International politics aside, what is this ban exactly about? I doubt that all GPUs or all ASICs will be banned to those countries. Is there some regulatory agency that defines what's an (advanced) AI chip? Do they go by transistor count, or by the amount of fast RAM?
Exports are obviously not banned... They added a cap and some additional restrictions on Poland and similar countries though
Specifically:
> Those on the tier two list will see the number of AI chips - called graphics processing units (GPUs) - capped at 50,000 unless they have a special license.
Impossible to say, as most people probably don't even know that their private key is stolen. I've personally seen it only once on a real certificate revocation. Yet another reason to have shorter lifespan.
It's a pretty narrow threat model for Alice to get her cert stolen by Bob, be completely unaware that this has happened, and the means Bob used only works once.
You wrote a lot of words to "explain" that this sort of a circuit is supposedly impossible (no filters here, except for inherent limitations of components):
Antenna->Amplify->Rectify->Headphones
It's a classic circuit, and yes it works. Given enough power it can be even replaced with a smoking hot dog (yes, a sausage), for example when directly touching the TX antenna.
Sure didn't and this is probably the fundamental misunderstanding the author had too. You can receive all the frequencies (this is easy and what you and the author are claiming is all you need to do). You cannot listen to all of them at once as the title suggests because it is impossible to demodulate it for all frequencies at once.
Nuance and understanding are important before you credulously say "well they say they built it so what they say must be true"
I'm just starting to really dig into learning radio and what not, but if it's tuned to a band where AM modulation is the norm, then wouldn't it work? The transmitters that push the amplitude above the noise floor(or squelch) will produce an audible frequency simply but pushing enough power at the human-perceptible frequency?
Well if you had enough different stations, you'd get white noise. I guess if you just listen to white noise you could say you're listening to everything at once.
The radio stations will interfere with each other. The more stations, the more interference.
It’s a classic yeah! [edit] The fact this works is because of the lack of filters or tuned circuits, its basically an amplified diode (you can even do without out it tbh)
But small correction, in this case it seems to be:
Antenna > Rectify > Amp > Headphones
Right? Ofc you can add more - rf or audio - amps between the antenna and headphones. But yeah. The lm386 is pretty interesting for this use, try it out, you will surprised what you will hear (from a mess of all nearby stations all mixed together to em emitting devices in your location and possibly ghosts (:p).
Too many people still don't understand C's greatest failure: the undefined behavior. Most people assume that if you write past an array then the result may be a program crash; but actually undefined behavior includes other wonderful options such as stealing all your money, encrypting all your files and extorting you for some bitcoin, or even partially destroying a nuclear isotopes processing facility. Undefined really means undefined, theoretically some demons may start flying out of your nose and it would be completely up to spec. If you think that this is justified by "performance gains" or some other nonsense then I really don't know what to tell you!
No, it doesn't. It means the C standard imposes no requirements. It does not mean the compiler becomes unconstrained by statutory law or physics, and if your compiler is actually malware then it is not politely waiting for undefined behaviour before injecting a payload.
The notorious nasal demons may not be in conflict with the C standard, but they are not going to actually happen, because they only exist in the imagination. The example is given to illustrate by absurdity that the scope of consequential defects is greater than "your program may crash", that's all. If you do wish to produce a similar effect then I suggest consuming a bowl of Buldak instant noodles whilst inducing a sneeze during compilation. Warning: your sinuses will not thank you. And cover your keyboard.
The biggest hazard with undefined behaviour is that the compiler is not required to issue warnings or errors when encountered.
Typically this view is proposed because a malicious attacker can actually make your program do all sorts of stuff you probably did not expect, including adding "functionality" that you did not include in your program.
The printed design has remained the same but the form factor has been pretty static for the last century or so. Things like bill readers are a big reason for that once they appeared it became a lot harder to swap around bill shapes.
I remember hearing that the Susan B Anthony dollar coin failed because there was no extra position in the coin drawer of cash registers to put it in. Can you image if every cash drawer now has to be redesigned to have different sized bills?
(I know, I know, it's not actually that big a deal. The drawers have removable inserts, but you get the point of it.)
(actually, on second though, automatic bill readers in vending machines, etc. would need a big retrofitting, that's probably much more a big deal).
The cash register issue I think could be papered over by just having the bills be smaller than the existing bills, ie $100s stay the same size and we cut off a bit of the bill for each denomination step downwards. That would keep them fitting in the drawer and be in line with the pattern of other countries who also make larger denominations physically larger.
1971 wasn't such a big deal. Between the 1930s and 1971 only foreign central banks could redeem their dollars in gold. So I would put the 'partial default' in 1933, if you care about gold.
But they had suspended convertibility of dollars into gold every so often before that. (And, of course, the dollar wasn't always about gold. They also experimented with silver and bimetalism.)
> But they had suspended convertibility of dollars into gold every so often before that.
They suspended redemptions of the certificated amount. You could not own gold until 1933 from 1974, but excluding of that, you can always convert your money into gold outside of the government if you want.
It's a classic undergraduate student mistake when learning computational complexity: "this problem is really hard, but I can represent it as SAT - well, it is NP-hard!". Whereas what you need is to represent SAT as an instance of your problem! Otherwise computing XOR of two bits would be NP-hard, as I can write a SAT formula to express it.
Even when you get the direction correct-- e.g. that you could encode an arbitrary SAT problem as an instance of your problem... that doesn't mean that in practice most instances of your problem can't be solved to an arbitrarily good approximation quickly or even solved optimally in a reasonable amount of time. It only means that in the worst case there is no efficient optimal solution or good approximation.
I've repeatedly encountered people using crappy solutions to problems because they read some result from complexity theory that made them think they couldn't do better. .. when in reality a slightly smarter algorithm does much better on average.
Consider for example the min cover problem: You have a set of bit vectors and you want to find the minimum collection where at least one vector is true for every bit. (e.g. optimizing a collection of tests). There is a simple greedy algorithm-- include the vector that covers the most yet-uncovered bits. There is a proof that this algorithm achieves the best possible worst case approximation error.
But in practice this is a useless result. Worst case approximation error is driven by pathological inputs. It's easy to come up with modifications of the greedy algorithm that significantly improve the quality of the solutions on average (or at least do in the sorts of real problems I've applied it to).
> we can't do any better than start placing the components on a 2D grid and check if the properties are respected
That specifically seems to be the bit where the explanation goes wrong. Proving that there's no easier method than brute forcing is a hard problem, not something to wave away as an exercise for the reader.
For anyone curious (and testing my recall), this should just mean: Solve a SAT problem using fnutz that are Frobbed correctly.
e.g., "Just set up a belt sequence that would solve a 3-SAT problem" to show that belt sequencing is at least as hard as 3-SAT.
(The reverse, setting up a SAT solver to solve belt sequencing only shows that SAT is at least as hard as belt sequencing, which is true for any problem that's not hard hard).
> [...] which is true for any problem that's not hard hard.
Yes, basically true for any problem where you can verify a correct answer in polynomial time (especially if someone gives you extra hints to help your verification).
You can also think of these 'hints' as 'extremely lucky guesses'.
Eg you can verify that a number is composite, and not prime, by 'guessing' its prime factors.
Or you can guess the solution to a Sudoku and then just verify it.
The traveling salesman problem is interesting: it's trivial to verify that any given candidate solution has a specific cost (and that cost can be very low), but it's not trivial to verify that the candidate is minimal. (I'm not even sure it's possible in polynomial time.)
Authentication, not necessarily encryption. It's a common misconception to think that you need the latter while you actually need the former. And no, encryption does not mean authentication, not at all, usually you can meaningfully modify the ciphertext if a given protocol has no authentication.
Also, here's a fun thought experiment: consider two channels, one authentic but not encrypted, another non authentic but encrypted. Can you actually find a use for the second one? Can you find a use for securely talking to an unknown entity, other than running Omgele? :)
We should distinguish whether we want everybody to be able to authenticate the messages or only our intended recipient. This is separate from the question of whether the message should be encrypted. It may be reasonable for infrastructure to work only with messages everybody may authenticate since there is nothing to hide. For this purpose a Signature Scheme is ideal - simply sign your messages.
Whereas for example in Signal two people could have made an Alice->Bob message. Both Alice and Bob have the keys to make such a message. Alice might have made it, and sent it to Bob, or, Bob might have just made it seem as though Alice sent him a message. Bob presumably knows if he's lying, but he can't prove it either way.
The unauthenticated link is basically useless. You aren't "securely talking to an unknown entity" because if you were that would be an authenticated link. TLS 1.3 can do "securely talking to an unknown entity" - but it's an authenticated link, the unknown entity is the authenticated remote party. You don't know who they are, but you do know they're your remote party whoever that is.
Maybe I should have added what an encrypted, but not authenticated link looks like, because I meant it in both directions. An example would be doing unauthenticated Diffie-Hellman (without any signatures, or proving knowledge of a secret, or anything of this sort), then proceeding using the shared key with even the best of schemes. Another example would be a spy sending and receiving one-time-pad encrypted data via an untrusted, malleable channel - the only authenticity is in hoping that adversarial modifications will cause one of the endpoints to fail at "parsing" the message. It is indeed useless.
Also, this property of Signal is called repudiation (or non-non-repudiation :) ), meaning that you as a party in the communication can repudiate the origin of the message, i.e. say that you didn't write it. It is a nice extra feature, on top of authenticity and secrecy.
> then proceeding using the shared key with even the best of schemes
Unlike with your "spy" scenario, this situation is in fact what TLS 1.3 builds initially and it's not useless at all, nor is the resulting link unauthenticated.
1. First Alice sends her fresh parameters to Bob
2a. Then Bob sends his fresh parameters to Alice
2b. Alice and Bob now have all the DH parameters and they now have a shared secret X
2c. Bob calculates a Digest of a transcript of the entire conversation so far and sends this Digest, encrypted with X to Alice, he can send this alongside the parameters if he wants
3. Alice also likewise calculates a Digest and sends the encrypted digest to Bob
Both Alice and Bob now have a shared secret and have an authenticated (because they've seen the other party's view of the conversation in the digest and confirmed it matches their expectation) communication channel which they can use. They don't learn each others' identity but, of course, it is easy to additionally offer this as part of the same protocol and HTTPS does so in one direction in the typical case.
Edited: Renumbered to clarify that only three messages are sent, parts 2a, 2b and 2c are actually a single message from Bob to Alice
Eric could allow those initial three messages to pass unmolested. In this case Alice and Bob now have an authenticated connection and Eric is unable to read or modify their messages. So I suppose you don't mean that.
What if Eric just substitutes his own message for Alice's in step 1? He provides his own parameters. Since these were not Alice's parameters, Alice will not provide an acceptable Digest for the conversation, the parameters Eric sent to Bob are different and do not match the transcript, the connection is terminated.
What if Eric substitutes Bob's only message in step 2? He provides his own parameters, and he can respond with a transcript digest for this alternate conversation. Now in fact the TLS 1.3 connection exists as normal, but it is between Alice and Eric. We're actually fine! We have a properly authenticated connection, with unidentified participants (we know they're Alice and Eric but Alice and Eric don't know that). Bob's connection fails, or he is unaware that Alice tried to connect.
Finally if Eric waits until Alice's second message in step 3, no message Eric knows how to construct is satisfactory. Only Alice's original message will work, other messages cause the connection to fail because Bob will not accept them.
I'm sorry, are you trolling? You pretend to be Bob to Alice, and Alice to Bob, at the same time. Real Alice and Bob never compute the same transcript digests, but it doesn't matter. As post handshake data is flowing you decrypt it and reencrypt, modifying what you want.
Or, imagine that there isn't even one legitimate Bob in the world. But Alice is still talking to someone who follows the protocol, and is indistinguishable from a real Bob. Is that possible?
I'm not trolling, I just don't think you've really thought about what "authentic" could mean if you don't have identity, which is a distinct problem.
For Alice there's no difference between a Bob whose identity you don't know and an Eric whose identity you don't know, they're each just another anonymous party.
Eric can't fool Alice and Bob into believing they're talking to each other, because they're using separate channels and identity systems will bind to the channel. Suppose Bob provides his identity, that's bound to the Eric-Bob channel, when Eric copies it to the Eric-Alice channel it's just obviously fraudulent, he could have made his own fraudulent claim of Bob's identity just as easily.
This is very nitpicky, and not even valid at that.
First, I think authorization is even more valid than authentication. In this context, it's the authority is what is important, so that only the designated entities can assert control over the system, and not others.
Second, it's very hard to imagine authorization on an open channel like radio, without any sort of encryption. In fact, only the one-time pad comes to mind, although I'm far from being a proper security person. What I see is that authority is usually demonstrated through some encrypted means - even if the message itself is unencrypted, its digital signature is.
>another non authentic but encrypted
HTTPS is one such channel. The weakest guarantee of HTTPS is that the comms between the client and the HTTPS terminating server is encrypted, nothing more. HTTPS security can be upgraded to include authenticity information, but it's not mandatory, and it's still very useful even in this weaker form.
Authentic channel is a channel typically uses digital signatures, or MACs, or something like the Dragonfly protocol used for example in WPA3. As you may know the padlock and alerts in browsers are exactly for that reason, to show that a channel is authentic. The client doesn't authenticate by default, we use passwords/API keys/oauth/etc for that. Though the client actually can, and some services use that.
> Second, it's very hard to imagine authorization on an open channel like radio, without any sort of encryption.
It's easy: you add digital signatures to sign plaintext packets/messages. And now you know they are authentic, and not generated by some random guy that bought a HackRF last week, and is now testing all firmwares that he can find.
Authorization can be achieved by authentication with either a preshared key or a key derived using public key cryptography and some PKI.
It's trivial to implement on an open channel, HMAC being a common form. This is how old APIs using HTTP (Flickr, S3) handled authorization despite all communication being cleartext.
Confidentiality and integrity can be achieved with a single authenticated encryption primitive, or done separately with encryption and a hash-based authentication primitive, or exist as one without the other.
I think it's a case where money / influence may indeed be flowing in both directions, but fundamentally the trains are working. Unless they experience the International Compressor Failure Day, or randomly clip GPS coordinates of a "dead zone" and simply refuse to move forward - but that just means some money hadn't flown where some crooked people expected it to flow.
One thing that is unclear to me is who is backing whom. The Left / Together Party backs our guys - no surprise there, all lefties love trains. But they are not such a big party in Poland, they can raise some ruckus in the media but I am not sure they can offer comprehensive legal/political backing in order to score a victory. They certainly would like to, it's a great story that would add them some voters.
These things are pretty random and don't usually align with party boundaries. Train lovers / open source / hacker communities are marginal interests groups. If a MP is from the region where the factory is - he might support it just because of that. Morawiecki famously has close friends in Newag board and PIS as a whole is on the Newag side it seems.
Razem has Paulina Matysiak who is a big train nerd so she's on the right side of this issue, but for a few decades the biggest supporter of hacking/open source culture in Poland was PSL's Waldemar Pawlak (he even organized Linux conferences in Palace of Culture :) ). I only found out when I attended one such conference in late 2000s and he had a presentation about Linux/Open Source in administration. It did not seem to turn the whole PSL into open source supporters and their image of backward/naive farmers certainly doesn't match with that.
Whenever there's some politicized case parties switch sides depending on temporary interests (see protests against ACTA back in 2011 vs PIS defending their Pegasus affair and spying on opposition members and journalists in 2060-2022).
BTW, this is (also) why the occasional Russian missile successfully penetrates the eastern flank of Europe. The damage potential of switching your entire air defense setup to a more aggressive posture will eventually result in civilian casualties. This happens everywhere, just the other day an American F-18 was shot down by an American destroyer in the Red Sea, and an F-18 carries additional deconfliction equipment that an airliner doesn't have. As of today Europe is still using the peacetime kosher method of "we need to intercept it with a combat jet, have a look, ask the president, then maybe shoot it down".
It's also the reason the US (last I checked*) has standing orders not to attempt to down the drones of unknown origin (adversary espionage, I guess) that swarm at military bases. The risk of accidentally attacking a civilian aircraft vastly outweighs—what they assess as—the immediate threat of the drones.
When there was a panic about the Chinese spy balloon last year, the US sent armed F-22's to shoot down... at least three different unmanned civilian balloons [0,1].
edit: I think I was wrong; apparently the US has a new "deadly force" order as of last week [2].
I'm quite sure the "deadly force" wording was for effect, more than any kind of actual change in posture or practice. Unless I'm mistaken there are still plenty of drones being seen in NJ and they're not blasting them out of the sky. And they've always had the option of lethal force around bases anyway.
what they assess as—the immediate threat of the drones
None of us know for sure but I think the immediate threat of the drones is negligible. If US bases are leaking signals that can be intercepted by drones overhead then these same signals could be just as easily intercepted by cars driving past the bases or nearby homes. And as far as the visible spectrum is concerned all the major players have satellites overhead anyway.
And as you say, the risks of shooting drones down are high. Damage to nearby property. Accidental shootdowns of innocent craft. Successful shootdowns would reveal our capabilities. Unsuccessful shootdowns would reveal our inability to deal with the threat. And in aggregate this would all give the enemy lots of intel as to where we do and don't have defenses. And open war (!!!) over our skies is, to put it mildly, kind of a big deal. There are, to put it mildly, global economic consequences.
Of course, that's all if these drones are of hostile origin, which I think is still a very open question.
If these drones are "ours," which would be weird but also plausible, then the "deadly force" note in the FAA notice could just be part of the cover story.
I know what you're saying! Clearly the vast majority of these drone sightings seem to be regular aircraft.
Some do not seem to be, although my skepticism is high because I have seen a lot of faked UFO videos over the years and faking points of light in the night sky is like, the easiest thing to fake in a fake video/photo.
While I think this is unlikely, we could imagine that whoever is doing shady drone stuff might want to actually observe some basic safety rules, ridiculous as that sounds.
Suppose for a second that these drones are a "flex" from China/Russia/whoever. Causing a midair collision with an aircraft because they're running dark, or risking the chance of that because they're running dark, is a lot more serious than just flying some drones.
And if it's aliens, hey, maybe they're just trying to... uh, fit in by mimicing our airplanes' safety lights? =)
> None of us know for sure but I think the immediate threat of the drones is negligible. If US bases are leaking signals that can be intercepted by drones overhead then these same signals could be just as easily intercepted by cars driving past the bases or nearby homes. And as far as the visible spectrum is concerned all the major players have satellites overhead anyway.
You can also do radio frequency signals intercepts from space, too. You need a big antenna on your satellite, but it's essentially a solved problem. Spaceborne SIGINT goes back to at least the early 70s.
The problem with satellites however is that they cannot loiter, so the window in which they can gather data is limited and predictable. They are also essentially fixed on their track - changing orbit requires fuel. Drones (and old-fashioned spy planes) do not suffer from that limitation.
Tossing a battery-powered radio in a gallon ziplock into the woods outside the chainlink for the base also works, and would have more loitering capability than a drone.
So throw it in a gallon ziplock inside some rope and stuff and toss into a tree. In any case, a drone has about 15-30 min of loitering time while a radio-in-a-bag has potentially weeks or even months. I know which I would choose for spying on radio transmissions.
What they don’t have is high accuracy pointing. If you want to listen to activity on 128MHz at a specific military base from GEO you’re going to be getting a huge amount of interference from everything else in CONUS on the same frequency. At LEO you can do much much better pointing with your antenna.
In the US there are also major restrictions to federal US military operating on US soil. [0]
Thus, any action (or effectors traveling) outside base boundaries would generally be illegal.
Given the mobility of drones and desire to prevent their encroachment on bases in the first place, the appropriately legal unit for this would be non-federalized national guard air defense units, tasked by the state governor to intervene.
The Posse Comitatus Act restricts the military from engaging in civil law enforcement. It doesn’t prevent the military from using force to defend US soil or airspace. For instance, on 9/11, fighter jets were scrambled to intercept Flight 93; they just didn’t reach it until the passengers had already forced the plane down.
The 9/11 military airspace defense mission was a mass of confusion, as a consequence of the then-novelty of civilian airliner suicide hijackings and split information between the FAA and NORAD.
Hypothetically, the fighters launched could have shot down a civilian plane, but it would have taken direct presidential authorization (i.e. national emergency).
In the absence of an immediate threat, that authorization isn't going to happen.
Drones in most cases are a civil law enforcement matter.
They're not obviously the actors of a foreign nation state, are not an invasion, and are not posing an immediate threat.
You're still vastly overstating the scope of the Posse Comitatus Act. As a matter of policy, the US military is cautious about intercepting hostile aircraft in American airspace[1], but the Posse Comitatus Act doesn't prevent it from doing so.
In particular, your claim that "any action (or effectors traveling) outside base boundaries would generally be illegal" is not only false but facially absurd, since it would imply that the US military is statutorily prevented from intercepting enemy bombers or responding to an invasion of American soil.
> If US bases are leaking signals that can be intercepted by drones overhead then these same signals could be just as easily intercepted by cars driving past the bases or nearby homes
Not really. Some signals can be very much unidirectional (eg, visible only to an overhead drone) instead of omnidirectional (eg, a car).
Just curious; what kind of signals would be uni-directionally beaming upwards? For communicating with aircrafts that directly hover above the base? Wouldn't that be really limiting in terms of usefulness?
Drones can capture much higher resolution images, and from very different angles, than satellites. Both are useful, and neither really replaces the other. A high-res composite image taken from multiple angles and exposures can confirm or refute what was just a hunch from satellite imagery alone.
Drones are dangerous. First, they can take high-quality photos, second they can jam the radio communications and GPS, third, they may contain explosives.
None and in most cases it’s not even clear it’s happening. Due to perspective, a plane far away and a drone up close could look very similar at night when all you can see are lights in a dark sky.
Pretty much any object in featureless space: ships on a flat body of water (sea, lake), aircraft in the sky, objects on flat terrain (plains, taiga, desert, sand, snow), objects in space.
Even on other solar system bodies (the Moon, Mars, etc.), it's quite difficult to gauge scale and distance without terrestrial references (trees, structures, etc.) to guide the eye.
Totally, it at least seems quite clear it's not happening anywhere near the extent to which it's suspected of happening.
Drones fly around. It's legal. It's fun. It's interesting for countless reasons to countless people. Really speaks to the state of our information environment that so many have been thrown into an absolute tizzy.
This would make a fascinating case study about how many people have never looked up at their own skies before. I also wouldn't be surprised if the hysteria is being amplified to distract from all the other nonsense in the world right now.
Sadly when the United States Coast Guard reports being followed by unknown drones (and unknown drones have been reported around military space by military personnel for years) and the government response is to say 'we don't know, and we are doing nothing' people tend to become concerned. The best way to stop vigilanties is to have a system of laws and and government that follows the laws and that instill trust in the people. When the government just shrugs, well... that's how you end up with horrible/idiotic vigilanytism.
I'm a government institutions guy, but yes, let's attack people for... following basic human nature, not the government big brains that ignore basic realities of human nature about needing trust in stable/steady government institutions who instead just demand 'faith in government' that isn't earned. The government isn't just failing in actions, they are failing in understanding this BASIC requirement for governing.
So... outlaw drones? Or are you proposing we just start shooting people's toys out of the sky? At what cost per drone is justifiable to achieve this? A couple hundred thousand dollars and risk of misfires, aviation accidents, and shrapnel?
I think the people panicking about drones are not going to be a fan of a federal ban on them. Just my two cents though.
I'm not proposing anything. I'm just pointing out when the government fails to lead/leaves a vacuum people can quickly turn to vigilantist/dumb type behavior and follow the first person/thought/idea that fills the void.
Here the government said 'the United States Coast Guard mistook some 747s far away for 12 drones following their boat and if it wasn't planes then actually we assessed the 12 drones and found they aren't a threat, we don't know what they are, whose they are, or were they came from' and expected people to just go, hmm, ok, nevermind then.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Government is there to help control/direct what it gets filled with when it's a societal one.
Yeah totally... we want the government to be at the ready with some answer for literally any event that confuses any moron with a Twitter account lest it blow up into many morons with Twitter accounts getting confused.
The government doesn't know, it has no real responsibility or right to know, and it says it doesn't know. People extrapolating that into ridiculous theories cannot really be pinned on the government.
Next up: "I saw a shadow in the woods near my house and the government said they have no clue what it is!!!!"
You, an allegedly levelheaded person: "Well nature abhors a vacuum! It's a failure to lead not to have answers to such questions!"
You might not like the take, but all I am doing is pointing out human nature and a basic role government provides.
If you don't enforce laws/proper behavior/provide safety, you get vigilanties. If you don't provide answers, people go looking, and gullible people settle for the first thing they find.
No one is confused about why these people are panicking. They’re panicking because they’ve offloaded their thinking and information processing to algorithmic bullshit-amplification machines.
That’s why I’m being aggressive against this same “errr well yah know the government should have answers!” bullshit you’re purveying right here.
"It's also the reason the US (last I checked*) has standing orders not to attempt to down the drones of unknown origin"
I think it depends. The smaller drones are allowed to be zapped using equiptment designed to take down drowns. They generally aren't shooting traditional munitions at drones domestically for multiple safety reasons, unless they are over a specific size/altitude.
The government has no right to destroy property (by any method) of private citizens who are flying drones when there is no evidence of illegality or of them being a credible threat.
To say "flying a drone makes it a credible threat" to say "drones are illegal," which someone is free to take up as their legislative priority.
Lol what are you even arguing right now? It is not legal for the USG to destroy, seize, or damage people's property when they are not breaking the law or credibly threatening people. At the times of the drone sightings, there was no evidence whatsoever of them breaking the law or credibly threatening people.
Please state your position explicitly instead of this silly dance.
A lot of this stuff is “doing something” to calm people down. People are losing their minds.
Where I live in upstate NY, Nextdoor.com was losing its shit over a “drone”, actually a lidar mapping plane, and some of the dumber people were suggesting taking shots at the Iranians.
I’m waiting for the next seemingly inevitable object lesson: it’s insanely illegal, federally illegal, to shoot at flying objects, for what I would have hoped were obvious reasons. But it seems we’re still really rather dumb as a collective.
It's maybe worth mentioning that the obvious reasons almost entirely have to do with the things you'd hit in the air, not once the bullet descended. If everyone on earth suddenly shot upward at around 80 degrees from the ground, you'd expect approximately zero casualties on average from the bullets falling and lethally striking surface objects (there would be a number of welts and bruises as well as minor property damage, but even that is less likely than you might suspect).
People are routinely killed by falling bullets. It turns out that the vast majority of idiots firing blindly into the air don't know or care to shoot only straight up, and it would be the same problem for whichever idiots were trying to shoot down drones.
Do you have a citation for that? I can't find any numbers on people getting hit by falling bullets, let alone fatalities. Things let celebratory gunfire don't seem to be comparable since people tend to congregate outside for celebrations resulting in larger groups of potential unintentional targets.
I have not logged the citations, but I distinctly recall reading on the order of one-two news reports per year of people being killed by falling bullets in multiple different countries, including US, Brazil, and several middle eastern countries.
Also, injuries and one fatality were confirmed by Mythbusters in [0]. Read the account for Episode 50, which was the only myth to receive all three ratings (Busted, Plausible, and Confirmed) at the same time.
I'm not sure that's at all the same thing with the extremely high rate of violent crime involving guns in Brazil. Pointing a gun straight at a city background, missing your specific target, and still injuring/killing somebody is very different from pointing a gun at the sky and having the 170 ft/s bullet fall, manage to hit that same highly populated region, and cause problems.
The point is that all sky-pointed bullets are NOT going only 170ft/sec.
Yes, it is reasonably established that bullets fired straight up do not regain their initial velocity on the way back down.
But, at less-than-vertical firing angles, they can retain a lot of their initial 4-figure-fps velocity, and how much is very dependent on particular trajectory, wind, bullet composition, and initial angle. Dependent enough that it's specifically outlawed in many states.
So, don't go glibly firing off skyward celebratory shots (over)confident in your understanding of the physics (or implicitly advocating it). You might be willing to take the risk, but no one else is willingly undertaking the risk you are creating.
I honestly can't believe that people would argue that they should be allowed to fire guns up in the air, lmao. You & I both know people don't indicate while driving, so I'm sure we're not that surprised, though.
No, I agree. Brazil is likely leaning towards immediate contact and absorption of small arms in that localized region of conflict rather than horizon aimed rifle fire like you’d expect with people shooting at traditional aircraft they believe is as close as a drone would be, towards what I presume would be a residential, no-fly zone, military airspace, etc.
It’s really not the collective. It’s every town and cities loonies that now have formed a small but vocal subset of the population thanks to the Internet.
Important to note that it was a panic about an alleged chinese spy balloon, but in all likelihood it was just a weather balloon. There was no proof it was a spy balloon.
Normal weather balloons are 20ft in diameter. This one was 200 feet in diameter and carried quite a payload - about the size of a couple of box cars. Additionally it had propellers and the ability to steer itself.
This is also why there was reluctance to shoot the balloon down until it had passed over the ocean. The enormous payload container was a definite threat to life and limb if shot down over a populated area, and most of the US has at least a token population.
It’s also much easier to do less damage on the drone itself by shooting it over water than land. Honestly I think that played a major factor where they shot it down.
Ummm, no. We recovered the balloons and they were full of surveillance equipment.
They seemed to not have a way to phone home, so more than likely China’s plan was to recover the balloon to get the data. That may be what you recall. For all we know they had been doing so for years successfully.
The US downed and recovered a Chinese balloon, not balloons.
The 2023 incident is pretty well written up on Wikipedia[1].
There was one Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down. Subsequent shoot-downs of balloons over the arctic and Great Lakes were not attributed to China - one that was recovered was definitively identified as a private weather balloon.
There were also previous Chinese surveillance balloon overflights - as well as one over Central America - that were not shot down.
> This happens everywhere, just the other day an American F-18 was shot down by an American destroyer in the Red Sea, and an F-18 carries additional econfliction equipment that an airliner doesn't have.
The Houthis claim the F-18 was downed by them[1], so it's still not clear if this was an actual friendly fire incident. This is consistent with reports the carrier retreated to northern red sea soon after the incident.
That depends on whether you trust the Houthis or the US Navy's sheepish apology for shooting at two F-18s (one missed), which will almost certainly have career consequences for somebody.
Really? I feel like "Iran shot down a US Navy jet" is more embarrassing than "the US shot down a US Navy jet." Not for the pilots responsible, but for the Navy as a whole. I don't have any insight on this particular story though.
They claim a lot of things, but whatever air defense they have comes from Iran, and Iran, as we just saw, isn't capable of shooting down IAF F-15s flying over their own airspace. Ansar Allah did not shoot down an American F-18. I don't believe Ansar Allah has any meaningful air defense at all; it would make no strategic sense for them to invest in it, they have no hope of maintaining air superiority against any of their adversaries. Like Hezbollah, which trained them, and which also has no meaningful air defense, their strategy is to be hard to bomb effectively.
According to BBC Persian (quoting Israeli sources) and many Israeli media , the IAF flew "hundreds" of sorties over Iranian airspace on that eventful night in October.
The reporting is that they were F35s though, not F15.
Iran's air defence system is based on the older Russian S300, which is incapable of detecting them.
Of course it wasn't that long ago that Iran was flying F14s and had complete air superiority over its neighbours. How the times have changed.
We also now know that the Israelis had informed the Iranians just before the attack through diplomatic channels of the impending attack, and that it would only contain specific military objectives.
Is the S300 just that useless? Possible. Did the Iranians decide to not respond and to "take one on the chin" in order to avoid a cycle of ever increasing conflict? Maybe. Had espionage already disabled Iran's air defence system? Also possible. We probably won't know for another 100 years.
Yeah, I don't think the strike on Iran shed as much light on this question as I'd originally thought it might, but it still seems clearly to be the case that air defense is not a big part of the Axis of Resistance strategy. Ansar Allah fought an open war against Saudi Arabia in the mid-late 2010s, during which the Royal Saudi Air Force routinely flew over Houthi-held territory, and so far as I know they've never verifiably shot a flight down.
Again, I think the most useful model here is Lebanon. Hezbollah has a desultory complement of SAM launchers, but no meaningful control over its airspace.
Oh yes that's just absolutely fanciful boasting by the Houthis.
The Houthis were probably not far off from claiming to have shot down the Ingenuity chopper which NASA lost on Mars . In reality they can't shoot down a Cessna 172.
I'm reading conflicting reports, but let's stipulate that; I don't think it makes any difference to the point I'm making. The better, clearer example is Lebanon, which hosts the crown jewel of the IRGC's proxy forces, and which doesn't have even a pretense of modern anti-aircraft defense. What would the point be? These are territories and militaries without meaningful air forces; they have already defaulted away air superiority. Their strategy is for that not to matter.
> Saree explained that the operation “was carried out using eight cruise missiles and 17 drones, resulting in the downing of an F-18 fighter jet while the destroyers attempted to intercept the Yemeni drones and missiles.”
So I think its possible that it was both a friendly fire incident and that the downing was the restult of the the Yemini attack.
The carrier "retreating" is also consistent with a lot of other scenarios, including just having fucked up majorly and needing a safe place to spend some quality time yelling at people.
A missle travels at tremendous speeds and require automated defence systems to neutralize the target at a safe explosion distance in the sky, which often does not afford humans to make “phone calls” and “meetings” and “discussion” to down the threat, before it potentially blasts a population centre or a military installation with thousands of soldiers and civilians at the base.
Military doesnt decide between downing an airliner and not downing it,
But rather a risk between downing an missile that can “potentially” be an airliner that god knows why is in a restricted airspace, and letting it fly and risk getting killed those thousands or even millions of people (if a population centre/city) get exploded with bombs and missiles.
Thats not true at all, and I have the receipts to prove it. When the Russians shot down KAL007, it was preceeded by numerous phone calls and meetings. Russian pilots cannot fire missiles without remote authorization from central command. The chain of communications is well documented. KAL007 was first radar identified and fighters were scrambled at 16:33. They obtained visual contact at or around 18:05 and reported it to be a potential civilian airliner. After much discussion, an order to shoot it down was given, which they did, 21 minutes later at as 18:26, nearly 2 hours after it was detected on air defence radar.
Different types of missiles exist. A cruise missile (for which the Russians have a much better name - winged missile) can be confused with an airplane, as it is essentially a drone with a turbojet engine. A ballistic missile travelling at supersonic/hypersonic speeds is much easier to discriminate based on velocity alone. Also, those are usually tracked all the way from a launch site using infrared cameras on satellites. The European incursions were mostly cruise missiles and the Iranian mopeds (and at least one ballistic incident that was likely a Ukrainian air defense S-300 missile that the Ukrainians lost control of; this is another problem that happens every now and then to everyone).
Then you are comfortable making a decision that could cost thousands of lives over one with a few hundred without taking in any other information other than a radar bounce that is approximately the same size/speed.
I mean you're largely correct. What I'm saying is that there may be a standing order to destroy all ballistic threats, and to exercise a very high degree of caution (high level approvals for each engagement) with any potential air breathing / subsonic threats. I imagine this is a common order given to Patriot batteries in hot, but not war, areas.
BTW, this is a bit similar to why the US very clearly advertises the Tomahawk as not nuclear capable - so that a few subsonic blips do not trigger a strategic exchange. The Russians do not do that, many of their commonly used missiles are dual purpose.
The Tomahawk was deployed with nuclear warheads, in several variants, between 1983–2010 or 2013 [0]. As far as I can tell, only the ground-launched variants were consistently advertised as non-nuclear, and that was to comply with the bilateral treaty obligations of the INF [1]—and there was a ground-launched nuclear Tomahawk, too [2], which was destroyed in 1991 when the INF treaty came into effect.
I don't think that there was ever a *unilateral* US aversion to these things. We've fielded large numbers [3] of nuclear-warhead cruise missiles—air-, sea-, and ground-launched, spanning much of the Cold war. We're currently developing a new one right now [4].
Ugh, I was clearly wrong about the Tomahawk, and I don't know why I thought so. It's probably not a believable story for the adversary, so such self-inhibition cannot yield any strategic results anyways.
> Military doesnt decide between downing an airliner and not downing it, But rather a risk between downing an missile that can “potentially” be an airliner that god knows why is in a restricted airspace, and letting it fly and risk getting killed those thousands or even millions of people (if a population centre/city) get exploded with bombs and missiles.
With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian military is, could they really be so far behind that they're unable to determine the difference between an commercial airlines and a high-speed missile?
At a glance, just looking at the trajectory of this UFO for half a minute would be enough to determine if it's an airline with stable flight path, VS a missile that has some sort of trajectory that doesn't look at all like a airline. Not to mention the radar signature has to be different in at least some ways.
But again, I don't know the capability or process of the Russian military, in a high-tension environment sometimes shit just goes wrong even though it shouldn't.
Ukraine uses (among other things) fixed-wing drones with similar characteristics to civilian aircraft. Some of them are *actual* civilian aircraft, retrofitted into unmanned suicide drones,
None of them remotely resemble an E190 though, which is about 50x the size of a cruise missile, communicates effectively with air traffic control and broadcasts ADS-B signals telling you what it is (at least when you're not jamming it...)
Radar doesn't exactly tell you the size of of a contact. Sure, you can measure the power of the return signal, correct for distance and get something that loosely correlates with size. But it correlates much more strongly with other things.
You're also making the assumption here that it was a modern Russian system. This wasn't exactly close to the current fighting, its entirely possible this radar was manufactured in the Soviet Union. I don't think those receive a lot (or any) civilian broadcasts.
Most A2A systems has wheels (or floats) and can thus easily be relocated. While it probably had good stuff once, I think all the high end equipment once located here has moved closer to Ukraine by now. What's left is probably the worst (human or technological) that's left.
An E190 on approach (remember, this airplane was trying to land at Grozny) has an approach speed between 125-145 knots (depending on load). A Cessna 172 for example has a cruise speed of ~120 knots and can cruise up to 10k feet. A typical instrument landing glide path is 3 degrees - that intercepts 10k feet at ~60km out.
The likelihood of confusing a regional jet with a small prop plane (purely based on speed/heading/altitude) is way higher during landing.
> Ukraine uses (among other things) fixed-wing drones with similar characteristics to civilian aircraft.
Including taking off from commercial airports on publicly available schedules, on predetermined airways/corridors, and broadcasting 1080 MHZ ADS-B data?
> With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian military is, could they really be so far behind that they're unable to determine the difference between an commercial airlines and a high-speed missile
If they exclude radar signature of commercial airliners, and let them fly, it will just make weapon makers start designing high-speed missiles with the radar signature of an airliner lol.
There is a reason why a lot of military and sci-fi movies have the phrase “aircraft with radar signature of a bird” , anything that the military excludes or allows to pass off, just becomes the cloning target of missile makers under the tag of “camouflage”.
Stealth airplanes might have the radar cross section of a bird but they don't have the same flight characteristics (altitude, speed.) If you can manage to see it, you won't confuse it for a bird.
A flock of migratory birds could very easily be cruising at that height, and if in a fast moving jetstream or similar could be moving at hundreds of miles an hour when referenced to a ground based source.
> it will just make weapon makers start designing high-speed missiles with the radar signature of an airliner lol.
The weapons industry isn't that enthusiastic about blatantly violating the Geneva Conventions. There would be massive diplomatic costs to making, selling, buying or firing missiles with fake civilian transponders.
> ... it will just make weapon makers start designing high-speed missiles with the radar signature of an airliner lol.
Well, the problem with that is that airliners are (relatively speaking) slow as fuck. A "high-speed missile" with the radar cross section of an airliner would be mind-meltingly obvious as a threat even to automated defense robots.
There are cruise missiles powered by ramjets that go significantly supersonic, but for the most part ballistic missiles are easier to use, longer range, and harder to intercept. The prospect of anti-air systems effective enough to pose ballistic missiles trouble in a "near-peer" non-nuclear conflict is recent. Both maneuvering-capable ramjet/scramjet cruise missiles and (the significantly easier) maneuverable hypersonic re-entry vehicles that launch ballistically, are the subject of recently fielded early models, active development & active testing because of that prospect.
Airliners aren't slow by cruise missiles standards: supersonic cruise missiles are few and far between, and most cruise missiles in fact fly roughly at the speed of an airliner (between 800 and 1000km/h).
You're the second person to talk about cruise missiles in this subthread.
The comment I replied to (and quoted in my reply) talked specifically about "high-speed missiles". Nearly all cruise missiles are most emphatically NOT that sort of missile.
> With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian military is, could they really be so far behind that they're unable to determine the difference between an commercial airlines and a high-speed missile?
In a quick decision, in a high-stress scenario during an actual attack, possibly. Even if they have the capacity to make that decision correctly otherwise, every system—including the human element—is fallible, and procedures in those circumstances are likely to err on the side of safety-from-attack, rather than safety-for-potential-attacker.
(OTOH, the rerouting of the plane afterward was clearly intentional murder with the hope it would help cover up the shooting incident, whether or not the shooting itself was an accident.)
Wait a minute. I thought they hit some angry birds?
All of these decisions are made by soldiers. Russian air defense troops are no doubt overworked, poorly treated, under intense pressure and probably motivated by avoiding going to the front.
Chances are, an operator or officer made a bad call. They are cogs in a killing machine.
I would have thought the aircraft’s transponder would have been the first clue. I can identify nearly every aircraft over my house right now using a $30 USB dongle, including callsign, airline, flight number, altitude, speed, and bearing.
> With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian military is, could they really be so far behind that they're unable to determine the difference between an commercial airlines and a high-speed missile?
It depends a lot on the context (weather, altitude) and equipment (Russia has a lot of equipment, some of it new, some of it old, some of it ancient).
Without minimizing the personal contribution to this disaster of every serviceman, IMHO the blame, first and foremost, rests firmly with whoever the bloody hell decided to keep the airspace open nearly three years into a war. Civilian airspace is open above Chechnya and Dagestan while the VKS is lobing missiles from/from above the Caspian Sea, and planes are landing at Sochi while Novorossiysk gets hit by drones. This is nuts even by post-Soviet standards. There's a very good reason why Ukraine closed their airspace almost right away and continue to keep it closed.
To pre-emptively address the "but that would be too costly" angle: well, maybe that should've been factored in before greenlighting the invasion. Boo-hoo. Does keeping it open look cheap now?
I can think of at least two incidents where the military was deciding between downing and not downing an airliner, and decided on the former. Oddly, they both involve Korean Air and the Soviet military.
One hopes the modern Russian military is less enthusiastic about such things, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it.
The past couple of times look likely to be legitimate confusion, probably coupled with a lack of care. In the KAL shootdowns, the Soviets intercepted, saw that they were airliners, and shot them down anyway.
> In the KAL shootdowns, the Soviets intercepted, saw that they were airliners, and shot them down anyway.
As I understand the pilot in the KAL 007 shoot down claimed that he visually identified the plane as a Boeing-type airliner years later, but also claimed he did not report that to control because it was not material since such aircraft could be readily converted to intelligence work which was what was the concern for which it was being intercepted. There is no additional support for this, and lots of things the pilot claimed about the incident are inconsistent with the evidence from radar tracks, flight data recorders of the shot down plane, and the records of the Soviet communications relating to the attack, so this particular unverifiable claim probably shouldn't be given much weight.
KAL 902, sure, we know that the pilot identified it as an airliner, tried to convince command not to have it shot down, but then followed the order to shoot it down.
Is there any doubt that the pilot who intercepted KAL007 got a decent look at the plane first? It should have been pretty obviously an airliner as long as it wasn’t miles and miles away.
This also occurred at least once with Canada/US military (but still Korean aircraft) during the panic on September 11, 2001 — an aircraft that was actually just doing normal stuff, very nearly got shot down.
I don't know about "nearly got shot down". They were escorted to a different airport and ordered to land, but despite several miscommunications they followed instructions and landed safely.
The heat signature from multiple big turbofan engines and the radar signatures for the same could look similar to a bomber or cargo military plane, so here again a human needs to discriminate somehow.
By this do you mean "electronic warfare" equipment, like radar/laser detectors and other such "target searching and seeking" detectors, as well as jammers, spoofers, and other such "search or seek disruption" devices?
I think they mean fancy IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) emitters. If you think about it, it sounds like a pain of a problem, the plane must be as stealthy as possible, but somehow, during those moments, communicate in a non-spoofable way that it's a friendly. No idea how they do this. Is there any interesting textbook on electronic warfare, I wonder?
I don't know either, but thought about it a lot at one point.
First, you only respond to correctly encrypted/signed requests. Everything else you ignore.
So, second, once you have your valid request, you respond to it, also in an encrypted fashion. IIRC F-35 can use their radars, with their bean-forming abilities, for stealthy comms, sending a very narrow beam of radio signals to the recipient.
And if this is fantasy, I suppose by the time you receive an IFF query, you know you're about to be shot at. So you might as well respond, sacrificing stealth. Hence why you want to really be sure you're really asked by your side, rather than receiving a spoof request.
Airlines just broadcast a ton of public information about themselves, so they don't really need an IFF system. They put their hands up and say "don't shoot, I'm a civilian!".
> by the time you receive an IFF query, you know you're about to be shot at
I don’t think that’s the most common case for an IFF query. AWACS oversight aircraft likely issue more IFF queries than fighter intercepts do. You still want to respond to a friendly AWACS inquiry, even though that aircraft is 100nm away and no direct/immediate threat to you.
An AWACS aircraft within 100 nanometers of you would indeed represent a direct and immediate threat. :)
TIL that nm isn’t actually accepted as an abbreviation for nautical miles. (It’s used so commonly in aviation that I assumed it was correct and it took me 3 or 4 searches to accept that this thing I knew was correct actually wasn’t. Thanks [seriously]!)
> Is there any interesting textbook on electronic warfare, I wonder?
I know that there are unclassified textbooks on this very topic, but I've long forgotten their names.
> If you think about it, it sounds like a pain of a problem, the plane must be as stealthy as possible, but somehow, during those moments, communicate in a non-spoofable way that it's a friendly. No idea how they do this.
Well, part of this problem is pretty trivial to solve: if you're coming back from a mission and are well in friendly airspace, you don't need to be stealthy at all, so you turn on your radio transmitters.
It's my understanding that when you're on a mission where you need to be as hard to spot as possible, you turn off all unnecessary transmitters and rely on Command telling Air Traffic Control and other interested parties where you're operating so as to reduce the chance that you collide with another aircraft and/or get shot down by friendlies.
DSSS is magic. Truly. It's like you can create an ~infinite number of "new frequencies" to send on, each being orthogonal to any other, then chose them cryptographically as needed. With enough care it's possible to make it difficult for the adversary to even detect the presence of a signal. And the tech used by the likes of F-35 with MADL and low-probability-of-intercept radars may be even fancier than that.
That being said in the Red Sea incident they likely were not stealthy at all. For one F-18 has a rather big cross section, it's a 4th generation jet. For another the Houthis are not known to operate any sensible air defense (I may be wrong here, someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
Any serious hardware Ansar Allah operates is provided by Iran, and Iran is not capable of shooting down IAF aircraft flying over their own territory. Ansar Allah did not shoot down an F-18.
AESA radars send radar impulses on different frequencies that appear to the observer to be random (and thus hard to figure out and jam).
They could use something similar for communication. Send the first byte on a frequency, the second byte on another one, etc.... The frequencies could be calculated to be un-distinguishable from the background radio radiation. Of course, both the sender and the receiver have to agree on this mechanism.
The really clever counterpart is how to transmit through your own spread-spectrum jamming. Quiet slots in the jamming must be manipulated in the same way as the active broadcast. For example, this allows communication to a ground convoy that is jamming all frequencies to prevent wireless remote-control IED detonation.
Nobody is saying “as hard if not harder,” that is 100% dishonest, and you know it’s dishonest. The claim is that the US Navy hasn’t faced much active combat over the last 80 years, and by comparison the Houthis’ guerrilla navy is formidable.
The Navy saw periods of combat during the “Tanker Wars” of the 1980s in the Persian Gulf, but that largely involved ships hitting mines. The Houthi assaults involve direct attacks on commercial vessels and warships.
“This is the most sustained combat that the U.S. Navy has seen since World War II — easily, no question,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the U.S. can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage…”
I hate how often people here just shamelessly lie.
>“This is the most sustained combat that the U.S. Navy has seen since World War II — easily, no question,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the U.S. can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage. … If you let it fester, the Houthis are going to get to be a much more capable, competent, experienced force.”
The UK and the Royal Navy are also less than impressed[1].
Once upon a time a US Navy Carrier Strike Group was touted as more destructive than an average country's entire air force, but the reality is the US Navy today is stretched thin fighting an enemy that's so overwhelming them that they make WW2 comparisons and underperform to the point of abject failure known as friendly fire.
> This is the most sustained combat that the U.S. Navy has seen since World War II — easily, no question
I have no drone in this fight, but your characterization of this quote is nonsensical.
The quote does not imply that the threats are closely comparable. It merely states that the current conflict is the "most sustained" since a past event which was obviously much more sustained.
I have stood on my roof and looked upward, and thought that it's kind of interesting that the next-highest solid object from my position is a plane, a satellite, or the moon.
I am not intending a meaningful comparison of the altitudes of houses and planes (or satellites or moons) when I do so.
It's the stuff that immediately follows which is the actual blasphemy:
>We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the U.S. can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage.
Remember that Arleigh Burke destroyers and other ships equipped with AEGIS are supposedly the best interceptors in the world. Remember that USN CSGs are supposed to instill absolute fear and execute absolute destruction when required. Admitting that the Houthis can (and will) penetrate and defeat that is all but admitting the US Navy can't handle any more of this, that the Houthis and the financiers behind them are peer enemies if not superior.
The only thing I wasn't expecting when I originally read that was that the "substantial damage" ended up coming from the US Navy themselves. Who needs enemies with friendlies like this.
OK but that's just the "US Navy was built for major power wars" problem.
The asymmetrical combat problem is real. We saw that back in 2000 with the USS Cole.
I have no insight here obviously, but there's a reasonable theory of warfare that you must accept small losses to justify overwhelming force.
Parrying small attacks against the peace is difficult -- cops can't stop bar fights -- but if it spills out into the streets, the riot police are ready to shut down the block (if you want to save the innocents) or bomb the neighborhood into oblivion (if you do not).
The US public prefers the first approach, until they do not.
Nothing in your quote implies "as hard or harder." In fact, it aligns well with what your parent said: The US Navy hasn't seen significant sustained combat in 80 years.
Whether or not they'r prepared for that has nothing to do with that quote and saying the we won't be able to easily bat them down every time is a long way away from saying they're as big a challenge as Japan in the '40s.
If you want to say that the USN is struggling to keep up with rapid changes in warfare I think you'd be correct.
We have a navy built to fight the Cold War and 21st century warfare is a looooot different. Cheap and effective missiles and drones are the new reality. And everybody knows the playbook for success against the US: a "regular" military will always struggle against irregular mobile forces that can melt back in to the general population.
However.
They've successfully shot down hundreds of Houthi drones and missiles with 100% success.
In that context, a single friendly fire incident (with no casualties) is regrettable but overall performance has been exemplary.
US Navy considers fighting the Houthis
It's disingenuous at best to frame it this way. The Houthis are funded by Iran, something of a near-peer in terms of capability (if not size) that has a pretty robust arms connection to Russia which is, well, Russia.
>If you want to say that the USN is struggling to keep up with rapid changes in warfare I think you'd be correct.
That's certainly part of it, though I will also say the same for the US military overall.
>They've successfully shot down hundreds of Houthi drones and missiles with 100% success.
The problem is wars aren't won with politeness and pleasantries, they are won by whoever has the guts to destroy and murder first. The US Navy (and US military overall) aren't fighting to kill, so they might win battles (claim victory over drones and missiles) but they won't win the war. If we aren't going in to win the war we should not start or join any in the first place.
The friendly fire incident is really a coup de grace after the aforementioned self-admissions that the Navy considers the pressure they are under as bad as WW2 if not worse. I am appalled as a US taxpayer at their underperformance and subsequent unacceptable failure, regardless whether that is because they can't (no resources) or won't (rules of engagement and politics prohibit them).
The US is not at war with the Houthis, or with Iran.
The US is maintaining a level of conflict, with the intent of not allowing escalation.
You might have a point that the US is politically hesitant to fully engage, should the time come. But that time has not come.
It's better for everyone in the world, if the US acts as hall monitor and gets a few paper airplanes thrown at them from around a corner. If and when the US chooses to exterminate the threat, the global repercussions will be enormous.
Sacrificing lots of expensive equipment and some red-blooded American kids is the price you pay to avoid global disaster. It's a terrible trade, but it's the burden of being the biggest kid in school, which we enjoy for unrelated reasons.
The military follows the orders of the president. They aren't fighting to kill or destroy the Houthis because that, apparently, isn't Biden's goal. Biden's presidency has been almost dovish in its approach to conflicts, which has been highlighted in Bob Woodward's excellent book War. This is the guy who argued vehemently (though unsuccessfully) against the troop buildup in Afghanistan when Obama was president.
His administration has always focused on diplomacy and limited engagement — as we've seen with his approach to arming Ukraine — so it shouldn't come as any surprise that he doesn't want to invade Yemen and eradicate the Houthis.
wars aren't won with politeness and pleasantries,
they are won by whoever has the guts to destroy
and murder first
The conflict with the Houthis isn't "war", unless we broadly define all armed conflict as "war."
It's ridiculous to reduce this to a "guts" issue. Biden and Trump won't be manning the front lines, so guts on their part doesn't play into it.
(Or maybe we should just do the ultimate, most gutsy thing ever by your logic and start nuking multiple countries)
War on the Houthis would require invading Yemen which, in the understatement of the century, would have some pretty serious and wide-ranging consequences. It would also likely play into Iran and/or Russia's hands as this would distract the US from other matters and likely galvanize Middle Eastern opposition to the US. To say nothing of the money spent and lives lost. I have not heard voices from either side of the aisle feeling that this would be remotely worth the cost.
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