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Comment by bethekind | Hacker News Reader

Seems to be an attack vector that they weren't prepared and/or trained sufficiently for.

I imagine that if you see it come in slightly BEFORE the expected drone, you'd be confused. Which one is the real McCoy, especially if they have the same signature on the radar. You don't want to shoot down the wrong one.

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> You don't want to shoot down the wrong one.

This is the great thing about drones. If you're not 100% certain it's friendly, there's no actual harm in shooting it down other than a small* hit to the budget. And I suspect going forward, that'll be a new military policy. If unsure, bring it down.

* Small in relative terms to the military's budget. Not so small to me, and an average, working-class pawn.

There's also the concern of collateral damage: falling debris/shrapnel from the interception, if CIWS/CRAM were used you have all those rounds returning to the ground somewhere downrange, UXO if using proximity rounds and they don't self destruct properly, and so on.

The CRAM has self-destructing rounds.

"One major difference between the land- and sea-based variants is the choice of ammunition. Whereas naval Phalanx systems fire tungsten armor-piercing rounds, the C-RAM uses the 20–mm HEIT-SD (High-Explosive Incendiary Tracer, Self-Destruct) ammunition, originally developed for the M163 Vulcan Air Defense System.These rounds explode if they impact a target, but if they miss they self-destruct on tracer burnout, greatly reducing the risk of collateral damage from misses." [0][1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS [1] https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/centurion-c-ram-the-solution-t...

Neat! Not foolproof surely but better than the alternative.

Given that the ex gratia payment per falsely killed Arab is generally less than $5k, sometimes less than $200, often nothing, I'm sure that's even less of a concern.

I suspect that the small hit to the budget would be treated as a career-ending gaffe for Lieutenant John Doe

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