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Comment by dottjt | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the obvious answer here just to require all ships passing through the red sea to equip anti-drone technology?

I understand those interceptor missiles are super expensive because they're designed to shoot down everything, but surely there's a much cheaper, automated technology that destroys drones specifically?

Don't get me wrong, this approach also causes all sorts of issues, but isn't this basically what they do in other countries facing potentially threatening situations like South Africa i.e. farmers carrying guns etc.

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I don't think the "obvious answer" is to engage in a mandatory arms race over shipping channels. The most obvious thing is to put commerce aside for a few minutes while we address these extremely serious social and political issues.

> The most obvious thing is to put commerce aside for a few minutes

Do you think it could be viable to set aside commercial interests to address the deep discord among the countries and their proxies in the region?

The practical approach to call for calm and protect commercial ties and robust economics is the only way forward that I can see. But I am open to your point of view.

> Do you think it could be viable to set aside commercial interests to address the deep discord among the countries and their proxies in the region?

Isn't that precisely what choosing to sail around the horn of Africa is? It's commercially unfavorable and it is designed to avoid the area of conflict.

> The practical approach to call for calm and protect commercial ties and robust economics is the only way forward that I can see.

Sure, but do you think that automatically heightening the level of conflict is the best way to achieve that? The OP even suggested that requiring this approach through legislation would be favorable.

> obvious answer here just to require all ships passing through the red sea to equip anti-drone technology?

Who will require this?

You’d also need every port that ship approaches and every nation whose waters it transits to clear active military equipment on a civilian vessel.

Not just that, but most commercial ships are registered in places like Panama specifically because they have almost no rules.

drones aren't the issue, it's the anti-ship missiles.

and both can get complicated enough that you need serious ECM and ECCM to reliably jam them, and almost certainly need systems that shoot them down; i.e. missiles and CIWS.

at that point you're just making fat warships.

"Can't we just Nuke em'?"

The obvious answer is to deal with the source of the problem - better late than never. Unfortunately the US government has not even figured out that there is a really serious threat to them and have let the situation to spiral out of control for quite long time instead of dealing with it.

What is the source of the problem?

Letting hostile authoritarian regimes to run uncontrolled or even worse, making deals with them. Unfortunately the effect is compounding.

I honestly thought you were referring to the Israeli occupation until I read your response later in the thread

There is a funny thing about occupation in the eyes of the international law. For example Armenians have always lived in Nagorno-Karabakh, this is their ancestors land, but according to the international law they were occupying the territory of Azerbaijan because one genocidal dictator assigned that territory once to Azerbaijan. Now they have been abolished from their land with no real perspective to return. But according to the international law everything is alright.

They also have anti ship missles, plus it’s not a one size fits all approach.

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