If the numbers are true, this would be one of the more successful attacks in history. Drones are changing the whole dynamic of wars.
Define “we.” The defence community has been deeply engaged with what’s going on in Ukraine since ‘22. (And the supremacy of sensor fusion in India’s air battle with Pakistan.)
We’re in a strategic imbalance. Cold War air defences were trained on high-value targets, like strategic bombers and spy planes. So currently our air defences are overspecced for something like this.
Nothing about drones makes them inherently undetectable. You just need a different model. I suspect those should be commonplace within 20 years, potentially a decade.
> at least in some places private drone ownership will become illegal
I could see ownership being restricted in wartime. More likely is eager air defences shredding birds on perimeters.
Probably not. Most of the history of war is weapons getting stronger and stronger and defence getting harder and harder. E.g. in ancient times a shield or simple palisade could protect you, now even tanks and trenches are not safe. The days of being able to build a wall along a border and hold it against a peer adversary are long gone and not coming back.
The whole Ukraine war thing seems a bit anachronistic like something from the last century. I think it isn't coincidental that Putin spends a lot of time reading about past centuries (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/putin-compares...)
But times have moved on.
Three years ago: "Oh stop nobody can do a decapitation strike. Russia's security concerns are bogus".
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fb...
It's cheaper now, it's easier to pull off remotely, but most airports already were vulnerable to terrorist attacks. It feels like the primary mechanism that protected civilian airports is that the weapons you'd use aren't easy to get, and states didn't want to supply their sponsored terror groups with that kind of weaponry because it'd be dangerously close to an act of war and very hard to deny.
Individually, you were never safe by default. Your safety depends on not being an interesting target.
Hello, cyberpunk future. Imagine Luigi with Ukraine's strike capabilities. 10 years from now? 5?
Ukraine isn't wealthy, but it's still an entire country.
Alas it feels optimistic to hope that asymmetric confrontation would be downtrodden people of the earth against bad world damaging take-take-take pests. Merely a science fiction. The world having powerful forces working strongly for the world rather than self interest: hardly believable science fiction.