This is the type of stuff Ukraine has been doing against Russian assets. It's effectifve asymmetrical warfare when you lose air superiority.
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.
China views the US as an adversary. They would very much like to reduce America's sphere of influence and are cognizant of the fact that we might end up in a war in the medium term future. The US bleeding immense amounts of money and military assets in Iran is great for China's relative strength; it's in their interest to increase those costs in ways that don't escalate immediate tensions with America. Sharing targeting and other intel is one of the more effective ways of doing that.
And what would the US do with that 'tension'? FWIW China is already helping Russia in their war against Ukraine and the West for several years. What did the US do? Nothing at all.
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 don't know - is allowing the sale of previously sanctioned Russian oil a trade war?
> 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.
> 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 is allied with Iran and has long term trade relations with the country, importing large amounts of oil from Iran, and supplying Iran with air defense systems and other military and economic support.
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.
I can already see Iran making FPV compilation "Death faces of American soldiers" like Ukrainian do, where target is to show face of terrified soldier from the last frame of FPV camera, right before FPV exploded. This is would be a weapon of massive demoralization when relatives of soldiers will be sifting through Iranian Telegram channels just to find video with their relative right before being killed or maimed.
This is a powerful propaganda tool for Iran waiting to be used to full extent.
Imagine a small quadcopter with deployment and transportation device packaged discretely inside an Amazon box.
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.
The usual thing that most of us do is not do things that make other folks want to blow our vehicles up. That's how I've avoided getting my stuff blown up, at least.
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...
> Are you going to flatten everything a mile around every base, and shoot at head height with zero warning?
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.
That first paragraph is a good argument for using this defense in occupied land, less so for domestic bases per the hypothetical. It becomes laughably bad if the target is changed from military to civilian; the defense seems likely to cause as much or more damage.
This is partly why most military bases are not in a city- open space makes it easier to defend. (Another reason is that the dangerous chemicals and loud training make residents hate the base even in peacetime.)
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...
I think going low-tech and deploy netting around critical things would be the most effective. Sure they are a pain but they'll catch drones before they reach any targets.
Park your aircraft in hangars. And hope you hid your tracks well enough once the generals start eyeing their almost expired bunker busters with a twinkle in their eye
Automatic turret-mounted anti-air shotguns. Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell.
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.
> Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell.
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.
Drones that can move that fast have extremely little cargo capacity for explosive charges and it's not fast enough to simply use the kinetic energy of the drone for much.
> Then two drones approach from opposite sides at 200 MPH.
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.
> Cool, you sent in a hundred thousand dollar cruise missile to blow up a thousand dollar turret. Turret wins.
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.
The argument is literally that it is problematic to send 100 k$ interceptors to stop 1 k$ drones and then you turn about and argue you can end 100 k$ cruise missiles to stop 1 k$ turrets. Your argument is inconsistent with the entire premise.
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.
Which only protect a small area, so drones just need to target less obvious things. Meanwhile your guns shoot birds and once in a while - an occasional bystander. Attackers are always advantaged since you have to protect _everything_ and they only need to target what's left unprotected. Some drones just drop grenades, I somehow don't see your shotgun hitting either the drone (too high) or a grenade (too fast and small).
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.
How many shotguns? How do they reload? What happens when they run out of ammo?
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.
What's their supply chain for being restocked with ammo? Is that supply chain susceptible to drone attacks along any part? Then you still lose eventually.
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.
> Automatic turret-mounted anti-air shotguns. Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell.
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.
Mandatory package screenings to detect explosives? I don't know if that's technically feasible at scale, or if that's already implemented (and I'd prefer not to ask that kind of question to Google/ChatGPT)
What else would anyone expect from a combative elderly person? It's always "I don't need help!" as they continually find something new to fuck up. The only difference here is there were a bunch of fools who thought it was a good idea to put this type of person in charge of our country instead of forcing him into a memory care home.
won't happen for now, drones are generally too slow for that. Unless it's stationary/on the ground. Ukrainians did manage to shoot down 2 russian KA-52 helicopters mid-flight last week though.
Ukraine is currently building 4.5 million drones per year. That's one drone every 30 seconds. Lockheed Martin delivered a record 191 F35s in 2025. That's less than one F35 every 1.91 days.
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.
This assume that all F35 are sitting on unprotected fields waiting for all those drones to come. Which is utter BS. Sure the US can loose few in unfortunate circumstances and it wont matter much.
A squadron of F-35s is worth more than the Moskva. Russia had to fight hard to regain the title of biggest loser and it could lose that in a single incident. But more than the financial loss the loss of having invested in something stupid is felt when you can't use any of the related blunders as you intended and have to keep them at a distance from the cheap practical warfare.
It's even worse, actually. This attack seems to be done by a regular quadcopter, so suddenly you have to be worried about your $100M aircraft being destroyed by a $500 drone if your base security isn't absolutely perfect.
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...
V-weapons were also an encounterable weapon which could strike from beyond range. Massive boondoggle though, just a very expensive expensive way to deliver very few explosives; waste of industrial output.
Look into how much current war costs already. And there is no end in sight yet. Loosing one F35 is insignificant (well maybe it will hurt someone's ego but that is about it).
The biggest security threat any country has is if an adversary sends 1-10 million drones at once, each with a small grenade on it, and overwhelms a city. They could literally target individual politicians or weak spots on infrastructure like buildings or bombs and almost nothing could stop it except possibly an EMP.
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.
1-10 million drones. At $400 a pop that’s $400,000,000-$4,000,000,000. A lot to throw at a single attack when you don’t actually know what defenses are in place. Maybe there is an EMP. Are you willing to spend a billion dollars to find out, while also murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians?
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.
This isn't a game of Command and Conquer with fog of war turned on. Of course they would have intel on exactly what they are going to attack. One cruise missile is about $4 million.
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.
So then my $400/each price tag is wrong - it’ll be much higher. If nothing else, the high price of gpus and ram might be saving us from an attack like this lol.
But also, 1000 carrier drones is a lot easier to shoot down than 1mil drones.
An attack like this might not be today, but in 10-20 years? If a country can develop this technology where multiple cities or military bases are completely overwhelmed by a swarm of drones, and all the politicians and generals are taken out by AI-controlled drones, why wouldn't they invest in it? As far as I can tell, unless some sort of localized EMP is developed, I don't know how an attack like this can be stopped. Maybe some sort of RF beam but I'm sure the devices can be shielded from that.
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.
> all the politicians and generals are taken out by AI-controlled drones, why wouldn't they invest in it?
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.
Jets aren’t single-use. A better comparison would be something like a tomahawk missile, which costs ~$2mil each (not counting r&d costs, launcher costs, getting them there costs, etc).
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.
Right now one of the limits is just controlling that many let along sourcing it. Putting that many actively controlled drones in one area at once and you'll swamp the bandwidth.
The drones in Ukraine largely use miles-long spools of fiber optic cable, so while I agree that sourcing is a problem, bandwidth likely isn't. If you want to be creative there's probably a bunch of hybrid wireless/wired/semi-autonomous configurations that would allow for minimizing bandwidth requirements in practice, but it would still fall apart as soon as a reasonably powerful jammer is turned on.
Feels like a massed attack using fiber optics would have lots of problems with drones getting tangled in the cables of those in front of/above them or cutting the cable. The trouble with making them autonomous in a city is that means more sensors and compute on board which raises the cost. It's a hard problem.
They would just be autonomous. Setting a GPS (or alternate system) coordinate is pretty simple enough. Individual targets could just be AI controlled at this point, or 10 years in the future.
This is the type of stuff Ukraine has been doing against Russian assets. It's effectifve asymmetrical warfare when you lose air superiority.
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.
Russia for sure but why would China take such an active position?
China views the US as an adversary. They would very much like to reduce America's sphere of influence and are cognizant of the fact that we might end up in a war in the medium term future. The US bleeding immense amounts of money and military assets in Iran is great for China's relative strength; it's in their interest to increase those costs in ways that don't escalate immediate tensions with America. Sharing targeting and other intel is one of the more effective ways of doing that.
> Sharing targeting and other intel is one of the more effective ways of doing that.
In what way would that not immediately escalate tensions?
And what would the US do with that 'tension'? FWIW China is already helping Russia in their war against Ukraine and the West for several years. What did the US do? Nothing at all.
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.
> And what would the US do with that 'tension'?
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?
I don't know - is allowing the sale of previously sanctioned Russian oil a trade war?
> 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.
> I don't know - is allowing the sale of previously sanctioned Russian oil a trade war?
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 is allied with Iran and has long term trade relations with the country, importing large amounts of oil from Iran, and supplying Iran with air defense systems and other military and economic support.
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.
China depends on Iranian oil, I'm pretty sure they view that war as an attack on China by proxy, it's a big deal.
Because how much oil they (used to) get from Iran
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I can already see Iran making FPV compilation "Death faces of American soldiers" like Ukrainian do, where target is to show face of terrified soldier from the last frame of FPV camera, right before FPV exploded. This is would be a weapon of massive demoralization when relatives of soldiers will be sifting through Iranian Telegram channels just to find video with their relative right before being killed or maimed.
This is a powerful propaganda tool for Iran waiting to be used to full extent.
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There was this The Register story, a couple of days ago[0]. It says we can't handle drone swarms.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/23/nato_air_defenses/
Imagine a small quadcopter with deployment and transportation device packaged discretely inside an Amazon box.
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?
Something very similar to this was pulled of by Ukraine last year
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
The usual thing that most of us do is not do things that make other folks want to blow our vehicles up. That's how I've avoided getting my stuff blown up, at least.
Everything else is a half measure.
This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_C-RAM With a software update to track drones. They can hit birds and mortars, they can take out a drone.
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.
> Centurion C-RAM
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...
> Are you going to flatten everything a mile around every base, and shoot at head height with zero warning?
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.
That first paragraph is a good argument for using this defense in occupied land, less so for domestic bases per the hypothetical. It becomes laughably bad if the target is changed from military to civilian; the defense seems likely to cause as much or more damage.
This is partly why most military bases are not in a city- open space makes it easier to defend. (Another reason is that the dangerous chemicals and loud training make residents hate the base even in peacetime.)
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...
Yes, the US seems to be fighting the last war - both strategically and tactically.
I think going low-tech and deploy netting around critical things would be the most effective. Sure they are a pain but they'll catch drones before they reach any targets.
Laser turrets near highest-value targets?
It becomes defense in depth though, perimeter defense is no longer enough. Thats kinda new.
Laser takes as much as 10s to disable a single plastic drone at a distance of ~400 meters. The slowest drone flies at 20 m/s.
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.
I would imagine the counter is computer vision defense systems that cover an entire base. And then eventually infrastructure.
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.
Park your aircraft in hangars. And hope you hid your tracks well enough once the generals start eyeing their almost expired bunker busters with a twinkle in their eye
Automatic turret-mounted anti-air shotguns. Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell.
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.
> Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell.
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.
Drones that can move that fast have extremely little cargo capacity for explosive charges and it's not fast enough to simply use the kinetic energy of the drone for much.
> Then two drones approach from opposite sides at 200 MPH.
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.
> Cool, you sent in a hundred thousand dollar cruise missile to blow up a thousand dollar turret. Turret wins.
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.
The argument is literally that it is problematic to send 100 k$ interceptors to stop 1 k$ drones and then you turn about and argue you can end 100 k$ cruise missiles to stop 1 k$ turrets. Your argument is inconsistent with the entire premise.
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.
Which only protect a small area, so drones just need to target less obvious things. Meanwhile your guns shoot birds and once in a while - an occasional bystander. Attackers are always advantaged since you have to protect _everything_ and they only need to target what's left unprotected. Some drones just drop grenades, I somehow don't see your shotgun hitting either the drone (too high) or a grenade (too fast and small).
> Which only protect a small area
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.
How many shotguns? How do they reload? What happens when they run out of ammo?
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.
I suspect they will run out of ammo much after the enemy runs out of drones.
What's their supply chain for being restocked with ammo? Is that supply chain susceptible to drone attacks along any part? Then you still lose eventually.
I don’t think so as shotgun shells are cheaper and smaller than drones.
When drones become cheaper then it’s a problem.
Great questions, I will reinstall Factorio for research purposes and get right back to you.
They might reload the same way semi-automatic shotguns reload.
Without writing an essay, I can definitely see automatic turtent mounted shotguns as an effective solution.
Imagine you're playing tower defense.
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.
And some Canada Gooses too?
How long till Canada wires up gooses brains and straps then with bombs for the ultimate biodrones? They already swarm naturally in attack formation!
trust the gooses
> Automatic turret-mounted anti-air shotguns. Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell.
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.
Clay shooting is fun. What happens when all the clays are released at the same time, not one at a time as you shoot? And if you miss one, you die.
Then how come on Ukraine / Russian front drones rule. would not be the case if those were so easy to shoot down
Customs inspection. An xray paired with some ai.
But why go through all that when you can just have someone in the country launch it, or drop it off?
Ironically, Ukraine sort of did this to Russia and destroyed several long range strategic nuclear bombers.
> What’s the counter to that?
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.
Mandatory package screenings to detect explosives? I don't know if that's technically feasible at scale, or if that's already implemented (and I'd prefer not to ask that kind of question to Google/ChatGPT)
The counter to this and more such scenarios is letting the world alone
I feel like this was a plot/subplot of either Diamond Age or one of the Gibson novels
" Trump said that “we don’t need help,” adding that the “last person we need help from is Zelenskyy.” "
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/iran-negotiate...
What else would anyone expect from a combative elderly person? It's always "I don't need help!" as they continually find something new to fuck up. The only difference here is there were a bunch of fools who thought it was a good idea to put this type of person in charge of our country instead of forcing him into a memory care home.
I heard through the grape vine that the US did actually ask Ukraine for help on drone defense.
DoD is trying to find US companies that can do drone detection and it isn't going well
That means it's exactly from Zelensky that he wants help.
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.
Was mentioned how it's a medevac heli (blurred it)
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How long until an F35 is destroyed by a drone?
We already have rocket powered autonomous drones capable of destroying fighter planes, they're called missiles.
won't happen for now, drones are generally too slow for that. Unless it's stationary/on the ground. Ukrainians did manage to shoot down 2 russian KA-52 helicopters mid-flight last week though.
There US has more then 600 of those with more coming. Losing one is insignificant.
Ukraine is currently building 4.5 million drones per year. That's one drone every 30 seconds. Lockheed Martin delivered a record 191 F35s in 2025. That's less than one F35 every 1.91 days.
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.
This assume that all F35 are sitting on unprotected fields waiting for all those drones to come. Which is utter BS. Sure the US can loose few in unfortunate circumstances and it wont matter much.
A squadron of F-35s is worth more than the Moskva. Russia had to fight hard to regain the title of biggest loser and it could lose that in a single incident. But more than the financial loss the loss of having invested in something stupid is felt when you can't use any of the related blunders as you intended and have to keep them at a distance from the cheap practical warfare.
>"A squadron of F-35s is worth more than the Moskva"
In Lala land.
Right, as measured in the new Petroclown basket currency.
~$100M/unit isn't exactly cheap to replace...
One $100M aircraft vs 2800 $35K drones. I think the future is nobody builds such kind of fighter jets again.
It's even worse, actually. This attack seems to be done by a regular quadcopter, so suddenly you have to be worried about your $100M aircraft being destroyed by a $500 drone if your base security isn't absolutely perfect.
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...
Wake me up when all F35 are sitting on airfields reachable by Iranian drones and unprotected and doing nothing but waiting to be hit
V-weapons were also an encounterable weapon which could strike from beyond range. Massive boondoggle though, just a very expensive expensive way to deliver very few explosives; waste of industrial output.
Not sure if that's intended as sarcasm. Losing a >$100M asset is far from insignificant.
Look into how much current war costs already. And there is no end in sight yet. Loosing one F35 is insignificant (well maybe it will hurt someone's ego but that is about it).
Oh the irony of US is the paper tiger like Russia and Iran is the underdog like Ukraine.
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.
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The biggest security threat any country has is if an adversary sends 1-10 million drones at once, each with a small grenade on it, and overwhelms a city. They could literally target individual politicians or weak spots on infrastructure like buildings or bombs and almost nothing could stop it except possibly an EMP.
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.
1-10 million drones. At $400 a pop that’s $400,000,000-$4,000,000,000. A lot to throw at a single attack when you don’t actually know what defenses are in place. Maybe there is an EMP. Are you willing to spend a billion dollars to find out, while also murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians?
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.
This isn't a game of Command and Conquer with fog of war turned on. Of course they would have intel on exactly what they are going to attack. One cruise missile is about $4 million.
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.
So then my $400/each price tag is wrong - it’ll be much higher. If nothing else, the high price of gpus and ram might be saving us from an attack like this lol.
But also, 1000 carrier drones is a lot easier to shoot down than 1mil drones.
An attack like this might not be today, but in 10-20 years? If a country can develop this technology where multiple cities or military bases are completely overwhelmed by a swarm of drones, and all the politicians and generals are taken out by AI-controlled drones, why wouldn't they invest in it? As far as I can tell, unless some sort of localized EMP is developed, I don't know how an attack like this can be stopped. Maybe some sort of RF beam but I'm sure the devices can be shielded from that.
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.
> all the politicians and generals are taken out by AI-controlled drones, why wouldn't they invest in it?
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.
> At $400 a pop that’s $400,000,000-$4,000,000,000. A lot to throw at a single attack when you don’t actually know what defenses are in place.
Have you seen the price tag on some of the US jets? Are they not doing just this?
Jets aren’t single-use. A better comparison would be something like a tomahawk missile, which costs ~$2mil each (not counting r&d costs, launcher costs, getting them there costs, etc).
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.
> Jets aren’t single-use.
They are sometimes.
Right now one of the limits is just controlling that many let along sourcing it. Putting that many actively controlled drones in one area at once and you'll swamp the bandwidth.
The drones in Ukraine largely use miles-long spools of fiber optic cable, so while I agree that sourcing is a problem, bandwidth likely isn't. If you want to be creative there's probably a bunch of hybrid wireless/wired/semi-autonomous configurations that would allow for minimizing bandwidth requirements in practice, but it would still fall apart as soon as a reasonably powerful jammer is turned on.
Feels like a massed attack using fiber optics would have lots of problems with drones getting tangled in the cables of those in front of/above them or cutting the cable. The trouble with making them autonomous in a city is that means more sensors and compute on board which raises the cost. It's a hard problem.
They would just be autonomous. Setting a GPS (or alternate system) coordinate is pretty simple enough. Individual targets could just be AI controlled at this point, or 10 years in the future.
GPSing your way through a city to targets is a big ask.
Aren't drones quite short-ranged, especially when carrying a payload?
>"1-10 million drones at once"
get real please.