In what way would that not immediately escalate tensions?
Credible sources claim it's very likely Iran is working with Chinese satellite data (that is also possibly available commercially but they would be unlikely allowed to obtain it without government approval). That of course in addition to Russian help that the US knows very well about and does, again, nothing at all.
I'm responding to the assertion that they would choose this route specifically to avoid increasing tensions.
> That of course in addition to Russian help that the US knows very well about and does, again, nothing at all.
Isn't the US currently involved in a trade war and toppling various administrations around the world due to these tensions?
> Isn't the US currently involved in a trade war and toppling various administrations around the world due to these tensions?
Which administrations? They are verbally attacking the UK, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Canada, raising and lowering tariffs randomly, if there is some grand plan in all of this it's hidden very well.
Of course I know about Venezuela and Cuba, but it's quite a stretch to claim that the US is aggressive towards them because of the tensions with Russia or China. If there was a coherent strategy, support for Ukraine would be a big part of that, but US support has ceased in the last year.
Who said anything about that? I'm referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93United_States_tr...
> They are verbally attacking the UK, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Canada, raising and lowering tariffs randomly, if there is some grand plan in all of this it's hidden very well.
The tariffs are more than verbal attacks and the ostensible lack of a grand plan doesn't change the reality of what's happening.
> Of course I know about Venezuela and Cuba,
Yes, that's what I was referring to, and Iran obviously.
> it's quite a stretch to claim that the US is aggressive towards them because of the tensions with Russia or China
That claim hasn't been made. I'm just pointing out that they're not the passive spectators unable to take any action like was suggested above with questions like "Well what would they do?" and the suggestions they would do "nothing" like they had done before.
> If there was a coherent strategy,
Again, having a plan or a strategy isn't important for the question at hand.
China also views the US as a strategic rival and would love the opportunity to take us down a peg.
Don't think that America's strategic opponents -- Russia, North Korea, Iran, China, Algeria do not provide some mutual support, even if for purposes of survival, and view the US as threat. We have already taken out Venezuela, Lybia, Syria and flipped Armenia. Cuba, Iran are next on our radar, but we are active all over the world trying to flip pro-Russian/pro-Chinese governments to pro-US governments.
This is a powerful propaganda tool for Iran waiting to be used to full extent.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/23/nato_air_defenses/
The box is shipped internationally and sent to a package delivery company that gets a job to deliver the box to an abandoned lot near an airforce base in bumfuck nowhere America.
Once the package is delivered the deployment device cuts the top of the box open and lets the drone out. The drone flies in the direction of the base and then kamikazes on the nearest helicopter or aircraft shaped object that it sees.
What’s the counter to that?
Or imagine a scenario where a country launches a weather balloon full of the same kinds of drones but equipped with solar panels.
The weather balloon explodes like a piñata and deploys all these drones over a vast area. The drones are programmed to make their way to different military or infrastructure targets and stop and recharge high places out of site of people and maybe only travel at night. They slowly make their way over days or weeks until they find their target. They’re designed to self destruct if they sense that they’re being handled by a human being.
What’s the counter to that?
Everything else is a half measure.
Or this: https://www.epirusinc.com/electronic-warfare if you think the C-RAM would get saturated. Whether the weather balloon drones move at night is irrelevant if you stop the last move they need to make.
Militaries have been defending themselves against attacks for as long as they've been around. Drones will change the way they fight a little, but it isn't going to be some magic pill that modern militaries can't adapt to. Hiding an explosive and then blowing it up when your target is nearby? That's almost the same concept as assassinating someone with a car bomb. Putting it in an Amazon box and letting the drone go the final distance changes things a little, but militaries and governments were able to assassinate people remotely before drones.
Swarming attacks with cheap munitions? Saturating an enemy's defenses has been a thing at least since the time of the English Longbow. The longbow regiments would all shoot at the same time, and while you could dodge one arrow it was hard to dodge all of them.
Drones are new and will take some adapting to. If a military refuses to change then it probably will be disadvantaged. But the US military has been buying and testing drones for a while, and is already undergoing the adaptation. As it better understands cheap drones for offense, it necessarily gains a better understanding of what is needed for defense.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for the US attacking Iran. All I'm saying is that the US military is not about to lose the conflict because of this particular tactic.
How's that going to work when the drone hugs the ground, only rising a bit to hop over walls? Are you going to flatten everything a mile around every base, and shoot at head height with zero warning?
> Leonidas EWS
How's that going to work when the drone doesn't show up on radar and has fiber-optic controls?
If drones were this easy to counter, we wouldn't be seeing them play such a massive role in the Ukraine war. The whole problem is that drones massively change how a conflict works, and the entire US military is designed for pre-drone warfare. It remains to be seen whether they can adapt quickly enough fast enough for this conflict - the US doesn't exactly have a great track record when it comes to asymmetrical warfare...
Yes. You've obviously never seen a C-RAM in action. They will put 20 mm rounds in any angle that isn't restricted. The rounds go far beyond a mile when fired into the air. Only a few hit the target, dozens/hundreds of rounds just sail off into the distance, and if it hits a village down the road, well that's just too bad. Shooting downward into the dirt is probably a better arrangement because ricochets won't go as far.
> How's that going to work when the drone doesn't show up on radar and has fiber-optic controls?
Tiny drones do show up on radar. Tiny birds show up on radar. Making a quadcopter or similar drone stealthy kills some of the value proposition on making them cheaply, and physically shrinking them lowers the amount of destructive payload they can carry. Fiber optics don't help against a directed energy weapon- the microwaves burn out the electronics; it's not a jammer, it's a heat ray. And if there was a fiber optic line, that means the attacker is close enough to be struck directly rather than some long-distance control or autonomous program.
Before you think you've solved warfare and that a modern military can't possibly defend against your brilliant tactics, learn about what warfare is actually like and how the systems work. A lot of your ideas have already been thought out. A loss of a single helicopter is not really an indictment of the US military's defense; the fact that there's only one of these stories vs. the many that have come out of Ukraine indicate that a US base isn't nearly as vulnerable as the Russians have been. While Ukraine is punching far above its weight, their adversary is hampered by (more) corrupt acquisition processes, poorly trained conscripts, and overall bad decision making.
And attacking civilian targets is a violation of the law of armed conflict. It would be a war crime if a country were to use drones (or any weapon) to intentionally attack civilians who are not participating in the fight.
I don't even know why people are still arguing. The US has been bombing Iran for nearly a month now. If drones and drone tactics were a particular weakness, why hasn't the US lost more equipment because of it? Out of 25 losses recorded for the US only one has been because of a drone. The US has lost more due to crashes and friendly fire than enemy drone action. Until drones are more effective than just someone not paying attention then it's hard to make an argument that there is a serious weakness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_an...
It becomes defense in depth though, perimeter defense is no longer enough. Thats kinda new.
So realistically a laser drone weapon can eliminate just a couple of drones until a third or a fourth one comes through and destroys your turret.
And then all drones tracked by satellite so any drone that doesnt show up gets shot down anywhere over a large geographic area.
Using cheaper drones to hunt down expensive drones.
Or of course, just eagles.
I bet you could do aiming and firing in less than 0.1 seconds with nearly 100% accuracy in the 50 meter range which would enable ~10 destroyed drones per unit if the drones are going 150 km/h.
Shotgun pellets are also basically entirely safe when shot into the air as they have low falling velocity enabling usage when shooting over populated areas.
Then two drones approach from opposite sides at 200 MPH. Your emplacement costs more than $200 and can only fire in one direction at a time.
Or, as we've seen in Ukraine, once your disposable low-cost drones have precisely identified a high-value, high-effectiveness static emplacement, you send in a cruise missile to clear it out, and then the drones continue sweeping forward.
A drone that can go 300 km/h is way more than 100 $, you are in the thousands of dollar range at that point. Turret wins if it blows up one.
Also, it could probably blow up more than one since at 300 km/h you would get 0.5 seconds to respond and I was arguing 0.1 seconds per target anywhere in a full 360. 0.25 seconds for anywhere on a full 360 would be enough for 2 and that is within human capability.
> you send in a cruise missile to clear it out
Cool, you sent in a hundred thousand dollar cruise missile to blow up a thousand dollar turret. Turret wins. Also you can put wheels on the turret, so it might not even be there.
Now you are probably going to argue about a drone that goes 1000 km/h at which point what you have is a cruise missile which costs tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. At that point the entire argument about drones being too cheap to cost-effectively stop is moot.
Or you might argue that the drones just go high. 50 m is a ludicrously low flight ceiling. But then your drone can not explode on contact. You could use a drone that drops explosives, but that still requires flying over the target. High flying drones are easier to detect, and you could counter that with flying shotgun drones or turret mounted machine guns which have ranges in the hundreds to thousands of meters and would still only cost a few dollars of ammo per kill.
My main point is that bullets can easily disable a cheap drone and are much cheaper than a cheap drone. You just need a cost-effective way of deploying mass bullets against mass drones. Logical answers are ground deployments around targets or drones with bullets that cost-effectively shoot down drones without bullets.
You will then likely get into a arms race of fighter drones to protect your bomber drones. And scale up your drones until they are not easily bullet-destroyable. But then your drone costs have likely increased to the point where anti-air cannons shooting 100 $ explosive shells are cost-effective. And so on and so forth.
Nope. The calculus is not about individual components, but about overall cost of the entire system and all of its associated support. What was the material, labor, and opportunity cost to install the turret? What was it protecting (which is now presumably destroyed by drones, or captured by the enemy)? You're also still assuming that you're facing off against guerillas fighting an asymmetrical war on a shoestring budget, but that's not the case. Whatever force you're fighting can be trivially bankrolled by a peer power who is happy to bankroll them to make you bleed to death. China will be happy to build plenty of cruise missiles, and plenty more drones.
You have presented no evidence as to the overall cost of this mystical unstoppable drone swarm. In contrast, we do know that shotguns, machine guns, and bullets are cheap, mass-produced, and mass-deployed by the tens of millions.
The key unknown of my proposal is the bulk cost and production of a small automated turret or fighter drone that can economically and flexibly deploy cheap bullet interceptors to asymmetrically defeat expensive drones. However, the operational requirements for such devices are simple and within the range of existing technology.
There is no clear evidence that cheap explosive drone swarms are magically cheaper than cheap fighter drone swarms or cheap ground drone swarms. It could easily go either way and without a rigorous actual analysis you and I are both unqualified to determine what is actually dominant.
We have these things called wheels. Or you could mount it on a drone.
> Meanwhile your guns shoot birds and once in a while - an occasional bystander
We are discussing protecting military bases or military assets.
> Some drones just drop grenades
That requires flying above the target. See counter-point 1.
Please put in the minimal effort needed to follow through at least a few steps of argument and counter-argument in your head. I assure you I am not putting in as little effort into my arguments as you did.
Can they be hacked, or duped into firing at friendly aircraft?
How will they deal with the enemy adapting their drones to have camoflage?
There's no way automatic turret mounted shotguns are the solution to this problem.
It simply isn't economical to produce, install and maintain all of these things, and now you've sunk a massive amount of resources into this infrastructure when the enemy doesn't even really have to launch a real attack.
When drones become cheaper then it’s a problem.
Without writing an essay, I can definitely see automatic turtent mounted shotguns as an effective solution.
Now picture an American military base. They're pretty big, right?
Now imagine how many of these shotgun towers you need to secure the paremeter based on the firing range of these weapons, then imagine how many you shotgun towers you need to defend the interior of the base from drones that don't attack from the side but instead come in from the middle because they can fly.
How much ammunition can each of these shotgun towers hold? What happens when it runs out? Does a human have to go over there and refill it? What kind of equipment do they use to do that? How much time does this take and how much fuel does it consume? What is the opportunity cost of this?
Now that's just one military installation. How many does the US have? Are you going to put these shotgun towers outside the homes of high ranking military officers? The roads that they take to go to work?
What's stopping someone from doing this kind of drone attack on the highway to the military installation timed with the morning or evening commute? What's the counter to that?
Automated shotguns are not an economically viable defense to the threats that I described in my previous post.
Yeah, doable. I went to a clay pigeon range last week (company outing). These are targets that move quite fast. They don't spring out from the same spot and some roll over the ground. I had never handled a gun before. I am 50, with the attendant poor eyesight and lack of twitch reflexes.
And yet, I still nailed 20/25 moving targets. A turret with a shotgun is going to hit much more than that.
But why go through all that when you can just have someone in the country launch it, or drop it off?
In the case of the AWS scenario someone driving by who decides to nick it?
Or the courier puts the box down upside down?
Just by the way is a package delivery company going to be willing to deliver a package to an abandoned lot?
Your solar panel equipped, "rest and recharge" idea is interesting.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/iran-negotiate...
DoD is trying to find US companies that can do drone detection and it isn't going well
Narcissism-speak is easy, once you have figured them out.
For example if they accuse others of something, that means they have done exactly what they are accusing others of.
Iran has thrice the population of Ukraine and 1.5x (nominal) to 3x (PPP) the GDP. With Ukraine building 23560 drones for every F35 the US is building, it would be quite reasonable to expect Iran to be able to build a few thousand per F35 ass well. Iran already has a fairly mature drone industry supplying the Russian side of the UA-RU, after all.
In other words: If it were to come to a race of attrition, the US can't afford to lose a single one. Even ignoring the massive cost difference, F35s simply cannot be constructed fast enough.
In Lala land.
The US has plenty of bases in the area, but considering the ease of an attack and the general anti-US sentiment of the region, projecting power into the Middle East is going to become an awful lot more difficult...
Trump made a very strategic error that he can’t easily get out of.
US borrowing trillions in debt to fund other people’s wars. This level of stupidity is Bush in Afhanistan.
I'm not sure what anyone can do about that but that to me is my biggest fear about the future of all this technology.
And these are either autonomous drones (more expensive?), or fpv with the fiber optic line out the back - either way you have to get them in range without being detected somehow.
In short, i think this is an unrealistic scenario - fun to imagine as a horror-sci-fi idea but unlikely to be deployed. Just one opinion.
China already has created a UAV that is designed to launch at least 100 drones. If they can make that 1000 drones and then fly out 1000 of these motherships at one time, that's already 1 million.
And yes the drones would be autonomous, there's no reason for any person to be controlling them in the age of AI.
But also, 1000 carrier drones is a lot easier to shoot down than 1mil drones.
It's much more effective than a cruise missile because you can just blow up weak points on bridges, buildings, take out entire military bases, etc. Even 1000 of these drones would be extremely effective but 1 million would be devastating.
Because that’s an abhorrent thing to do. Because then you have to occupy people who don’t want to be occupied. Because the nation you just destroyed has allies who have the same weapons. Because that nation has the same weapons. Because killing “all the politicians and all the generals” will become impossible immediately after the first time this is used - assuming it’s not already impossible today.
Have you seen the price tag on some of the US jets? Are they not doing just this?
The US spent $11.3b in the first six days of israel’s war with iran. So not an unprecedented amount of money, just a lot to put into a single attack that could fail, and that mostly kills humans, and that requires a shit ton of logistics to make happen.
They are sometimes.
get real please.
We may even need to revisit what air superiority means in the age of long range, relatively stealthy drones that are cheap to produce using widely available tech.
I also would expect Russian and Chinese Satellite intel being fed to Iran to locate these types of targets, again exactly like how the NATO powers have been providing intel to Ukraine.