Trump Assassination Drone Recon
The playing field continues to tilt.
Not quite six years passed between Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland and their utter defeat. During that time they produced a torrent of innovations that largely defined warfare in the second half of the 20th century. Notable contributions include:
Cruise missiles.
Ballistic missiles.
Jet fighters.
Air to air missiles.
MANPADS.
Shaped charge anti-tank weapons.
Assault rifles.
Submarine snorkels.
Combined arms warfare doctrine.
Ukraine is in a similar position to Germany eighty years ago - they are outnumbered, outgunned, and frantically innovating to stay ahead of the Russians. Drones in warfare today are a change of similar magnitude to aircraft in naval warfare or combustion engines in land warfare during WWII.
Trump’s would-be assassin used drone reconnaissance just hours before the actual attempt. Creating an attack capable drone would be a much more complex endeavor here, due to the lack of access to military grade explosives. While there are impressive civilian Tannerite detonations seen in YouTube videos, packing a workable amount of explosives onto a drone and solving the ticklish problem of how to detonate the charge are a much different matter than blowing up an old microwave from a safe distance.
The Secret Service is getting roasted for this failure and rightly so, just for the failure to both properly interdict the shooter and to secure Trump’s safety. They have not even begun to digest the drone angle to this attack, but they must, which is going to be an amazing thicket of civil liberties and technical challenges.
The protection of high value targets is the domain of the Secret Service, but I see a much more pedestrian problem that’s going to be absolutely awful if we do skid into civil disorder after November’s Civil War Referendum.
The first is a satellite image of the East Bay area and the second are the various jurisdictions and feature names. As I sit here on my back porch, looking up at steep, forested hills, full of crunchy dry grass, it’s too easy to imagine a drone carrying a dowel with a sharpened point and fins made of the same plastic credit card sized Fresnel lens I keep in my wallet for those occasional old man vs. fine print label battles.
I’ve never taken this thing out in the sun to see how much concentrated heat a seven square inch lens would produce, but fires sometimes start from sunlight focused by clear glass bottles. Every year there are people arrested here for arson, sometimes wildland fire fighters in need of a paycheck. A lone individual in this state with a little bit of ingenuity in the realm of timed ignition and drone operations skills could cause an absolute disaster. And drone filming of fires is expected, we have periodic instances where CALFIRE’s air attack has to shut down because some moron just HAS to get an overhead shot of the action. A guy with outdoor gear, cameras, and drones can pretty much wander everywhere and not have much trouble, as long as he doesn’t bother the water bombers.
Things here are going to burn and burn, until the plants that are left are smaller, more widely spaced, and they’ll get selected for natural fire resistance. That does not mean specifically that they can take the heat, fire resistance could take the form of hardy seeds that animals and birds happily spread. The hated invasive cheatgrass does this and it’s taken over a lot of our range land here in the west.
I expect this trend, like so many others, to get weaponized. I’ve been saying We’re Gonna Fight for years, and drone facilitated action at a distance will be part of that.