This is a tech power fantasy. Its not at all representative of the state of the art and disregards a lot of difficulties.

Massed drones absolutely can wreck terrible destruction, death by a thousand cuts to any facility or base or airfield. But the kind of amassed yet precise strike against a hundred targeted individuals, with smart targeting and somehow knowledge of their career status?! Come on.

I wouldn't even finish that movie, let alone fund that proposal.

smart targeting is clearly crucial, yes. but the objective of warfare is not to wreak (or wreck, heh) terrible destruction; it is to break the enemy's will to resist. by themselves, drones don't tell you who to target or where they are; they just gather surveillance data and deliver munitions, very precisely and in a way that is very difficult to stop. in combination with things like facebook data and cellphone subscriber data, that's an extremely powerful capability

keep in mind that what is happening today is not what will happen tomorrow or what can happen in five years

you are rejecting the possibility because of its unfamiliarity, much as the navy rejected the possibility of a surprise attack on pearl harbor

I'm challenging the supporting assumptions you described. Real time career knowledge, real time non visual person tracking, real time coordinated search across cities, real time IFF, lethal payloads on them all, real time localization. There's a lot of requirements there. An alien invasion would probably use clouds of drones in this way. The US could. Russia, China. After some testing. But not the next ISIS. And those states that can already have better options for targeting at range on a battlefield. And I'm challenging the use case. Are they within US borders? How? Flew in? Launched from within? How did they get close enough? A ship? Infiltration?

Pearl harbor was easy, required no new tech, just will. And Pearl Harbor was well known before the attack, had been demonstrated years before. This isn't that.

> Real time career knowledge, real time non visual person tracking, real time coordinated search across cities, real time IFF, lethal payloads on them all, real time localization. There's a lot of requirements there. ... Are they within US borders? How? Flew in? Launched from within? How did they get close enough? A ship? Infiltration?

Rather than go through and carefully solve the fascinating puzzle of how to destroy civilization step by step, I'm just going to point out that these things are not actually very difficult. Instead of hoping that the next Daesh can't recruit anyone who knows how to build an IMSI catcher, write a Facebook app, or use LinkedIn (or VKontakte if their adversary is Russia), think about what happens when there's a conflict between two adversaries that can.

> The US could. Russia, China. After some testing. But not the next ISIS.

Certainly the three states you mention could develop that capability, yes, although they don't currently have Slaughterbots fleets ready to launch. And Daesh certainly wasn't able to develop it, although they did drop a bunch of unguided hand grenades on people from remotely-piloted quadcopters. But what about Turkey? France? Rebels in the West Bank less incompetent than Hamas? The Zetas, who as I understand it have been running their own cellphone networks for 10 years? The Sinaloa cartel, which has thousands of drones carrying contraband across the US border? The Jalisco cartel, which is already targeting the families of police officers? The US-backed Guaidó faction in Venezuela? The US-backed military dictatorship currently running Egypt?

This isn't something that requires the budget of an aircraft carrier, and it's not something you can see from a satellite before it happens.

Sure. 'Think of the possibilities' is a fun exercise. I'm more in the 'will it scale' camp, that's all.

I've actually worked in this area before. There's more attention on this than you might imagine, and less than it deserves. There's also better ways to use drones to cause terror and disrupt operations that I obv won't get into. Maybe its not tech fantasy as I originally said, but it is much further out than you originally said as well, and it's a bit overkill. If you wanted to have the effect of causing fear in soldiers using drones, I think (but don't know) there are easier ways that don't require the same limiting assumptuons about technology, logistics and scaling.

So, what do you think we can do to prevent it?

Nice try, China.

Heh! Actually, although I'm in Argentina, I thoroughly endorse 墨子's defensive program: if every country is safe against attacks, then all the people will be safe, while if every country is vulnerable to attacks, then life will be bitter and filled with grief. So, just as 墨子's followers worked to improve the fortifications of the various states of China so that none could gain by attacking another, I think we should figure out how to reduce our collective vulnerability to this kind of drone-swarm attack.

Except that I think it's kind of impossible and we are basically doomed.

Minus the emotional wording, this has been the justification for large standing militaries in every nation state ever. I mean, it's the Dept of Defense here in the US.

Right, and the US isn't even a nation-state, despite the persistent efforts of certain reactionary groups to change that. But it's a backwards justification, because thousands of years of history show us that large standing militaries increase the risk of war, while fortifications diminish it.

$10 will get you a palm sized drone with a flight time measured in minutes. Stop dreaming. The type of drone that people are scared of costs at least $1000.

Hamas sends thousands of rockets in that budget range and nobody is scared that rocket swarms are going to kill thousands of Israelis. IDF retaliation killed more innocent people in a single bombing than all Hamas rockets combined.

> $10 will get you a palm sized drone with a flight time measured in minutes.

retail, and battery-powered. what will a $10 bom get you with a nitromethane-powered engine or a glider dropped from a helium balloon

> The type of drone that people are scared of costs at least $1000.

they need to rethink that. stop fighting the last war

> Hamas sends thousands of rockets in that budget range and nobody is scared that rocket swarms are going to kill thousands of Israelis

that's because hamas is too dumb to put glider wings and ardupilot on each rocket and possibly too deprived of facebook and imei-logger data to know where to find the specific thousands of israelis who are family members of the invading officers

'our enemy might be as incompetent as the hamas model rocketry club' is not a great way to think out how to provide security

this is not a dream. this is a nightmare

listen, i know this scenario isn't happening today. but it's going to happen within the next few years, and the fact that it isn't happening today isn't much of an argument against that

Who is going to try that and why wouldn't they meet the business end of a nuclear missile?

possibly because the officers in the nuclear silo want some of their family members to still be alive when they go home. or possibly because the nuclear dudes don't know who to nuke. or possibly at the point where your answer to a military threat is 'well if they try that we could just nuke them' you are kind of admitting that it is a very serious threat indeed; note that nobody got nuked in response to 9/11