odanny
Diamond Member
We have felt secure on our home soil for so long that I think this complacency is now ingrained in how people think. Plus we have already seen mysterious drone activity in the U.S., which was never fully explained, which is also a bad sign for U.S. security.
“Any country that has strategic bombers, strategic missiles and silos, or strategic nuclear submarines at port is looking at the attack and thinking the risk to our arsenal from a containerized set of drones disguised as a semitrailer poses a real risk,” said Jason Matheny, CEO of the Rand Corporation and a former director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, which develops advanced technologies for U.S. spy agencies.
Ukraine’s feat was the latest display of an accelerating use of asymmetric attacks, in which one force, often smaller and weaker, deploys unconventional tactics against another.
Take, for example, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who have used relatively low-cost missiles and drones to snarl commercial shipping in the vital Red Sea waterway, prompting a retaliatory U.S. bombing campaign under President Donald Trump that cost well over $1 billion.
The “character of warfare is changing at a ratio faster than we’ve ever seen,” Army Gen. Bryan Fenton, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, told Congress in April. “Our adversaries use $10,000 one-way drones that we shoot down with $2 million missiles. That cost-benefit curve is upside down.”
Unconventional methods, such as exploiting a technology supply chain, are also being used by established powers to degrade their adversaries. In September, amid attacks across its northern border, Israel pulled off an audacious operation that rigged pagers and walkie-talkies to explode when triggered remotely. The attack contributed to the devastation of Hezbollah’s ranks, from which it has not fully recovered, and may have spared Israel a costly invasion of Lebanon.
Asymmetric warfare is as old as the Bible’s David versus Goliath and as devastating as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in which al-Qaeda operatives hijacked U.S. airliners and killed almost 3,000 people. That plot cost between $400,000 and $500,000, according to the 9/11 Commission. By some estimates, the United States has spent $8 trillion on post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
But drones, even short-range craft like the ones Ukraine smuggled into Russia, have become the asymmetric weapon of choice because of their relatively low cost, accessibility and remote piloting. And while much has been made of cyberweapons in asymmetric warfare — there was widespread fear about Russia taking out Ukraine’s electric grids and communications networks before it invaded — so far the physical impact has been muted.
WaPo
“Any country that has strategic bombers, strategic missiles and silos, or strategic nuclear submarines at port is looking at the attack and thinking the risk to our arsenal from a containerized set of drones disguised as a semitrailer poses a real risk,” said Jason Matheny, CEO of the Rand Corporation and a former director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, which develops advanced technologies for U.S. spy agencies.
Ukraine’s feat was the latest display of an accelerating use of asymmetric attacks, in which one force, often smaller and weaker, deploys unconventional tactics against another.
Take, for example, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who have used relatively low-cost missiles and drones to snarl commercial shipping in the vital Red Sea waterway, prompting a retaliatory U.S. bombing campaign under President Donald Trump that cost well over $1 billion.
The “character of warfare is changing at a ratio faster than we’ve ever seen,” Army Gen. Bryan Fenton, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, told Congress in April. “Our adversaries use $10,000 one-way drones that we shoot down with $2 million missiles. That cost-benefit curve is upside down.”
Unconventional methods, such as exploiting a technology supply chain, are also being used by established powers to degrade their adversaries. In September, amid attacks across its northern border, Israel pulled off an audacious operation that rigged pagers and walkie-talkies to explode when triggered remotely. The attack contributed to the devastation of Hezbollah’s ranks, from which it has not fully recovered, and may have spared Israel a costly invasion of Lebanon.
Asymmetric warfare is as old as the Bible’s David versus Goliath and as devastating as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in which al-Qaeda operatives hijacked U.S. airliners and killed almost 3,000 people. That plot cost between $400,000 and $500,000, according to the 9/11 Commission. By some estimates, the United States has spent $8 trillion on post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
But drones, even short-range craft like the ones Ukraine smuggled into Russia, have become the asymmetric weapon of choice because of their relatively low cost, accessibility and remote piloting. And while much has been made of cyberweapons in asymmetric warfare — there was widespread fear about Russia taking out Ukraine’s electric grids and communications networks before it invaded — so far the physical impact has been muted.
WaPo
empire SUCKS BIG TIME
