Is the U.S. Vulnerable to a Drone Sneak Attack?

Comments

• Carmakazi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I think basically everyone except North Korea is. Anyone who allows goods and people to move through their borders with any level of freedom can theoretically get attacked like Russia did.

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  • AcidicBasicGlitch@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Exactly, it’s a modern day trojan horse. It seems to be fairly easy to then potentially pin the attack on just about anyone using shell companies for shipment. Especially with the deregulation and removal of so many safety and security positions over the last several months.

    I was reading a little about the beeper attacks in Iran, and I think even now there is still some uncertainty about which company actually worked with the Mossad to manufacture the batteries that contained the explosive.

    The only reason I even bring that up, is that there were so many steps involving so many different groups of legitimate manufacturing companies as well as shell companies to bring the beepers into Iran. Some of the beepers were even taken apart and inspected before being distributed as a security measure, but they had used such a small amount of explosive fuel within the batteries, that it was completely missed.

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    • Tower@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Unless there’s another beeper attack I missed, the one last September was directed at Hezbollah, across Lebanon and Syria.

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  • jacksilver@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I mean, this has always been true, the drones only close the gap by miles. The big issue with the drone attack was Ukraine ability to sneak explosives deep into Russian territory. The delivery mechanism of drones may make it more accurate, but it could have been rockets/mortars and the effect would have been the same.

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  • catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    NK has a bunch of manufacturing plants. Lots of trucks and trains cross their borders with Russia, China, and even South Korea every day.

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• mctoasterson@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Its possible a sleeper cell of terrorists could effectuate some small area drone strikes with commercial off the shelf drones and improvised explosives.

  The large scale military drones you are envisioning that can do the same damage as military aerial bombardment, that is a much harder thing to “sneak” into the US at any kind of scale or to build in secret.

  As for future state actor capabilities. It seems possible that China is working on drone tech deployed from submarines or other force-projection platforms. Yet another reason to avoid a hot war with near peer militaries in current year.

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  • AcidicBasicGlitch@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Ok I’ll just come out and say this, I think it would be easy for a corrupt individual who needs to boost patriotic morale to

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• floo@retrolemmy.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  From whom?

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  • Pistcow@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Gestures Broadly

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The Billion Dollar Question.

    Japan tried to bomb the US by sending balloons over the jet stream and it was largely ineffective due to the range and lack of precision. Moving a weapon across an ocean and into range of a target without a ton of telecommunication support and manual intervention would be a herculean task. Far easier to just bomb one of the hundreds of US military bases local to your neighborhood, as with the Al Qaeda bombing of the US base in Somalia or the Houthis in Yemen targeting US bases and large ships trying to navigate the Red Sea.

    But domestically? A little surprised nobody has tried to turn a large drone aircraft into a weapon for an Oklahoma City style attack.

    If you look at the techniques employed by the Ukrainian insurgents against Russia, explosives embedded into the shipping containers of large trucks have been incredibly potent. Drones hidden within the tops of shipping containers put Ukraine within striking distance of the Russian bomber fleet.

    Definitely something a committed insurgency within the States could employ against police/military.

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    • unpossum@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Ukrainian insurgents defenders

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    • reptar@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      …into a weapon for an Oklahoma City style attack.

      In terms of the actual explosive, I think that was a whole lot of mass.

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  • Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Just look at the list of countries that the USA has pissed off in the last whatever years, and choose one at random.

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  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Specifically? Who knows, but the concept has already been tested by someone

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• Doom@ttrpg.network ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Boston Bomber with a drone.

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• jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Drones have an incredibly limited range, so any drone attack would have to originate either inside the United States, off our coasts, or within the borders of Canada and Mexico.

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  • Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Yes, indeed. Can you buy or build a drone in the US? No problem. Can you get explosives or other nasty stuff to arm it? No issue for a determined group. Can you find an undefended soft target? Of course, there is a smorgasboard of those.

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    • jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      One person making a drone is far different from China staging an attack.

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  • entwine413@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    And? What’s stopping those scenarios from happening?

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    • jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Highly unlikely.

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  • AcidicBasicGlitch@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Yeah that’s why it would be like a Trojan horse, if it allegedly came in from a shipment from another country.

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