Comments on: More on drones and their use

By: Dale Amon

Dale Amon — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 21:35:49 +0000

if you discuss drones as a threat, you need to specify the threat. I do not put WMD’s high on that list for non-state actors. Look at the options:

* Radiological weapons (dirty bombs sic.)
by the time you stuff in the electronics and the explosive
dispersal charge and have added in heavy radioisotopes
in some quantity, I am not sure you have much of a
weapon. Messy and annoying but not terribly deadly.

* Biological weapons.
Weaponizing bio weapons is not easy. Delivery is not the
real problem for folks wishing to do this. It’s making the
bugs actually disperse in an ‘effective’ way.

* Nuclear weapons.
U235 is heavier than lead. Even with a shotgun style
you still have a fairly hefty bit of kit. Not something you
are going to fit in a little homebuilt drone.

* Chemical weapons.
You could actually kill people with this even on a small
craft if you had deadly enough stuff like Sarin. But even
then, you have the issue of the quantity you can
carry, the rate of dispersal, how to get a killing
concentration over a significant size crowd in open
air despite winds, etc…

* Conventional small arms.
A few hundred rounds of 9mm on a crowd could be
nasty but it just doesn’t have the mass terror effect
that terrorists want.

* Explosives.
You are limited by the carrying capacity. Perhaps a
few pounds or tens of pounds of C4 at most. Damaging
as a military weapon for a pinpoint unhardened targer
but not much of a fear weapon.

Probably the most likely use is just plain intel for on the
ground self-mobile self-detonating exploding islamists.

dispersal a

By: lucklucky

lucklucky — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:14:21 +0000

In the future as technology evolves everyone will be able to destroy the world. The only option is for us to have many worlds.

For now Robots will be everywhere by everyone. For good and bad. If you have a cute daughter maybe the kid next door will have a robot with camera to peak at her or vice versa…

By: Alan K. Henderson

Alan K. Henderson — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:44:08 +0000

http://volokh.com/2012/02/21/drone-warfare-getting-out-of-hand/

By: Ed Snack

Ed Snack — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 03:28:27 +0000

Jonathon, don’t get the point about the Maxim gun and WW1, the British Army was very well aware that the German army had roughly 4 times as many machine guns per establishment as they did, they originally asked for 8 a battalion, the government allowed 2. They were also well aware of the effects of firepower, the Boers if no one else taught them that.

Perhaps more correct to say the the professional part of the army were well aware of it; the large numbers of superannuated officers dragged in to command Kitchener d=formations were often far less competent.

Was there hubris, probably, but not, I suggest, in quite the way you seem to imply.

By: Hmm

Hmm — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:43:57 +0000

How good is any solution to a theoretical problem. The biggest problem is determining what problem to concentrate on. Are drones actually a major threat yet? If it is a threat or becoming a threat can that possibility be reduced/neutered? Is the defence to be against large or small scale? Is it to be against explosive, bio, nuclear, electromagnetic, neural/psycho, or a mix? Drones provide an interesting topic for stories, but until they start to be used. The easiest solution to any of these is to start by having a countermeasure against drones. If you can take down the drones then you can start to deal with the problem of their payload.

There’s loads of different pathways I can think to take Thriller/Sci-Fi screenplays using drone tech. Dreaming up narratives for their use and destruction is also probably a fairly good way to get a grip on what the real problem is. Most of the current drone tech appears to be fairly easily dealt with. Anti-drone drones (both singular and in flocks) are the first thing that spring to mind.

It’s almost tempting to write a few quickies and stick them on amazon just to see if they take off, or would drone novelettes drag on and on?

By: sconzey

sconzey — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:49:12 +0000

I’m not entirely sure how UAVs change the threat profile of non-state actors acquiring WMDs. If terrorists have WMDs, that they will use UAVs as the delivery mechanism is not your main problem…

What *is* interesting is that in many ways the history of weaponry is the history of government. It is the armed forces who maintain the monopoly of the stationary bandit, so their incentives must be aligned with those of the State. Thus the age where the Knight is the unstoppable killing machine lends itself to a feudal system of government. However as cheap and accurate firearms make peasant mobs militarily effective, States become more democratic, expanding the franchise to offer citizen-soldiers an incentive to maintain the status quo.

But the untrained mob is not today an effective military force, nor has it been for at least a century. An argument could be made that the free market policies of 19th century England and the US were driven by the increasing industrial requirements of the modern army.

War today is shaped by nukes, drones, and the ‘net. How has the shape of war today shaped our governments?