I Could Kill You with a Consumer Drone

"Meanwhile, on the military side, the Pentagon is still buying Boeing Scan Eagles at hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop when they can buy a similar capability for only a few thousand dollars at a local hobby shop."

1.Your local hobby shop drone will not be able to fly for 20 hours like a fixed wing Scan Eagle. Bad comparison. 2. Modifying drones to be used for combat is cheap if you don't count the labor cost, and in relative peace time counting the labor costs and overall cost of fielding a system is fair. If you take a $5,000 consumer drone and want it to *reliably* explode on someone, at small volumes that will likely take enough labor time to verify, let alone certify, that it pushes the price up to closer to the price of the new dedicated loitering munitions...

At the very least they should be tested for heavy metals and for basic psychological sanity. Just being in physical contact with firearm and ammunition risks lead exposure. If abnormal, it should be addressed at once.

I do think that war would be better off being done remotely via automated floating and aerial weapons platforms controlled remotely if not semi-autonomously. I mean without soldiers on the front line.

I change that slightly to "Good luck getting an explosive payload."

The difficulty for an attacker is the explosive payload, not the delivery mechanism. If it were easy for an attacker to get an explosive payload there would be car bombs going off every day as an easier delivery mechanism than use of quadcopters.

Thankfully it seems to be relatively easy to prevent people from making explosives, at least outside of warzones in countries with strict border control, because random people don't have a valid reason to buy industrial chemicals or equipment, and especially not chemicals identified as precursors for making explosive compounds. And for plants where such industrial chemicals are legitimately necessary to use, inputs and outputs can be measured, and detection taggants[1] used, and many other security measures, to prevent accidental or deliberate loss of control over such chemicals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taggant#Explosive_taggants

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You can’t do it from a remote location. That’s a significant difference.