Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

> If middle powers like Ukraine can do that to Russia, they can do that to countries like the US

Ukraine borders on Russia, but the US is separated by ocean from serious threats. Attack by UAVs of this sort seems nearly impossible.

View on HN

How does the ocean protect America from swarms of short range drones being launched from normal looking shipping containers on trucks being controlled from thousands of miles away?

The first volley would work of course but then container ships are gonna be nuked from orbit after that

Which would utterly destroy the US economy and do more damage than any drone attack.

Plus imagine if those attackers realize they can ship those containers from Mexico or Canada.

Pretty sure it would destroy whoever is on the other side of those shipping containers too though

> whoever is on the other side of those shipping containers

Could take a while to figure that out. It took days/weeks to figure out the 9/11 attacks with some certainty.

I'm not sure what that does for whoever initiates the attack. They still eventually get found out and unless they've managed to conquer the US, everyone is now bankrupt.

> everyone is now bankrupt

A good reason enough for a lot of people, no?

How far off are palm sized drones that have light weight solar panels on them that can flit about here and there and sit and wait and recharge in unobtrusive locations until they make their way to their target?

Don’t we receive millions of containers of cargo annually, not to mention having fewer internal movement restrictions? It certainly doesn’t seem implausible that someone could ship some drones around - the hardest part is avoiding explosives detector, but that’s a hard problem and the defense has the unenviable task of having to get it right millions of times.

Countries could be forward deploying these assets covertly in deniable ways in prep for future tensions?

I’d certainly plan for that if my job was physical security. It’s cheap by military standards and it’s not like we don’t have precedent with things like Russian deep-cover operatives. The commodification of the tech could make an adversary more confident in their ability to deny it if found, too, if everyone is using parts from China and open source software.

I think the key deterrent is that the U.S. has production capacity for the important systems and overwhelming capacity to strike back, so a rational foreign state isn’t going to think there’s a way they win by trying it. Terrorist groups might be a different story, so I’m really glad this wasn’t an option during Bush’s big adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan because however bad drone strikes are for military defense, they’re even worse for civilians.

I've long-wondered about the use of global container logistics for moving something like a small nuclear or chemical/biological weapon and just having it wait in-situ, until it needs to be activated.

I never considered drones, which is even more obvious, in hindsight.

Yeah, it’s frankly a big terrifying. Nukes are at least plausibly hard to shield from detection but drones don’t have a unique signature and there’s so much dual-use stuff that it seems too plausible that someone could get stuff through customs by claiming it’s civilian and then arming it right before use.

While not a land border, the Bering Strait does include two small islands, Big Diomede (Russian) and Little Diomede (US), which are only 3.8 kilometers apart.

The US contains, at a minimum, 10s of thousands of nationals from every middle power in the US. Sometime adversaries, like Iran and China, have more than a million nationals in the US. Every one of them has perfectly legal access to the technology which was used in this attack.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com