Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

s/drone/guerilla tactics/ and the answer, speaking as a veteran, is nothing.

I expect to get downvoted for this, but after a tour in Iraq I firmly believe theres no weapon or countermeasure thats going to be unilaterally effective at arresting the concept of guerilla warfare and terrorism except negotiation. Otherwise, you end up dividing your city into red and green zones, and pretty soon even if a terrorist attack hasnt happened in a few months, terrorism is pretty successful in making peoples lives outright miserable. smoking kills more americans than terrorism in 2017, but we still have to take our shoes off at the airport.

People just want equality, some measure of freedom, liberty, and prosperity. Show up with tanks, rig an election in favor of your candidate, and disenfranchise an entire segment of the population like we did in Iraq, and you will find people will adopt all sorts of creative and clever methods to not only sabotage your mission, but actively eliminate your high value targets youve come to rely upon for 'nation building' or whatever geopolitical pursuit du-jour is popular.

In Iraq, we called it "winning hearts and minds." doing things to fix problems like providing clean water or just a few meals made incredible progress in crushing the enemies ability to recruit anyone more sophisticated than an angry goat herder. And he quit being angry once we fixed the sidewalk to the mosque.

In maduros case, he is reviled by a sizeable majority of his population. he openly ignores major problems like starvation, he engages his people with violent tactics, and he disregards basic human rights and living conditions. Nothing, no technology on this earth, will keep you safe if your people turn on you. There is no police or military force that can endure sustained guerilla terrorist tactics indefinitely. Not even the US Military.

In counter-terrorism they call defensive measures "hardening the target" because they know it can never be completely secure as you mention.

Guerilla tactics are the evolutionary counter-balance to an overpowering force. If there's a day when a power becomes so great it can't be resisted we're all in trouble. We like it when we're resisting (Revolutionary War) but not when we're being resisted (Iraw and Vietnam). But the tactic exists because it's effective.

What is the best way to disagree with this unilaterally?

I don't even understand what this means, let alone how you could disagree with what was said.

https://youtu.be/-B0dqvXyx84?t=38s

The same way you disagree with anything unilaterally. By yourself =)

This is the correct answer.

What can defend against someone who is resourceful, determined, and has an axe to grind? Not much.

Anyone remember Killdozer?

>Anyone remember Killdozer?

Go over to ar-15.com or some prepper forums and everyone will know exactly who you're talking about, here probably not so much. This crowd doesn't tend to idolize that kind of thing.

You don't have to idolize it to understand it, and learn from it.

Same with the Unabomber. Everyone likes to make jokes, but how many of those people have read what he wrote?

I read it and I don't think it's worth reading - it struck me as the ravings of a disgruntled pseudo-intellectual.

Killdozer is a perfect example of how we CAN defend against this kind of attack: Make sure that everyone has something to lose.

If they'd just cut that guy some slack, like maybe not destroying his business, or helping to relocate, or anything that left him with a reason to keep being a productive member of society, then the outcome would have been very different. But they fucked him into the ground, until eventually he fucked back.

http://archives.durangotelegraph.com/04-06-24/mountain_excha...

> The story of the batch plant also goes back to 1992, three years after Heemeyer had moved to the area. Heemeyer bought his two acres from the Resolution Trust Corp., the federal agency set up to handle the assets of failed savings and loan institutions. He bought the two acres for $42,000 but later agreed to sell it to the Docheff family, which wanted the property for a concrete batch plant, for $250,000. They agreed, but then he wanted $375,000 and at some later point wanted a deal worth approximately $1 million. All of this was well before the rezoning proposal hit town hall.

He got a quarter of a million for land he bought for $40k. That's hardly fucked into the ground.

Sure, but it's more that he felt he had no power and wanted to invert that powerlessness.

The (afaik) plan started after they repeatedly denied him the ability to create his own path to his property, and hit him with fines etc due to a forced rezoning. The guy (apparently) tried to negotiate and got hung out to dry a bit.

Don't know the exact details of whether they were in the right to do so, but the point is the guy felt like he had his back against the wall and had nothing left to live for.

Not condoning the guys actions though.

Never heard of killdozer, thanks for sharing!

You don't need so much work to make an impact, a truck is enough.

Nothing will make you safe from cheap attacks like IED's or Drones dropping explosives. The Q is: what will make it "safe enough to operate" under the threat. The IED threat made vehicles heavy and expensive, movement restricted.

The drone threat is similar but different. Protection of a single high value locatoin like a presidential speech (Maduro situation) is quite doable. Some combination of surveillance and kinetic and electronic countermeasures. It's not foolproof but it appears to work ok-ish (there are still high value targets speaking around the world and zero drone assasinations and now nonzero failed assasinations). The problem is that it's resource intensive and asymmetric as hell. And it's still just a question of time until the first successful attack.

A more interesting question is, what does a group of soldiers do to protect from a drone threat? They don't have a fixed location and huge resources, like a presidential speech. You can't fire a hugely expensive AA weapon at an off the shelf drone. It would seem you need some kind of weapon that is light, cheap, and reliably kills an off the shelf drone up to max altitude, and can be re-used or carried in large numbers by a single rifle squad.

It could be as simple as another drone? This is at least my guess. The most reliable and cheap thing to use to attack a drone is another drone. That would then be effectively the start of an arms race of drones. Higher, faster, better armed, better countermeasures. We'd see a replay of the evolution of fighter planes, but for plastic UAV's?

I would add to your list, "cheaper". Any drone that can be swarmed and taken down by cheaper drones is probably a bad investment.

> Show up with tanks, rig an election in favor of your candidate, and disenfranchise an entire segment of the population...

I protested the Iraq invasion in 2003 but this is a revisionist and historically inaccurate version of why it failed so spectacularly.

The U.S. didn't occupy a functional country and then destroy it. The outbreak of mass murder and tit-for-tat violence wasn't motivated by political grievances against U.S. policy. The U.S. removed a dictator that was keeping the lid on religious sectarian infighting. It erupted immediately into a civil war and that was further inflamed by third parties.

"The fall of Baghdad saw the outbreak of regional, sectarian violence throughout the country, as Iraqi tribes and cities began to fight each other over old grudges. The Iraqi cities of Al-Kut and Nasiriyah launched attacks on each other immediately following the fall of Baghdad to establish dominance in the new country, and the U.S.-led Coalition quickly found themselves embroiled in a potential civil war. U.S.-led Coalition forces ordered the cities to cease hostilities immediately, explaining that Baghdad would remain the capital of the new Iraqi government. Nasiriyah responded favorably and quickly backed down; however, Al-Kut placed snipers on the main roadways into town, with orders that invading forces were not to enter the city. After several minor skirmishes, the snipers were removed, but tensions and violence between regional, city, tribal, and familial groups continued."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq

The U.S. didn't occupy a functional country and then destroy it. The outbreak of mass murder and tit-for-tat violence wasn't motivated by political grievances against U.S. policy. The U.S. removed a dictator that was keeping the lid on religious sectarian infighting.

The US got a lot of good will right after the invasion. It destroyed that by disbanding the Iraqi army, by failing achieve basic safety for the country and by managing the country in an incompetent fashion.

Moreover, the country was in horrific shape due to ten years of draconian sanctions. They were theoretically against Saddam but the average Iraqi suffered horribly - the looting of priceless Iraqi artifacts by destitute mob was an expression of what US sanctions had reduced the country to (along with Saddam himself, of course).

> The U.S. didn't occupy a functional country and then destroy it.

But they did disband the Iraqi army and the whole Iraqi state!

>"The fall of Baghdad saw the outbreak of regional, sectarian violence throughout the country, as Iraqi tribes and cities began to fight each other over old grudges."

These are things the Iraqi Army and Police could have kept under control, had they existed. Instead, unemployed soldiers made up much of the sectarian fighting forces.

A country without a state devolving into anarchy shouldn't be that surprising. But to the US, it apparently was!

It wasn't surprising to the US. That was the whole point. To destroy the Iraqi oil industry.

Why would the US, the country dependent on oil prices being low, would want to destroy the oil industry of a major producer?

Depends on who you ask. There is a somewhat popular conspiracy theory out there [0] that claims Saddam (just like Gaddafi) got "removed" for selling oil in Euros instead of Dollars [1], which would have hurt the petrodollar in the long term.

[0] https://www.quora.com/If-Saddam-Hussein-and-Gaddafi-were-ous...

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/meast/10/30/iraq.un.euro.r...

Yes, that and what I said in another subthread.

Also, Sadam had outlived his utility.

First time I've ever heard this. I've heard lots of how the U.S. went in to steal Iraqi oil, but never about how the U.S. went in to destroy the Iraqi oil industry. Explain?

From what I've read, it was a deal with the Saudis. Iraq was reportedly planning, with Russian help, to modernize its oil industry. And to out-produce Saudi Arabia, and break OPEC. And to evade US sanctions by selling oil in other currencies.

There's also reporting about close ties between the Bush and Saudi families. Same private schools. Kids vacationed together.

They were also planning to stop using the $ in favour of the Euro to price their oil. US business interests did not like that one bit.

A dictator that the US had supported, initially because he killed lots of communists, and then fought a proxy war against Iran.

It's quite similar to what happened in Syria. When the Syrian government was torturing "terrorist suspects", for the CIA nonetheless [0], it was also considered a US ally.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/19/syria-...

Revisionist if you don't have a clue what Special Forces/CIA et al do....

If the occupation force used cheap, throwaway drones then guerrilla tactics are rendered obsolete. But even that scenario would be inefficient.

The most efficient form of occupation is by getting the benefits of the occupation without the occupation: discretely hijacking a government + their media + most important companies, turning every citizen of a country into a debt slave.

Why fight millions of people if you can pay off a few dozen senators?

Such "asymmetric warfare" can be very effective: if defending costs much more than mounting an effective attack, then an underdog attacker can keep on bleeding the better-resourced defender or even eventually force the defender to give up.

The use of COTS drones might not become a trend though, since jamming/spoofing the GPS and the radio frequencies used would prevent the drones from being directed effectively. Customizing the drone radios would add to effort and costs, and require somewhat specialized skills.

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