The bad guys can use drones too. While billions have been spent on ballistic missile defense, little attention has been given to the more imminent threat posed by unmanned air vehicles in the hands of terrorists or rogue states.
Building a ballistic missile is a big deal. They take a lot of development it really is rocket science which is expensive and hard to keep secret. At best, youll end up with something like a Scud missile with a range of a few hundred miles and limited accuracy. You would not be able to aim at an individual building.
Unmanned air vehicles are another matter. They are small, cheap and you could buy one tomorrow. Short-range versions with video cameras are common, but thanks to GPS and Google Earth you can also put one to within a few yards of your aim point from long range. Very long range in 2003 a TAM-5 UAV with a six-foot wingspan was flown over 1880 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. One scenario features a mass drone attack launched from a tanker or freighter well out in international waters.
Eugene Miasnikov of the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies at MIPT, calls the UAV a suicide bomber on steroids, basically. Unlike a suicide bomber, a drone can easily penetrate security and threaten otherwise safe areas (eg the Green Zone) or reach crowded public places like spots stadiums. Dense crowds would lead to large numbers of casualties from fragmentation bombs, and an attack by multiple UAVs could cause panic and further injuries in the crowd. And don’t even get us started about chemical, biological or dirty bomb radioactive payloads.
Already, there have been a number of terrorists using (or, at least, intending on using) UAVs. Bin Laden had a plan to assassinate President Bush at the G8 summit, the FARC in Colombia bought drones. Hezbollah flew a “Mirsad-1″ drone over Israeli territory in 2004.
Another paper by Dennis M. Gormley, on UAVs and Cruise Missiles as Possible Terrorist Weapons draws similar conclusions about the ease with which such weapons can be used and the difficulty of intercepting small, slow aircraft. He notes a significant incident in Iraq:
Moreover, two Iraqi ultra-light aircraft managed to fly directly over the 3rd Infantry Divisions logistical encampment and disappeared before orders could be arranged to fire at them. Even the use of expensive airborne reconnaissance systems such as AWACS would not help. Their radars intentionally eliminate slow-flying targets on or near the ground to prevent their data processing and display systems from being overtaxed.
One solution to the threat of hostile UAVs is DARPAs Peregrine. This is a drone-killing drone, designed with dual propulsion mode to combine long loiter time on patrol with a dash capability for intercept. Spending on Peregrine has gone up from nothing in 2004 to $1.4m in 05 and $5m in the coming year. In Popular Mechanics, Noah and friends tried designing one of the drone-fighters. The one here was provided by The Mad Planeman whose blog tinkers with aircraft design.
But killing drones isn’t the hard part, really. It’s detecting and identifying before they can do damage that poses the biggest challenge. As Miasnikov points out if they are launched a few miles from their target there may be only minutes to react.
Those with long memories or an interest in esoteric weapons will recall that we have been here before. During WWII the US came under attack from thousands of small, long-range unmanned aircraft Japanese Fugo balloon bombs. Thirty feet across and made of mulberry paper, each carried three incendiary bombs to the US mainland all the way from Japan. Although they were dismissed at the time, tremendous resources were put into countering them. And although they did little damage, the Fugos were originally intended to carry biological agents, which would have made them a far more serious threat.
How great the threat is this time remains to be seen.
– David Hambling
UPDATE 2:46 PM: There is no doubt that cheap and plentiful drones will be everywhere in future, used for everything from newsgathering to traffic control and fighting forest fires. The way will be led, as usual, by military…Theres a section on them in my book, Weapons Grade.
UPDATE 05/02/06 8:56 AM: Just how cheap and easy are these UAVs to build? Well, as CF points out, the Society of Automotive Engineers holds a drone-making contest every year for students. The machines cost anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 to build, he says. And the winning plane can generally haul between 30 and 40 pounds — with just a 1.5 horsepower engine.
Good Evening Folks,
It looks like we take the UCAV’s to the next level, Stinger armed Predators. Machines killing machines. To us senior citizens it all seems like the comming true of ’50’s Science Fiction movies and all those Popular Science, Popular Mechanics covers.
Machines killing machines, it didn’t make much sense then or now, but hey grab you date, go to the “Drive In”, and grab some popcorn and Jucyfruits and sit back and enjoy the experience. Those of you old enought know the attraction here wasn’t always the movie.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
Can you say ‘aAranoid beyond belief?”
I mean ‘Paranoid’.
UAV, RPV, not much difference these days, except it’s Uninhabited Air Vehicles (can’t say Unmanned, cuz that’s not PC).
Terrorists have had these for years, when’s the attack due? Maybe it’s harder than you think, or maybe they’d rather do suicide bombs like London and Madrid.
the paranoia is growing…
Pedestrian’s delusions of grandeur are very amusing.
Doubtless he COULD tell us.…..but then he’d have to kill us.……
I built one last week to finally repay my neighbor’s dog for all the poop he leaves in my yard! Let’s see him reverse engineer that!!
This has already been identified as a threat, and by someone not in the defense industry to boot. You guys are too slow. See http://jef.raskincenter.org/unpublished/piper_cub_offense.html
It’s easy to build one of these things, but piloting them intelligently is another matter. You need command, control, and communications to be able to use drones effectively — that means you need a communications network allowing you to:
* uniquely address one drone,
* issue it commands arbitrarily
* receive telemetry
* be utterly resistant to jamming.
The more drones in the sky, the more difficult this becomes, as frequency space and time domain channels are congested. Additionally, with increasing distance, C3 becomes incredibly more difficult. Even with the Internet, pinging a remote host from one coast to another takes close to 30ms **best case**, due to speed of light limitations. This is because the speed of light is 3e8 m/s, and the width of the continent is (for USA, approximately) 3.42 Mm (1 miles = 1 609.344 meters). Remember that it takes two propegations (one echo packet, one response packet). Basic telemetry will have similar problems. When moving at several hundred miles per hour, 0.03s can make quite a difference. At 100MPH, 30ms translates to almost 5 feet or so. Considering these drones are only 6 feet wide (usually), it’s *REALLY EASY* to miss your target completely, especially if it’s another drone.
Hence, you want drone C3 close to the battlefield to minimize propegation delays. Don’t forget network packet overhead. And don’t forget also channel congestion overhead. And last but not least, the human factor as well — if one human operator is time-slicing between 10 drones, response time for each individual drone is going to drop in proportion, at the very least.
Terrorists are more than capable of flying drones. But it’s not *practical* for them to do so — for any kind of accuracy in sophisticated maneuvering, it requires them to be co-resident on the battle field, which makes them easy targets (even if we can’t make heads or tails of the RF signals used to control the drones, we can just look for the strongest RF source, and that’s likely their C3 center). For remote operation, the drones will tend to follow predefined trajectories, a la ICBMs, only on a smaller scale. Laser tagging a drone would be relatively easy, and thus, they equally become relatively easy targets to take out.
In the case that the drones are launched only a few miles from the targets, then plain-vanilla optical surveillence ought to suffice to tell where they came from. True, we might not be able to defend against a single attack wave, but it ought to be possible to prevent future waves based on such observations. It’ll also make it somewhat easier to spot future drone launch sites once we know what form they take.
What %age of our politicians are aware of all the above and have any of the ‘big bosses’ ever thought about the implications — or are they to frightened tolet it into the media. It is unbelievable that there is so little public appreciation of the possibilities.!!!! Or is someone going to tell me to belt up?
Everything reminds me of my Novel. (a great headline in the Onion a weeks back)
In my Novel have yet another new (and highly fictional) use for UAVs. I can’t tell you what that is because its a super duper double dippy secret known only to me and certain select Agents — all with a licence to kill my mood with their rejection letters!
But seriously, this is not like WWII where countries actually had the resources to actually conquer the USA. These bozos have the resources to at the most, mimic a bad day in London during the blitz and with NO danger of a followup invasion. I say, get a grip (If any of you have lost yours; actually it seems like mostly thinking people here.)
Yes, many people (sadly) can be killed and harmed. Property damage and loss could be high in cost but this is not anything like what England faced and yet we’re running around like Chicken Little. Again, get a grip. Fear is our greatest enemy. These bastards are, as they correctly title themselves “terrorists.“
They are able to harm — how do I put this so as not to minimize the terrible loss of those who lost someone on 911 — I lost my father in an accident so I can hardly imagine — but, they can’t harm our NATION as an entity unless we harm ourselves, no matter how terrible individual losses may be, that’s the fact. Again, think of what people in Lodon must have gone through during the Blitz — sorry but there is no comparison.
As to why we haven’t seen this: I think they like the certanty of the human delivery system and they’d be wanting to do some experimentation somewhere. Maybe the FBI should switch from keeping track of flight schools and start keeping tabs on model airplane clubs and hobby shop patrons.
9/11 wasn’t that bad compared to some big WWII air raids either but you wouldn’t want it to happen again!!
What this doesn’t say is how do we stop a mass raid by UAVs using GPS guidance to attack crowded areas. Do we all carry a shotgun?
“9/11 wasn’t that bad compared to some big WWII air raids either but you wouldn’t want it to happen again!!“
Well Of course we wouldn’t want that to happen again! What the … ???
Certainly you seek to make me sound like some uncaring person unconcerned with doing what we can to prevent harm. Where the do you get off? And how could you honestly think that? Geeeezzeee!!!!
We’re being pumped up with the rhetoric that this a war. This terrorism crap is not a war — a war is where some big frigging army backed by the wealth of a nation or nations is a threat such that our nation can be taken over. A war is, Napoleon marching across Europe. Japan was printing dollars for use in the US when they expected to take us over. No wait, that was Mexican Pesos I saw with the Emperors mug (Japan planned to grab Panama and work their way North) but you get the point. They had the means. We persevered and won.
Surely you do not think that these terrorists can destroy or take over the US? Do you have any idea how BIG we are compared to any and all terrorist groups? If not — we’re frigging BIGGGG!!!! We’re the US damn it!
They can, sadly, harm us greatly, individually and in mass but this is not a war aimed at destroying the US. They are not trying to destroy or take over the US! God god, how could they?
These small groups are trying to drive Western influence out of what they mistakenly believe to be their (the wacko fundamentalists) lands, make points to gain adherents, and to terrorize people living there into buckling under to their stupid religious fanaticism.
A war was when we took over Iraq — we have the means to conquer — they don’t. Not even well funded, well armed whole nations such as Iran! let alone kooks with so little resources that they have to steal our planes to crash into us!
All the same, if you got the impression we should not do everything we can about any and all terrorist attacks, you didn’t read my last post right and you sure as heck don’t understand me or the respect I have for the law enforcement folks actively keeping us safe.
Perhaps it is knowing what our parents went through when the fate of our great nation was ACTUALLY in doubt that makes me a little dismissive of such concerns today from outside threats. (Unless you’re talking about China or a consortium of Russia and some other players — now that’s a whole ‘nother matter.) Even then, that President didn’t play manipulative games with our fears but rather said, “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.“
… as if anyone cares about my stupid rants. :-0
If a determined group or groups, with fanatical, financial backing would attempt this, it could happen. Most of the time WE tend to argue and speculate, then when it happens We are at a loss and tend to point fingers. It is food for thought that apparently They(terrorist) would attempt this and just to rub our faces in the dung. They, jihadist, muslim fundamentalist are really attemting to destroy our culture and way of life, by whatever means possible.
I have been using UAV’s with crap-filled paper bags to assault my neighbors. It has been working beautifully so far. I am working on a prototype “diahrea cannon” which can be activated by eating a can of refried beans. I will keep you all posted on my progress.
I have been using UAV’s with crap-filled paper bags to assault my neighbors. It has been working beautifully so far. I am working on a prototype “diahrea cannon” which can be activated by eating a can of refried beans. I will keep you all posted on my progress.
Somehow so many in the west just do not get it. Starting in the 1950’s muslim fundamentalists have been plotting the overthrow of western civilizations. They constantly plot. “They” are not any one country. They are thousands of radical extremists in many nations who believe that by divine intervention they will drestroy all non muslims on earth.
If they possess small warheads removed from both obsolete tactical field artillary shells and taken from old fashioned “Merves” they just need a handful of small nuclear explosions in cities to create worldwide panic, collapse stock markets, ruin the value of currency and drive oil price well over $100 a barrel.
That would unleash hidden sympathisers all acrossthe USA who would attack water supplies, electric grids, schools, oil pipelines etc
This is world war all right. Though our enemy is not wearing uniforms or following any Geneva Conventions.
The Muslims started planning the destruction of the Twin Towers in 1987. It took them 14 years to pull it off. And they have many more things planned.
Loose lips sink ships.
Maybe the terrorists are traing whales to carry bombs to the US and their C3 is a little off. That’s why whales keep beaching themselves. Have you ever had to remove a dead whale from a beach? Talk about a dirty bomb!
They can hit us and hurt us. They cannot defeat us. We will do that to ourselves. This nation is the most divided population the world has ever seen, Everything seems to be split right down the middle, and our resolve to protect ourselves is no different.
It completely confounds me how many people have forgoten how it FELT on 9/11. Yeah everyone seems to remember the event, but few seem to remember the feeling. How can we still be so divided? On 9/12 we seemed to speak with a single voice. Democrats and Republicans stood and cheered when G.W. Bush told the world “You are either with us, or your against us.” By the end of March it seemed half of congress was against us. Bombs are not our biggest threat.….division is.
Until we can make the hard decision to wipe out those who still support terrorists (Iran, Syria, most of the ______stan countries, Korea, and maybe even Russia)we will continue to worry about what might come to be. Nukes are our biggest fear and our greatest weapon. We need to remember where the button is.
OOOOh I remember exactly how I felt that day.
OOOOh I recall clearly how the congress gathered together at the foot of the front steps to make their proclaimations on national TV.
OOOOh I vividly recall how the democratic congressmen begain to walk away thinking that little bite of showmanship was over, only to discover that all the republicans stayed behind to sing God Bless America. Since that point on democrates have been hammering away at the 9/11 unity. Why?
Because we have traitors in all 3 branches of our government. Go ahead and see how many congressmen recieved money from the Arabs during election time.
The answer is not A-bombing them to kingdom come. Their nations sit over loose faults that could cause catastrophic problems for the rest of the world.
The answer is P.W.C.; passive weather control.
Pollution changes the electrical constant between the earth and sky. the 4 biggest polluters are U.S., China, Russia, Middle East-they burn off gas deposits day and night.
If we shut down america one day a week, the pollution constant drops, which changes the eletrometic flux between earth and sky, which changes the configuration of the jet stream.
we can by simply taking one day off work (completely shut down except for emergency servies), each week to alter the jet stream, forcing typhons to crash into China, and terrible drought & dust storms in the moslem countries. Tremendous ice storms would occur in Russia. All these things would drastically alter the economic balance of power in our favor.
Funny, you guys in the US still believe it was terrorists that masterminded 9/11.
Most of you cant see it on the world stage as a perfect catalyst for a resource grab in iraq.
Your media leads you, your governement ‘protects’ you by eroding your rights, fear is the weapon here, your own.
Wake up.
Nations fall, of course. Nothing is forever. But America is not a Nation as much as it is a belief. America is defined by its freedom and it defines freedom. You can destroy buildings, you can destroy leaders, soldiers, and people… but the desire for freedom cannot be killed. That is why the terrorists will fail.
HELLO FRIENDS, I AM A CITIZEN OF A COUNTRY WHICH IS ONE OF THE POOREST NATION OA ASIA THAT IS BANGLADESH.WHAT EVER THE CONDITION I AM PROUD OF MY MOTHERLAND.I AM BOTHERED TO WRITE BECAUSE, MY MOTHERLAND IS ALSO AFFECTED BY ALL THIS FUNDAMENTALISM TO A VERY LIMITED SCALE. THE BAD GUYS HAS ONLY I GUESS 3% SUPPORT OF OUR POPULATION CAUSE, WE ALL ARE PEACE LOVING.IN THIS BATTLE WHO WIN HARDLY MATTERS TO ME BECAUSE MOST OF MY PEOPLE ARE FIGHTING FOR THEIR EXISTANCE.TO ME, ITS A STUPID ACT-KILLING EACH OTHER KNOWING FULLY THAT NONE CAN WIN THOUGH BOTH SIDE PREECH THAT THEY ARE WINNING.TO MAKE MY POSITION CLEAR– I DO NOT SUPPORT THE US ATTACK ON SOVREIGN NATIONS WITH THE EXCUSE TO CONTROLE TERRORISM AND AT THE SAME TIME THE KILLING OF INNOCENT CIVILIAN BY THE EXTREMIST GROUPS(ISLAM DOES NOT PERMIT THAT).THANKS FOR PATIENCE READING.MAY ALLAH BLESS US ALL.
here’s an easy answer to all this: shotguns and skeet shooting lessons for all.