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Comment by D_Alex | Hacker News Reader

>Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not.

This is too complacent for my liking. Every rusty trawler is a viable launch platform for Shahed type drones (operational range ~2500 km per Wikipedia). Nearly every US oil refinery and LNG terminal are on the coast. And then there are floating oil platforms (e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdido_(oil_platform))

The article then says:

>One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something.

And:

>And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thing for forty years certainly can.

I'll leave it here for y'all to ponder.

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> Every rusty trawler is a viable launch platform for Shahed type drones

And where exactly are you planning to operate that trawler out of? Or are you going to send it across the Atlantic on its own (well, with a couple of tankers accompanying it, but never mind that) and hope no-one pays attention?

> operational range ~2500 km per Wikipedia

I think you either added an extra zero or were looking at the hyped prototypes rather than the models in actual use. The Shaheds have ranges in the hundreds of miles, not thousands.

2500 km is a realistic range of you follow the war in Ukraine. Kyiv is frequently attacked with Shahed drones and it is far from frontlines.

Kyiv is pretty close to the Russian border to its north, even Moscow itself is less than 1000km away.

I think the furthest hits Ukraine has been able to achieve with drones were on a refinery about 1300km from Ukraine controlled land.

> Kyiv is frequently attacked with Shahed drones and it is far from frontlines. reply

It's a couple of hundred miles from the frontlines in Kharkiv, and the Russian border to the North is even closer.

Shaheds are launched not from the frontline (to avoid a launch site being attacked) but I would agree that a typical attack distance is around 500 km (which is much less than the range stated in wikipedia). Still this unlikely the max range of this drone and there is a tradeoff - one can increase range by reducing the war head mass.

The genius of the Shahid drone is that the fuel is the warhead. Look at Shahid attacks - mostly FA damage, very little HE damage. They are for killing people and destruction of soft infrastructure by fire, not destruction of hardened infrastructure by explosion.

The fuel tank is heavily segmented, so they are difficult to shoot down. When shot, they lose fuel but continue to the target. They get to the target with less fuel, but still get there. The HE them detonates the remaining fuel load.

A Shahid could do a 2500km mission, and arrive with a very small fuel load. That will be effective against targets that already have enough fuel to burn there, such as apartment buildings, petroleum energy infrastructure, office buildings, etc. Less so against places with little flammable material concentration such as hospitals, military installations (other than fuel and munitions depots), roads and runways, etc.

> And where exactly are you planning to operate that trawler out of? Or are you going to send it across the Atlantic on its own

China operates fishing fleets all around the globe but Iran is not known for this so Iranian fishing vessel in western Atlantics will rise suspicions. An ordinary cargo vessel heading to the Central America on other hand may sail unnoticed.

How to identify a vessel as Iranian though? They can just register it in a Caribbean country and give it a less suspicious name.

>I think you either added an extra zero or were looking at the hyped prototypes

I thought I was clear where I was looking - here, you may check for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136.

> Its range has been estimated to be anywhere from between 970–1,500 km (600–930 mi) to as much as 2,000–2,500 km (1,200–1,600 mi).

You presented the absolute maximum estimate as if it were the conventionally accepted value. That's incredibly misleading.

I assume that smuggling drones into the US is easier than it was for Ukraine to smuggle them into Russia.

These people are used to executing civilians when they are the police. That's how IRGC, hamas and hezbollah work. You won't see much action from people like that when they can't just shoot anyone that they don't like.

Its harder. 20% of Russians(my estimate) have connections to Ukraine (relatives, friends, or were born there) and could be Ukrainian agents, there are lots of land routes how you can smuggle stuff. Things are not as well connected between Iran and US.

Agents in the US would just be normal citizens asking for money/crypto. You'd need to find fools to deceive, but a lot of people fall for scams to get small gains. Many hard drug users in particular are often rather self centered in my limited experience.

Or if you wanted to attack refineries, you could possibly select some climate change activists to do it for you?

Or find angry children to do it. Make things go bang for fun.

Our industrial infrastructure appears to be vulnerable to me (as a superficial opinion).

The real fix is to help poor people in other countries to like the US. And work hard at avoiding doing things that radicalise dangerous haters.

I believe all those pools of opportunities are much smaller to what Ukraine has in Russia.

We're getting into Tom Clancy novel territory here.

It seems to me that there a large and well-established drug smuggling industry that might be quite interested in Iranian drone technology and has long-established logistics competence regarding transport into the US from distant countries. (I searched for 'fentanyl precursors' now, some search results named very distant sources.)

You know what they say when you assume.

It's surprisingly difficult to find ships if they don't want to be found. Iran has been able to maintain it's shadow fleet for decades for a reason. It'd be more difficult to get a boat that close to the USA for sure, but not impossible. What is more likely are attacks by the various Iranian terrorist organisatons that have been showing up especially in the UK [1, 2].

[1] https://news.sky.com/story/four-arrested-on-suspicion-of-syp...

[2] https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-890851

It's probably an accident, since I would normally expect them to claim responsibility and victory, but a refinery exploded in Texas the other day: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/valero-oil-refinery-explosion-t...

> Every rusty trawler is a viable launch platform for Shahed type drones

The point is Iran isn't going to be landing tactical, much less strategic, fire on America unless we royally fuck up. It will be closer to terror/psyop attacks.

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