The White House is guarded by amongst the most comprehensive suite of passive and active defences in the world. Any air asset that comes within a restricted corridor is to be met by the warning message from a United States Air Force aircraft, its missiles firmly locked onto the incoming threat. And yet, an unknown aircraft crash lands onto the White House lawn.
In Europe, alarm bells start ringing at a sensitive nuclear site. Air based radar systems have picked up an incoming hostile aerial target. As a crisis team assembles to counter from the ground, a signal is sent to a nearby air force base. As fighter aircraft start taxiing, they receive further news. Instead of one target, there are a hundred.
Halfway across the world, a leading political figure is giving a speech at a rally. As his eyes observe the crowd gathered before him, though bulletproof glass, he feels secure knowing that the area is guarded by the best military units in his country. And yet, nearby, there is an explosion, directly above the crowd.
All three scenarios have happened, or are nervously awaited by security experts. The weapon used in all three instances? Commercial drones, which can be purchased by anyone with the requisite financial ability. Since the dawn of organized society, there has been an increasingly frantic battle between the attacker and defender. In years of yore, walls were built to stop crusading armies. These armies responded with projectiles hurled from catapults and multi-story siege weapons. Walls became thicker, a strategy which worked till the introduction of the cannon, decisively used in the Fall of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmed II in 1453. The 20th century saw the introduction of aircraft, which were quickly weaponized. A new game of cat and mice began, with faster aircraft meeting more advanced anti-aircraft technology, from flak to rockets to modern heat-seeking missiles and in the future, laser-based systems.
This was met in parallel by a new technology: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), known more colloquially as ‘drones’. These are the very ones which the United States has used to wage war and destruction from Yemen to Waziristan, and the very ones we saw near nightly bulletins of, their destruction marked as collateral.
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