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Drone attack on parked U.S. Army BlackHawk in Iraq
- Teever 7mo agoImagine a small quadcopter with deployment and transportation device packaged discretely inside an Amazon box. The box is shipped internationally and sent to a package delivery company that gets a job to deliver the box to an abandoned lot near an airforce base in bumfuck nowhere America. Once the package is delivered the deployment device cuts the top of the box open and lets the drone out. The drone flies in the direction of the base and then kamikazes on the nearest helicopter or aircraft shaped object that it sees. What’s the counter to that? Or imagine a scenario where a country launches a weather balloon full of the same kinds of drones but equipped with solar panels. The weather balloon explodes like a piñata and deploys all these drones over a vast area. The drones are programmed to make their way to different military or infrastructure targets and stop and recharge high places out of site of people and maybe only travel at night. They slowly make their way over days or weeks until they find their target. They’re designed to self destruct if they sense that they’re being handled by a human being. What’s the counter to that?
- DenisM 7mo agoLaser turrets near highest-value targets? It becomes defense in depth though, perimeter defense is no longer enough. Thats kinda new.
- egorfine 7mo agoLaser takes as much as 10s to disable a single plastic drone at a distance of ~400 meters. The slowest drone flies at 20 m/s. So realistically a laser drone weapon can eliminate just a couple of drones until a third or a fourth one comes through and destroys your turret.
- dev-ns8 7mo agoSomething very similar to this was pulled of by Ukraine last year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
- Veserv 7mo agoAutomatic turret-mounted anti-air shotguns. Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell. I bet you could do aiming and firing in less than 0.1 seconds with nearly 100% accuracy in the 50 meter range which would enable ~10 destroyed drones per unit if the drones are going 150 km/h. Shotgun pellets are also basically entirely safe when shot into the air as they have low falling velocity enabling usage when shooting over populated areas.
- bink 7mo agoAnd some Canada Gooses too?
- sjkoelle 7mo agotrust the gooses
- speed_spread 7mo agoHow long till Canada wires up gooses brains and straps then with bombs for the ultimate biodrones? They already swarm naturally in attack formation!
- Teever 7mo agoHow many shotguns? How do they reload? What happens when they run out of ammo? Can they be hacked, or duped into firing at friendly aircraft? How will they deal with the enemy adapting their drones to have camoflage? There's no way automatic turret mounted shotguns are the solution to this problem. It simply isn't economical to produce, install and maintain all of these things, and now you've sunk a massive amount of resources into this infrastructure when the enemy doesn't even really have to launch a real attack.
- prepend 7mo agoI suspect they will run out of ammo much after the enemy runs out of drones.
- 7mo ago
- prepend 7mo agoI would imagine the counter is computer vision defense systems that cover an entire base. And then eventually infrastructure. And then all drones tracked by satellite so any drone that doesnt show up gets shot down anywhere over a large geographic area. Using cheaper drones to hunt down expensive drones. Or of course, just eagles.
- IncreasePosts 7mo agoPark your aircraft in hangars. And hope you hid your tracks well enough once the generals start eyeing their almost expired bunker busters with a twinkle in their eye
- Eextra953 7mo agoI think going low-tech and deploy netting around critical things would be the most effective. Sure they are a pain but they'll catch drones before they reach any targets.
- uniq7 7mo agoMandatory package screenings to detect explosives? I don't know if that's technically feasible at scale, or if that's already implemented (and I'd prefer not to ask that kind of question to Google/ChatGPT)
- markdown 7mo agoCustoms inspection. An xray paired with some ai. But why go through all that when you can just have someone in the country launch it, or drop it off?
- lejalv 7mo agoThe counter to this and more such scenarios is letting the world alone
- parsimo2010 7mo agoThis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_C-RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_C-RAM With a software update to track drones. They can hit birds and mortars, they can take out a drone. Or this: https://www.epirusinc.com/electronic-warfare https://www.epirusinc.com/electronic-warfare if you think the C-RAM would get saturated. Whether the weather balloon drones move at night is irrelevant if you stop the last move they need to make. Militaries have been defending themselves against attacks for as long as they've been around. Drones will change the way they fight a little, but it isn't going to be some magic pill that modern militaries can't adapt to. Hiding an explosive and then blowing it up when your target is nearby? That's almost the same concept as assassinating someone with a car bomb. Putting it in an Amazon box and letting the drone go the final distance changes things a little, but militaries and governments were able to assassinate people remotely before drones. Swarming attacks with cheap munitions? Saturating an enemy's defenses has been a thing at least since the time of the English Longbow. The longbow regiments would all shoot at the same time, and while you could dodge one arrow it was hard to dodge all of them. Drones are new and will take some adapting to. If a military refuses to change then it probably will be disadvantaged. But the US military has been buying and testing drones for a while, and is already undergoing the adaptation. As it better understands cheap drones for offense, it necessarily gains a better understanding of what is needed for defense. To be clear, I'm not advocating for the US attacking Iran. All I'm saying is that the US military is not about to lose the conflict because of this particular tactic.
- crote 7mo ago> Centurion C-RAM How's that going to work when the drone hugs the ground, only rising a bit to hop over walls? Are you going to flatten everything a mile around every base, and shoot at head height with zero warning? > Leonidas EWS How's that going to work when the drone doesn't show up on radar and has fiber-optic controls? If drones were this easy to counter, we wouldn't be seeing them play such a massive role in the Ukraine war. The whole problem is that drones massively change how a conflict works, and the entire US military is designed for pre-drone warfare. It remains to be seen whether they can adapt quickly enough fast enough for this conflict - the US doesn't exactly have a great track record when it comes to asymmetrical warfare...
- exabrial 7mo agoIronically, Ukraine sort of did this to Russia and destroyed several long range strategic nuclear bombers.
- scarecrowbob 7mo agoThe usual thing that most of us do is not do things that make other folks want to blow our vehicles up. That's how I've avoided getting my stuff blown up, at least. Everything else is a half measure.
- caycep 7mo agoI feel like this was a plot/subplot of either Diamond Age or one of the Gibson novels
- glaucon 7mo ago> What’s the counter to that? In the case of the AWS scenario someone driving by who decides to nick it? Or the courier puts the box down upside down? Just by the way is a package delivery company going to be willing to deliver a package to an abandoned lot? Your solar panel equipped, "rest and recharge" idea is interesting.
- carefree-bob 7mo agoThis is the type of stuff Ukraine has been doing against Russian assets. It's effectifve asymmetrical warfare when you lose air superiority. We may even need to revisit what air superiority means in the age of long range, relatively stealthy drones that are cheap to produce using widely available tech. I also would expect Russian and Chinese Satellite intel being fed to Iran to locate these types of targets, again exactly like how the NATO powers have been providing intel to Ukraine.
- AlecSchueler 7mo agoRussia for sure but why would China take such an active position?
- lejalv 7mo agoBecause how much oil they (used to) get from Iran
- carefree-bob 7mo agoChina is allied with Iran and has long term trade relations with the country, importing large amounts of oil from Iran, and supplying Iran with air defense systems and other military and economic support. China also views the US as a strategic rival and would love the opportunity to take us down a peg. Don't think that America's strategic opponents -- Russia, North Korea, Iran, China, Algeria do not provide some mutual support, even if for purposes of survival, and view the US as threat. We have already taken out Venezuela, Lybia, Syria and flipped Armenia. Cuba, Iran are next on our radar, but we are active all over the world trying to flip pro-Russian/pro-Chinese governments to pro-US governments.
- rurp 7mo agoChina views the US as an adversary. They would very much like to reduce America's sphere of influence and are cognizant of the fact that we might end up in a war in the medium term future. The US bleeding immense amounts of money and military assets in Iran is great for China's relative strength; it's in their interest to increase those costs in ways that don't escalate immediate tensions with America. Sharing targeting and other intel is one of the more effective ways of doing that.
- ge96 7mo agoWas mentioned how it's a medevac heli (blurred it)
- s5300 7mo ago[dead]
- opengrass 7mo ago[flagged]
- freediddy 7mo agoThe biggest security threat any country has is if an adversary sends 1-10 million drones at once, each with a small grenade on it, and overwhelms a city. They could literally target individual politicians or weak spots on infrastructure like buildings or bombs and almost nothing could stop it except possibly an EMP. I'm not sure what anyone can do about that but that to me is my biggest fear about the future of all this technology.
- rtkwe 7mo agoRight now one of the limits is just controlling that many let along sourcing it. Putting that many actively controlled drones in one area at once and you'll swamp the bandwidth.
- packetlost 7mo agoThe drones in Ukraine largely use miles-long spools of fiber optic cable, so while I agree that sourcing is a problem, bandwidth likely isn't. If you want to be creative there's probably a bunch of hybrid wireless/wired/semi-autonomous configurations that would allow for minimizing bandwidth requirements in practice, but it would still fall apart as soon as a reasonably powerful jammer is turned on.
- rtkwe 7mo agoFeels like a massed attack using fiber optics would have lots of problems with drones getting tangled in the cables of those in front of/above them or cutting the cable. The trouble with making them autonomous in a city is that means more sensors and compute on board which raises the cost. It's a hard problem.
- freediddy 7mo agoThey would just be autonomous. Setting a GPS (or alternate system) coordinate is pretty simple enough. Individual targets could just be AI controlled at this point, or 10 years in the future.
- hrdwdmrbl 7mo ago" Trump said that “we don’t need help,” adding that the “last person we need help from is Zelenskyy.” " https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/iran-negotiate-ceasefire-deal-trump-kharg-hormuz-oil-rcna263474 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/iran-negotiate...
- srean 7mo agoThat means it's exactly from Zelensky that he wants help. Narcissism-speak is easy, once you have figured them out. For example if they accuse others of something, that means they have done exactly what they are accusing others of.
- mindslight 7mo agoWhat else would anyone expect from a combative elderly person? It's always "I don't need help!" as they continually find something new to fuck up. The only difference here is there were a bunch of fools who thought it was a good idea to put this type of person in charge of our country instead of forcing him into a memory care home.
- estimator7292 7mo agoI heard through the grape vine that the US did actually ask Ukraine for help on drone defense. DoD is trying to find US companies that can do drone detection and it isn't going well
- hrdwdmrbl 7mo agoHow long until an F35 is destroyed by a drone?
- FpUser 7mo agoThere US has more then 600 of those with more coming. Losing one is insignificant.
- Figs 7mo ago~$100M/unit isn't exactly cheap to replace...
- recursivecaveat 7mo agoOne $100M aircraft vs 2800 $35K drones. I think the future is nobody builds such kind of fighter jets again.
- crote 7mo agoIt's even worse, actually. This attack seems to be done by a regular quadcopter, so suddenly you have to be worried about your $100M aircraft being destroyed by a $500 drone if your base security isn't absolutely perfect. The US has plenty of bases in the area, but considering the ease of an attack and the general anti-US sentiment of the region, projecting power into the Middle East is going to become an awful lot more difficult...
- FpUser 7mo agoWake me up when all F35 are sitting on airfields reachable by Iranian drones and unprotected and doing nothing but waiting to be hit
- recursivecaveat 7mo agoV-weapons were also an encounterable weapon which could strike from beyond range. Massive boondoggle though, just a very expensive expensive way to deliver very few explosives; waste of industrial output.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo agoThere was this The Register story, a couple of days ago[0]. It says we can't handle drone swarms. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/23/nato_air_defenses/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/23/nato_air_defenses/
- general1465 7mo agoI can already see Iran making FPV compilation "Death faces of American soldiers" like Ukrainian do, where target is to show face of terrified soldier from the last frame of FPV camera, right before FPV exploded. This is would be a weapon of massive demoralization when relatives of soldiers will be sifting through Iranian Telegram channels just to find video with their relative right before being killed or maimed. This is a powerful propaganda tool for Iran waiting to be used to full extent.
- dttze 7mo ago[dead]
- nojvek 7mo agoOh the irony of US is the paper tiger like Russia and Iran is the underdog like Ukraine. Trump made a very strategic error that he can’t easily get out of. US borrowing trillions in debt to fund other people’s wars. This level of stupidity is Bush in Afhanistan.
- jeremie_strand 7mo ago[flagged]