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posted by martyb on Monday February 13 2017, @01:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the drones-with-shotguns dept.

This year, the world saw a long-theorized weapon in action: a commercial drone, like a person might find at Best Buy, dropping a bomb on a target in Iraq. These drone bombers, used by the ultra-violent quasi-state ISIS in Iraq and Syria, are the flashiest combination of modern technologies with the modern battlefield. Cheap, camera-carrying robots, put to nefarious ends by a group that could never otherwise dream of fielding an air force. Dropping grenades isn't the deadliest thing an insurgent group can do with a small flying robot, but it leads to a very important question: What, exactly, is the answer to such a drone?

[...] Here is just a short sample of the more out-there anti-drone tools: net guns, drones carrying nets, squads of drones with nets, drones with net guns, and a smart anti-drone bazooka that fires, you guessed it, a net at a drone (we liked that last one). There was a vaporware drone concept that ensnared the propellers of other drones with wire. A Russian firm floated the concept of a microwave gun, to fry the electronics of hostile drones. And most famously, there are the Dutch police eagles, trained to snag a drone from the sky.

Part of the problem for law enforcement, the Pentagon, and other entities trying to protect against drones is that they're cheap. Workable quadcopters cost as little as a couple hundred dollars. Is there a way to knock drones out of the sky that's just as cheap as the drone itself?

Source

http://www.popsci.com/how-to-stop-a-drone


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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 14 2017, @12:44PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday February 14 2017, @12:44PM (#466925)

    Back when the rebels were really a thing, we didn't give them nearly enough resources to accomplish their goal. I can't say at what point the rebel forces were subjugated by foreign interests, but it should have been clear to the state department long before we spent millions on training and arming them.

    The rebel forces were subjugated by foreign interests from Day 1. Specifically, by the United States.

    As in, the US immediately began arming them, and may have in fact been behind the attempt to remove Assad in the first place. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it very clear in her leaked emails that overthrowing Assad was a major foreign policy goal for the United States. And that concerns about the humanitarian situation, freedom, democracy, and so forth had exactly zero to do with that decision. The US had 3 major reasons for trying to oust Assad:
    1. Israel wanted them to. Probably because a new Syrian government would probably be willing to cede all claims to the Golan Heights and probably additional territory in the southern areas of Syria.
    2. They wanted to set up oil and natural gas pipelines from Saudi Arabia and Iraq through Syria and Turkey into Europe, to directly compete with the Russian pipelines that many eastern European nations depend on.
    3. Syria was an isolated Russia-friendly government surrounded by US-friendly Israel, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey. Taking over Syria, and then taking over Iran, would be 2 moves that would substantially shorten the Middle Eastern front of the ongoing US-Russia Cold War. (You probably thought the Cold War ended in no later than 1992, but the US is still very much fighting it.)

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday February 14 2017, @02:39PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 14 2017, @02:39PM (#466953) Journal

    You're mostly on target, but there were rebels fighting against the Syrian government before '08. Bush wouldn't consider aiding them, and by the time Obama was elected, it was already to late. Had we sent the rebels all the aid they needed around 2005, or 2006, Syria might well be a stable nation today. Or not. But, while we're considering if's, maybe if Syria had a more western government, then Iraq wouldn't be in such severe shit.