I'm quite sure the "deadly force" wording was for effect, more than any kind of actual change in posture or practice. Unless I'm mistaken there are still plenty of drones being seen in NJ and they're not blasting them out of the sky. And they've always had the option of lethal force around bases anyway.
what they assess as—the immediate threat of the drones
And as you say, the risks of shooting drones down are high. Damage to nearby property. Accidental shootdowns of innocent craft. Successful shootdowns would reveal our capabilities. Unsuccessful shootdowns would reveal our inability to deal with the threat. And in aggregate this would all give the enemy lots of intel as to where we do and don't have defenses. And open war (!!!) over our skies is, to put it mildly, kind of a big deal. There are, to put it mildly, global economic consequences.
Of course, that's all if these drones are of hostile origin, which I think is still a very open question.
If these drones are "ours," which would be weird but also plausible, then the "deadly force" note in the FAA notice could just be part of the cover story.
Thus, any action (or effectors traveling) outside base boundaries would generally be illegal.
Given the mobility of drones and desire to prevent their encroachment on bases in the first place, the appropriately legal unit for this would be non-federalized national guard air defense units, tasked by the state governor to intervene.
Hypothetically, the fighters launched could have shot down a civilian plane, but it would have taken direct presidential authorization (i.e. national emergency).
In the absence of an immediate threat, that authorization isn't going to happen.
Drones in most cases are a civil law enforcement matter.
They're not obviously the actors of a foreign nation state, are not an invasion, and are not posing an immediate threat.
They are breaking civil aviation laws.
In particular, your claim that "any action (or effectors traveling) outside base boundaries would generally be illegal" is not only false but facially absurd, since it would imply that the US military is statutorily prevented from intercepting enemy bombers or responding to an invasion of American soil.
[1] The reasons for which are well discussed here: https://www.navalgazing.net/Thoughts-on-the-Chinese-Balloon
Not really. Some signals can be very much unidirectional (eg, visible only to an overhead drone) instead of omnidirectional (eg, a car).
Metadata could be useful to intercept.
https://www.fun.com/marvel-3-inch-spider-man-flying-figure-i...
You can also do radio frequency signals intercepts from space, too. You need a big antenna on your satellite, but it's essentially a solved problem. Spaceborne SIGINT goes back to at least the early 70s.
The "drone threat" is a bunch of mass hysteria. Every photo I was shown was obviously a passenger jet liner.
It's not 'for effect'. It's the legal description of
use of a firearm by police/military.
Ergo a reminder that the military or police can shoot you is for effect; it does not represent a change to the status quo.
Would these drones be running FAA-standard navigation lights and a transponder? Because that seems to be the case for most of these drone spottings :)
Some do not seem to be, although my skepticism is high because I have seen a lot of faked UFO videos over the years and faking points of light in the night sky is like, the easiest thing to fake in a fake video/photo.
While I think this is unlikely, we could imagine that whoever is doing shady drone stuff might want to actually observe some basic safety rules, ridiculous as that sounds.
Suppose for a second that these drones are a "flex" from China/Russia/whoever. Causing a midair collision with an aircraft because they're running dark, or risking the chance of that because they're running dark, is a lot more serious than just flying some drones.
And if it's aliens, hey, maybe they're just trying to... uh, fit in by mimicing our airplanes' safety lights? =)
IMO most likely commercial LIDAR mapping by some company that’d rather remain stealth.
Even on other solar system bodies (the Moon, Mars, etc.), it's quite difficult to gauge scale and distance without terrestrial references (trees, structures, etc.) to guide the eye.
Drones fly around. It's legal. It's fun. It's interesting for countless reasons to countless people. Really speaks to the state of our information environment that so many have been thrown into an absolute tizzy.
It’s obviously just mass hysteria.
I'm a government institutions guy, but yes, let's attack people for... following basic human nature, not the government big brains that ignore basic realities of human nature about needing trust in stable/steady government institutions who instead just demand 'faith in government' that isn't earned. The government isn't just failing in actions, they are failing in understanding this BASIC requirement for governing.
I think the people panicking about drones are not going to be a fan of a federal ban on them. Just my two cents though.
Here the government said 'the United States Coast Guard mistook some 747s far away for 12 drones following their boat and if it wasn't planes then actually we assessed the 12 drones and found they aren't a threat, we don't know what they are, whose they are, or were they came from' and expected people to just go, hmm, ok, nevermind then.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Government is there to help control/direct what it gets filled with when it's a societal one.
The government doesn't know, it has no real responsibility or right to know, and it says it doesn't know. People extrapolating that into ridiculous theories cannot really be pinned on the government.
Next up: "I saw a shadow in the woods near my house and the government said they have no clue what it is!!!!"
You, an allegedly levelheaded person: "Well nature abhors a vacuum! It's a failure to lead not to have answers to such questions!"
No, that's actually not a levelheaded take.
If you don't enforce laws/proper behavior/provide safety, you get vigilanties. If you don't provide answers, people go looking, and gullible people settle for the first thing they find.
That’s why I’m being aggressive against this same “errr well yah know the government should have answers!” bullshit you’re purveying right here.
I think it depends. The smaller drones are allowed to be zapped using equiptment designed to take down drowns. They generally aren't shooting traditional munitions at drones domestically for multiple safety reasons, unless they are over a specific size/altitude.
To say "flying a drone makes it a credible threat" to say "drones are illegal," which someone is free to take up as their legislative priority.
On a side note, do you have a TRUST or Part 107?
> Many of the drone-downing systems do not permanently destroy it.
Uhh yeah if a consumer grade drone falls 300 feet out of the sky then yes it's destroyed.
Look up TFRs. Look up all the other restrictions these drones are supposed to be following. Tell me how they're legal.
"Uhh yeah if a consumer grade drone falls 300 feet out of the sky then yes it's destroyed."
Not irreparably. Some components will.
https://nypost.com/2024/12/28/us-news/mystery-nj-drone-sight...
> Not irreparably. Some components will.
Okay.
Lol what are you even arguing right now? It is not legal for the USG to destroy, seize, or damage people's property when they are not breaking the law or credibly threatening people. At the times of the drone sightings, there was no evidence whatsoever of them breaking the law or credibly threatening people.
Please state your position explicitly instead of this silly dance.
They seemed to not have a way to phone home, so more than likely China’s plan was to recover the balloon to get the data. That may be what you recall. For all we know they had been doing so for years successfully.
But they were definitely spy balloons.
The 2023 incident is pretty well written up on Wikipedia[1].
There was one Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down. Subsequent shoot-downs of balloons over the arctic and Great Lakes were not attributed to China - one that was recovered was definitively identified as a private weather balloon.
There were also previous Chinese surveillance balloon overflights - as well as one over Central America - that were not shot down.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident
Normal weather balloons are 20ft in diameter. This one was 200 feet in diameter and carried quite a payload - about the size of a couple of box cars. Additionally it had propellers and the ability to steer itself.
> There was no proof it was a spy balloon.
There was a preponderance of evidence - from the route of the balloon (over US strategic nuclear missle silos), to the equipment that was recovered to radio intercptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident
Where I live in upstate NY, Nextdoor.com was losing its shit over a “drone”, actually a lidar mapping plane, and some of the dumber people were suggesting taking shots at the Iranians.
It's maybe worth mentioning that the obvious reasons almost entirely have to do with the things you'd hit in the air, not once the bullet descended. If everyone on earth suddenly shot upward at around 80 degrees from the ground, you'd expect approximately zero casualties on average from the bullets falling and lethally striking surface objects (there would be a number of welts and bruises as well as minor property damage, but even that is less likely than you might suspect).
Do you have a citation for that? I can't find any numbers on people getting hit by falling bullets, let alone fatalities. Things let celebratory gunfire don't seem to be comparable since people tend to congregate outside for celebrations resulting in larger groups of potential unintentional targets.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/201323
Celebratory gunfire incidents were included, but only make up 4.6% of the total.
In approximately one year:
>Altogether, 317 persons received stray bullet injuries;
>142 (44.8%) were female, and 176 (55.5%) were outside the age range 15 to 34 years.
>Most individuals (258, 81.4%) were unaware of the events leading to the gunfire that caused their injuries.
>Many (129, 40.7%) were at home; most of these persons (88, 68.2%) were indoors.
>Sixty-five persons (20.5%) died, 18 (27.7%) of them at the shooting site and 55 (84.6%) on the day they were shot.
>Fourteen persons received nonfatal injuries by secondary mechanisms.
Also, injuries and one fatality were confirmed by Mythbusters in [0]. Read the account for Episode 50, which was the only myth to receive all three ratings (Busted, Plausible, and Confirmed) at the same time.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1284427/stray-bullets-vi...
Yes, it is reasonably established that bullets fired straight up do not regain their initial velocity on the way back down.
But, at less-than-vertical firing angles, they can retain a lot of their initial 4-figure-fps velocity, and how much is very dependent on particular trajectory, wind, bullet composition, and initial angle. Dependent enough that it's specifically outlawed in many states.
So, don't go glibly firing off skyward celebratory shots (over)confident in your understanding of the physics (or implicitly advocating it). You might be willing to take the risk, but no one else is willingly undertaking the risk you are creating.
Military doesnt decide between downing an airliner and not downing it, But rather a risk between downing an missile that can “potentially” be an airliner that god knows why is in a restricted airspace, and letting it fly and risk getting killed those thousands or even millions of people (if a population centre/city) get exploded with bombs and missiles.
BTW, this is a bit similar to why the US very clearly advertises the Tomahawk as not nuclear capable - so that a few subsonic blips do not trigger a strategic exchange. The Russians do not do that, many of their commonly used missiles are dual purpose.
I don't think that there was ever a *unilateral* US aversion to these things. We've fielded large numbers [3] of nuclear-warhead cruise missiles—air-, sea-, and ground-launched, spanning much of the Cold war. We're currently developing a new one right now [4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile_family)#Vari...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_For...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-109G_Gryphon
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nuclear_cruise_missil... ("Category: Nuclear cruise missiles of the United States")
[4] https://news.usni.org/2024/06/06/report-to-congress-to-on-nu... ("Report to Congress on Nuclear-Armed Sea-Launched Cruise Missile")
One hopes the modern Russian military is less enthusiastic about such things, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it.
Given that they have just done it again, I’d bet they have plenty of enthusiasm.
As I understand the pilot in the KAL 007 shoot down claimed that he visually identified the plane as a Boeing-type airliner years later, but also claimed he did not report that to control because it was not material since such aircraft could be readily converted to intelligence work which was what was the concern for which it was being intercepted. There is no additional support for this, and lots of things the pilot claimed about the incident are inconsistent with the evidence from radar tracks, flight data recorders of the shot down plane, and the records of the Soviet communications relating to the attack, so this particular unverifiable claim probably shouldn't be given much weight.
KAL 902, sure, we know that the pilot identified it as an airliner, tried to convince command not to have it shot down, but then followed the order to shoot it down.
With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian military is, could they really be so far behind that they're unable to determine the difference between an commercial airlines and a high-speed missile?
At a glance, just looking at the trajectory of this UFO for half a minute would be enough to determine if it's an airline with stable flight path, VS a missile that has some sort of trajectory that doesn't look at all like a airline. Not to mention the radar signature has to be different in at least some ways.
But again, I don't know the capability or process of the Russian military, in a high-tension environment sometimes shit just goes wrong even though it shouldn't.
https://www.flightglobal.com/military-uavs/ukraine-appears-t... ("Ukraine appears to deploy modified A-22 ultralights as suicide UAVs")
You're also making the assumption here that it was a modern Russian system. This wasn't exactly close to the current fighting, its entirely possible this radar was manufactured in the Soviet Union. I don't think those receive a lot (or any) civilian broadcasts.
People do like to provide their very important opinion completely oblivious what Grozny is farther away from eg Crimea than Kiev.
literally small prop planes with guidance systems and instead of ~4 passengers it's lots of explosives. commonly used against Russian oil depots, etc.
small radar signature, and a lot of ambiguity with civilian aircraft.
The likelihood of confusing a regional jet with a small prop plane (purely based on speed/heading/altitude) is way higher during landing.
Including taking off from commercial airports on publicly available schedules, on predetermined airways/corridors, and broadcasting 1080 MHZ ADS-B data?
If they exclude radar signature of commercial airliners, and let them fly, it will just make weapon makers start designing high-speed missiles with the radar signature of an airliner lol.
There is a reason why a lot of military and sci-fi movies have the phrase “aircraft with radar signature of a bird” , anything that the military excludes or allows to pass off, just becomes the cloning target of missile makers under the tag of “camouflage”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_by_flight_heig...
The weapons industry isn't that enthusiastic about blatantly violating the Geneva Conventions. There would be massive diplomatic costs to making, selling, buying or firing missiles with fake civilian transponders.
Well, the problem with that is that airliners are (relatively speaking) slow as fuck. A "high-speed missile" with the radar cross section of an airliner would be mind-meltingly obvious as a threat even to automated defense robots.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_International_Airlines...
The comment I replied to (and quoted in my reply) talked specifically about "high-speed missiles". Nearly all cruise missiles are most emphatically NOT that sort of missile.
All of these decisions are made by soldiers. Russian air defense troops are no doubt overworked, poorly treated, under intense pressure and probably motivated by avoiding going to the front.
Chances are, an operator or officer made a bad call. They are cogs in a killing machine.
It depends a lot on the context (weather, altitude) and equipment (Russia has a lot of equipment, some of it new, some of it old, some of it ancient).
Without minimizing the personal contribution to this disaster of every serviceman, IMHO the blame, first and foremost, rests firmly with whoever the bloody hell decided to keep the airspace open nearly three years into a war. Civilian airspace is open above Chechnya and Dagestan while the VKS is lobing missiles from/from above the Caspian Sea, and planes are landing at Sochi while Novorossiysk gets hit by drones. This is nuts even by post-Soviet standards. There's a very good reason why Ukraine closed their airspace almost right away and continue to keep it closed.
To pre-emptively address the "but that would be too costly" angle: well, maybe that should've been factored in before greenlighting the invasion. Boo-hoo. Does keeping it open look cheap now?
In a quick decision, in a high-stress scenario during an actual attack, possibly. Even if they have the capacity to make that decision correctly otherwise, every system—including the human element—is fallible, and procedures in those circumstances are likely to err on the side of safety-from-attack, rather than safety-for-potential-attacker.
(OTOH, the rerouting of the plane afterward was clearly intentional murder with the hope it would help cover up the shooting incident, whether or not the shooting itself was an accident.)
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-shot-in-the-dark-the-u...
By this do you mean "electronic warfare" equipment, like radar/laser detectors and other such "target searching and seeking" detectors, as well as jammers, spoofers, and other such "search or seek disruption" devices?
First, you only respond to correctly encrypted/signed requests. Everything else you ignore.
So, second, once you have your valid request, you respond to it, also in an encrypted fashion. IIRC F-35 can use their radars, with their bean-forming abilities, for stealthy comms, sending a very narrow beam of radio signals to the recipient.
And if this is fantasy, I suppose by the time you receive an IFF query, you know you're about to be shot at. So you might as well respond, sacrificing stealth. Hence why you want to really be sure you're really asked by your side, rather than receiving a spoof request.
Airlines just broadcast a ton of public information about themselves, so they don't really need an IFF system. They put their hands up and say "don't shoot, I'm a civilian!".
I don’t think that’s the most common case for an IFF query. AWACS oversight aircraft likely issue more IFF queries than fighter intercepts do. You still want to respond to a friendly AWACS inquiry, even though that aircraft is 100nm away and no direct/immediate threat to you.
It always gets me when someone abbreviates nautical miles in lowercase even though context is (almost) always clear it can't be nanometers.
TIL that nm isn’t actually accepted as an abbreviation for nautical miles. (It’s used so commonly in aviation that I assumed it was correct and it took me 3 or 4 searches to accept that this thing I knew was correct actually wasn’t. Thanks [seriously]!)
I know that there are unclassified textbooks on this very topic, but I've long forgotten their names.
> If you think about it, it sounds like a pain of a problem, the plane must be as stealthy as possible, but somehow, during those moments, communicate in a non-spoofable way that it's a friendly. No idea how they do this.
Well, part of this problem is pretty trivial to solve: if you're coming back from a mission and are well in friendly airspace, you don't need to be stealthy at all, so you turn on your radio transmitters.
It's my understanding that when you're on a mission where you need to be as hard to spot as possible, you turn off all unnecessary transmitters and rely on Command telling Air Traffic Control and other interested parties where you're operating so as to reduce the chance that you collide with another aircraft and/or get shot down by friendlies.
That being said in the Red Sea incident they likely were not stealthy at all. For one F-18 has a rather big cross section, it's a 4th generation jet. For another the Houthis are not known to operate any sensible air defense (I may be wrong here, someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
They could use something similar for communication. Send the first byte on a frequency, the second byte on another one, etc.... The frequencies could be calculated to be un-distinguishable from the background radio radiation. Of course, both the sender and the receiver have to agree on this mechanism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spect...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr
The really clever counterpart is how to transmit through your own spread-spectrum jamming. Quiet slots in the jamming must be manipulated in the same way as the active broadcast. For example, this allows communication to a ground convoy that is jamming all frequencies to prevent wireless remote-control IED detonation.
The Navy saw periods of combat during the “Tanker Wars” of the 1980s in the Persian Gulf, but that largely involved ships hitting mines. The Houthi assaults involve direct attacks on commercial vessels and warships.
“This is the most sustained combat that the U.S. Navy has seen since World War II — easily, no question,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the U.S. can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage…”
>“This is the most sustained combat that the U.S. Navy has seen since World War II — easily, no question,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the U.S. can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage. … If you let it fester, the Houthis are going to get to be a much more capable, competent, experienced force.”
The UK and the Royal Navy are also less than impressed[1].
Once upon a time a US Navy Carrier Strike Group was touted as more destructive than an average country's entire air force, but the reality is the US Navy today is stretched thin fighting an enemy that's so overwhelming them that they make WW2 comparisons and underperform to the point of abject failure known as friendly fire.
[1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/24/red-sea-houthis-...
I have no drone in this fight, but your characterization of this quote is nonsensical.
The quote does not imply that the threats are closely comparable. It merely states that the current conflict is the "most sustained" since a past event which was obviously much more sustained.
I have stood on my roof and looked upward, and thought that it's kind of interesting that the next-highest solid object from my position is a plane, a satellite, or the moon.
I am not intending a meaningful comparison of the altitudes of houses and planes (or satellites or moons) when I do so.
>We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the U.S. can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage.
Remember that Arleigh Burke destroyers and other ships equipped with AEGIS are supposedly the best interceptors in the world. Remember that USN CSGs are supposed to instill absolute fear and execute absolute destruction when required. Admitting that the Houthis can (and will) penetrate and defeat that is all but admitting the US Navy can't handle any more of this, that the Houthis and the financiers behind them are peer enemies if not superior.
The only thing I wasn't expecting when I originally read that was that the "substantial damage" ended up coming from the US Navy themselves. Who needs enemies with friendlies like this.
The asymmetrical combat problem is real. We saw that back in 2000 with the USS Cole.
I have no insight here obviously, but there's a reasonable theory of warfare that you must accept small losses to justify overwhelming force.
Parrying small attacks against the peace is difficult -- cops can't stop bar fights -- but if it spills out into the streets, the riot police are ready to shut down the block (if you want to save the innocents) or bomb the neighborhood into oblivion (if you do not).
The US public prefers the first approach, until they do not.
War is politics.
At the moment, there is a lack of political will to properly give the Houthis a pounding into the sand to force them to stop chucking shit at ships.
Mainly because the American public does not want to deploy marines to Yemen and get in another pointless land war in a sandbox.
Whether or not they'r prepared for that has nothing to do with that quote and saying the we won't be able to easily bat them down every time is a long way away from saying they're as big a challenge as Japan in the '40s.
We have a navy built to fight the Cold War and 21st century warfare is a looooot different. Cheap and effective missiles and drones are the new reality. And everybody knows the playbook for success against the US: a "regular" military will always struggle against irregular mobile forces that can melt back in to the general population.
However.
They've successfully shot down hundreds of Houthi drones and missiles with 100% success.
In that context, a single friendly fire incident (with no casualties) is regrettable but overall performance has been exemplary.
US Navy considers fighting the Houthis
That's certainly part of it, though I will also say the same for the US military overall.
>They've successfully shot down hundreds of Houthi drones and missiles with 100% success.
The problem is wars aren't won with politeness and pleasantries, they are won by whoever has the guts to destroy and murder first. The US Navy (and US military overall) aren't fighting to kill, so they might win battles (claim victory over drones and missiles) but they won't win the war. If we aren't going in to win the war we should not start or join any in the first place.
The friendly fire incident is really a coup de grace after the aforementioned self-admissions that the Navy considers the pressure they are under as bad as WW2 if not worse. I am appalled as a US taxpayer at their underperformance and subsequent unacceptable failure, regardless whether that is because they can't (no resources) or won't (rules of engagement and politics prohibit them).
The US is maintaining a level of conflict, with the intent of not allowing escalation.
You might have a point that the US is politically hesitant to fully engage, should the time come. But that time has not come.
It's better for everyone in the world, if the US acts as hall monitor and gets a few paper airplanes thrown at them from around a corner. If and when the US chooses to exterminate the threat, the global repercussions will be enormous.
Sacrificing lots of expensive equipment and some red-blooded American kids is the price you pay to avoid global disaster. It's a terrible trade, but it's the burden of being the biggest kid in school, which we enjoy for unrelated reasons.
His administration has always focused on diplomacy and limited engagement — as we've seen with his approach to arming Ukraine — so it shouldn't come as any surprise that he doesn't want to invade Yemen and eradicate the Houthis.
wars aren't won with politeness and pleasantries,
they are won by whoever has the guts to destroy
and murder first
It's ridiculous to reduce this to a "guts" issue. Biden and Trump won't be manning the front lines, so guts on their part doesn't play into it.
(Or maybe we should just do the ultimate, most gutsy thing ever by your logic and start nuking multiple countries)
War on the Houthis would require invading Yemen which, in the understatement of the century, would have some pretty serious and wide-ranging consequences. It would also likely play into Iran and/or Russia's hands as this would distract the US from other matters and likely galvanize Middle Eastern opposition to the US. To say nothing of the money spent and lives lost. I have not heard voices from either side of the aisle feeling that this would be remotely worth the cost.
The Houthis claim the F-18 was downed by them[1], so it's still not clear if this was an actual friendly fire incident. This is consistent with reports the carrier retreated to northern red sea soon after the incident.
[1] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241222-yemens-houthis-cl...
But if you managed do find some evidence of it being friendly fire, besides just taking US Navy word at face value, feel free to share with us.
But downing an American aircraft right next to its fleet, shortly after takeoff, is not something I would imagine they could do.
I don’t think there is any general expectation among the American public or military that American aircraft will never be shot down.
The reporting is that they were F35s though, not F15.
Iran's air defence system is based on the older Russian S300, which is incapable of detecting them.
Of course it wasn't that long ago that Iran was flying F14s and had complete air superiority over its neighbours. How the times have changed.
We also now know that the Israelis had informed the Iranians just before the attack through diplomatic channels of the impending attack, and that it would only contain specific military objectives.
Is the S300 just that useless? Possible. Did the Iranians decide to not respond and to "take one on the chin" in order to avoid a cycle of ever increasing conflict? Maybe. Had espionage already disabled Iran's air defence system? Also possible. We probably won't know for another 100 years.
Again, I think the most useful model here is Lebanon. Hezbollah has a desultory complement of SAM launchers, but no meaningful control over its airspace.
The Houthis were probably not far off from claiming to have shot down the Ingenuity chopper which NASA lost on Mars . In reality they can't shoot down a Cessna 172.
> Saree explained that the operation “was carried out using eight cruise missiles and 17 drones, resulting in the downing of an F-18 fighter jet while the destroyers attempted to intercept the Yemeni drones and missiles.”
So I think its possible that it was both a friendly fire incident and that the downing was the restult of the the Yemini attack.
Navy Cruiser Shot Down Super Hornet During Carrier Approach (and Nearly Hit Another One)
How very reassuring. I doubt they would be turned off if Russia was actually targeting the eastern flank. Ukraine was targetting Chechnya. I wknder if our media will hold Ukraine accountable if it was indeed a Russian missile that brought the plane down, or even a prematurely exploding drone, or an actually intercepted drone that used the civilian plane as cover.