The Drone Threat to America's Cities -- Seth Stodder - Lawfare

[erronis]

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-drone-threat-to-america-s-cities

Drones are coming for our cities. The tech is cheap, the threat is real, and our defenses are nearly nonexistent.

A scary piece with no good solution.

This past March, the FBI warned state law enforcement that Iran might be planning to attack targets in California using drones launched from vessels floating offshore. As it turned out, the threat wasn't real. The warning was based on "unverified" intelligence, and there was no evidence of an actual plot. Californians could breathe a sigh of relief.

But we shouldn't get too comfortable. While the FBI might have been wrong about the specific Iranian plot, the threat of a serious drone attack is growing. And we're not even remotely prepared for it--or the public panic that would likely ensue.

. . .

But make no mistake, a few dozen Shaheds launched from fishing trawlers 15 miles offshore would do serious damage. Traveling at 115 mph, Shaheds could hit targets near the coast--for instance, three of Los Angeles County's four oil refineries--in about 10 minutes. The results could be devastating: death and destruction, environmental damage, toxic plumes over urban areas, and severe fuel shortages that would hammer the Golden State's economy. The drones would fly below radar coverage, making them hard to detect--and neither California's coastline nor the refineries are defended with the kind of interceptors Ukraine uses to block 95 percent of the Shaheds that Russia launches every day. Under current law, only the military is allowed to have that kind of capability--and it's unclear whether military bases in California would actually have the ability to intercept several dozen Shahed drones just minutes away from hitting their targets.

And oil refineries aren't the only infrastructure that's vulnerable in California. There's also the power grid, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), or the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where 40 percent of all oceangoing containerized trade enters the U.S., along with most of the oil imported from the Middle East or brought from Alaska to supply California's economy. As Port of LA Executive Director Gene Seroka noted at the time of the FBI's warning about the supposed Iranian plot, "these ports, airports and utilities are soft targets for the bad guys." And the same could be said for coastal cities and infrastructure in other parts of the United States and around the world, such as the dense network of oil and gas infrastructure in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi along the Gulf Coast or major seaports like the Port of New York and New Jersey, Charleston, or Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

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[republianmushroom]

1. The chicken little syndrome raising it's ugly head.

Must fear something.