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Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

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Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#351

Post by vidarh »

sukilot wrote: post #95
phobosanomaly wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To underscore your point, here's an example of how easy it is to get god-tier military hardware in Mexico from one of the many people breaking bad across the border in the US. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/arming... This fella in Texas was selling .50-cals and miniguns straight to the Cartels for years. There are likely many, many more like him. Mexican think tanks have spent years trying to f…

There was an absolutely trivial solution: send a few fighter planes to blow up the haciendas and spray herbicide on the plantations. But the US government prefers to profit and make political hay from the drug war.

It's been tried. It didn't work.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#352

Post by ashtonkem »

JackFr wrote: post #294
ashtonkem wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High value targets will justify expenditure of more resources. For most targets a few men with AK-47s might do the trick, but for the well protected target this would be a pretty decent strategy. It certainly would strike fear into the hearts of men otherwise protected against more pedestrian threats, which is probably part of the point.

So how will a drone attack me in my house? Mind you my house is not a hard target but is air conditioned, so I keep the doors and windows shut. How will a drone attack me in my car? I don’t have a great car, but I’m pretty sure it can outrun an off the shelf quadcopter. So assuming I’m safe in my home and in my car, I guess other opportunities exist to kill me, but you need to have an operator ready with a drone in p…

> so I keep the doors and windows shut

Got armored glass? If no, then two drones will do the trick.

> I don’t have a great car, but I’m pretty sure it can outrun an off the shelf quadcopter.

Not if you stop at stop lights.

More realistically, the thing that gets VIPs assassinated is a predictable schedule. Assassination drones up the ante quite a bit, because one can park a drone in the bushes by your favorite coffee shop in the off chance that you’ve decided to get a latte today, while it’s much harder to successfully hide men with guns in a similar position.

> but as a targeted means of killing I can’t imagine it being better than a mortar or RPG.

I think you’re probably right that an RPG shot at your vehicle is worse for your survival odds, but I think you’re missing the element of risk. The problem with assassinating someone with an RPG is that you’ve got to get within shooting-back range. The chances of you getting shot before or after starting an assassination attempt is pretty high, which means that a successful defensive strategy is to create a wide cordon around the VIP to make attempts too risky. With a drone you don’t have to be anywhere close to the target, which allows for you to make an attempt on a hypothetical VIP with no personal risk whatsoever. If they spot your drone and shoot it down, you’re only out a cheap drone and some explosives, which is much better than getting shot at personally.

Again, for a soft target this is silly, men with guns are used to hurt and terrorize soft targets the world over; they’re cheap and reliable. But as a means to harass hardened targets, drones create new possibilities.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#353

Post by ashtonkem »

JackFr wrote: post #295
dogma1138 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t order a mortar on alibaba, and it requires much more training to use it effectively than flying a drone. Mortars are also large and heavy and require a crew to serve as well as spotters to direct fire which means you need to have people closer to your target and working communications. All of this complicates the logistics considerably which makes them less effective and more dangerous to their operators. E…

> You can’t order a mortar on alibaba Well you can’t order C4 on Alibaba either. But if you can get C4 you can likely get a mortar.

A mortar tube without training is nothing more than an exciting way to get yourself and your mates killed.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#354

Post by dogma1138 »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #289
dogma1138 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite likely because the logistics aren’t there yet and even more so because actual weapons are available everywhere. Drones still require someone to turn them into weapons going after bomb makers is an extremely effective strategy because while there are a million guides on the internet on how to make an IED or a suicide vest the actual amount of people capable of making them is extremely small the world isn’t HN.

What do you mean the logistics aren’t there yet? Drones are used daily by bad guys for recon purposes. These bad guys are groups with caches of weapons and skilled bomb makers in their numbers. Why in 7 years havent They just put the two together? What in our arm chair analysis are we overlooking?

I think you greatly over estimate the number of competent bomb makers considering just how effective taking them out has been.

Much of the military equipment in circulation is decades old, you have RPGs from the 70’s being in use.

The logistics for drones isn’t there yet, the human capital isn’t there yet either I would give it 5-10 more years till these drones will be prevalent in nearly every conflict.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#355

Post by dogma1138 »

peteretep wrote: post #314
dogma1138 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t order a mortar on alibaba, and it requires much more training to use it effectively than flying a drone. Mortars are also large and heavy and require a crew to serve as well as spotters to direct fire which means you need to have people closer to your target and working communications. All of this complicates the logistics considerably which makes them less effective and more dangerous to their operators. E…

I’m not sure cartels have much trouble finding military hardware or people trained to use it

Believe it or not they do, small arms are much easier to get than heavy weapons they also are much easier to use. The cartels ironically rely on a lot of weapons coming in from the US especially as the remnants of Cold War era proxy wars in central and South America die out and they can no longer benefit from both the US and the former USSR dumping enough weaponry to invade Europe into the jungles.

Weapons don’t grow on trees, they are easy to get as long as there are conflicts in the region which are sponsored by superpowers or other patrons with sufficient resources that facilitate those shipments once those end they become rarer and rare.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#356

Post by dogma1138 »

JackFr wrote: post #295
dogma1138 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t order a mortar on alibaba, and it requires much more training to use it effectively than flying a drone. Mortars are also large and heavy and require a crew to serve as well as spotters to direct fire which means you need to have people closer to your target and working communications. All of this complicates the logistics considerably which makes them less effective and more dangerous to their operators. E…

> You can’t order a mortar on alibaba Well you can’t order C4 on Alibaba either. But if you can get C4 you can likely get a mortar.

You can get C4 much more easily than you think plastic explosive has a ton of civilian uses from demolition to mining and oil and gas.

Mortars and mortar rounds on the other hand aren’t as easy to get and require trained crews to employ.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#357

Post by Ancapistani »

peteretep wrote: post #274
ashtonkem wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High value targets will justify expenditure of more resources. For most targets a few men with AK-47s might do the trick, but for the well protected target this would be a pretty decent strategy. It certainly would strike fear into the hearts of men otherwise protected against more pedestrian threats, which is probably part of the point.

Seems like more hassle than a mortar for about the same effect?

Smack the back of a mortar round of pavement, and you now have an impact grenade. Hang that under a drone, and you have a way to drop impact grenades on unsuspecting targets from an altitude high enough that the drone can’t be detected visually.

ISIS was doing just that a few years ago. There were/are plans floating around on the Internet for stabilizing fins for common mortar rounds - 3D print those, and you’re 90% of the way there.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#358

Post by Spooky23 »

smolder wrote: post #301
Spooky23 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy those things and you’ll end up on a list and under surveillance quickly.

Doesn't that imply you're already under surveillance? The list that we're on is: anyone who is alive and can be surveiled.

No, but there are specific collaborations for high risk purveyors of things like explosive precursors.

If you show up at a farm store to buy certain fertilizers in unusual quantities, that interaction will likely be reported or otherwise flagged.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#359

Post by Animats »

sudosysgen wrote: post #298
esturk wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, golf industry will be fine. If a technology is so advantageous, then it will eventually become the counter to itself. Imagine several drone swarming around you like a body guard and you would have several orbital layers for short/medium/long range protection. Imagine a drone being so sophisticated that it can calculate the sniper shot gunning for you and can even deflect the bullet or take the direct hit for you…

That can just never work. Several drones swarming around you do will do bugger all against enough shrapnel, or against a shaped charge, or just a sufficiently heavy drone going fast enough. Or the drone could carry a chemical agent and kill you. The economics of defence are such that kamikaze anti-drone drones won't work. Either they'll miss the vast majority of the time, or they will be hideously more expensive than…

"The bomber will always get through". That remark was made about the big bombing campaigns of WWII, and the planned nuclear attacks of the 1950s and 1960s. Drone attacks are the same concept in miniature.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#360

Post by anitil »

robocat wrote: post #248
anitil wrote: post #85

I actually work in the drone detection/jamming field. My only surprise is that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. We already see drones used for drug smuggling and privacy violations, as well as the use of drones to carry IED payloads. Drones are an amazing tool but as with any tool, they can be used in nefarious ways.

I presume the cheapest protection would be fine netting. Is there any indication of netting being used as protection against drones? Or would netting be to obvious that there was a target worth targeting?

Some of the more entertaining defenses I've seen are netting and actual hawks trained to snatch them out of the sky!

Nets tend to be a sort of one-hit thing, so if you miss you're out of luck. They're obviously not ideal around airports and other infrastructure.

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