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Comment by King-Aaron | Hacker News Reader

Surely one of the people on the deck with a shotgun could have a go at it without revealing too much secret information

As a former ordnance officer: lol

No one is going be the CO the opens fire on a non combatant drone on the USA coast, as you'd lose your command pretty fast.

Edit: I can't post faster, so here's a response to a reply:

I didn't peruse the logs myself, so I don't know the situation, but the rules of engagement are pretty strict, and also they may not have even had ordnance onboard for the weapons needed to take out one of these things. Not every ship carries live rounds all the time, and near the USA coast we pretty much never wanted to have loaded guns.

Like I said elsewhere, the US Navy isn't a bunch of untrained psychos looking to shoot stuff. Officers and enlisted are trained to put our lives on the line, not get scared and shoot everything that looks weird or threatening.

I don't get the bloodlust shown in here!

What's surprising to people is the fact that rules of engagement are inconsistent across government entities. E.g., when you think of local police, people characterize firearm usage in a way that is not measured or protocol-driven. So people are substituting the experiences they're familiar with, and applying them (incorrectly) in a naval context.

This is probably it, even between branches there are major differences, the Navy and Air Force both tend to be more educated than the ground forces which tend to attract soldiers and Marines who want to play Battlefield games in real life.

> I don't get the bloodlust shown in here!

This is how untrained people think. This particular group (the people who frequent this site) would probably want to know, quite strongly, what the craft are trying to do, and who was piloting them.

It was probably russia fucking with us from a submarine nearby.

Sounds reasonable. Or whoever was behind the crazy infrasound weapons used against US diplomats in Cuba.

Was that ever actually proven to be an infrasound weapon? I recall the story being pretty odd and it just slipped out of the spotlight

Nobody knows for sure, however the most plausible explanation put forward is neurological side effects of a banned pesticide being sprayed heavily in the embassy compound to combat Zika. They found the same pesticide was in use in Guangzhou, where diplomatic personnel complained of the same issues.

https://www.scribd.com/document/426438895/Etude-du-Centre-de...

If anyone (with sufficient resources) can send a drone swarm to go harass, or worse, anyone, including the US Navy, and there's nothing that can be done about it then eventually I think something quite bad is going to happen.

It reminds me of 9/11. Everyone knew that crashing commercial aircraft could cause a great deal of destruction but somehow we could never prepare for such a scenario until it actually happened.

I wouldn't be surpised if there are over 50k individuals in the US with the electronics/computer knowledge to pull this off. All it takes is one person to develop an obsession with it and spend the time needed to pull it off. If you look at a 10-20 year time frame I'd say there's a high certaintity that someone commits a terror attack via a large number of drone.

The saving grace here is that people who want to terrorise often aren't the same with these skills IMO. If you have the skill/knowledge to make a drone swarm you probably have other valuable skills, have a good job and live comfortably. Lower chances of radicalisation.

You're looking at it backwards. Some of those who are already radicalized have the background and mental capacity that they could learn the knowledge needed to pull this off. Al Qaeda didn't radicalize pilots; they sent radicals to flight school.

You're right. We're probably going to see an attack on a stadium full of people that involves a drone swarm crop dusting the crowd with a combination of pesticides and nail bombs.

It's gonna suck to see the end of outdoor music shows in our life time. :-/

I dont think its clear that nothing can be done, its just that nothing was done. Going weapons hot with military anti aircraft guns within a few miles of civilian ships and aircraft is probably not something that any sane officer is going to order, unless there is a safety of life issue.

A shotgun doesn't "go for miles" they could have easily brought down some of these invaders to see what was going on (if they got lucky)

> Everyone knew that crashing commercial aircraft could cause a great deal of destruction but somehow we could never prepare for such a scenario until it actually happened.

Are we prepared for that today?

Well they installed locks on the pilot's door which seems to have neutered the approach so far.

Interestingly and off topic, the same lock that is intended to prevent take over of a plane, was used by a pilot to crash the plane and kill all 150 people [1]:

> The crash was caused deliberately by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies and declared "unfit to work" by his doctor. Lubitz kept this information from his employer and instead reported for duty. Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, he locked the cockpit door and initiated a controlled descent that continued until the aircraft impacted a mountainside.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

Nothing is 100%. Clearly the chances of leaving doors wide open is much more dangerous than locking them.

Are we not? Current protocols eliminate almost all chances of taking over a plane with box cutters. People now know what is up and will risk a laceration to take out some homeboys when they know it means certain death if they don't

So serious question from an operational perspective: One of these drones were over the helipad, which I would have assumed would be considered 'controlled airspace'... If they knock down drones that go over airports, why not over a military vessel's airspace? Or is it not considered restricted airspace if not in use? etc

Conditions off the Californian coast are different to a Straight of Hormuz transit. Every deployment will have command guidance, RoE, threat briefings, maintain a picture of possible threats etc. A ship doing routine training is probably under default 'self defence' rules. And no CO wants to be the one to mistakenly blast some civilians into pink mist.

Experience shows that mistakenly blasting some civilians into pink mist doesn't mean anything if those civilians aren't white US citizens on US soil...

You can certainly choose to believe this, but it is wrong.

What you are referring to is choosing to blow something up based on a systematic approach that follows the laws of armed conflict, with frequent legal oversight, separate after action review, in a system that strongly punishes failure to follow process. This system is fully endorsed by the US Congress, representing the citizenry.

So if some civilians get blown up, 9/10 it was a deliberate decision.

I meant that there are no actual repercussions.

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalese_cable_car_disaster_(1...

repeated incidents where US killed citizens of other countries with impunity and no repercussions for the perps

Rogers certainly got off lightly, as did the system that promoted him, and the US has to own that, along with all the other atrocities. The US pays in a thousand ways they choose not to account for -- the guilty have externalised the costs.

Shooting down unaccounted for drones isn't bloodlust, it's common sense. They should have taken down at least a couple of them to try and ascertain what's going on, how can you defend against something that you don't understand.

I don't understand that mentality. At the very least I would think they would be considered a security risk since they could be spying on sensitive systems. It's not like we're talking about manned aircraft here.

If just looking at a boat is enough to reveal vital secrets, then that ship has already sailed.

Same mentality that would fire a CIO whose breach mitigation strategy was to unplug a couple computers in the "server room" - its a nonsensical reaction that only demonstrates your lack of knowledge and your inability to recognize your lack of knowledge, you're not going to get much out of hand ordnance in a situation like this

I don't see any real similarity between those two situations.

There aren't any details in the article on the size of the drones or their distance but I think a destroyer would have a wide range of weapons available from which to choose the appropriate level of response.

Doing nothing and hoping it goes away doesn't seem like the wisest response to this type of incident.

Not trolling you, genuinely trying to bridge a communication gap I see both sides of: they, and I, reacted literally to I think what you meant to be hyperbole, i.e. by saying "Surely one of the people on the deck with a shotgun could have a go at it without revealing too much secret information", you meant to say "why didn't they take any aggressive action?":

The other comments speak to various factors why it was more complicated, and just affirming that decision wouldn't have enabled action, TL;DR: you don't start throwing $500K missiles at lights 1,000 feet above deck when you're right off the coast of the US, and also we don't have nearly all the info here, just a subset of a subset of docs that got through via FOIA two years ago, you can safely assume that would have been considered at the time

To be fair, they equip the SNOOPIE team w/ COTS, hand held video cameras rather than installing some sophisticated, centrally managed surveillance camera system. OTOH, it's much less dangerous for a bunch sailors to run around on deck with cameras than with shotguns.

There's a difference between going 'weapons free' with the ship's AA CIWS vs sending some MPs up with small arms (some of these things were close)

There's no blood in a UAV, shooting one down is only destruction of property, not bloodlust.

It's intellectual curiosity. Nobody would be harmed by blasting one and figuring out what it is and who it belongs to.

The problem is when you make a mistake and now an Iranian plane is in the water. Part of the job of the armed forces is that they stand and handle the risk far more intelligently than we would, i.e. they don't react in terror constantly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–U.S._RQ-170_incident

Three responses up though someone is just suggesting that a sailor with a shotgun could take down one of the drones that was hovering close over the helipad.

That negates the possibility of misidentifying a plane as a drone, or hitting anything unintended, or of any risk of taking down a plane at all.

There's a wide gulf of responses between that and firing off an anti-aircraft missile in a "using a bazooka as a flyswatter" kind of application.

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