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Defending Against Drones
theodp writes "The US has not had to truly think about its air defense since the Cold War. But as America embraces the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, Newsweek says it's time to consider how our greatest new weapon may come back to bite us. Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles. And while Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, at $3 million apiece such protection carries a steep price tag, especially if we have to deal with $500 DIY drones."
Defense? The purpose of the US military as per the US Constitution? Heck, our military and political leaders forgot about defense a loooong time ago. It's been all about offense since the end of WWII. The US hasn't been involved in any military action that we didn't start in the first place, so this should be a tough one for the brass to wrap their heads around.
I don't respond to AC's.
what about bullets? They have been in the market for quite long already.
It would seem to me if every citizen knew how to properly shoot a rifle, odds are pretty good one of those things could be knocked out of the sky with a barrett. It would cost all of us a heck of a lot less money too.
In fact... this is exactly the sort of thing the 2nd amendment was written for. "The people" defending themselves from attack.
500$ per drone - $3 000 000 to destroy a drone ... smell like we could get a nice DOS type war
Does the counter to this threat really need to be high tech and expensive? Clearly the perfect counter to UAVs are UAVs. You could take a few gamers and pay them minumum wage to sit around in a room on call. When a possible threat is detected a UAV is launched and remote control is handed over to an operator and they bring down the threat or surveil and report, then they can go back to their wow raid or play flight sims or whatever it is they want to do to keep busy in the meantime. Step it up a notch by training operators/doing background checks/having distributed locations etc but it's still pretty cheap. You don't need many people in order to have it so that there will always be someone ready to take over at a moments notice.
Not like they used to. Air burst rounds will likely be the next iteration in the infantry arms race: Essentially a grenade that files in a flat trajectory and can detonate where ever you tell it to, such as "that line of sandbags, plus 1m" and then you aim above the sandbags.
They certainly will come in handy against your average "terrorist" armed with an AK-47, but once these types of guns are available to both sides of a conflict it will get real ugly. I certainly hope they remain a technology demonstrator only by some gentlemans agreement. But the next iteration of ground warfare is already in progress...
It's always easier to destroy than to build. This is what makes terrorism so effective. It takes millions of dollars to defend against weapons costing only a few thousand dollars. A 20 thousand dollar missile can take out a 200 million dollar airplane. A boat loaded with explosives can sink a ship costing several hundred million dollars. It's expensive being on the defensive.
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that I can disable a $500 drone with little less than a portable radio, my laptop and a couple of bucks worth of radioshack equipment. Thing about the drones is that they TOO have weaknesses. And a safe, unbreakable, unhackable, wireless, remote control interface costs a LOT more than $500. And an EM emitter, or even just a remote jamming device, or in case of a wireguided or automated drone a laser to interfere with or destroy the optics seems like pretty easy to come by and cheap solutions.
And for those really high tech drones that can survive these kinds of odds. I'm sure we can spend a cheap stinger on. Why anyone would WANT to make the leap all the way to a patriot missile, made for smashing down objects the size of a spaceshuttle is beyond me.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
I don't understand: Drones are easy to take down. A couple of dragoons or zealots should do the trick nicely, or maybe a few marines instead. Heck, you can go at em with SCVs and have a fighting chance.
I am officially gone from
By the time you pay someone to build it, then test to make sure it actually works, package and ship it, I suspect it will cost a bit more. Now add *real* remote control that can work from 100s or 1000s of km away. That's a few more bucks. Now add a payload of explosives that makes it a credible threat (I'm sorry, 1/2kg of explosive in a model airplane isn't what one would call a death dealing engine of war that would justify shooting it down with a $3M Patriot). Oh, now it's bigger, so you need a bigger engine, and a larger fuel tank or battery, etc.
Pretty soon you're up to some serious money. I doubt you could build a credible threat that is manufacturable and usable in a battlefield environment for less than $100k a copy.
You shouldn't compare the price of the defense to the price of the weapon, but rather to the damage it can do.
This message was brought to you by Sarcasm and Troll Feeders United (STFU)
It's not about the cost of what you have to shoot down but what you have to defend.
As other nations develop their drones (and robotic fish and crawlers/walkers) our drones should be able to defeat theirs most of the time as long as ours are "smarter" and their senses are more acute.
The only problem is when "most' of the time isn't good enough, either when the enemy can produces a huge number of inferior yet numerically overwhelming units (China?) OR if they carry WMD (Nuclear, Biological or Chemical) where letting just one through is catastrophic.
That is why missile defense against a major nuclear power like Russia is useless; when the damage a single $10M nuclear ICBM can cause might be in the Trillions of dollars
(target: Manhattan) it makes it very worthwhile to produce lots and lots of missiles to
overwhelm any conceivable defense. The
return on investment(?) is very high!
Of course for a minor power (Iran, N. Korea are you listening?) that can just barely get their missiles to fly, drones might be a much better way of delivering the goods. (or diplomatic pouch/FedEx).
Read about the history of air warfare during WWI, with the rise of airplanes. The situation is analogous to drones. Ultimately, drones will have defenses and counter-attacks. It's not been a big deal yet because we're fighting people who don't have access to the technology, but that will change.
Do you have ESP?
Would it be possible to build tripod mounted lasers to lock onto a drone and just keep firing at it until the battery explodes / circuitry melts? Locking on should be easy since $500 drones won't be going at 200 meters per second. A laser working with household level power should be able to fry a drone in a few minutes.
what would be wrong with a hefty eloctromagnetic pulse - so long as it was aimed in the right direction and there was nothing else nearby then this would knock them out. Or even a nice big laser :) these drones are pretty slow moving right?
The article reads like an attempt to stir up a panic and get loads of tax dollars thrown at a simple problem. Once a drone is detected then they can easily be take out. Home made ones that 'terrorists' might have are vulnerable to someone with a shotgun or a hunting rifle. I'm sure the first attempt to hit the White House with a GPS controlled drone will make good target practice for the snipers on the roof. Larger and faster ones would stand little chance against someone chasing and shooting from a Police helicopter. And the really fast ones, that even America doesn't have yet, they can be treated as normal foes and the air force can have them. Care needs to be taken not to deploy defensive missiles that cause a greater danger than the attacking weapons. I seem to remember that when Isreal became a target for Iraq's missiles the Patriots used to hit them were nearly as dangerouse as the incoming Scuds to the people on the ground. The real problem isn't the weapons to shoot the drones down, it's the ability to detect and track them. I doubt much of the USA is covered by radar that could track small drones flying at rooftop height. But I think upgrading radar systems and air traffic control is a harder sell than nice expensive weapons.
Seriously. If we can shoot down mosquitos with optically guided lasers for $50, surely we can shoot down drones?
The U.S. are worried this technology will get into the wrong hands! What makes them think they have the right ones? Such arrogance!
It's arrogant to be concerned about high-tech weapons falling into the hands of people who want to harm you?
Are you off your meds, again?
At the risk of getting in to a pointless argument, I feel the U.S. invasion of several countries (illegally or otherwise) seems to be a sign of the U.S. wanting to harm people and as we've seen, all to often they have been civilians. War is bad period! No one has the 'right hands' to wield war machines IMHO.
By the time our enemi...ZERG RUSH! RUN!
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Economics!.. what if a $500 drone destroy a $500 drone?
-Woof woof woof!
A 500 buck drone, capable of carrying 250g of c4, with a range of 5 km and an endurance of 30 minutes, could bring a country to its knees.
Targets?
Satellite dish LNBs, High Tension cable insulators, refinery pipework, radar dishes on weaponry, etc etc etc.
use two, the first the blow an access into a window, and EVERY important computer is a target, bank computers, traffic control computers, air traffic control, industrial process, etc etc etc.
Use 5, meshed together, and the fifth could be flown inside a rabbit warren, SCRAM control sensors in a reactor plant, you name it.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
At the risk of getting in to a pointless argument, I feel the U.S. invasion of several countries (illegally or otherwise) seems to be a sign of the U.S. wanting to harm people and as we've seen, all to often they have been civilians.
Well, yeah, it's going to be pointless if you insist on side-tracking it. What in the world does that have to do with your original comment?
War is bad period! No one has the 'right hands' to wield war machines IMHO.
I've never understood how grown men can make such childishly naive statements. So what if "no one has the right hands"? As long as the technology exists, it's going to be used. If you're going to live with the rest of us in the real world, you're going to have to wrap your mind around the idea that people are going to do things you don't like. Stomping your foot and screaming "BUT I DON'T LIKE IT!" isn't going to change anything.
In fact a private drone (from a university) has already done that years ago, across the Atlantic. It certainly cost a lot more than $500, but components have gone down in price quite a lot.
My crappy EasyStar ($60 of glorified styrofoam) can fly for almost an hour with a brushless motor on a 11V, 1200mA.h battery that costs around $30. It wouldn't be too hard in the near future to build a drone covered with lightweight solar cells, and enough batteries to stay airborne during the night. The EasyStar can already easily accommodate 200g of payload, for a total weight of one kg or two.
With an Arduino it's already super easy to build a drone with GPS guiding. But even if GPS is jammed it's not much harder to implement inertial positioning, and beyond that cell phone relay trilateration to lock in on a target. Each of those features can be had in a 1g integrated package.
Those are still vulnerable to military jamming, but at a significant cost to the target. There are other ways around this: sun tracking has not been done AFAIK but it shouldn't be too hard to do. We have *slightly* better clocks than mariners of the old time and that's what they used. At night, star tracking is also a possibility. Then some DIY drone people are experimenting with magnetic sensors, which is what migratory birds use.
In conclusion, drones are gonna be a problem, and I suspect states are going to try to ban them, to obviously no effect since all it takes are cell phone components (lithium batteries, microcontrollers, GPS receivers), some styrofoam and a few cheap power electronics components (brushless motors, controllers, and servos). Oh and duct tape. They better ban duct tape quick.
http://www.mikrokopter.de/
For 1250 (a bit more expensive than 500, ok) you can get the hexacopter, which:
- has 20 to 40 minutes endurance
- is fully automatic
- can fly to GPS coordinates without outside commands
- can carry over 1 kg payload.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
We gotta keep finding new threats. Otherwise defense contractor stock would drop! We can't have that!
The EasyStar, the base for most DIY drone experiments, is a 1.3 m wide slab of styrofoam -- 700g worth of it. It doesn't have to fly at 30000 feet to be hard to shoot down. I doubt you could take that down at a few hundred feet, let alone a few thousand.
I think that the actions of the US military are harmful to the US citizens, yes. Modern US military policy is most closely related to an autoimmune disorder.
Of course, the whole reason there are that many anti-American Muslims in the first place is because we keep meddling in the affairs of people squabbling over a patch of dirt that they each think is sacred based on some ancient fairy tale. The Muslims are crazy, of course, but that's no reason to inflame them by meddling in this religious spat.
(And, yes, I know you're Israeli.)
We should stop selling weapons to everyone and anyone as these same weapons end up being used against us. We should nationalize the defense industry as part of our military; as great as our military is, is it more than capable of being in charge of it's own weapons production. As long as our "defense" industries are profit based, they will require -- and "our" government will provide -- war.
Brushless motors and controllers are over 90% efficient. Plus DIY drones are made of a sort of styrofoam, which traps heat and IR, all you could possibly see is the (very, very) slightly hotter air passing through cooling holes. After flying my plane the battery is about as warm as my cell phone after a long call.
I think that the actions of the US military are harmful to the US citizens, yes. Modern US military policy is most closely related to an autoimmune disorder.
You're entitled to your opinion. I'm just not sure where the "yes" came from, since I never asked for anyone's opinion about US military policy.
Of course, the whole reason there are that many anti-American Muslims in the first place is because we keep meddling in the affairs of people squabbling over a patch of dirt that they each think is sacred based on some ancient fairy tale. The Muslims are crazy, of course, but that's no reason to inflame them by meddling in this religious spat.
Yeah, I feel the same way about the Bloods and the Crips. Just let them conduct their business in peace, I say. Live and let live!
(And, yes, I know you're Israeli.)
I had to go and look at the flag on my uniform, just to make sure. It's red and white, with a maple-leaf in the middle, not blue and white with a star of david. So, I'm pretty sure you're wrong (3 out of 3!) but I'm open to changing my mind if you can present a strong enough case.
$500 is the retail cost of one (1) EasyStar-based DIY drone:
In bulk, that shit wouldn't cost you more than $300. In fact, if you wanted to make tens of thousands of those, you could probably go down to $100. And you could easily make them bigger for not much more.
I didn't side track, I responded to your point about people wanting to harm others, making the point that it's not just so called terrorists that want to harm.
Which, once again, has nothing to do with your original statement. I asked you why you think it's "arrogant" to want to protect yourself, and you answered "but we harm people too!". That's a complete non-sequitur. You may as well have said "I like apples!".
Perhaps we/I live (foolishly?) in hope of a better world?
Hoping for it is fine - ignoring reality is not.
Good point! Maybe I'm a deluded idealist...
It's a curable condition :)
Tinfoil hats should protect everyone from falling bullets. At least according to what I read here about these wonderful inventions.
Probably.
You might want a set of tinfoil shoulder pads as well.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I certainly hope they remain a technology demonstrator only by some gentlemans agreement.
Oh that holds out well in war. They can't even reasonably hold the Geneva Convention.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
If the Bloods and the Crips are off of American soil, why get involved in their squabble, especially when our involvement causes all sorts of other problems?
And you implied you were Israeli in an earlier post (about a year ago); my bad.
Consider a small freighter, 200 km off New York. It launches a few hundred small unmanned planes, guided by a small computer autopilot. Each plane carries four thermite stick bombs, similar to the ones used in WWII. When the planes reach the vicinity of New York they climb to a few hundred meters altitude and start dropping the thermite devices. What was cutting edge tech 70 years ago is garage tech today.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
--Winston Churchill.
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
Counterexample: Both sides in WWII had chemical weapons, but neither used them. But not because some treaty banned them, but because both sides had nothing to gain by escalating.
A gentlemans agreement would not necessarily be based on a treaty or to protect civilians, but on the fact that both sides don't want to get involved in a race to the bottom, and that both sides have enough foresight to avoid it. As predicted by pure game theory, i.e. math.
E.g. Russian (to pick a "classic" opponent) made air burst tech makes it into the hands of insurgents fighting us, and ours to whoever is fighting against Russia. GPS guided artillery shells seem a smarter choice for more precise destructions since it is not such an entry-level weapon.
There are some inexpensive technologies that could be scaled up a bit to knock down small drones.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's surprising that nobody has replicated the V-1 "flying bomb" of WWII. That was the first cruise missile, and wasn't expensive. Carrying 850Kg of explosive, it could take out medium-sized buildings. Its main limitation was poor guidance. The Nazis fired about 8,000 at London, but couldn't hit a target smaller than a big city. The guidance system was a gyro/pendulum/magnetic compass system, and just flew the thing in a straight line until a small propeller/odometer had counted enough turns.
Since it flew straight and level, it was easy to shoot down. Still, "easy to shoot down" meant hundreds of interceptors and hundreds of anti-aircraft guns, and the success rate at shoot-down only reached 75% or so.
With a modern guidance system, one that could hit a target and didn't fly straight and level, these things could be formidable weapons today. If someone launched twenty of them, each programmed to take a different path to the same target, some of them would get through. Nobody has enough interceptors any more to take out an attack like that.
For the prototype models, I can see why it would be so expensive. However now that the tech has progressed and can be duplicated in a $500 kit there is no reason for the price to stay that high for new models.
As someone who likes flying model helicopters, I can see it won't be long until the government bans that on fears that "I might be a terrorist wanting to fly my T-Rex 600 into something", closing off yet another avenue of harmless pleasure.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I warm to your gentle understanding heart!
There are missiles between the Stinger and the Patriot. The current stock of US radar guided missiles cost anything between 150k to half a million per round. Sure, probably not cheap enough yet, but getting there. And really this all comes down to range/capability. The current stock of missiles are designed to shoot down other missiles or aircraft, meaning they have to be really high-performance. For example, the AMRAAM has to fly out maybe 20-30 miles and then still have enough energy to chase down a maneuvering plane.
When you're dealing with a swarm of "cheap" drones, you won't need all that performance. It's cheap, so it probably wont be able to pull off those high G maneuvers fighter jets try. If it has a small engine (thus small IR), then it probably can't go very fast either. And it's range of its weapons is probably small too. So now you can build a missile with semi-active radar (like the Sea Sparrow), give it 10 miles (or even less). It probably doesn't even have to be supersonic (even cheaper!). So now may have a missile that's as cheap, or cheaper than most drones you're trying to shoot down.
Or, we might just see the return of large caliber AAA. Computer guided 88s. Yum.
Small Autocannons and smartbombs FTW!!!!
Problem solved.
Let's say you engage in a behaviour like eating sugary things (like gobbling up a huge amount of the world's resources and supporting evil regimes) that attracts bees and Wasps (terrorists, drones, etc.). Sure, you can spend PILES of money on insecticides (patriot missiles, TSA, etc.), or, you could simply stop engaging in the behaviour that attracts bees and wasps.
Duh. But people like you are greedy, lazy, and stupid, and can't live without their SUVs, McMansions, and daily intake of beef, sugar, and Salads in February, and so rather than change your behaviour, you would rather ramp up the insecticide production. Tards. Keep it up, and expect people to bomb the crap out of you. It's really very simple, almost Newtonian in structure.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Do you go into a hole for half the year then? "hundreds of citizens firing up in the air" happens every duck, pheasant and goose hunting season in this country. Not to mention deer and bear hunting which often results in an angle that is shooting towards the sky, not the ground.
If the Bloods and the Crips are off of American soil, why get involved in their squabble, especially when our involvement causes all sorts of other problems?
Because we all live on the same planet. Why get involved when China starts "recycling" electronics by burning them? Why oppose Japanese whaling fleets? Why protest against French (or any) nuclear testing? Why boycott South Africa for being an apartheid state?
Like it or not, events taken halfway around the world can and do affect us. How we respond to various events is always open to debate, but just saying "it's not within our borders" and sticking your head in the sand is not an option. The US learned that the hard way in WW2 and they've been overcompensating ever since, but even that's better than the isolationist mentality.
And you implied you were Israeli in an earlier post (about a year ago); my bad.
I don't think I ever implied that, as I'm not in the habit of lying unnecessarily. Glad to clear up the misunderstanding, though.
It's the Patriot missiles that cost $3 million.
Good grief, just crash a $500 drone into a $500 drone.
But the Pentagon would rather spend 50 times that - $25,000 - to create a committee that spends $250,000 coming up with $2,500,000 ideas that take $25,000,000 in R&D dollars to demonstrate how cost in-effective a $500 drone is.
After all, when the drones are flying over us they don't want to give the local RC club any ideas...
are condemmed to repeat it sometime after he left office, henry kissinger noted that all his efforts to out do the soviet union by pushing new, fancy arms systems were a disaster, the soviets always managed to copy us, and sooner then we expected. His case in point was MIRVED missles (MIRV, multiple independent re entry vehicles, instead of the missle delivering one bomb to one spot, one missle delivers several bombs to different locations)
Just loose to Canada in the gold medal game, and you wont have to worry about an onslaught of DIY drowns attacking from the north.
If these are garage-built then what about electronic warfare? The initial apparatus might be expensive but it is cheap to run. Garage built drones would presumably have limited (if any) autonomy and require constant communication with the pilot so simply jamming the signal would likely be enough. With a large enough directed signal you could even knock out the electronics. This would probably not work against hardened military devices but you will have at least raised the threshold on what can get through to the point where more expensive options can be used to knock them out.
You really put a lot of thought into this didn't you? No, the odds are far from "pretty good". There's a reason why people hunt flying birds with shotguns: the spray of pellets is much more likely to hit a fast-moving target than a single projectile, and while there are any number of people in the U.S. who are quite proficient with shotguns, only a very, very few have the requisite skill necessary to hit a bird with a rifle, much less a drone, which would probably be flying MUCH faster than a bird, and if flying low, would be in sight for only a fraction of a second.
As to your suggestion that citizens be armed with Barrett sniper rifles, it takes months of intensive training to become a proficient sniper, and they start off with expert marksmen. Even then, the very best snipers would probably be ineffecive against a target such as a drone, which, given the the advances in small off-the-shelf turbine engines that are readily available to R/C hobbyists, would be travelling at a couple hundred mph, and if flying at low altitude, would only be visible for a split second. Add to that the mass of the Barrett, which makes it difficult to maneuver quickly enough to track a fast-moving target. Plus there is the wholly unanswered question of readiness: how to alert this civilian air defense artillery corps and give them useful targeting data IN TIME to be effective. What are they going to do? Lug a large heavy weapon plus ammunition with them to work, the beach, on dates etc, on the off chance that they might be alerted to incoming drones? The idea of training large numbers of ordinary citizens to the level of proficiency required is not a tenable one, to put it charitably, and would be FAR from cost-effective.
There is also the danger of falling bullets, as another poster pointed out. And if you don't think the danger is real, tell that to my friend Cathy, whose uncle was killed about four years ago in Miami by a falling bullet. He was sitting on his back patio with his wife watching the New Year's fireworks and having a glass of champagne when he slumped to the ground dead. The first thought was that he had suffered a massive heart attack, but the medical examiner noticed a small hole near his collarbone, and the autopsy revealed that he had been killed by a small caliber handgun bullet falling from a steep angle, fired into the sky by some unknown, and unknowing, person celebrating the fireworks. The thought of masses of people firing enormous volumes of .50 caliber rounds into the sky over populated areas is a terrifying one to me personally.
Your imaginary "Wild West" is only imaginary. Not everyone had a gun. A firearm was a pretty major investment back then, and many people never had the money to purchase one. Many more people couldn't justify the investment, if they did have the money. Then, as now, many honest people had no weapons, but EVERY SINGLE CRIMINAL had one or more weapons.
Further, the "Wild West" had few law men, fewer judges and courts, almost no police forces at all, unless you moved into one of the major cities. Of course, by the time a city became a real "city", the surrounding countryside wasn't so very wild anymore.
Perhaps you should look up some of the myths of the Wild West. Many of the people credited with killing dozens, or scores of men, simply did not. That era of sensationalist reporters tended to blow the facts far beyond reality. Even the famed Dodge City never had all the killings that it is credited with. Go ahead, google around if you're interested. Much of my reading and "study" predated the internet - and I'm not interested in finding citations for the things I've learned over the years.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Obviously, to counter those drones, we will need a larger army of drones themselves. And it is not realistic to expect an army of teenagers to sit waiting for a drone attack that doesn't come, or pilots. We will need to build some sort of AI to control them all, a global digital defense network, if you will.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
And dont forget:
Ministry of Truth : Misinformation
Ministry of Peace : Management of perpetual War
Ministry of Love : Enforce loyalty thru fear and torture
Ministry of Plenty : Maintains poverty and scarcity
You're right. The Reaper drones cost $10 million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MQ-9_Reaper
10 years for simple possession stops most sane people from going there.
Incidentally it's the same 10 years for possession of a guided missile.
Put a receiver, micro servos and control surfaces on the fins of an Estes rocket.
10 years federal, no explosive payload required.
I'm sure the same is true for an airplane of any size as soon as you put an explosive payload on board.
It's not going to stop the likes of suicide bombers but will keep casual drone fun down to a minimum.
For myself I'm using sort of a drone to feed various groups of deserving peoples paranoia.
It fly a scale RC predator over every bunch of nuts (e.g. tea parties, anti-WTO protests, pot legalization, illegal immigrant amnesty protests, gun shows, Dead shows etc) that gathers (time allowing).
It doesn't matter to me what the group is about, just that the groups contains a % of paranoid nutters that I can push closer to the edge of madness.
It's good to live in N Cal. Lots of fruits, nuts and flakes within easy driving distance.
Call it social engineering.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A guilt trip rarely convinces anyone of anything, except to stop talking to you, or to lie.
I'm not saying your basic point is wrong. I rather agree with it. But your way of expressing it is counterproductive.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you think those claims aren't credible, you have no idea how the US works.
Any functional state basically comprises two things: regulation of natural resource extraction, and regulation of reproduction. This is the definition of a 'state': it's a static arrangement of successive generations of people living their lives and making technological improvements that lead to progress, without runaway overpopulation or resource consumption that would lead to collapse. The 'governor' is the person responsible for governing the rate of resource consumption.
The United States, however, is not a state. It was never intended to be. It was intended to be a limited federation of other, sustainable states.
Unfortunately, the US tries very hard to act like a state. It grants citizenship widely, expropriates natural resources on a global scale, distributes entitlements, and claims jurisdiction over citizens regardless of locale. The few, convoluted methods of regulation that it enacts are so hopelessly ineffectual that we would be better off without them. It has no real way of regulating resource extraction, save a few environmental measures. Consequently, it doesn't. Most of it's 'citizens' don't even live in cities, let alone D.C. Population growth is not really regulated at all, rather encouraged.
Why is this? Well, in a resourceless 'state' like the US, the most effective way to gain the resources necessary to maintain the population is by force. This requires a large army of excess population in order to send adventuring. This arrangement is actually an aftershock of the Civil War, when excess populations in the North found themselves without the means to support their needs with the secession of Southern states. After the war, these were added to freed slave populations in order to constitute the current group of people dependent on US government force for their livelihoods: nearly half of the US population. These generations come in regular waves, maintained and accentuated by regular resource wars planned well ahead of time. During wartime, there is a paucity of reproduction, followed by a 'boom' after the war, planting the seed for the next generation's war.
This is the basic method of regulating population: endless war. It can't really be called 'regulation', though, since it requires a generation with excess population to begin with, in order to secure the resources necessary to maintain the current generation. And this process creates a new generation of excess population as a result. It's more of an 'investment' in the future: investing in a new generation able to execute the future wars necessary to expropriate resources for maintenance of the society, the resourceless 'state'. Successful wars bring a reduction of population, an increase in resources, and prosperity. Failed wars waste resources with no return, save injured soldiers in need of support who are stiffed their bonuses and greeted with homelessness.
Of course, the future generation doesn't tend to like this arrangement. So it necessitates some nasty undemocratic things like drafts and false-flag operations and oppressive taxes in order to perpetrate.
The one thing the US has gained a very tight grip over, is the money economy. Drafts are no longer necessary if a young person's options are to either fight or starve. Population can be regulated this way as well, though it is extremely crude. US 'bonds' are sold as the vehicle of investment in the next generation of war. Bondage of the excess population of the next generation is a direct investment in government force. This is the primary means of regulation for the US, given it's inherent limitations.
Now, how does this lead to a fascist coup? What was it that Roosevelt did to upset this arrangement, and cause him to be targeted? He campaigned on promises not to engage in needless warfare (as most politicians do). He inflated the currency, destroying the value of government 'bonds'. He redistributed wealth from the older genera
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Styrofoam, cyanoacrilate and duct tape are much easier to work with than steel.
Ugh. That "come up with a 1 M$ attack" should have read "come up with a 1 K$ attack". Devising an attack that costs ten times what you have and only damages 0.1% of your target is not a good plan.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
This newsweek bit really shows a lack of understanding of modern military equipment. UAV attacks against the US in a time of war might work once or twice, but never over the long term. Two reasons. 1) Any drone big enough to carry a weapon payload runs on something other than electric, which means heat, which means MANPADS, HMMWV Avenger Anti-Air, Centurion C-RAM (Phalanx CIWS for land defense),Bradley M6 Linebacker,etc. This does not even cover the number of 'convential' guns that have anti-air ammo including the Tanks, Artillery, and Ship board guns. Plus larger SAM systems like the patriot, or SM-1,SM-2 or RIM-116. Then add to that every single .50 Cal M2 machine gun owned by the armed services.
2) Drones are Computers normally controlled by RF. The US ability to control the RF spectrum, Jam radars, radios, and fry electronics from range is bar none the best the world has to offer.
So you better make that first attack a good one, cause like flying passanger planes into buildings you really only get one shot at it.
The polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem has predicted the evolution of warfare we're observing today as far back as 1986:
It's been some time since I read it, but I recall him having envisioned evolution of war machinery as it became more and more miniaturized and swarm-like, until it was completely impossible to know if and who was attacking who. A country was able to e.g. form giant undetectable light-focusing lens overlaid in the upper layers of the atmosphere to influence agricultural yield of another country and affect its economy without needing to resort to direct contact and observable violence.
Very interesting to see the actual 21st century technology follow the exact path predicted by Stanislaw Lem. And we're only at its beginning.
All in all, a recommended read (like many other works by Lem).
Screw them all drones. I am waiting for the next iPhone gadget that makes possible to shoot down drones with lasers. pew, pew !! which reminds me.. I have to buy an iPhone...
I'm sorry but the activities that I engage in that they don't like have to do with looking at scantily clad women and having sex.
You don't compare the cost of the defensive weapon system to the cost of the offensive weapon system, you compare the cost of the defensive weapon system to the cost of what would be lost if the offensive weapon system succeeded. By that scale, Patriot is dirt cheap.