by arrowsmith on 6/14/25, 5:48 PM with 153 comments
by rbanffy on 6/14/25, 6:30 PM
The article doesn't get much into what can be the next step - fully autonomous drones that travel by night, charge by day, and find a target by themselves. A bit like landmines, with a shorter half-life, but highly mobile and intelligent enough.
by directevolve on 6/14/25, 7:04 PM
- Non-wired drones can be jammed. It’s early days for building defenses against these attacks.
- Non-state actors have far less access to the sophisticated intelligence needed to strike hard targets or secure against counter strikes.
- Setting up hidden bombs for remote detonation on soft targets, like the freeway, has been possible, no need for drones. What other factors have been preventing these types of attacks? How do drones change those factors?
If America was hunting Osama bin Laden today, I bet we’d have used a drone to kill him rather than sending in special forces. Likewise, if I was a cartel in the jungle or rebel force in the mountains, I’d be damned scared of the military or police coming after me with an endless wave of drones.
by FerretFred on 6/14/25, 6:33 PM
by walrus01 on 6/14/25, 6:24 PM
It's really not, the Ukrainians have geographically distributed assembly and testing, QC of quadcopters in the ten to fifteen inch propeller size class in many random and hard to find locations. A shitload of them can be assembled by a team of ten people working in a 2000 sq ft workshop in an apartment building basement.
Large drone factories like something that can crank out shahed 136 size uav? Or like what the US mil calls a group 3 uav? Or group 4 sized? Sure, agreed, different thing.
I agree with a lot of the points the author makes in this article but I question if they've ever assembled a 12" prop size quadcopter (large enough to carry a good sized amount of munition on a 10-15 minute one way trip) from components. It's something easy to distribute as a cottage industry.
by thomassmith65 on 6/14/25, 6:43 PM
What will bring it to an end will be a panopticon: video surveillance everywhere, stronger anti-encryption laws, AI monitoring the whole lot.
I'm not an activist with an agenda here; it's just that there's an upper limit to how much drone terrorism a society will tolerate.
by darquomiahw on 6/14/25, 6:45 PM
Explosives and fuzing mechanisms, which are already regulated in many countries.
by chrisweekly on 6/14/25, 6:23 PM
by imaginationra on 6/14/25, 6:34 PM
If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon.
by mosura on 6/14/25, 6:32 PM
Historically nuclear arms used to be thought of as creating a hostage type scenario, where you can think of major cities of nuclear powers held hostage by their opponents. This is ok as long as the rival nuclear powers remain large and few in number such that their desires for your compliance do not contradict those of another nuclear power. The drone problem is going to become a variant of the “everyone has nukes now” except drones are so much harder to detect in idle states.
Companies selling what they claim are solutions to this stand to print money, but it is not clear how it can really be done.
by cakealert on 6/14/25, 6:35 PM
It will successfully mitigate the cheap flying drone threat as long as they aren't launched close to the target. There will probably not be any more birds in human territory however since discriminating will be counter productive anyway, hostile drones will seek to impersonate birds otherwise.
by 4ndrewl on 6/14/25, 6:46 PM
by jopsen on 6/14/25, 7:01 PM
Technology with globalization might be possible (I'm not entirely sure), technology we have today without organized states, not happening.
by bambax on 6/14/25, 6:59 PM
Maybe, but the goal of terrorism isn't to destroy "value", whatever that is. It's to create fear and unrest and make life miserable for the people in the target country. "Economic disruption" doesn't do that. It doesn't actually do anything.
Also, drones are not needed for any of this, or suicide bombers. It's trivial to leave a suitcase on a train or in the subway and cause hundreds of deaths and extreme mayhem. (Not trivial to make a bomb to fit that suitcase, but not very hard.)
My theory of why it almost never happens is, there are actually very few terrorists.
It's telling that the examples in the post are not from individual terrorists but from states.
by AnotherGoodName on 6/14/25, 6:48 PM
by blargthorwars on 6/14/25, 6:32 PM
All things being equal, the advantage belongs to the defender, with a significant caveat: the defender must be aware of the risk and deploy defensive drones in advance.
by orbital-decay on 6/14/25, 8:51 PM
One rule about "infinite scaling" predictions is that the real world always messes them up. Warfare has changed, that's true. The rest of the life is not so easy to change, and (useful) drones are harder to build than it looks.
by ndsipa_pomu on 6/15/25, 10:33 AM
by therein on 6/14/25, 6:42 PM
I hope ExitGroup.US doesn't think they are the first group to have this kind of collective.
by andruby on 6/14/25, 7:21 PM
by Teever on 6/15/25, 2:50 AM
by intended on 6/14/25, 7:07 PM
I won't call this a counter point, since what is argued is plausible, if not likely.
What I will make a comparison to piracy back in the MP3 era. It really seemed like it would be impossible to stop it, and then came the RIAA, MPAA. Eventually governments managed to figure out the internet and how to deal with the small and nimble upstarts.
But better still, (or less grim) is Netflix - when actual alternatives to piracy existed, people were more than happy to follow them.
(Of course that era didn't last for long, but we'll mark that as the utilty limit of the comparison)
by johnea on 6/14/25, 10:40 PM
It's been made quite clear, that HN is fundamentally a right wing-nut controlled forum.
I think there are a lot of woke-nut people in the mix as well, maybe even an equal amount, but the wing-nut mode of the highly bimodal distribution just flags anything that demonstrates that we've elected a criminal to the office of US president. Whereas the woke-nut mode is tolerant of allowing discussion to carry on, even on topics they don't agree with.
I guess it was to be expected, given the vulture capital origins of the platform...
by xnx on 6/14/25, 6:32 PM
Is this what he founding fathers were thinking of when they wrote the Bill of Rights?