I've wondered a lot about whether these uavs aren't more powerful than a lot of our fighter jets. I guess it's inappropriate to talk about scenarios where they could be deployed to cause great harm. But, it doesn't take much thinking to imagine the efficacy of a well placed uav, and the small difficulty it would be to conceal one of these in an adversarial country.
Do you think a trigger happy captain wouldn’t request permission to engage/capture these drones? He probably did, it was probably denied, and evidence of these requests were not leaked.
This was obviously an exercise between friendlies.
This was happening at sea, and apparently at night. The parts probably would have been blown into the ocean and sank or floated away before anyone could find them.
agreed for the second sighting after everyone was made aware of them not being anything navy related. Given the waters, the proximity to other testing sites, it's likely the sailors didn't man the guns the first time for the simple reason of perhaps not being in the loop for a test.
Second time sounds like they weren't prepared to respond quick enough.
Would you want to reveal what defenses you have against drones that are not doing any damage? It is possible such a swarm was intended precisely to suss out what defenses there may be.
No one is going be the CO the opens fire on a non combatant drone on the USA coast, as you'd lose your command pretty fast.
Edit: I can't post faster, so here's a response to a reply:
I didn't peruse the logs myself, so I don't know the situation, but the rules of engagement are pretty strict, and also they may not have even had ordnance onboard for the weapons needed to take out one of these things. Not every ship carries live rounds all the time, and near the USA coast we pretty much never wanted to have loaded guns.
Like I said elsewhere, the US Navy isn't a bunch of untrained psychos looking to shoot stuff. Officers and enlisted are trained to put our lives on the line, not get scared and shoot everything that looks weird or threatening.
So serious question from an operational perspective: One of these drones were over the helipad, which I would have assumed would be considered 'controlled airspace'... If they knock down drones that go over airports, why not over a military vessel's airspace?
Or is it not considered restricted airspace if not in use? etc
Conditions off the Californian coast are different to a Straight of Hormuz transit. Every deployment will have command guidance, RoE, threat briefings, maintain a picture of possible threats etc. A ship doing routine training is probably under default 'self defence' rules. And no CO wants to be the one to mistakenly blast some civilians into pink mist.
Experience shows that mistakenly blasting some civilians into pink mist doesn't mean anything if those civilians aren't white US citizens on US soil...
You can certainly choose to believe this, but it is wrong.
What you are referring to is choosing to blow something up based on a systematic approach that follows the laws of armed conflict, with frequent legal oversight, separate after action review, in a system that strongly punishes failure to follow process. This system is fully endorsed by the US Congress, representing the citizenry.
So if some civilians get blown up, 9/10 it was a deliberate decision.
Rogers certainly got off lightly, as did the system that promoted him, and the US has to own that, along with all the other atrocities. The US pays in a thousand ways they choose not to account for -- the guilty have externalised the costs.
I don't understand that mentality. At the very least I would think they would be considered a security risk since they could be spying on sensitive systems. It's not like we're talking about manned aircraft here.
Same mentality that would fire a CIO whose breach mitigation strategy was to unplug a couple computers in the "server room" - its a nonsensical reaction that only demonstrates your lack of knowledge and your inability to recognize your lack of knowledge, you're not going to get much out of hand ordnance in a situation like this
To be fair, they equip the SNOOPIE team w/ COTS, hand held video cameras rather than installing some sophisticated, centrally managed surveillance camera system. OTOH, it's much less dangerous for a bunch sailors to run around on deck with cameras than with shotguns.
I don't see any real similarity between those two situations.
There aren't any details in the article on the size of the drones or their distance but I think a destroyer would have a wide range of weapons available from which to choose the appropriate level of response.
Doing nothing and hoping it goes away doesn't seem like the wisest response to this type of incident.
Not trolling you, genuinely trying to bridge a communication gap I see both sides of: they, and I, reacted literally to I think what you meant to be hyperbole, i.e. by saying "Surely one of the people on the deck with a shotgun could have a go at it without revealing too much secret information", you meant to say "why didn't they take any aggressive action?":
The other comments speak to various factors why it was more complicated, and just affirming that decision wouldn't have enabled action, TL;DR: you don't start throwing $500K missiles at lights 1,000 feet above deck when you're right off the coast of the US, and also we don't have nearly all the info here, just a subset of a subset of docs that got through via FOIA two years ago, you can safely assume that would have been considered at the time
If anyone (with sufficient resources) can send a drone swarm to go harass, or worse, anyone, including the US Navy, and there's nothing that can be done about it then eventually I think something quite bad is going to happen.
It reminds me of 9/11. Everyone knew that crashing commercial aircraft could cause a great deal of destruction but somehow we could never prepare for such a scenario until it actually happened.
> Everyone knew that crashing commercial aircraft could cause a great deal of destruction but somehow we could never prepare for such a scenario until it actually happened.
Interestingly and off topic, the same lock that is intended to prevent take over of a plane, was used by a pilot to crash the plane and kill all 150 people [1]:
> The crash was caused deliberately by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies and declared "unfit to work" by his doctor. Lubitz kept this information from his employer and instead reported for duty. Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, he locked the cockpit door and initiated a controlled descent that continued until the aircraft impacted a mountainside.
Are we not? Current protocols eliminate almost all chances of taking over a plane with box cutters. People now know what is up and will risk a laceration to take out some homeboys when they know it means certain death if they don't
You're right. We're probably going to see an attack on a stadium full of people that involves a drone swarm crop dusting the crowd with a combination of pesticides and nail bombs.
It's gonna suck to see the end of outdoor music shows in our life time. :-/
I wouldn't be surpised if there are over 50k individuals in the US with the electronics/computer knowledge to pull this off. All it takes is one person to develop an obsession with it and spend the time needed to pull it off. If you look at a 10-20 year time frame I'd say there's a high certaintity that someone commits a terror attack via a large number of drone.
The saving grace here is that people who want to terrorise often aren't the same with these skills IMO. If you have the skill/knowledge to make a drone swarm you probably have other valuable skills, have a good job and live comfortably. Lower chances of radicalisation.
You're looking at it backwards. Some of those who are already radicalized have the background and mental capacity that they could learn the knowledge needed to pull this off. Al Qaeda didn't radicalize pilots; they sent radicals to flight school.
I dont think its clear that nothing can be done, its just that nothing was done. Going weapons hot with military anti aircraft guns within a few miles of civilian ships and aircraft is probably not something that any sane officer is going to order, unless there is a safety of life issue.
This is how untrained people think. This particular group (the people who frequent this site) would probably want to know, quite strongly, what the craft are trying to do, and who was piloting them.
It was probably russia fucking with us from a submarine nearby.
Nobody knows for sure, however the most plausible explanation put forward is neurological side effects of a banned pesticide being sprayed heavily in the embassy compound to combat Zika. They found the same pesticide was in use in Guangzhou, where diplomatic personnel complained of the same issues.
What's surprising to people is the fact that rules of engagement are inconsistent across government entities. E.g., when you think of local police, people characterize firearm usage in a way that is not measured or protocol-driven. So people are substituting the experiences they're familiar with, and applying them (incorrectly) in a naval context.
This is probably it, even between branches there are major differences, the Navy and Air Force both tend to be more educated than the ground forces which tend to attract soldiers and Marines who want to play Battlefield games in real life.
The problem is when you make a mistake and now an Iranian plane is in the water. Part of the job of the armed forces is that they stand and handle the risk far more intelligently than we would, i.e. they don't react in terror constantly.
Three responses up though someone is just suggesting that a sailor with a shotgun could take down one of the drones that was hovering close over the helipad.
That negates the possibility of misidentifying a plane as a drone, or hitting anything unintended, or of any risk of taking down a plane at all.
There's a wide gulf of responses between that and firing off an anti-aircraft missile in a "using a bazooka as a flyswatter" kind of application.
Shooting down unaccounted for drones isn't bloodlust, it's common sense. They should have taken down at least a couple of them to try and ascertain what's going on, how can you defend against something that you don't understand.
I doubt they’ve been tested for that, or are typically configured to do so.
I have seen a consumer DJI drone forced into return to home mode with an old satellite TV dish and bits out of a microwave oven. They don’t cope well with 900-ish watts of semi directed 2.4GHz noise. That guy says he eventually got that to work at over 1km range. It never “fried the electronics” though, even at short ranges.
(Yes, I have some strange friends and acquaintances...)
They're not off the shelf drones, but it's long been possible to have long range homemade RC planes, even autonomous ones. I remember seeing such videos 10 years ago on Youtube for example, though hobbyists who might be doing that today are not being so public about it since authorities have been cracking down hard on it.
fascinating read.. my first thought was that they must have been either a covert military operation to test some bleeding edge tech, or launched via submarine by an adversary
Perhaps, but I'm not convinced that these things are actually all that fast, or at least the ones popularized in Gimbal and Go-Fast. The trigonometry just doesn't work out.
I think that’s well within the bounds of possibility. I know at least 8 or 10 people who could pull this off if they tried, I’d give myself maybe a 70% chance of doing so on my own given a low-mid 5 figure budget. I’d suspect there are many many people on diydrones or rcgroups forums who could do it.
Ardupilot, gps waypoint navigation remotely reset using satphone data/telemetry channels, initially guided using public ais coords of the ships.
I’d probably go with a consumer grade fixed wing rc glider to get the range/duration required (that wouldn’t hover over the helipad, but would be much easier to get 90+ mins duration and 100+ mile range that a multi rotor). If I could get a non ais equipped boat near by I’d consider LoRa radios instead of a sat phone (which might end up leaving payment/identity/location data behind) but would have trouble getting much past 100km line of sight range. Also very low bandwidth at long range, so even sending back still images to use for setting new gps waypoints would be a challenge over LoRa.
(For the record, I’m on the other side of the planet, and was at the time of these sightings too...)
No submarine can come this close to the coast without being detected. Especially not in this area, there's huge numbers of Navy ships there 24-7 due to training, and all of them are using passive sonar all the time due to that training.
This sounds like a direct threat to the operational security of the United States Navy, and to the freedom of navigation, and eventually the National Security of the United States.
I'm surprised the Marines on board weren't authorized to shoot them out of the sky. Perhaps it's time to develop some high power EM weapons to take them out, big magnetrons are cheap, and there is a lot of electrical power available onboard.
Considering the amount of evidence provided, there's no way to be sure its 'some other country'. It could be US citizens, the US armed forces, or hell, an ET. Safe to not make assumptions.
There's no marines onboard a destroyer, and no one is shooting anything that hasn't shot first when you're in that area, it's full of Navy training platforms and civilians.
Based on the flight times and 100 mile flights ~100 miles off the coast and the investigated boats in the area...they couldn't be small. At least not with current consumer battery technology. Maybe if they were launched by a sub?
There's a youtuber that has a multi-hour autonomous drone, but it's solar powered and this was at night.
With that attitude you'd have started real war many times during the Cold War. Just go to youtube and watch Cold War fly-bies over opposite navy ships.
Here it were international waters and no any weapons trained toward the ships - and even trained weapons isn't enough actually to start shooting.
you miss the point - it isn't Florida with the "stand your ground", it is international waters where one side's "reasonable" most probably means absolutely nothing to the other side(s). You shoot at something in your denial zone - it is an act of war, and you open yourself to reciprocation. China, for example tries to establish various zones in international waters for the reasons of its national security - the US ships and planes still sail and fly right through rightfully without giving a flying f-k.
Seems unlikely to me. A huge number of people would have to participate in such a conspiracy, facing the prospect of ending their careers - never mind prosecution.
Sounds like something a couple of CIA operatives (plus support) could do easily, without leaving a trail.
And then the only other thing to risk might be to relay “anything in this sector is with our boys, wink wink” to one person in command locally, who will know not to engage, and who will never ask any questions.
Matter of fact, they could get away with just reading and maybe temporarily “influencing” the rules of engagement for drones, and then allowing them to be amended “in light of the incident”.
Well the CIA isn’t technically supposed to operate on US soil, but this happened at sea, loads of people think that claim is a total joke anyway, and PSYOP is one of their specialties.
Or it could have been highly compartmentalized within the Navy[0]. Or it could have been foreigners or pranksters! I have some “grip” on all of those possibilities, and I don’t claim to know what happened.
Anyway, the possibility it was staged is not as ridiculous as you assume, even before considering precedent.
The Navy doesn't need to be in on it, all that's needed for the described conspiracy is the CIA operating some drones with sufficient range. Range isn't that hard to get if you don't need any other payload, and they can probably launch them from one of the nearby islands.
The types of military organizations that would be involved in something like this don't have to worry about prosecution. The CIA, for example, runs a global network of torture prisons, and hacked congressional computers to destroy evidence when investigated about it, got caught, lied about it, and nothing happened. (The torture prisons are still operating.)
A single person could do it... if they had the time and money.
It’s easy — for the typical HN poster — to make a drone. But, it’s tedious and expensive to make several dozen of them.
A raspberry PI with a GPS module, a few bulky brushless motors, and a hefty LiPo pack and you could probably make something with an autonomous range of 100 miles. The only limiting factor is money, time, and a wife who won’t mind you wasting money and time.
Would you want to fire several hundred kilos of tungsten in a random direction while you're next to the USA coast, where civilians and shipping pass by all the time?
Edit: as a reply, since I can't post faster:
CIWS, in certain modes, do indeed track a target and fire at it, which could be considered a "random direction" when considering the maneuverability of the target.
I would think CIWS systems don't fire in random directions. Anyway if these were just small drones that would probably be overkill, I would think a shotgun would be sufficient.
Big testing ground for the Navy. SD has a large naval base. If you wanted to prank/spook/spy on the USN there would be few better locations to pick from.
And, we're only going to hear of events that were seen. Even if the locations of events were random, we simply would be more capable of spotting ones that happen in that area
> is the naval presence there unique compared to other regions
Yes, the Navy operates two of the channel islands which are both relatively large. They each have a sizeable runway, plenty of radar, etc. A lot of training activities seem to occur in that area too.
Aren't those UFO videos in the New York Times a few years back from the same general area, off the coast of San Diego? Is this the same thing?
(Also, this is the US military messing with itself. Someone in some skunk works hanger in Nevada has some secret weapon and they want to test it out on a real navy.)
>(Also, this is the US military messing with itself. Someone in some skunk works hanger in Nevada has some secret weapon and they want to test it out on a real navy.)
This would seem to be a pretty likely explanation (near-infinitely more likely than ETs, at least). It'd also perfectly explain David Fravor's story of spotting strange vehicles during a Navy training exercise (e.g. how the craft seemed to have advance knowledge of a Navy meeting spot, and the reaction from his superiors).
He thinks it couldn't be US military, but if it's some covert/intelligence thing, doesn't seem too implausible that they may try to do a realistic, unannounced red team exercise during a routine training exercise. That wouldn't explain his claims of it performing gravity-defying maneuvers, but there's no evidence of that besides his and some of his colleagues' testimonies, though.
I hasten to add that I sure as shit hope it's UFOs, because maybe they can do carbon capture, or fusion, or tell us if Tony Soprano dies at the end or not. I just don't think it's all that likely.
This is so weird me and my dad saw something really similar to this with the red flashing and then white light hovering around a ship off the NC coast a few months ago at night. We watched it go on for a while with binoculars, so strange. It was far away but could tell one was a ship not really 100% sure the other light was a drone it could’ve been another boat.
I don't get why the UAVs need lights. They might not have been detected without them-- so it's like they were asking too be seen.
Also just an aside, I was on that cruise ship that was in the vicinity a month before this. I went out onto the deck (the bow) late at night. We were way out offshore near the military operating area. It was pitch black out there and creepy as fuck.
For visual line-of-sight flight, it's helpful to have different color LEDs on the front and rear so you can tell which way it's pointed. Certainly sounds like a photographer job.
Folks, there are very strict conditions under which a Navy ship can use weapons, and some unknown aircraft isn't gonna be a situation that they're going to open fire. You could be shooting some moron in an ultralight or some kids science project or whatever.
The US Navy is a professional organization, not some scared cops who shoot first and ask questions later.
Edit: I'm done here, but please stop all the military fantasy where everything is a threat and needs to be shot. This was like 50 miles from the coast of the USA, not Iran or NK.
I'm a former SWO qualified Naval officer, as stated elsewhere I believe. I vouched your comment just to reply, because it's important to be correct. I'm not going into details about anything else, I've gone into detail elsewhere about this topic already.
You come here to comment rudely, well outside your supposed SWO naval officer context, but without demonstrating evidence of any qualification in a relevant and visible context, and others are the idiots for doubting such absurdly terse replies on a technology site where explanation and questions are par for the course among many types of technical experts? Is being a socially clueless asshole part of your qualification requisites as well?
Yes, and every officer since then has been drilled not to do such mistakes. The military fucks up like this sometimes, but that's one event out of millions of miles steamed.
Not defending this event, those sailors should have been court martialed, but your snarky comment didn't add anything.
US Navy destroyers are equipped with CIWS and AA missiles designed to engage multiple supersonic sea skimming cruise missiles simultaneously. If the destroyers had felt that they were in any danger they would have quickly made mincemeat out of the UAVs. Still curious to know who operated their (fairly capable) drones in such a brazen manner though.
Do those things have the capability to attack such tiny targets that are already close in? We're talking about something the size and speed of a bird. By the time you realize it's not a bird it's probably already on top of you. Moreover, they're small enough that they wouldn't represent a substantial threat to a ship in and of themselves (as compared to, say, an explosive-laden dinghy), and so perhaps not necessarily the kind of target that would've been specified for these weapons systems. I would imagine defenses for such small UAVs would be more in the vein of electronic countermeasures.
Fair point. Based on the admittedly thin circumstantial evidence in the article, I assumed relatively small craft. For example,
1) Why would a Carnival cruise ship feel the need to disclaim involvement for anything except a small, COTS drone? (IOW, presumably they at least believed they could have been such small drones.)
2) 4+ were spotted together. Wouldn't those be audible, especially if much larger than COTS drones?
3) The lights ("white light", "red flashing light") suggests COTS drones, especially because the cruise ship also noticed them. If they were special purpose military or intelligence drones, why keep the lights on?
Granted, the supposed distances involved suggest otherwise, but the article never establishes why they believed the drones were necessarily flown such distances. Rather, it seems those distances are based on the presumption that the drones were flown from one of the ships with active AIS. But that's a rather dubious assumption in the context of someone buzzing military ships w/ multiple drones.
So I thought about it, and even if a small drone was loaded with explosives it really couldn’t damage a war ship. Unless it attacked the sensors.
A shaped charge hitting the EOSS, the radar dome, or parts of the Aegis system’s sensor array could potentially cripple the ship’s ability to defend itself.
No not by itself. Honestly I know very little about modern explosives but I could imagine a swarm of drones, made of or carrying explosives could converge on a critical section of a target additively making a substantial explosive force.
I know just enough about material science to say probably not. A munition needs to break or penetrate a surface to be effective. To do that it needs to apply a great deal of force in a short period of time- spreading the force out over space or time reduce the destructive capability of the munition. So getting hit 500 times by 1 lbs bombs is not the same as getting hit once by a 500 lbs bomb- it’s not additive, the 500 lbs destroys things the 500 1 lbs can’t.
That being said, I’d imagine being on the receiving end of 500 1 lbs explosives is still a very bad day.
Right, if I apply 1 pound of force to your head 520 times, you’ll be really annoyed with me. If I apply 520 pounds of force to your head once, I’ve just crushed your skull.
If each of those 1 lb bombs lands precisely on one of the ship's sensors, then that ship is out of action, even if its hull has not been breached anywhere.
One could imagine other payloads like chaff, smoke, or even paint or flash bangs to disable equipment and injure the crew perhaps. Not sure how efficient that would be though.
> Do those things have the capability to attack such tiny targets that are already close in?
Yes
> We're talking about something the size and speed of a bird
Birds have nothing on stealthy, supersonic anti-ship missiles.
> By the time you realize it's not a bird it's probably already on top of you
In a war scenario all wildlife gets shot first. Modern systems developed in the past ten years also commonly have the capability to discern bird wings from propellers for this scenario. Hurray cheaper compute, everybody can run a SVM classifier in real-time now. Without spending too much money on your radar (40k USD? parts only) you can classify birds at about 0.5-1km away, who knows the exact capability of people with money to spend on the problem.
> I would imagine defenses for such small UAVs would be more in the vein of electronic countermeasures.
I don't think they can afford to see every bird as a threat during a battle. That means they'll also see every piece of shrapnel as a threat. And every piece of outgoing large munitions. I got the impression that speed and direction of travel are common filters. So something that's slow, tiny, and changing direction a lot is legitimately going to be hard to distinguish from a lot of non-threatening things.
I can't speculate on what's actually on US Navy warships right now, but I'm telling you commercially you can distinguish birds from drones under a kilometer away today. The knowledge has been around on how to do so with radar since 2006 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1603402, but even without that, there are numerous combined radar-camera surveillance systems out there for accurate target classification. Not like you don't have time to cue a camera to look at an interesting radar target when it's travelling slowly like a UAV might.
The military’s been able to distinguish this since the early 90s — at least. And yes modern drones didn’t exist in the 90s but other similarly-sized machines did, eg balloon-mounted telemetry devices.
Citation: personal experience with those sensor systems.
The parent is correct. They have considerable capacity to accurately classify everything in their regional vicinity in milliseconds. This is old capability.
Tracking millions of entities in your general space in real-time is definitely possible today. I have little reason to believe the US Navy cannot do it too.
Unless wildlife is wearing armor, the radar and even polarimetric light signature is vastly different between a bird and shrapnel even if it's not moving at all. Not all detection methods are heuristic.
An eg Exocet missile is only 12" in diameter when it's approaching you head-on. So optically it would be similar to a DJI-size drone. Thermal will be vastly different ;)
Most target shooters couldn't hit a drone that wasn't hovering let alone a sailor who had guns training several years back. A shotgun would be the way to get these guys when they got in close enough.
i don't think the officers in charge of protecting the ship generally factor the material costs of doing so in to their decisions. they've got standing orders from above, and somewhere far up the chain, somebody traded off costs, lives, reputation, etc, etc. dude at the bottom has a set of rules.
Well they should factor in strategic loss by attrition. If you shoot a $1 million dollar missile at every $100 dollar drone, that’s a good way to lose a war.
Not sure about mid ranking officers, but captains who are in charge of ships think about such things.
But does the 1 million dollar missile cost 1 million to build a second one?
Often times military cost per unit factors in a fixed R&D cost. It doesn't necessarily mean it literally cost 1 million in parts and labor to assemble the single missile.
HN conveniently forgets that a $100 dollar drone has a $100 performance. Smaller range, smaller payload, worse navigation electronics. You can probably kill unprotected civilians and protected soldiers if the explosives reach the head. That's scary for civilians but for the military? It's only as bad as bullets and missiles.
All the Destroyers listed in the article definitely have 1 or 2 CIWS on board. I'm confident that would do the trick -- having seen them in action.
Additionally, each of those Destroyers have 7 (if I recall correctly) .50 caliber machine gun mounts around the perimeter of the ship, which could also probably handle the drones.
With so many civilian vessels nearby, and so near the coast, it seems like "shoot first and ask questions later" might not be the way to go in cases like this. A Phalanx CIWS round can travel over 5 km if it doesn't hit anything.
Launching rockets that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars at drones that cost almost nothing is not a solution. It's a recipe for defeat via attrition. They could have 50 cheap decoy drones for every drone carrying a payload.
Also the laser is far more scalable than rockets but still easily overwhelmed and susceptible to the same attack because it cannot distinguish between decoy drones and payload drones
The laser was targeting rockets fired by a Soviet BM-21 truck-mounted multiple rocket launcher. The rockets are used like artillery, not for targeting drones. Presumably if the laser is able to destroy 40 incoming rockets then it would be able to destroy much larger numbers of relatively slow drones.
Thanks for the correction about the rockets. But I'm not so sure that the laser solves the drone problem. Drones could be launched closer and come from every direction staying close to the ground. You could also spread them out around the laser so the laser spends most of its time transiting between decoy targets
Where is the evidence? This is just some logs of sightings by the crew on the ships. No specific information or anything of interest really other than random references to hashtag tic tac.
My takeaway from this is at the end of the article where there are links to multiple other drone swarm incidents. This includes an incident at Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant and an anti-ballistic missile battery in Guam. Yikes, this isn't the first time a high-value asset has been targeted by drone swarms?
I definitely heard about the nuclear plant. Might be time to put up one of those boards with pins and strings and find the connections and triangulate the source :)
The US military/intelligence apparatus is so large it wouldn't surprise me if this is yet another case of the left hand not knowing what the right is up to. Or maybe they had a vague idea, considering they didn't even attempt to shoot them down. Going off the nonchalant response, this is probably not the first time UAVs have flown over their ships. Except this time it was unplanned, and so kicked off an investigation.
I'm getting UFO crank vibes from both authors social media. Also no mention of request for comment from any official in the reporting. Just building a narrative from a selective release of FIOA requests.
Given how long the US military has been running drone operations world wide it's a near certainty they have war gamed the scenario of the adversary's drones attack at night under a new moon.
If the drones are quad copters then they would need to be released released pretty close to the target (under 10 miles say). If they are winged drones then they are most likely military in origin.
The story of the drones over Colorado seems to have sunk beneath the seas. However there were so many drones and so many sightings who ever was behind that would certainly have anticipated that the drones would be detected by civilians.
The fact that none of these drones have been captured (just shoot at the lights) leads me to belief these are all military in origin war gaming drone warfare 2.0.
This feels like a classic Sun Tzu “Art of War” technique. The objective is purely psychological.
First, begin with light incursions. Test the response. What does the United States do about a little annoyance? Nothing?
Next, wait a bit then increase the stimulus. What if we have multiple drones doing tricks. No response? Do they have guns to shoot these down?
Next, we add different types of drones. Some large enough to carry bombs. Others with scanners.
Next, they come in flocks of 40-50. Too many to shoot down.
Let’s be honest: China has drone superiority to America, probably by a lot. We have no idea.
We have been running incursions near Taiwan for years. This would be a natural response.
It can also be denied. That is the key point. If it were giant red drones with CCP emblems the United States press and public would get pissed off and a larger response would follow.
Little innocuous drones? Enough to get on your nerves, can be denied, threatening and menacing yet nothing to react to.
Also, the drones DJI releases to the public are nothing short of incredible.
With this much drone engineering talent in China, you have to wonder what they are keeping under wraps, developing for the military and intelligence instead...
I helped sail/transport a 32' boat down the coast of Australia years back with a friend and a professional captain/boat-transporter, it took a few weeks and we got to know the captain pretty well. He told us one time he was transporting a boat and was pretty far off the coast when he saw red lights in the distance coming towards him extremely fast. Then all of a sudden there was a car-sized vehicle hovering in front of him over the ocean...it sat there for 30 seconds or so, then accelerated away and was over the horizon in less than 10-15 seconds. The guy was kind of out-there, but I swear he wasn't making it up.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadEDIT: probably better to add "...in 2019" based on the correction below
Not sure how I missed that... guess it's time to go to bed.
I do think the headline has an urgent undertone that makes it seem like this just happened. Not sure if intentional or not
While the article does make this clear first thing, it may be worth having the title reflect this is a past event.
This was obviously an exercise between friendlies.
This was happening at sea, and apparently at night. The parts probably would have been blown into the ocean and sank or floated away before anyone could find them.
> This calls into question the “drone” designation. Was there ever even a hard description of these craft beyond lights in the sky?
Second time sounds like they weren't prepared to respond quick enough.
No one is going be the CO the opens fire on a non combatant drone on the USA coast, as you'd lose your command pretty fast.
Edit: I can't post faster, so here's a response to a reply:
I didn't peruse the logs myself, so I don't know the situation, but the rules of engagement are pretty strict, and also they may not have even had ordnance onboard for the weapons needed to take out one of these things. Not every ship carries live rounds all the time, and near the USA coast we pretty much never wanted to have loaded guns.
Like I said elsewhere, the US Navy isn't a bunch of untrained psychos looking to shoot stuff. Officers and enlisted are trained to put our lives on the line, not get scared and shoot everything that looks weird or threatening.
I don't get the bloodlust shown in here!
What you are referring to is choosing to blow something up based on a systematic approach that follows the laws of armed conflict, with frequent legal oversight, separate after action review, in a system that strongly punishes failure to follow process. This system is fully endorsed by the US Congress, representing the citizenry.
So if some civilians get blown up, 9/10 it was a deliberate decision.
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalese_cable_car_disaster_(1...
repeated incidents where US killed citizens of other countries with impunity and no repercussions for the perps
There aren't any details in the article on the size of the drones or their distance but I think a destroyer would have a wide range of weapons available from which to choose the appropriate level of response.
Doing nothing and hoping it goes away doesn't seem like the wisest response to this type of incident.
The other comments speak to various factors why it was more complicated, and just affirming that decision wouldn't have enabled action, TL;DR: you don't start throwing $500K missiles at lights 1,000 feet above deck when you're right off the coast of the US, and also we don't have nearly all the info here, just a subset of a subset of docs that got through via FOIA two years ago, you can safely assume that would have been considered at the time
It reminds me of 9/11. Everyone knew that crashing commercial aircraft could cause a great deal of destruction but somehow we could never prepare for such a scenario until it actually happened.
Are we prepared for that today?
> The crash was caused deliberately by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies and declared "unfit to work" by his doctor. Lubitz kept this information from his employer and instead reported for duty. Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, he locked the cockpit door and initiated a controlled descent that continued until the aircraft impacted a mountainside.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
It's gonna suck to see the end of outdoor music shows in our life time. :-/
The saving grace here is that people who want to terrorise often aren't the same with these skills IMO. If you have the skill/knowledge to make a drone swarm you probably have other valuable skills, have a good job and live comfortably. Lower chances of radicalisation.
This is how untrained people think. This particular group (the people who frequent this site) would probably want to know, quite strongly, what the craft are trying to do, and who was piloting them.
It was probably russia fucking with us from a submarine nearby.
https://www.scribd.com/document/426438895/Etude-du-Centre-de...
It's intellectual curiosity. Nobody would be harmed by blasting one and figuring out what it is and who it belongs to.
That negates the possibility of misidentifying a plane as a drone, or hitting anything unintended, or of any risk of taking down a plane at all.
There's a wide gulf of responses between that and firing off an anti-aircraft missile in a "using a bazooka as a flyswatter" kind of application.
I have seen a consumer DJI drone forced into return to home mode with an old satellite TV dish and bits out of a microwave oven. They don’t cope well with 900-ish watts of semi directed 2.4GHz noise. That guy says he eventually got that to work at over 1km range. It never “fried the electronics” though, even at short ranges.
(Yes, I have some strange friends and acquaintances...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_C._Rogers_III
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655#Post-tour_...
- "Hacker in his garage" A highly qualified amateur who built/modded drones to play a prank or showcase his products to potential customers.
- The drones were launched from the coast by a secret Russian/Chinese military cell to test new technology and spook the US military.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M
I think that’s well within the bounds of possibility. I know at least 8 or 10 people who could pull this off if they tried, I’d give myself maybe a 70% chance of doing so on my own given a low-mid 5 figure budget. I’d suspect there are many many people on diydrones or rcgroups forums who could do it.
Ardupilot, gps waypoint navigation remotely reset using satphone data/telemetry channels, initially guided using public ais coords of the ships.
I’d probably go with a consumer grade fixed wing rc glider to get the range/duration required (that wouldn’t hover over the helipad, but would be much easier to get 90+ mins duration and 100+ mile range that a multi rotor). If I could get a non ais equipped boat near by I’d consider LoRa radios instead of a sat phone (which might end up leaving payment/identity/location data behind) but would have trouble getting much past 100km line of sight range. Also very low bandwidth at long range, so even sending back still images to use for setting new gps waypoints would be a challenge over LoRa.
(For the record, I’m on the other side of the planet, and was at the time of these sightings too...)
I'm surprised the Marines on board weren't authorized to shoot them out of the sky. Perhaps it's time to develop some high power EM weapons to take them out, big magnetrons are cheap, and there is a lot of electrical power available onboard.
I'm willing to help develop countermeasures.
There's a youtuber that has a multi-hour autonomous drone, but it's solar powered and this was at night.
https://dronelife.com/2021/03/18/skyfront-gas-electric-hybri...
That could almost had done what’s reported from land, and easily from a small boat 50 miles away from the ships (which is well over the horizon).
Here it were international waters and no any weapons trained toward the ships - and even trained weapons isn't enough actually to start shooting.
During the cold war drones were huge, noisy, expensive, and had relatively short endurance. They weren't used in waves like drones can be now.
Zone denial seems like a reasonable response to today's threat environment.
But it's a fair point that shooting down an unmanned drone is a lot less aggressive than shooting down a manned one.
Of course, not starting a war with aliens that don't shoot seems wise.
They were 1000 feet in the air. Maybe read the article first.
My honest guess is it was staged, to “help” congress approve the new drone defense budget (which is probably not a terrible idea).
Next!
And then the only other thing to risk might be to relay “anything in this sector is with our boys, wink wink” to one person in command locally, who will know not to engage, and who will never ask any questions.
Matter of fact, they could get away with just reading and maybe temporarily “influencing” the rules of engagement for drones, and then allowing them to be amended “in light of the incident”.
Or it could have been highly compartmentalized within the Navy[0]. Or it could have been foreigners or pranksters! I have some “grip” on all of those possibilities, and I don’t claim to know what happened.
Anyway, the possibility it was staged is not as ridiculous as you assume, even before considering precedent.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_team
The types of military organizations that would be involved in something like this don't have to worry about prosecution. The CIA, for example, runs a global network of torture prisons, and hacked congressional computers to destroy evidence when investigated about it, got caught, lied about it, and nothing happened. (The torture prisons are still operating.)
A single person could do it... if they had the time and money.
It’s easy — for the typical HN poster — to make a drone. But, it’s tedious and expensive to make several dozen of them.
A raspberry PI with a GPS module, a few bulky brushless motors, and a hefty LiPo pack and you could probably make something with an autonomous range of 100 miles. The only limiting factor is money, time, and a wife who won’t mind you wasting money and time.
What if it was a legit training exercise and the side effect is some drone scare that also helps get a budget approved.
Edit: as a reply, since I can't post faster:
CIWS, in certain modes, do indeed track a target and fire at it, which could be considered a "random direction" when considering the maneuverability of the target.
Yes, the Navy operates two of the channel islands which are both relatively large. They each have a sizeable runway, plenty of radar, etc. A lot of training activities seem to occur in that area too.
(Also, this is the US military messing with itself. Someone in some skunk works hanger in Nevada has some secret weapon and they want to test it out on a real navy.)
Yes.
> Is this the same thing?
Unfortunately the article doesn't have any details like what shape they had or how big they were so at this point it's anyone's guess.
This would seem to be a pretty likely explanation (near-infinitely more likely than ETs, at least). It'd also perfectly explain David Fravor's story of spotting strange vehicles during a Navy training exercise (e.g. how the craft seemed to have advance knowledge of a Navy meeting spot, and the reaction from his superiors).
He thinks it couldn't be US military, but if it's some covert/intelligence thing, doesn't seem too implausible that they may try to do a realistic, unannounced red team exercise during a routine training exercise. That wouldn't explain his claims of it performing gravity-defying maneuvers, but there's no evidence of that besides his and some of his colleagues' testimonies, though.
Maybe save you a click if you were looking for any kind of resolution.
Also just an aside, I was on that cruise ship that was in the vicinity a month before this. I went out onto the deck (the bow) late at night. We were way out offshore near the military operating area. It was pitch black out there and creepy as fuck.
Maybe that was meant as intimidation?
It's a small object emitting a bright light. Trying to take a picture or identify the craft becomes impossible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpeSpA3e56A
The US Navy is a professional organization, not some scared cops who shoot first and ask questions later.
Edit: I'm done here, but please stop all the military fantasy where everything is a threat and needs to be shot. This was like 50 miles from the coast of the USA, not Iran or NK.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/J0jD8Swl3h8/maxresdefault.jpg
Can you please point me to the thread where you justify this (otherwise unbearably arrogant) response with your credentials?
(Seriously, how did this comment not get yanked as an obvious ad hom troll?)
Don't know if that last part has always been true.
Not defending this event, those sailors should have been court martialed, but your snarky comment didn't add anything.
Do those things have the capability to attack such tiny targets that are already close in? We're talking about something the size and speed of a bird. By the time you realize it's not a bird it's probably already on top of you. Moreover, they're small enough that they wouldn't represent a substantial threat to a ship in and of themselves (as compared to, say, an explosive-laden dinghy), and so perhaps not necessarily the kind of target that would've been specified for these weapons systems. I would imagine defenses for such small UAVs would be more in the vein of electronic countermeasures.
1) Why would a Carnival cruise ship feel the need to disclaim involvement for anything except a small, COTS drone? (IOW, presumably they at least believed they could have been such small drones.)
2) 4+ were spotted together. Wouldn't those be audible, especially if much larger than COTS drones?
3) The lights ("white light", "red flashing light") suggests COTS drones, especially because the cruise ship also noticed them. If they were special purpose military or intelligence drones, why keep the lights on?
Granted, the supposed distances involved suggest otherwise, but the article never establishes why they believed the drones were necessarily flown such distances. Rather, it seems those distances are based on the presumption that the drones were flown from one of the ships with active AIS. But that's a rather dubious assumption in the context of someone buzzing military ships w/ multiple drones.
Also, the Navy's recent history of situational awareness isn't the greatest. See, e.g., https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crash...
A shaped charge hitting the EOSS, the radar dome, or parts of the Aegis system’s sensor array could potentially cripple the ship’s ability to defend itself.
That being said, I’d imagine being on the receiving end of 500 1 lbs explosives is still a very bad day.
Yes
> We're talking about something the size and speed of a bird
Birds have nothing on stealthy, supersonic anti-ship missiles.
> By the time you realize it's not a bird it's probably already on top of you
In a war scenario all wildlife gets shot first. Modern systems developed in the past ten years also commonly have the capability to discern bird wings from propellers for this scenario. Hurray cheaper compute, everybody can run a SVM classifier in real-time now. Without spending too much money on your radar (40k USD? parts only) you can classify birds at about 0.5-1km away, who knows the exact capability of people with money to spend on the problem.
> I would imagine defenses for such small UAVs would be more in the vein of electronic countermeasures.
?Porque no los dos?
Citation: personal experience with those sensor systems.
Tracking millions of entities in your general space in real-time is definitely possible today. I have little reason to believe the US Navy cannot do it too.
https://youtu.be/bdwjcayPuag
i don't think the officers in charge of protecting the ship generally factor the material costs of doing so in to their decisions. they've got standing orders from above, and somewhere far up the chain, somebody traded off costs, lives, reputation, etc, etc. dude at the bottom has a set of rules.
Not sure about mid ranking officers, but captains who are in charge of ships think about such things.
Often times military cost per unit factors in a fixed R&D cost. It doesn't necessarily mean it literally cost 1 million in parts and labor to assemble the single missile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
Additionally, each of those Destroyers have 7 (if I recall correctly) .50 caliber machine gun mounts around the perimeter of the ship, which could also probably handle the drones.
I’d like to understand the rules of engagement- it seems a bit odd we’d just stand around watching them.
I've seen the original video but the audio is clearly some sort of rental property ad
Also the laser is far more scalable than rockets but still easily overwhelmed and susceptible to the same attack because it cannot distinguish between decoy drones and payload drones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Nicolas_Island
Where else are they going to test, Patuxant?
I'm getting UFO crank vibes from both authors social media. Also no mention of request for comment from any official in the reporting. Just building a narrative from a selective release of FIOA requests.
My money is on <other unit/branch/ally> was doing it and failed to notify or something.
Somebody probably got an ass chewing/punishment and that was the end of it as far as the navy was concerned.
If the drones are quad copters then they would need to be released released pretty close to the target (under 10 miles say). If they are winged drones then they are most likely military in origin.
The story of the drones over Colorado seems to have sunk beneath the seas. However there were so many drones and so many sightings who ever was behind that would certainly have anticipated that the drones would be detected by civilians.
The fact that none of these drones have been captured (just shoot at the lights) leads me to belief these are all military in origin war gaming drone warfare 2.0.
First, begin with light incursions. Test the response. What does the United States do about a little annoyance? Nothing?
Next, wait a bit then increase the stimulus. What if we have multiple drones doing tricks. No response? Do they have guns to shoot these down?
Next, we add different types of drones. Some large enough to carry bombs. Others with scanners.
Next, they come in flocks of 40-50. Too many to shoot down.
Let’s be honest: China has drone superiority to America, probably by a lot. We have no idea.
We have been running incursions near Taiwan for years. This would be a natural response.
It can also be denied. That is the key point. If it were giant red drones with CCP emblems the United States press and public would get pissed off and a larger response would follow.
Little innocuous drones? Enough to get on your nerves, can be denied, threatening and menacing yet nothing to react to.
Classic Sun Tzu.
With this much drone engineering talent in China, you have to wonder what they are keeping under wraps, developing for the military and intelligence instead...
https://wimflyc.blogspot.com/2021/03/foo-fighters.html seems like a similar phenomenon; maybe there weren't any drones in the first place.