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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

How long until the US is subject to this kind of targeted assassination? It doesn't seem that this tech is so inaccessible to state actors with billions to invest. There are sufficient such enemies. Is the Secret Service really confident that it can protect its charges from this kind of attack?

I think they'll find that a drone missile can also be a boomerang.

EDIT: The objections to this scenario are taking it more literally than I was. I was thinking of a few dozen launched together from a yacht or freighter or enemy safe house in a nearby suburb. That's a lot easier than reproducing the US global operation.

There was a similar sequence near the beginning of Olympus has Fallen.

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A state actor with billions of dollars to invest would just use a regular missile. But not against another state actor with billions of dollars to invest into anti-air defense. The only reason why these are used in places like Syria or Yemen is because there's nobody there with the capacity to reliably shoot down drones and/or warplanes.

I don't think there is any air defense system capable of defending vast civilian areas from drone attacks?

The closest is probably the Israeli Iron Dome, and that costs about $50M for a battery with 17km range. Great for a tiny country under constant attack, but hardly economical for good coverage of larger countries.

The drones that are capable of launching those missiles are huge, and require airstrips to operate - we're not talking quadcopters here. Consider that e.g. Reaper - which can carry at most 2 such missiles - has a wingspan of 15 meters, and weighs a ton. Any such thing trying to cross the border would be quickly detected and shot down, same as any other warplane.

There is a different issue with small off-the-shelf quadcopters that are turned into "assassin drones" by adding a small shaped charge sufficient to kill the target if they manage to get close enough to detonate it point blank. But that's also something the Secret Service can handle fine, once they realized that it was a viable attack vector.

Imperialism and extrajudicial killing is only bad when other people do it, obviously. /s

There is no _bad_ on this scale. There is only "aligned with our objectives" and "not aligned with our objectives". And we short-hand the latter with "bad" and the former with "good" to create the propaganda association of ethics. So yes, I would gladly repeat your comment unironically.

I think this is sound. Pax Americana is part of the foundation for massive human progress. It has led to a Golden Age the like of which has never been seen before.

I mean, I don't know if this would be the tech leap that does it. This is spending millions of dollars to stab someone from a chair a continent away. I think we were probably at the "this is going to backfire" moment with the first round of drones. I doubt that this ability to now ostensibly limit civilian casualties weighs heavily on those who would perform an attack such as you're imaging.

Never because the US tightly controls its airspace. Targeted killings in the first world tend to make use of poisons and bullets.

It worked wonders on 9/11.

Let's analyze what it would take to make your scenario work: some state actor is going to fly a drone or aircraft with the range to reach the US (launched from where?), past any radars and other sensors that the continental US has without being detected (and then fly back out even), drop a specialized munition that leaves large, analyzable debris behind, and somehow not be identified to face reprisal. That is exceedingly unlikely.

Why not just launch the drone from inside the US and use a generic explosive? Unexplained drone swarms near sensitive targets have been fairly common.[1,2] Them not being weaponized seems like more of a choice for reprisal like you said than a lack of capability.

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/07/30/drone-...

[2]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/34662/faa-documents-of...

> until the US is subject to this kind of targeted assassination?

I suppose this depends on one's definition of "this kind."

The R9X is deployed from a massive drone platform. Using it on our homeland requires air superiority around the target. That's not, in the near term, a significant risk.

Technically the US has already, over two subsequent administrations intentionally and with a handful of discrete attacks, gone after and killed a father, his US citizen son (a minor), and US citizen daughter (a minor) in a series of targeted missile and commando strikes. It was done outside US soil but it was at least one targeted killings of US citizen kid. The daughter may have been accidental since her assassination was a commando raid and not two seperate drone strikes like they used to get the son.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/how-tea...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/01/yemen-strike-e...

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Technically almost impossible. The US have bases overseas, its enemies don't have anything within or close to the US borders.

> Is the Secret Service really confident that it can protect its charges from this kind of attack?

Yes. Our military is pretty confident that it can handle any form of missile/flying object trying to reach US soil before its an issue, which is part of why we feel pretty much zero repercussions for being terrible.

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