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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   31403 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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So any opinions on the drone sightings in New Jersey? Is it just mass hysteria and people mistake airplanes for drones? Are they aliens? Supernatural phenomenon? Just a distributed prank by drone owners?

So far the confusion and appeal to the government is bipartisan:

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/15/politics/mysterious-drone-sightings-lawmakers-criticize-response/index.html

Lawmakers from across the political spectrum on Sunday criticized the federal government’s response to mysterious drone sightings in the Northeast, as officials emphasize there is no evidence of a security threat.

Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, a ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, also expressed frustration with the administration’s response to the public. “The government has a real responsibility to put more information out there so people better understand what the real dangers are,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Trump said Friday that the government needs to convey more information and shoot down the drones.

Asked Sunday about the president-elect’s post calling on the government to shoot down the drones, Mayorkas said, “We are limited in our authorities.”

What drives me crazy is that only phone videos seem to exist and phone cameras suck for faraway objects in the night. Is there not one good camera with a zoom in New York/New Jersey?

Edit:
This orb ABC News was puzzled over is really an out of focus Venus:
https://x.com/MatthewCappucci/status/1868052013164134899

There's probably a significant element of mass hysteria adding noise to the body of reports, but I found this theory from Reddit (tl;dr: US government sockpuppet theatre to create momentum/public or internal support to marshal significant funds for a drone defense moonshot) plausible. Considering the way the Ukraine war is being conducted and the Chinese drone swarm videos that are being circulated, it would be shocking if US military planners were not currently running around desperate for a way to get the funding bodies to acknowledge the scale of the problem without projecting weakness to the outside.

As in my own favoured theory for the "tictac video" UFO case before, there could also be an element of flexing the US military's own capabilities to likely adversaries. "See, our ship-launched drones confuse and overwhelm even the rest of our military and civilian law enforcement. Do you think you would have a chance?"

There's an absolutely absurd amount of money being thrown at drone warfare in general in the US - eleven figures and growing by my estimate. But the thing is, that's almost entirely about building up attack capabilities - because drone warfare is the culmination of like five different disciplines worth of buzzword bingo! AI, machine learning, machine vision, autonomous weapons, 3d-printing, batteries, advanced semiconductors, supply chain challenges, mesh networks, swarms and coordinated behaviors, cost-to-hazard ratios...

Drone defense is surprisingly straightforward, provided you're a real first world country. There's a lot of fancy electronic warfare toys that can trivially defeat anything off-the-shelf, and anything more robust to EW (whether a cheap firmware reflash or a custom high-autonomy platform) is still vulnerable to a half-decent shotgun. In fact, basically all drones are weak to shotgun, and mounting a radar on a rapid-fire spreader turret is pretty cheap by military standards. Protecting high-value locations is basically a solved problem - I'm sure there's still some ongoing grifts to solve it even more expensively better, but for any location worth protecting, the means exist today.

Of course, cheap by military standards is still ludicrously expensive by infrastructure standards, and there's a few orders of magnitude more critical infrastructure targets than military targets, so there's not really a scalable solution to this problem that involves grounding or destroying drones just before they strike infrastructure targets. The actual scalable solution is to license and regulate drone ownership, and use early warning systems built on top of existing surveillance capitalism to track and crack down on anyone whose purchasing habits start to look like the incredibly obvious signs of building a drone fleet, not to mention the equally obvious signs of building a ton of explosives to attach to those drones. Anyone with the capability to overcome regulation and surveillance and still pose a credible threat (cartels, China, Russia, maybe Iran) faces the risk of starting a war with their actions - and if this risk isn't enough deterrence, we've got bigger problems.

It is in principle possible for some jihadi group to smuggle enough drones, explosives, and operators into the US to do 9/11 Part 2: Electric Boogaloo, but it would take an uncharacteristically spectacular degree of coordination, training, and resources. I don't think anyone is sockpuppeting drone terror in response to a perceived threat of jihadi drone terror.

In fact, basically all drones are weak to shotgun, and mounting a radar on a rapid-fire spreader turret is pretty cheap by military standards.

I never saw an automatic or anti drone turret in combat footage, despite a very high incentive for Russia/Ukraineto to have that.

There is tons of footage of shotgun use and this Russian soldier is doing it very non-chalantly:

https://old.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1eq2jmh/soldier_shoots_down_a_drone_from_moving_truck/

Fighting against a drone searching for you must be nerve wrecking, you hear the high pitched sound and play hide and seek against the drone operator:

https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1d1611e/russian_soldier_shoots_a_drone_with_his_shotgun/

Of course this is the lucky case where the human survived. There is tons of footage of drones hitting their target.

Rheinmettal, Thales, BAE all have such systems in production today; other players are in development. Ukraine doesn't have them because they're not 50 years old and rotting in a warehouse; Russia doesn't have them because they went all in on EW and, in typical Russian fashion, produced something claimed to be effective and dangerous on paper, maybe even showed off some fancy prototypes, but then collapsed into graft and half-measures under actual wartime pressures.

As noted, any real first world country can solve this problem today.

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