Terrorism is all about terror.

Imagine a major league football or baseball stadium packed to capacity. Two or three drones, each with a relatively small explosive charge surrounded by shrapnel fly in, crash into the spectators, and detonate. You end up with a small number of immediate casualties like what happened at the Boston Marathon. But the stampede of tens of thousands of panicking people trying to rush out of the stadium will probably injure and kill many more. Have a car bomb or two strategically located a couple blocks away where you expect those crowds to run and you’ve succeeded in your terror plans quite nicely…

deleted by creator

I’m calling it. Pretty soon Trump is going to demand the construction of giant fans along the US/Canada border to blow all the smoke back into Canada.

Must capitalize Every other Word in Every run-On sentence.

That plus a well configured pi-hole. I don’t even get ads in my iPhone apps thanks to it.

Some are actually put on display like a trophy by the police or military group that captured it.

Not entirely sure what the policy is for these sorts of things, but I do know various countries Coast Guards and Navies will use abandoned boats, lifeboats, etc. for target practice. It actually serves a couple of purposes, including live fire training. It also ensures the boat will sink, which means other boats won’t spot it, call it in, and cause an unnecessary search & rescue operation all over again for the same vessel. It’s also far safer for the crews to just sink it than it is to tow it. And if they’re busy towing one of these in then it means hours or even days where they can’t be out patrolling and responding to emergencies, etc.

Having said all that I could see them wanting to keep a sub like this since it’s demonstrating a new tactic. Investigators might want to take a close look at how it’s put together. If it wasn’t for that then I could see them just scuttling it after they recovered any drugs (not that there were any in this case).

It’s pretty easy to clear out a collapsed tunnel compared to completely rebuilding an underground facility full of high tech equipment.

Even if they don’t have any nukes that they developed themselves, there’s always the possibility they could’ve bought one or two from North Korea…

First it was murder hornets, now regular bees are after us as well…

Exactly. Look at a current US Navy ship like the USS Beloit and it has a reported draft of 14 feet. You’re going to want to launch a ship like that into deeper water than what it drafts so that it doesn’t bottom out and damage the hull.

It’s possible they’ve still been damaged enough to be unusable. Heat and/or shrapnel from those airplanes that burned could have easily caused damage that these satellites can’t see.

This is why they used small FPV drones and launched them just a few kilometers away. There was virtually no warning, and small low flying drones would be very difficult for any automated defensive system to detect in time.

I think the Russians also felt a false sense of security given how far these airbases are from Ukraine. They may have had defenses in place for larger drones flying all the way from Ukraine, but again, such a system would have difficulty with small drones flying at treetop level from a very short distance.

It’s not just a theory. The US military has confirmed that is what they are trying to do:

https://www.twz.com/air/russia-covering-its-aircraft-in-tires-is-about-befuddling-image-matching-seekers-u-s-military-confirms

deleted by creator

Exactly. As a courtesy they might give trusted allies a few hours notice, or at least inform them when the op has started. But unless they needed the assistance of an ally in planning and preparing such an attack then informing anybody well ahead of time serves no useful purpose at all.

No. The sequel to that one.

Kind of makes me hope for a delayed reaction like the dam explosion in the movie Force 10 From Navarone.

I would love to see Ukraine trolling Russia with this.

Detonate an underwater charge that weakens one of the bridge supports. Wait while the Russians react, examine the bridge, etc.

A dozen or so hours later detonate another hidden underwater charge on another support a few hundred yards away.

Repeat the process after random delays until so many supports are weakened that the bridge collapses under its own weight.

This is the sort of op they would typically notify an ally of when it is actually imminent or just got started. If Biden was still in the White House my guess is he would have been given roughy 72 hours notice or less.

GPS and similar systems are extremely low power, meaning it’s trivial to jam them with a higher powered signal closer to potential targets. And you can easily counter multiple navigation systems by broadcasting over a wide range of frequencies.

Much better to augment radio navigation with inertial navigation, terrain mapping, etc.