, they'd never be found and could do _a lot_ of damage.

Killing specific people might be hard but harassing gathering and attacking to crowds don't need 2 kilos.

Honestly, the only explanation I can think of is that it is easy to see a quadrocopter fly and do its thing but it is actually hard to actually notice its real life impracticality unless you own one of them.

I don't know what specific model is shown in the picture but if it is a DJI Mavic Air 2 then it only weighs 570 gram and can only fly for 34 minutes.

When you compare a quadrocopter with a real life bomber then practically no bomber on earth is lighter than the bombs it is carrying. A B-52 can carry 30% of its weight in payload. So that would give us at most 171g for the bomb the Mavic Air 2 is carrying but even this is optimistic because it was not designed for this use case.

The idea of "cheap" drones carrying bombs is basically an urban legend. You can certainly build a good bombing drone for $5000 to $10000 and fly many missions and thereby kill hundreds of people with it but that same money can also buy guns and lots of ammo as well.

I understood it as they dont intend to get the drone back.

I did some searching, letter bombs were using 50g of RDX [1] and were able to kill a person so driving (and exploding) a drone with 171g of RDX into someone is more than enough.

If you take its 18km of reach (while I doubt the controls are able to go that far although with a 4g sim card this could be doable) you get a poor mans cruising "missile" for $1k. And there is nothing preventing (except the price) launching few of them.

I think that those drones are posing a real threat even more as probably the drug cartels have the money to realize it, if they can afford to build parallel cellular network [2], they surely can also perform this.

Their use case probably is not killing an average Joe but rather assassinations on high profile targets that are heavily guarded. And quite frankly I am really interested how bodyguards can tackle this as drone can literally fall from the sky, without any electricity being used so jamming (or frying electronics if feasible) wont work here. I think this is going to become a real nightmare in the future.

[1] 4g of RDX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Qj1qSZDKg or 100g of "something" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_664jlLwqI

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-telecoms-cartels-s...

Hmm, isn't the idea of letter bombs that the bomb is literally within arm's length, whereas that sort of proximity for a noisy drone, keeping it close enough to a possibly moving target, while setting it off may not be super practical. It may be more realistic to get within, say, 10 meters?

Also, no way the FAA would issue waivers for this sort of mission. /s

Yes, this is certainly a part of problem constructing it.

I would imagine that replacing the motors and adding larger battery while keeping the control system shouldnt be an issue.

Also within an article there is a picture of a box with 4 motors, if lower part would be made from something like copper, it could be used as shaped charge [1] or adding shrapnel would also be an option. Or just make it to carry the normal hand grenade. The noise is surely an issue if you dont keep the distance, so I would imagine that you fly high over the target and then go into free fall.

In either case, this has a potential to become something really nasty.

Anyway, enough of this talk, it is surely an interesting technological challenge and interesting debate, but there are some really sick people on this planet and I dont want to give them any ideas. Also I bet there are some red lights blinking in some 3 letter agency somewhere :D :D :D

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_charge

Think a lot of these comments don't take into consideration how cheap these drones can be made, especially if you have add a 3D printer into the mix.

Printing the air frame is a huge cost saver.

Cheap motors are everywhere, plenty of places to scavenge tiny hobby motors (doesn't have to fly super fast or lift 2000 grams)

Cheap arduino's for brains and motor control, not much to it.

You can get away with having a tiny lipo battery for powering the motors since it's a one way trip for the drone anyways...

With the right choice of materials you could get a drone BOM down to $100-150 [not included transmitter remote control] Needless to say, having a cartel budget you can really pump up production to few 100 a week if needed....

Making sumthing that's going to be used for a one way trip isn't hard, when your objective is to make a impact on target.

This is the new battlefield.

A phone network is no use - latency means it’s useless for visual realtime control of a drone and you could just store a gps waypoint route on the flight controller and save the 4g modem weight if you meant as a mission control mechanism.

Achieving the precision of someone holding a letter would be remarkably challenging. Source: racing drone pilot for 5+ years.

Forget visual - DIY (semi-)autonomous drones are doable today and could be pretty scary too. 4G may not be good enough for a human pilot flying FPV but it’s likely more than enough for a drone with GPS running Ardupilot to hone in on a target tagged with a planted transmitter or bugged phone.

Hobbyists have been documenting step by steps for this since 2008, nothing you’re suggesting is remotely new.

Why hasn’t it happened? What is the part of the movie plot imagination that doesn’t translate quite as well to real life?

I'm not sure, tbh, though I suspect it's due somewhat to the general technical incompetence of (terrorist & gang) organizations. Bright people aren't exactly attracted to the idea of joining an organization which doesn't value life highly, and the bright ones that do enlist may be likely to be conscripted to work on other projects or killed by enemies/rivals. It's doable by hobbyists, but doing it with the scale/accuracy needed to be dangerous is a complicated endeavour that doesn't lend itself well to this kind of organization.

Fly a drone carrying a 500gram camera behind a tall building. You’ll learn the 6 things that stops this whole idea working. It’s consigned to the movie plots for the foreseeable future.

Russians use drones at regular basis to throw[1] old ВОГ-17[0] grenades for automatic grenade launchers at Ukrainian soldier at Donbas.

[0]: https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%9E%D0%93-17 [1] https://www.slovoidilo.ua/2020/06/11/novyna/bezpeka/bojovyky...

You mean mostly Ukranian citizens against Ukrainian army which was unconstitutionally deployed against them? (note that I do not deny Russian involvement, but foreign involvement in civil wars is a really common matter)

Ukrainian army uses similar simple drones to throw grenades at rebels as well [0][1]. And interestingly enough Chinese develop similar drones [2], so I think they will be more and more common in future conflicts.

[0]: https://tvzvezda.ru/news/vstrane_i_mire/content/202052159-Rc... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_Y810e2RXk [2]: https://www.defenseworld.net/news/24569/Weirdly_Shaped_Chine...

Why is this comment being downvoted?

Because the first sentence in the comment contains an inconvenient truth which goes against the dominant propaganda narrative and which is really hard to refute, so the only tool left for "fighting" with this information is downvotes?

Yep. Ukrainian Voluntary Army used them too. Ukrainian army bought military drones from Turkey, which did show in Syria.

BTW: 3 millions citizens of USSR were at Germany side in WWW2. Do you think it was civil war?

Those Turkish drones have been bought in 2019 and AFAIK barely seen deployment for the fear of losing them. While the cheap drones are widely used by the army at the very least for reconnaissance. It's very hard to distinguish the Ukrainian army from the "volunteers", but the drone from the link in my previous comment was shot down just in 2020.

>BTW: 3 millions citizens of USSR were at Germany side in WWW2. Do you think it was civil war?

No, because those collaborationist have stayed mostly in the rear (e.g. see deployments of the SS "Galizien"), while on front lines fought forces from the invading countries. Also it's a matter of ratio. USSR was invaded by a 3.8M strong force, so even if you include those collaborationist, more than 50% of the invading force were foreigners. Meanwhile in today's DNR/LNR militia more than 90% of personnel are Ukrainian citizens (well, de jure, most of them don't think about themselves as Ukrainians anymore) and by a very strange coincidence in all recent prisoner swaps Ukrainian citizens were swapped for Ukrainian citizens. A very strange "Russo-Ukrainian war", don't you think?

To get a sense why it's a civil war, just watch footage from the early days of the conflict [0][1]. You can see that moving military forces have been actively blocked by simple folk who understood, that this unlawful deployment will simply result in Ukrainians killing other Ukrainians for political gain of the fresh-installed government.

BTW I do think that Chechen wars can be viewed as a civil war, even though the rebel forces were supported by Saudi and Kuwait money, and foreign mercenaries have actively participated in it.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xp4I-prrk0 [1]: https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=039_1397631470

> So that would give us at most 171g

Grenades weigh about that much.

> I don't know what specific model is shown in the picture but if it is a DJI Mavic Air 2 then it only weighs 570 gram and can only fly for 34 minutes.

It's worth what, on the order of $1000? Strap 100 g of explosives to it, fly it to the target's face and detonate. It does not need 34 minutes of fly time.

Technology progresses. What's hard today may be easy tomorrow.

It's tried and true: there's lots of drone footage out there of ISIS drones dropping bombs on vehicles and people. Here's a quick example of an attack on a vehicle: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/world/video-reportedl...

Actually, you can kill a person with a tiny drone the size of a hand palm, it only requires a tiny explosive to enter the forehead and kill the person.

While I agree with your premise, I would just like to point out that in Mexico, the number of missing people far outweigh the number of confirmed deaths. Not all cartel murders result in visible bodies on streets, and many of them do take care to hide their trails.

Unless you are trying to send a message, it seems to me that the best assassination would leave doubt even as to whether the person was dead, or how they died. I think the parent's observation is spot on.

There was that movie where the mobster told the incompetent hitman - "Just walk up to them, put the gun to their head and pull the trigger. That way, you can be sure."

Then he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger (because his uzi attack had failed to kill the target)

Anyway, hard to beat the classics. Until the drone can lie in wait, identify the target itself, home in on it and explode at point blank range, well then we haven't gotten close to the traditional approach.

Fly a drone to a location and conduct surveillance for the target.

ID target and activate drone bombing protocol.

Still have to track, home and estimate distance to target before exploding.

We know this is hard, witness that nobody has accomplished it yet?

the costs are dropping

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