美國還未為爆炸無人機做好準備
America Is Not Ready for Exploding Drones
America Is Not Ready for Exploding Drones
發生在委內瑞拉的一宗表面暗殺嘗試顯示，科技發展日新月異比政府可以應對的速度還快。
An apparent assassination attempt in Venezuela shows how technology is moving faster than governments can counter it.
An apparent assassination attempt in Venezuela shows how technology is moving faster than governments can counter it.
AUGUST 7, 2018
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was intoning something about economic renewal, flanked by his wife and a handful of high officials, in a country gripped by poverty, starvation, and shortages. Then, in a moment broadcast live on television that has since gone viral, his wife’s face changed. For an instant she seemed to duck as she reached for the official next to her; Maduro glanced up with apparent concern. The camera panned to the National Guardsmen in formation on the street before him as dozens suddenly started running. According to the government and witnesses, they had seen explosions in the sky.By the government’s account, those explosions were part of an attempted assassination by drone—which if correct would be the first instance of such an attack targeting a head of state, and a possible portent of things to come.
The United States pioneered military drones for surveillance and then missile strikes in Afghanistan nearly two decades ago; only a handful of states now have those capabilities. But small, commercially available drones of the kind Venezuela says were used in the attempt have proliferated widely among private actors in recent years. They do not require billions of dollars to procure or runways to take off. They can be used for filming or for delivering commercial products or humanitarian aid. They can just as easily carry explosives.
The attempted target in Venezuela was new, but the risk was not, nor is the anxiety among analysts and officials that it’s only getting worse and that countries, including the United States, are unprepared to deal with it. Only months after the Islamic State took the Iraqi city of Mosul in the summer of 2014, there were reports that the group was flying surveillance drones. The fall of 2016 brought the first known instance of fatalities from a suspected ISIS drone, when two Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq were killed examining an explosives-rigged drone they had shot out of the sky. At the peak of ISIS drone activity in 2017, according to a report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, its drones were flying dozens of missions a month across Iraq and Syria, with one Syrian Defense Force soldier reporting repeated drone attacks on logistics lines and and ammunition depots.
“This has been building for some time,” Vance Serchuk, the executive director of the KKR Global Institute, the geopolitical strategy arm of the investment firm KKR, told me. His institute has conducted research on drone and counter-drone technologies; he is also an Atlantic contributor. In Iraq and Syria in particular, ISIS “figured out how to weaponize drones before we figured out how to counter them. … Modern air defenses are built against planes and cruise missiles. A quadcopter is small, low and slow. We don’t have a good architecture for defeating this on the battlefield.”
This technological evolution is typical of terrorist groups’ tactical innovations, which often involve devising low-cost ways to inflict disproportionate damage on a stronger enemy. It’s easier and cheaper, for example, to rig and hide a simple explosive device along a roadside, as various insurgent groups did to devastating effect in Iraq, than it is to find and disarm them, or protect personnel against them. Similarly, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and others have turned everyday technologies—from pressure cookers, to vans, to airplanes—into weapons of war. Commercial drones are just the latest example of a longstanding pattern.
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