Turkey Now Has Swarming Suicide Drones It Could Export
Most of the hand-wringing about this strikes me as pretty far-fetched. While I have no doubt that attack drones will be used extensively on the battlefield, I think their use beyond that will be isolated. There are few advantages to using drones as a weapon that aren&#x27;t already available to both terrorists and states. If you want to hunt specific people down and kill them, you don&#x27;t need a drone. And if you want to cause mass casualties, there are much better options <i>today</i> than a swarm of hundreds of fragile one-time-use drones. Why don&#x27;t we have more terrorist attacks using guns or truck bombs? Why don&#x27;t we have drone IEDs right now? Why aren&#x27;t drones taking down airplanes and helicopters all over the world? Why don&#x27;t we have SAM attacks at every airport in the world?<p>The nightmare scenario most people seem to be worried about is the &quot;slaughterbots&quot; one from that video, but it doesn&#x27;t make any sense to me. In some mythical future, we&#x27;ll have the ability to use a tiny explosive charge to blow a hole in a specific person&#x27;s head? I guess the person who came up with this missed the memo about the 300 million devices we have in this country that can use a shaped explosive charge to put a hole in someone&#x27;s head.<p>And <i>who</i> is the entity that&#x27;s releasing these drones to kill half a city? If it&#x27;s our government, they could clearly do this now if they wanted to. Why don&#x27;t they? If it&#x27;s another government, that&#x27;s no different than any other act of war they could currently carry out. What advantage does this offer? If it&#x27;s a terrorist organization, again, they have better and cheaper options available <i>today</i>. And it&#x27;s not like we couldn&#x27;t stop them: who was flying that giant plane? Who were those guys releasing these swarms from the van? Where did they buy these drones? Where did they get the explosives? Just like many other threats, we&#x27;d track them down.<p>I&#x27;m not saying there&#x27;s no risk, just that I think it&#x27;s completely overblown. Every new technology carries a risk that a malicious actor will use it for harm, but the same technological advancements also enable us to better defend ourselves. So maybe there is some future dystopia where huge swarms of anonymously-controlled &quot;slaughterbots&quot; roam the skies looking for targets to murder, but if we have the ability to do that, we <i>also</i> have the ability to maintain defensive swarms, personal EMPs, chaff and smoke emitters, laser sentries, broad spectrum signal jamming, automated hacker entities, or whatever else we come up with.