A battlefield front line in Eastern Europe is a far cry from a USAF base surrounded by 3 letter agencies.

I would bet that the people who invented drone warfare have some awareness of the risks.

Drone warfare isn't invented though. Warfare tactics are ever evolving, the same as an MMA fighter can do whatever it takes to win. So it's not like there's an inventor of drone warfare, who wrote the rules and derived the consequences, and could predict the outcomes. Especially when warfare economics starts to go back to individuals/small entities having asymmetrical advantages over state actors. And when development in this space is incredibly rapid, accelerating and available to anyone with a laptop, a DIY CNC cutter and some off the shelf chemicals.

Defending against these types of threats isn't something the traditional military orgs are equipped for. They are slow to move, react, plan. They have established doctrine to counteract a simulated opponent's doctrine.

One would also bet that some discarded “allies” from the Cold War operating from a cave in Afghanistan couldn’t pull off a surprise attack on American soil, killing thousands. And yet they did.

For the record, that attack did include an aircraft slamming into the pentagon itself.

Bloated intel agencies aren’t run by gods, they’re run by bureaucrats. They have, and will, fail.

> One would also bet that some discarded “allies” from the Cold War operating from a cave in Afghanistan couldn’t pull off a surprise attack on American soil, killing thousands. And yet they did.

One would have to have been pretty ignorant then. It’s not like 9/11 was an isolated event. The same target was hit 8 years prior.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bomb...

Totally. Multiple agencies were aware of the plot in full or in part, and it was utterly down to mismanagement of national defense.

The “inside job” has always really been distraction from the mundane truth it was a massive fuckup by the people in charge.

So I’m very open to the possibility there are a lot of adversaries walking around the permitters of US bases with little drone kits having a blast.

And the very near miss of the White House or other nearby target https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93

Because the US definitively do not have prior experience of being hit by surprise from the air on their own soil…

Sounds like the perfect place to drop some biological weapons.

>Crazy that Covid 2025 was first detected in Langley isn't it?

What's worse is that this won't take more than a garage bio lab to do.

Makes me want to move to Antarctica.

I wouldn’t worry about theoretical garage bio labs. It’s hard enough doing microbiology, molecular genetics, and bioinformatics even with a real lab full of experienced scientists and technicians. The idea of one or two people doing anything threatening even with millions of dollars ignores the fact that nobody has the requisite expertise to not only perform all the experiments and analyses, but somehow keep the equipment running without service contracts.

Good luck getting an Illumina or Agilent tech to your clandestine garage operation to set up and calibrate your gear.

You sound exactly like the old sysadmins who were saying why mysql is a toy that you should never use for your website.

Open source science is real and has a barrier to entry that's just your time. Anyone with a biology degree can set up a garage lab today that would have been state of the art in 2010 for under $20k.

With all due respect, you sound like someone with little to no experience with the topic at hand.

Having set up a state of the art labs in 2011 and 2015 and having what you’re imagining is the required education, I can assure you there’s nothing myself or anyone else can do with 20k today that’s even in the same arena as the former.

And if you’re basing this solely on marketing claims for nanopore… I was a beta tester.

The fentanyl crisis should serve as a warning here. Precursors can be made in labs elsewhere and smuggled in and assembled in a lab of nearly arbitrary quality if a hostile nation state was motivated. Perhaps $20k isn't enough but $20M is tiny for a government sponsored program and more than enough to cause catastrophic damage.

Considering how poor the DoD response outlined in this article has been, they may have awareness, but that doesn't mean they're appropriately addressing the risk.