Ukraine struck Russia’s largest oil refinery, located in the city of Omsk, on Monday, marking what its forces say was its furthest-ever drone attack in the war.
The Omsk facility, which processes about 21 million tons of oil a year, is in Western Siberia and about 1,700 miles from Ukrainian territory — roughly the distance between Los Angeles and Houston.
It’s possible that this becomes the new “mutually assured destruction” we had back in the 20th. Basically, a cold war brought on by drones instead of nukes. It could mean a near-future of peace, however uneasy. I can’t say that living with the looming propagandized threat of the USSR was good, but I think it was a far sight better than being in an active shooting war with them.
The difference is nobody ever felt comfortable nuking their own civilians. I think chemical weapons are a better comparison. Autonomous drones will become illegal and unacceptable in warfare, but for riot control less lethal ones will be common and occasionally an authoritarian leader will use the military grade ones on minority groups or dissidents.
I think that is a crazily optimistic take. Even if countries were to stop outright drone warfare and keep things to cyber attacks and economic warfare there would be nothing to stop them from using the tech to attack their own citizens.
US constitution has already proven to be worth about as much as Lloyd and Harry’s I.O.Us.
Yeah no because all we will have in response to that is the excuse for the psychos to deploy AI fueled “defense” anti-drone “security” drones flying nonstop 24/7 everywhere. Mechanized mafioso anyone?
Oh great now I am worried about drones carrying dirty bombs.
Dirty bombs are a meme weapon, they’re not really effective except for scaring people who don’t know that they’re not effective
That’s exactly what people are worried about happening.
It’s much harder to control their production, though. They don’t need enriched uranium and huge facilities, you can put them together in your bedroom (not at scale, obv.)