Drone attack on parked U.S. Army BlackHawk in Iraq

https://www.twz.com/air/drone-attack-on-parked-u-s-army-black-hawk-in-iraq-a-harbinger-of-whats-to-come

by jerlam • 4 months ago

65 92 4 months ago

Teever3• 4 months ago

Imagine a small quadcopter with deployment and transportation device packaged discretely inside an Amazon box.

The box is shipped internationally and sent to a package delivery company that gets a job to deliver the box to an abandoned lot near an airforce base in bumfuck nowhere America.

Once the package is delivered the deployment device cuts the top of the box open and lets the drone out. The drone flies in the direction of the base and then kamikazes on the nearest helicopter or aircraft shaped object that it sees.

What’s the counter to that?

Or imagine a scenario where a country launches a weather balloon full of the same kinds of drones but equipped with solar panels.

The weather balloon explodes like a piñata and deploys all these drones over a vast area. The drones are programmed to make their way to different military or infrastructure targets and stop and recharge high places out of site of people and maybe only travel at night. They slowly make their way over days or weeks until they find their target. They’re designed to self destruct if they sense that they’re being handled by a human being.

What’s the counter to that?

DenisM• 4 months ago

Laser turrets near highest-value targets?

It becomes defense in depth though, perimeter defense is no longer enough. Thats kinda new.

egorfine• 4 months ago

Laser takes as much as 10s to disable a single plastic drone at a distance of ~400 meters. The slowest drone flies at 20 m/s.

So realistically a laser drone weapon can eliminate just a couple of drones until a third or a fourth one comes through and destroys your turret.

dev-ns8• 4 months ago

Something very similar to this was pulled of by Ukraine last year

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb

Veserv4• 4 months ago

Automatic turret-mounted anti-air shotguns. Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell.

I bet you could do aiming and firing in less than 0.1 seconds with nearly 100% accuracy in the 50 meter range which would enable ~10 destroyed drones per unit if the drones are going 150 km/h.

Shotgun pellets are also basically entirely safe when shot into the air as they have low falling velocity enabling usage when shooting over populated areas.

bink• 4 months ago

And some Canada Gooses too?

Teever3• 4 months ago

How many shotguns? How do they reload? What happens when they run out of ammo?

Can they be hacked, or duped into firing at friendly aircraft?

How will they deal with the enemy adapting their drones to have camoflage?

There's no way automatic turret mounted shotguns are the solution to this problem.

It simply isn't economical to produce, install and maintain all of these things, and now you've sunk a massive amount of resources into this infrastructure when the enemy doesn't even really have to launch a real attack.

lelanthran• 4 months ago

Automatic turret-mounted anti-air shotguns. Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell.

Yeah, doable. I went to a clay pigeon range last week (company outing). These are targets that move quite fast. They don't spring out from the same spot and some roll over the ground. I had never handled a gun before. I am 50, with the attendant poor eyesight and lack of twitch reflexes.

And yet, I still nailed 20/25 moving targets. A turret with a shotgun is going to hit much more than that.

05• 4 months ago

Which only protect a small area, so drones just need to target less obvious things. Meanwhile your guns shoot birds and once in a while - an occasional bystander. Attackers are always advantaged since you have to protect _everything_ and they only need to target what's left unprotected. Some drones just drop grenades, I somehow don't see your shotgun hitting either the drone (too high) or a grenade (too fast and small).

kibwen3• 4 months ago

Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell.

Then two drones approach from opposite sides at 200 MPH. Your emplacement costs more than $200 and can only fire in one direction at a time.

Or, as we've seen in Ukraine, once your disposable low-cost drones have precisely identified a high-value, high-effectiveness static emplacement, you send in a cruise missile to clear it out, and then the drones continue sweeping forward.

prepend3• 4 months ago

I would imagine the counter is computer vision defense systems that cover an entire base. And then eventually infrastructure.

And then all drones tracked by satellite so any drone that doesnt show up gets shot down anywhere over a large geographic area.

Using cheaper drones to hunt down expensive drones.

Or of course, just eagles.

IncreasePosts• 4 months ago

Park your aircraft in hangars. And hope you hid your tracks well enough once the generals start eyeing their almost expired bunker busters with a twinkle in their eye

Eextra953• 4 months ago

I think going low-tech and deploy netting around critical things would be the most effective. Sure they are a pain but they'll catch drones before they reach any targets.

uniq7• 4 months ago

Mandatory package screenings to detect explosives? I don't know if that's technically feasible at scale, or if that's already implemented (and I'd prefer not to ask that kind of question to Google/ChatGPT)

markdown• 4 months ago

Customs inspection. An xray paired with some ai.

But why go through all that when you can just have someone in the country launch it, or drop it off?

lejalv2• 4 months ago

The counter to this and more such scenarios is letting the world alone

parsimo20103• 4 months ago

This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_C-RAM With a software update to track drones. They can hit birds and mortars, they can take out a drone.

Or this: https://www.epirusinc.com/electronic-warfare if you think the C-RAM would get saturated. Whether the weather balloon drones move at night is irrelevant if you stop the last move they need to make.

Militaries have been defending themselves against attacks for as long as they've been around. Drones will change the way they fight a little, but it isn't going to be some magic pill that modern militaries can't adapt to. Hiding an explosive and then blowing it up when your target is nearby? That's almost the same concept as assassinating someone with a car bomb. Putting it in an Amazon box and letting the drone go the final distance changes things a little, but militaries and governments were able to assassinate people remotely before drones.

Swarming attacks with cheap munitions? Saturating an enemy's defenses has been a thing at least since the time of the English Longbow. The longbow regiments would all shoot at the same time, and while you could dodge one arrow it was hard to dodge all of them.

Drones are new and will take some adapting to. If a military refuses to change then it probably will be disadvantaged. But the US military has been buying and testing drones for a while, and is already undergoing the adaptation. As it better understands cheap drones for offense, it necessarily gains a better understanding of what is needed for defense.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for the US attacking Iran. All I'm saying is that the US military is not about to lose the conflict because of this particular tactic.

crote3• 4 months ago

Centurion C-RAM

How's that going to work when the drone hugs the ground, only rising a bit to hop over walls? Are you going to flatten everything a mile around every base, and shoot at head height with zero warning?

Leonidas EWS

How's that going to work when the drone doesn't show up on radar and has fiber-optic controls?

If drones were this easy to counter, we wouldn't be seeing them play such a massive role in the Ukraine war. The whole problem is that drones massively change how a conflict works, and the entire US military is designed for pre-drone warfare. It remains to be seen whether they can adapt quickly enough fast enough for this conflict - the US doesn't exactly have a great track record when it comes to asymmetrical warfare...

exabrial• 4 months ago

Ironically, Ukraine sort of did this to Russia and destroyed several long range strategic nuclear bombers.

scarecrowbob• 4 months ago

The usual thing that most of us do is not do things that make other folks want to blow our vehicles up. That's how I've avoided getting my stuff blown up, at least.

Everything else is a half measure.

caycep• 4 months ago

I feel like this was a plot/subplot of either Diamond Age or one of the Gibson novels

glaucon• 4 months ago

What’s the counter to that?

In the case of the AWS scenario someone driving by who decides to nick it?

Or the courier puts the box down upside down?

Just by the way is a package delivery company going to be willing to deliver a package to an abandoned lot?

Your solar panel equipped, "rest and recharge" idea is interesting.

carefree-bob2• 4 months ago

This is the type of stuff Ukraine has been doing against Russian assets. It's effectifve asymmetrical warfare when you lose air superiority.

We may even need to revisit what air superiority means in the age of long range, relatively stealthy drones that are cheap to produce using widely available tech.

I also would expect Russian and Chinese Satellite intel being fed to Iran to locate these types of targets, again exactly like how the NATO powers have been providing intel to Ukraine.

AlecSchueler4• 4 months ago

Russia for sure but why would China take such an active position?

lejalv2• 4 months ago

Because how much oil they (used to) get from Iran

carefree-bob2• 4 months ago

China is allied with Iran and has long term trade relations with the country, importing large amounts of oil from Iran, and supplying Iran with air defense systems and other military and economic support.

China also views the US as a strategic rival and would love the opportunity to take us down a peg.

Don't think that America's strategic opponents -- Russia, North Korea, Iran, China, Algeria do not provide some mutual support, even if for purposes of survival, and view the US as threat. We have already taken out Venezuela, Lybia, Syria and flipped Armenia. Cuba, Iran are next on our radar, but we are active all over the world trying to flip pro-Russian/pro-Chinese governments to pro-US governments.

rurp• 4 months ago

China views the US as an adversary. They would very much like to reduce America's sphere of influence and are cognizant of the fact that we might end up in a war in the medium term future. The US bleeding immense amounts of money and military assets in Iran is great for China's relative strength; it's in their interest to increase those costs in ways that don't escalate immediate tensions with America. Sharing targeting and other intel is one of the more effective ways of doing that.

bigbadfeline• 4 months ago

China depends on Iranian oil, I'm pretty sure they view that war as an attack on China by proxy, it's a big deal.

ge96• 4 months ago

Was mentioned how it's a medevac heli (blurred it)

freediddy4• 4 months ago

The biggest security threat any country has is if an adversary sends 1-10 million drones at once, each with a small grenade on it, and overwhelms a city. They could literally target individual politicians or weak spots on infrastructure like buildings or bombs and almost nothing could stop it except possibly an EMP.

I'm not sure what anyone can do about that but that to me is my biggest fear about the future of all this technology.

rtkwe4• 4 months ago

Right now one of the limits is just controlling that many let along sourcing it. Putting that many actively controlled drones in one area at once and you'll swamp the bandwidth.

packetlost• 4 months ago

The drones in Ukraine largely use miles-long spools of fiber optic cable, so while I agree that sourcing is a problem, bandwidth likely isn't. If you want to be creative there's probably a bunch of hybrid wireless/wired/semi-autonomous configurations that would allow for minimizing bandwidth requirements in practice, but it would still fall apart as soon as a reasonably powerful jammer is turned on.

freediddy4• 4 months ago

They would just be autonomous. Setting a GPS (or alternate system) coordinate is pretty simple enough. Individual targets could just be AI controlled at this point, or 10 years in the future.

FpUser7• 4 months ago

"1-10 million drones at once"

get real please.

kennywinker4• 4 months ago

1-10 million drones. At $400 a pop that’s $400,000,000-$4,000,000,000. A lot to throw at a single attack when you don’t actually know what defenses are in place. Maybe there is an EMP. Are you willing to spend a billion dollars to find out, while also murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians?

And these are either autonomous drones (more expensive?), or fpv with the fiber optic line out the back - either way you have to get them in range without being detected somehow.

In short, i think this is an unrealistic scenario - fun to imagine as a horror-sci-fi idea but unlikely to be deployed. Just one opinion.

Implicated• 4 months ago

At $400 a pop that’s $400,000,000-$4,000,000,000. A lot to throw at a single attack when you don’t actually know what defenses are in place.

Have you seen the price tag on some of the US jets? Are they not doing just this?

freediddy4• 4 months ago

This isn't a game of Command and Conquer with fog of war turned on. Of course they would have intel on exactly what they are going to attack. One cruise missile is about $4 million.

China already has created a UAV that is designed to launch at least 100 drones. If they can make that 1000 drones and then fly out 1000 of these motherships at one time, that's already 1 million.

And yes the drones would be autonomous, there's no reason for any person to be controlling them in the age of AI.

mitthrowaway2• 4 months ago

Aren't drones quite short-ranged, especially when carrying a payload?

hrdwdmrbl2• 4 months ago

" Trump said that “we don’t need help,” adding that the “last person we need help from is Zelenskyy.” "

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/iran-negotiate...

srean• 4 months ago

That means it's exactly from Zelensky that he wants help.

Narcissism-speak is easy, once you have figured them out.

For example if they accuse others of something, that means they have done exactly what they are accusing others of.

mindslight• 4 months ago

What else would anyone expect from a combative elderly person? It's always "I don't need help!" as they continually find something new to fuck up. The only difference here is there were a bunch of fools who thought it was a good idea to put this type of person in charge of our country instead of forcing him into a memory care home.

estimator7292• 4 months ago

I heard through the grape vine that the US did actually ask Ukraine for help on drone defense.

DoD is trying to find US companies that can do drone detection and it isn't going well

hrdwdmrbl2• 4 months ago

How long until an F35 is destroyed by a drone?

FpUser7• 4 months ago

There US has more then 600 of those with more coming. Losing one is insignificant.

Figs• 4 months ago

~$100M/unit isn't exactly cheap to replace...

yodon• 4 months ago

Not sure if that's intended as sarcasm. Losing a >$100M asset is far from insignificant.

follie2• 4 months ago

A squadron of F-35s is worth more than the Moskva. Russia had to fight hard to regain the title of biggest loser and it could lose that in a single incident. But more than the financial loss the loss of having invested in something stupid is felt when you can't use any of the related blunders as you intended and have to keep them at a distance from the cheap practical warfare.

crote3• 4 months ago

Ukraine is currently building 4.5 million drones per year. That's one drone every 30 seconds. Lockheed Martin delivered a record 191 F35s in 2025. That's less than one F35 every 1.91 days.

Iran has thrice the population of Ukraine and 1.5x (nominal) to 3x (PPP) the GDP. With Ukraine building 23560 drones for every F35 the US is building, it would be quite reasonable to expect Iran to be able to build a few thousand per F35 ass well. Iran already has a fairly mature drone industry supplying the Russian side of the UA-RU, after all.

In other words: If it were to come to a race of attrition, the US can't afford to lose a single one. Even ignoring the massive cost difference, F35s simply cannot be constructed fast enough.

iammjm• 4 months ago

won't happen for now, drones are generally too slow for that. Unless it's stationary/on the ground. Ukrainians did manage to shoot down 2 russian KA-52 helicopters mid-flight last week though.

speed_spread2• 4 months ago

We already have rocket powered autonomous drones capable of destroying fighter planes, they're called missiles.

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 months ago

There was this The Register story, a couple of days ago[0]. It says we can't handle drone swarms.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/23/nato_air_defenses/

general1465• 4 months ago

I can already see Iran making FPV compilation "Death faces of American soldiers" like Ukrainian do, where target is to show face of terrified soldier from the last frame of FPV camera, right before FPV exploded. This is would be a weapon of massive demoralization when relatives of soldiers will be sifting through Iranian Telegram channels just to find video with their relative right before being killed or maimed.

This is a powerful propaganda tool for Iran waiting to be used to full extent.

nojvek• 4 months ago

Oh the irony of US is the paper tiger like Russia and Iran is the underdog like Ukraine.

Trump made a very strategic error that he can’t easily get out of.

US borrowing trillions in debt to fund other people’s wars. This level of stupidity is Bush in Afhanistan.

Drone attack on parked U.S. Army BlackHawk in Iraq

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