The targeting requirements and level of autonomy needed to indiscriminately massacre civilians, in other words, are much lower than what you’d need to selectively destroy hardened targets on a battlefield.
If you want to indiscriminately kill random civilians, there are cheaper options than maiming individual people with $500 a pop drones. Life-sustaining infrastructure is made up of very soft targets, for instance. The strikes on desalination plants in the Middle East were a major controversy for this reason. Likewise the mass deployment of cheap, plentiful gravity bombs on major cities during WWII.
Even if you presume the existence of a cartoonishly nihilistic terrorist group with neither state-level capacity nor any meaningful goals that would give them specific targets, I’d expect that smuggling in a rifle and targeting large crowds (or just ramming crowds with a truck, as we’ve seen with ISIS-style attacks in Europe, and the Waukesha terrorist attack in Minnesota) would have a much more ‘effective’ complexity-lethality tradeoff. If they’re unusually smart for deranged extremists, maybe sabotage of critical infrastructure.
The use case that I do see for drones is assassinations of high-profile individuals by disillusioned civilians. Luigi Mangione’s demographic of smart engineering students capable of long-term planning who feel they have very little to lose is only growing, after all.
I read this comment, felt relieved, and then stopped to reflect on the fact that I just mildly freaked out over a post saying “killing people is gonna be super easy” and then was relieved to read a comment saying “it’s actually even easier already”.
The advantage of drones in this regard is that they let you threaten a much larger number of people with a small payload. Short of a nuke, there’s nothing you could put into a shipping container that would come close to threatening a meaningful fraction of a major city. This gives them a deterrent value that never existed for states with lots of ordinary munitions, and so could be worth the cost of acquisition.
For terrorists, acquiring and using such weapons might be more prohibitive than ramming into a crowd with a truck. But the fact that it would be possible at all would encourage people to exploit the vulnerability, especially since drone swarms carry considerable shock and awe value for terror (unlike destroying a water treatment facility).
Most natural gas distribution networks are vulnerable to overpressurization which might cause city-wide fires and hundreds of casualties, a few terrorists can organize that by physically capturing relevant infrastructure. But for that they need technical competences which they lack, as no contemporary violent non-state actors really reach the sophistication of Aum Shinrikyo.
Your plan, however, requires not only engineering skills but time and money and production facilities. It’s not impossible that another AS-like apocalyptic sect will emerge in the future but it seems unlikely. Hezbollah might have the means to develop capability in the near future (as Yair Halberstadt has rightfully noted below) and it may be a natural outgrowth of their current drone program but they won’t be able to keep the program secret from Israeli intelligence
If you want to indiscriminately kill random civilians, there are cheaper options than maiming individual people with $500 a pop drones. Life-sustaining infrastructure is made up of very soft targets, for instance. The strikes on desalination plants in the Middle East were a major controversy for this reason. Likewise the mass deployment of cheap, plentiful gravity bombs on major cities during WWII.
Even if you presume the existence of a cartoonishly nihilistic terrorist group with neither state-level capacity nor any meaningful goals that would give them specific targets, I’d expect that smuggling in a rifle and targeting large crowds (or just ramming crowds with a truck, as we’ve seen with ISIS-style attacks in Europe, and the Waukesha terrorist attack in Minnesota) would have a much more ‘effective’ complexity-lethality tradeoff. If they’re unusually smart for deranged extremists, maybe sabotage of critical infrastructure.
The use case that I do see for drones is assassinations of high-profile individuals by disillusioned civilians. Luigi Mangione’s demographic of smart engineering students capable of long-term planning who feel they have very little to lose is only growing, after all.
I read this comment, felt relieved, and then stopped to reflect on the fact that I just mildly freaked out over a post saying “killing people is gonna be super easy” and then was relieved to read a comment saying “it’s actually even easier already”.
The advantage of drones in this regard is that they let you threaten a much larger number of people with a small payload. Short of a nuke, there’s nothing you could put into a shipping container that would come close to threatening a meaningful fraction of a major city. This gives them a deterrent value that never existed for states with lots of ordinary munitions, and so could be worth the cost of acquisition.
For terrorists, acquiring and using such weapons might be more prohibitive than ramming into a crowd with a truck. But the fact that it would be possible at all would encourage people to exploit the vulnerability, especially since drone swarms carry considerable shock and awe value for terror (unlike destroying a water treatment facility).
Most natural gas distribution networks are vulnerable to overpressurization which might cause city-wide fires and hundreds of casualties, a few terrorists can organize that by physically capturing relevant infrastructure. But for that they need technical competences which they lack, as no contemporary violent non-state actors really reach the sophistication of Aum Shinrikyo.
Your plan, however, requires not only engineering skills but time and money and production facilities. It’s not impossible that another AS-like apocalyptic sect will emerge in the future but it seems unlikely. Hezbollah might have the means to develop capability in the near future (as Yair Halberstadt has rightfully noted below) and it may be a natural outgrowth of their current drone program but they won’t be able to keep the program secret from Israeli intelligence
Quick correction: Waukesha is in Wisconsin, not Minnesota.