Comment by GoatInGrey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GoatInGrey | Hacker News Reader

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It's going to be an analogue of the situation with firearms today where the assailant has an asymmetrical advantage over civilians but not the countermeasure (police).

Also, the US military has been stockpiling kinetic drone countermeasures for about four years now. The idea is you get a hardened, ~11 pound autonomous drone that slams into the target at roughly 90 mph and physically destroys it before returning home. Add on 1-2 year-old US EW technology that now disables autonomous drones (yep, even autonomous drones), and you can establish a very comprehensive defense. The point I'm making here is that the tech is not only possible, but it exists.

Is it perfect? No. Though defense against firearms and explosives today isn't perfect either. Namely because of response times of the countermeasure. So in that sense, we aren't entering a uniquely dangerous situation.

Edit:

I think what will happen is that the first time a UAS is used on civilians, flying drones around population centers will be banned without permit. That way, if a drone is seen flying without a permit, it gets taken down on sight.

The "unique" part is two-fold.

   1. It's cheap.
   2. It's anonymous.

The fact that we haven't had more drone terror attacks says more about the technological slowness of terrorists than its infeasibility.

And eventually terrorists catch up. (Probably after the Russia-Ukraine war ends and some skilled people from both sides are unemployed)

It's infeasible to blanket every inch of civilian space with kinetic or EW anti-drone systems.

They may become commonplace at mass events (concerts, parades, gatherings, etc.) but will never cover all soft targets.

And unlike the nearest analog in chemical weapons, drones are dual-use, stable, and easily assembled.

The only reason the 1995 Tokyo Subway attacks [0] weren't worse was because of ineptitude.

Someone could be a quarter as intelligent and successfully fly an FPV drone into a target.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack#Ch...

> The fact that we haven't had more drone terror attacks says more about the technological slowness of terrorists than its infeasibility.

Also motivation and incentives. The reason we haven't seen many drone attacks on civilians is that it is far more lucrative to get civilians to buy your product than to kill them, and the companies that actually have the resources to mount a credible drone attack are making a lot more money doing the former.

Terrorism in general has always been far more overhyped than actually a problem - the median number of terrorist deaths per year in the U.S. from 1970-2020 is 4, making your odds of being killed in a terrorist attack significantly lower than being struck by lightning. And the reason is simply that it's deeply irrational. What do you have to gain from killing a random stranger?

The calculus to make a terrorist is simple

   non-terror life opportunity
   vs
   terror life opportunity

Why you tend to have domestic terror in places with bad economies (and high economic equality). And why beliefs often drive it (religious, political, etc.), by adding righteousness to the terror side of the equation.

But requisite minimum skillset is also a consideration, and that's where drones are dangerous.

We're talking (play videogames and some soldering) instead of (chemistry or biology).

3000 people died on 9/11 alone. Spreading it over 50 years, makes it 60/year. Where did you get the 4 from?

It's the median, not the mean. Here's the raw data:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States

The median is more relevant than the mean simply because it's less sensitive to outliers. 9/11 was an outlier; 85% of all U.S. terrorist deaths in the last 50 years happened on that one day.

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