nominally because it wanted to spend the money on more E-2s, which can operate on smaller and rougher airfields, which would be handy in (e.g.) the Pacific where tiny islands don't necessary 'fancy' runways that the E-7 needs.
But they're actually very handy in tracking tiny targets—like drones—so Australia is sending E-7(s) to the Middle East:
Congress rebuffed the Pentagon's attempted to 'completely kill' E-7 acquisitions, and the USAF has now put in an order, and it may be that people now realizing having some number of E-7s may be handy:
you could have started a war with your neighbors using only sticks and stones - indeed, much of human history is people starting wars with their neighbors using weapons that we today would call primitive.
But now you can start a very destructive war with your neighbors.
Thanks to modern technology, you don't have to bother beating your neighbor to death with a wooden club, you now can annihilate them, and basically anything in their immediate vicinity, from a comfortable distance :D
There are actually a few exempted categories, such as test and measurement equipment (because something like a signal generator can obviously generate whatever the user selects).
In the two test launches shown in the video, the "missile" doesn't fly straight nor does it demonstrate ability to be "guided" by the launcher towards any particular target.
It's also incredibly slow. There are children's rocket kits that fly significantly faster than this.
Yeah, neither article nor the video itself talks about "accuracy" AFAIK, which seems like a kind of important thing in this whole concept, otherwise it's just a "horizontal rocket launcher" which is cool I guess, but not so close to a MANPAD.
The video is also cut in a way so you cannot tell that the launch seems to have been a complete failure? The rocket is vertical at the last frame: https://i.imgur.com/e2Kld6I.png
The engine and the warhead are two of the biggest challenges in making a missile, in large part because anything high performance is also going to be spectacularly dangerous to manufacture.
I frankly would care little about the speed; it can always be improved with a better propellant. I would care about a cheap ability to guide the rocket. If it's there, it may be consequential for a real (para)military application.
(A quadcopter is perfectly guidable, but it must be slower than a rocket, and costs more than $96.)
When everyone started working on 3D-printed guns, I was sitting here thinking that if it comes to actual revolution, one is going to need anti-tank/anti-air a whole lot more than (relatively easy to acquire) small arms... Nice to see movement on this front
In the American context, hopefully it never comes to an actual revolution, because life for everyone will be much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better afterward. We should do what we can to avoid one, especially because while it's fun to fantasize about your side being the one to start a revolution, there's no reason to think that the other side won't also think the same way and maybe they'll beat your side and make your life really, really awful.
Secondarily, there's a lot to say about anti-tank and anti-air power in the context of a "revolution". Most of it is pure fantasy including the idea that 3D printed missiles are going to start striking US strike aircraft at 40k feet in the equally absurd fantasy that those aircraft are going to just be bombing American cities and towns and countrysides. It's really just pure Internet-driven fantasy to think that these scenarios are plausible or the least bit desirable in any fashion.
If its a revolution you probably aren't hitting them 40k in the air, your hitting them when they park similar to how Ukraine sent drones after bombers behind enemy lines. I really hope we can avoid any kind of conflict, with the way American's think I could see one or both sides resorting to biological/chemical weapons faster than they start making missiles. There is also no reason to assume what starts out as your side will remain such, revolutions are crazy risky.
> If its a revolution you probably aren't hitting them 40k in the air, your hitting them when they park similar to how Ukraine sent drones after bombers behind enemy lines.
Right, and you don't need to conjure up anti-tank missiles (sure those could be nice to have) to do this. You could seize a bulldozer and drive it into the airframes, or just shoot them to bits. At this point if you have access to American jets on the ground to destroy them, you've already lost the manufacturing capacity to repair them.
> There is also no reason to assume what starts out as your side will remain such, revolutions are crazy risky.
Absolutely. Robespierre learned that lesson. Putin is learning that lesson from the perspective of starting a war but not being able to predict the outcome. The status quo is pretty great and we should be very careful and guarded about changing that, especially through violent means. Most things that are problems today can be resolved through legislation and the existing democratic mechanisms. Throwing that out (not suggesting you are suggesting that) would be almost certainly profoundly unwise. It's very much like the Monty Hall Problem.
> hopefully it never comes to an actual revolution, because life for everyone will be much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better afterward.
In the situations a revolution comes to exist, it is because life for everyone is already getting much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better. Nobody starts a revolution for funsies, so you're supposing a false dichotomy where the choice is between "plunge into hell for no reason" or "continue living a great life", when in fact the latter is not an option at all.
> In the situations a revolution comes to exist, it is because life for everyone is already getting much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better.
Some folks want to hasten "a revolution" because (a) they think it's going to happen 'eventually' anyway so might as well get it over with, and (b) they think they can come out 'on top' and set up the new system the way they want it (because the current Enlightenment-based system(s) suck in their opinion):
I think modern day Americans do not understand how bad war is because they’ve been engaged in it for nearly 30 years continuously without directly feeling the consequences.
Loads, the various attempts to overthrow the Weimar Republic for one, but many smaller, like the Impresa di Fiume.
Maybe not “for fun” but largely for justifications that pale in comparison to the suffering they unleashed.
Americans ready to go to war because eggs and gas are too expensive, or their trans teen’s top surgery was delayed, might be making similar mistakes. But Americans are good at making mistakes, perhaps supernaturally gifted.
This is obviously true now in places that aren't currently revolting, which is why they aren't revolting. But it can definitely get bad enough that it's worth gambling on the chance of a better life (as well as the chance of a worse life) vs. a guaranteed chance of a horrible life, or imminent death.
They do when they're convinced it's a walk in the park.
See the Spanish civil war, which was a two week coup by military worried about conspiracy theories turned into a years long war turned into a 40 year dictatorship (with decades of hunger).
Exactly. Revolutions are awful things that are only defensible if the conditions are brutal enough. And even then, there has to be the caution that the revolution can be co-opted by infinitely worse people than those that were overthrown (take the Russian revolution, for example)
Also, actual revolutions require a significant chunk of "excluded elite". People who have nothing can generally manage a riot, maybe burn down some buildings until the police open fire, but nothing more coordinated. Revolutions require more money and organization. I'm reminded of how the convicted Jan 6th rioters were a lot more middle-class than you might expect.
No American revolution would succeed without a significant chunk of US military support. Either from above ("autogolpe"), or entire units defecting en masse.
The Russian revolution is not a good example if you are talking about the October revolution. It cannot be stated objectively that it turned out to be worse, and, in fact, for many replacing the czars with the Bolsheviks led to a lot better living conditions.
I mean... we're 4 years into a little Russian jaunt that was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks. And a certain someone just picked a war with Iran pretty much for funsies
I don't want to underestimate the level of arrogance/stupidity that might be involved in sparking a revolution at this point
I wouldn't call either of those a revolution; they're both top-down directed foreign offensives. A revolution is generally domestic and sparked by widespread popular internal unrest, even if it's sometimes led by elites.
Yes, my point is more that entering into a war for funsies is a similarly stupid decision, and we have a whole bunch of guardrails that are supposed to prevent it, but somehow it just keeps on happening
It is easy to see that South Korea is much better off now as a democracy than under the generals. It is easy to see the Philippines are better off than under Marcos. What countries move away from democracy to become better?
It’s practically impossible for an indigenous insurgency to be effective without state backing, so the real question is who would be willing provide such support and under what circumstances. Similar to how France supported US independence as a way to hurt the UK. Or the UK supporting Native Americans to attack the US (war of 1812).
Being able to effectively organize enough to create home grown weapons and fight an insurgency is a signal to a 3rd party that you are organized and committed and worthy of further support. From there it can snowball.
> Most of it is pure fantasy including the idea that 3D printed missiles are going to start striking US strike aircraft at 40k feet
Nobody is really talking about hitting supersonic jets at 40k feet, nor even destroying a fully-armoured tank. More about making your opponent think twice about deploying close air support, and have move cautiously with their APCs and supply trucks.
We can see some version of this playing out in Ukraine, and I guess it is possible that FPV drones have pretty much invalidated the role a DIY missile launcher would play
Or worse. Neither your side nor your opponents side wins, an unknown threat swoops in and takes over and now you have a drastically worse system than either “side” would have at least tried to implement. Instability is a great opportunity for Russia to swoop on in, or China. The next American Civil War hopefully never happens because it will end worse than anyone realizes.
For anyone that thinks a "civil war" scenario might be fun, I recommend watching Alex Garland's 'Civil War' - a highly realistic portrait of what an inter-US war would actually look like.
I did not find that movie to be realistic at all but I can see why other people do. I think it it’s far more likely to be a CIA faction led ‘attempted coup’ similar to the 2016 on in Turkey. I think Turkeys coup was likely run by their secret police as a way to flush out dissidents and heavily suppress them. So I would expect a Jan 6 but with more of a real actionable plan created by informants and doomed to quickly fail followed by a de-MAGAfication program similar to de-Baathification in Iraq or de-Nazification in Germany.
Times have changed since then but the first Chechen war heavily works against the theory of your second paragraph. Instrumental was their seizure of anti-tank and heavy weaponry during ambushes of Russian forces entering into Grozny and other chokepoints. Eventually they used these weapons to capture even more heavy weapons and then won a few years of outright independence.
It didn't exactly matter in the end. Russia eventually encircled them with artillery and pounded them until they gave up and brokered a deal. Their fighting skills and spirit have since been added as an asset on the Russian military's balance sheet.
it doesn't really matter in the end because the human species will one day be extinct.
would the chechens be in their position now had they never fought? impossible to say, counter-factual conditionals are all unconditionally true. though i'm not sure why you'd assume so...
In exchange for two brutal wars they got 9 years of de facto independence. That's not even very long.
You dont need counterfactuals to ask if it was worth it or compare 9 years to the age of the universe.
Armed revolutions are often lionized and glorified because they form part of most countries' national mythos - the binding agent holding together most national identities.
But, the ugly truth is that most of them are just a tragic waste of human life. Chechnya was very much that.
Everyone with the “only solution is revolution” mentality needs to read this comment. Anyone salivating over/romanticizing armed conflict has never experienced it and can’t fathom how awful it is. I know I can’t, and that’s why I don’t want to find out.
revolutions are like earthquakes or pandemics: created by forces beyond our control and a matter of when, not if. people romanticizing or anti-romanticizing armed conflict online doesn't even enter the frame <zizekian sniff>.
From my experiences with the YPG in the Syrian Civil War --- You'd be surprised how many people that have seen combat absolutely loved it. There was one guy that would go in a state of ecstasy while being shot at, literally expressing happily "ha ha they try to shoot me" and this is a guy who had seen many of his comrades die. Once you accept you are dead it's actually far less mundane than normal life, while at the same time you have a fairly straightforward sense of meaning and purpose. Plus life is much simpler -- 99% of (that) war is just standing guard, smoking cigarette, drinking tea, moving sandbags, etc, much less complicated than say something like trying to juggle a dentistry practice while driving the 2 kids to school events and then going home to patch drywall on the house.
There's a reason why Hemingway wrote "There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter." Going home just to have a toddler scream at you for the wrong color cup or walking into the grocery store and just effortless picking one of 1000 brands of cereal just seems so -- hollow -- afterwards.
This is a large component of the alt-right, isn't it.
> much less complicated than say something like trying to juggle a dentistry practice while driving the 2 kids to school events and then going home to patch drywall on the house
There is genuinely a group of people who'd rather fantasize about mass murder than do chores. Every now and again one of them actually picks up a gun. Then some school kids never have to go to events, or anywhere, ever again.
I have some sympathy for people who can't adapt to peace. When I was a kid one of my neighbours was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Calvert ; I knew him as an old man who drank too much and never talked about the war. This is not an excuse to restart the war.
>This is a large component of the alt-right, isn't it.
I couldn't tell you. YPG was dominantly left-wing and looked up to the former communist 'Apo'. I imagine the phenomenon is fairly politically universal.
>There is genuinely a group of people who'd rather fantasize about mass murder than do chores. Every now and again one of them actually picks up a gun. Then some school kids never have to go to events, or anywhere, ever again.
Yes there are people like that. Although most of the Kurds I met started fantasizing about fighting ISIS only after Islamic theocrats starting murdering and raping their population. I doubt many of them who gained a taste for combat were doing chores one day and started fantasizing they could live under a tyrannical regime so they'd have an "excuse" to "restart" the war.
Personally I don't think soldiers in need of a war have to fantasize too hard to come up with a morally acceptable outlet. I wouldn't look down on those who fought against the Russians in Ukraine or against ISIS in Mali because they need an outlet for their escape from civil life.
Anyone salivating over/romanticizing surrendering to a dictatorship hellbent on committing genocide has never experienced it and can't fathom how awful it is. I know I can't, and that's why I don't want to find out.
I whish I coule upvote you more than once: as shitty as your country may feel to you, it's not remotely close to how bad it would be in the advent of a civil war (which come pretty much after any revolution).
Even if “your side” won in the end, you'd have lost a lot in the process.
In order for that to happen, there has to be a way for regular people to live good lives without needing a revolution. Unfortunately, the Epstein class has and is doing everything in their power to get rid of those alternatives.
Fuck that. South Korea constantly worked toward progress and went from generals to democracy.
America won a Civil war against traitors like the Epstein class, but we want to just give up today because democracy is hard and what, hope the new dictator class is more benevolent? When has that ever been the case?
The US is ours, Democracy is ours. That is why they constantly undermine it. Why would we give up the stronger position that is easier to win from just because they keep trying to undermine it? That makes zero sense.
It’s not about combatting the state and more of supplanting the state. Where the state has abandoned the streets to crime a local neighborhood watch can pick up the slack. People can then pay their neighborhood watch and vote to cut their local government taxes. The state is strangely ok with a high degree of street level violence in that it mostly affects those without power and provides a continuing justification for increased state powers - actually fixing the problem would undermine the justification. An example of this would be in South Africa where private security is playing an ever increasing role in policing. Once private security becomes large enough they become a real threat to the government as they are usually better organized and suffer less corruption.
I read a paper that was published by the US military about twenty years ago and a line that I'm going to paraphrase struck out at me: "The home made cruise missile will be the AK-47 of the 21st century.
I found this paper when I was reading about that guy in NZ who was trying to build a missile at home for $20k in around 2003-2004.
The cost for what he was trying to achieve is likely below $5k now, if you don't include access to machines like 3d printers that are pretty ubiquitous now.
I think this violates ITAR. You aren't allowed put a guidance system on a rocket. And even if you were allowed to do it for your own fun/education, you certainly aren't allowed to provide instructions to foreign entities about how it do it.
A friend of mine interested in model rocketry demoed a sun tracking model rocket at a state convention. Pretty soon after, he had a chat he described as "terrifying but friendly" with "a few dudes in windbreakers" who wanted to know what he was up to. He didn't get into any trouble but decided he'd stick to unguided rockets from then on.
Between that and playing spot the fed at the local machine gun shoot, I was surprised at just how much attention the state pays to these kind of hobby conventions, but I guess I shouldn't be.
It's life imprisonment just to possess a launcher (not even the rocket) that is intended to launch a rocket/missile that guides towards an aircraft. And the guy has another youtube short where he explicitly says the intended guidance system is cameras that update the location of a missile and then he shows a real drone and also the emblem of an aircraft as intended targets for this guidance system, while also calling it a MANPADS launcher.
That's before you even get to ITAR.
Those of us who have seen people get nailed to the wall for having a almost to scale picture of a machinegun part on a piece of metal, or people convicted of possessing rocket launchers because the ATF put an entirely different gun inside of an deactivated tube and claims it is a rocket launcher because the ATF's own gun could fire inside of it, are watching this with our jaws dropped because we've seen that even bad faith representation of intent that were so much looser than this end in serious convictions.
I think ultimately it's a consequence of weapons manufacturers in the US is trying to make their products sound more impressive, and in general military terminology is a huge nonsensical mess.
Just consider that "self propelled gun" and "main battle tank" are very different things despite the first being a quite accurate description of what the latter consists of. Or the distinction between a cruise missile and a one way drone...
Guns, swords, and bombs are weapons. The same, attached to fancy computers that can use them autonomously are weapon systems. At least that's how I've always hears the terms used.
Guided missile launchers are weapons systems, because the projectile and the launcher each are a component of a complete system which requires significant technology. This is in contrast to a firearm, which has all of the technology in the gun and not the ammunition (for the most part) or more simply a knife or sword.
I suppose I'd say: well, no, a gun's ammunition does something significant, but also even if that disambiguation were necessary in a particular circumstance, this article is not that.
It’s a bit silly for this situation, but the basic idea of moving from “weapon” to “weapon system” is reasonable, in a 20th century kind of way.
Basically, WWII showed planners they were in the war business not in the ship/plane/tank business. Take navies, for example. For most of the history of the professional navy, the overwhelming cognitive container for “unit in the navy” was a ship. Planners paid for ships to be laid down, admirals planned where they went and captains were responsible for them in all regards. You could reasonable count a navy’s capability by counting the kind and number of their ships: thus and such frigates, ships of the line, etc. However, even before the 20th century naval planners knew and acted like ships weren’t atomic: counting guns on ships of the line as a distinguishing feature or planning a sortie based on available marines both herald what would come later. But mostly we thought of ships as ships. If the enemy was to have 3 battlecruisers then we ought to have 4.
WWII shuffled all that around. At the scale of fighting and industrial demand, the idea of a “ship” or a “tank” or a “fighter” as a unit of analysis started to look tenuous. Successful commanders and (especially) planners noticed that the math worked out much better if we considered units of analysis larger than individual technological objects. The immediate consequence is one starts to think in terms of weapons delivery to the enemy and not the Sherman tank. The primary concerns then (often but not always) shift from characteristics of the weapon as a weapon to: can this system as a collective be built cheaply, can it be deployed + trained on easily, and can it achieve goals in mixed employment.
The same basic idea animated the operations research revolution in warfare, the bam changes from thing to thing_system or thing_platform are consequences of that.
i don't like the framing of $96 that pops up with this topic.
There are so many reasons why the pricing point is completely irrelevant. Yet it frames it as if it were a similarly helpful option to fpv drones for the underdog nation - It's not, nor would it be if it were $9.60 or $0.96. This launcher has not even hit a PoC state - to mention the production cost of the prototype at this point is an extremely weak talking point - it means nothing.
I find how technology changes warfare to be fascinating. Usually the impact isn't fully predicted beforehand.
The American Civil War was defined by being the first large-scale war fought with accurate long range rifles and the casualties reflect that, being higher than any subsequent war America has been in (600k+).
WW1 was defined by artillery and the machine gun. In many ways, the horrors of WW1 are actually worse than WW2.
WW2 was defined by tanks, air power and aircraft carriers. Although, interestingly, the concept of mobile warfare goes back to the Mongols.
Vietnam was defined by asymmetric warfare and the inability for a vastly superior, imperial power to win a land war against a vastly inferior but motivated foe.
One of the more significant inventions in military technology was the AK-47 (named because it was invented in 1947 btw). This became the tool of choice for insurgencies everywhere for decades. It's cheap and highly reliable.
And this brings us to Afghanistan, which interestingly is called the graveyard of empires. Through a sequence of events the USSR invaded in 1979 and quickly captured Kabul, installing a puppet government, and then weathering a decade of insurgency that resulted in defeat (sound familiar?). The the defining weapon was the Stinger should-mounted SAM [1]. Why? Because it devastated helicopters that the USSR was dependent on in a highly mountainous region.
In the 1980s, the Stinger launcher cost $30-40k and that completely changed warfare.
We're now firmly in the drone era. This really began in the 2000s when fairly expensive drones became the tool of choice for the US to assassinate people. A reaper drone [2] still costs $20M+. But that has all changed with how cheap commercial drones have become and the crucible for that change is of course Ukraine.
We've seen all sorts of military uses of drones, from as simple as a commercial drone silently dropping hand grenades on Russian troops in trenches to more sophisticated attacks that make it virtually impossible for the Russian Navy to operate in the theater.
And now we're seeing it in Iran where the US, despite spending $1 trillion every year on the military has no answer to Iran's Shahed drones, that cost probably $10-20k each and Iran can produce thousands of them every month. These will only get cheaper. It's fair to say that drones will impact every conflict going forward. The US has sought Ukraine's innovations against Russian drones, specifically the bullet drone [3].
So up until now it requires a state actor to make a shoulder-mounted SAM like the Stinger but with advances like the submission, how will the world change if any bunch of insurgents with $100 in chips and sensors and a 3D printer can manufacturer a nearly comparable weapons system?
I will be a negative yancy, and regurgitate things from the previous thread in combination with my pattern-matching brain and experience with making UAS firmware/hardware etc.
Cool project, but this is the 1% of the work that's required to get an initial platform in place. It cannot intercept an airborne target, and it will take the rest of the 99% of the work on testing, refining guidance/propulsion/sensors etc, finding and fixing errors, finding and fixing incorrect assumptions that will lead to re-building various subsystems etc.
Another way of phrasing it is that this is a cargo cult MANPADS.
A slingshot is a MANPADS. It's not a very good one, but it's portable, and an air defense system. The Fliegerfaust was a manpads, and it just yeeted a few tubes into the air.
Regardless of whether this actually works (I have my doubts, but also understand it might be difficult to get range time on a device like this :)), it exposes a fundamental issue with arms control today.
Small firearms are hundreds of years old. Drones have been commercially available for many years and are easily modifiable into something that is 80% as good as what is currently being fielded in Ukraine.
It is not technically feasible to restrict someone from assembling basic, non-firearm-specific components to build a firearm. In the US, there is an increasing effort at the state level to serialize, restrict, and document individual firearm parts. However, an 80% good barrel can be fabricated at home, a 100% as good receiver can be printed on any recent 3D printer, and the rest of the parts (bolt, trigger assembly, etc) can be designed around easy home fabrication (see FGC-9). There is no practical way to trace, regulate, or stop behavior.
It isn't possible to restrict someone from building a capable drone either. The firmware is opensource, the parts can be ordered from almost any marketplace, and an energetic payload can easily be made by any amateur chemist from chemicals in any hardware or camping store. EW is often touted as a solution, but is frequently beaten by tethered drones. Cheap COTS IMUs are getting good enough to provide surprisingly accurate short-term INS, to say nothing of autonomous systems that need no external input past initial targeting.
I personally think this is a far bigger risk than most countries realize, largely because they are 10-15 years behind the technology. I believe this will force most governments into spending an order of magnitude more to defend their institutions at every level, not just core government security.
At least in the US, these threat vectors will absolutely be used to justify intrusions into civil liberties, but no amount of infringement will be able to even partially mitigate these threats. I think this should start to play out over the next 5-10 years.
These discussions always focus around enforcement and never on alignment. The moat for this stuff historically has never been strict enforcement; it has been that the people who have the know-how on how to do it have nothing to gain by doing it, since they are well-educated and benefit from the current socioeconomic order (they have no motive to change it; rather, they want to climb it).
This is shifting. First, economic stratification is getting worse, and as economic mobility declines people start looking for alternatives. (See all of Gen Z cheering for Luigi Mangione). Second, AI will enable people who are less educated to build these kinds of weapons.
For example, you can use a Kalman filter to greatly improve the data you get from an IMU and GPS via sensor fusion. Before, this required a specialist skillset; now you can get a "good enough" implementation by prompting Claude.
I really wish the debate around this stuff wasn't framed in terms of preventative enforcement because it naturally leads towards more enforcement (when your only tool is a hammer...). The root of the issue is that the government does not trust its citizenry to follow the law without Big Brother watching. That in and of itself is a symptom of a larger grave political crisis in America: the decay of the state's political legitimacy.
> The root of the issue is that the government does not trust its citizenry to follow the law without Big Brother watching.
People did fly two planes into the World Trade Center. That was a thing that happened. Along with all the regular mass shootings, all the way up to Vegas.
> That in and of itself is a symptom of a larger grave political crisis in America: the decay of the state's political legitimacy.
Well, only because people are actively chiselling away at it because they think they will be able to loot the ruins.
your argument here rests on whether someone with the know how to do these types of things will not be able to find a job in the near future. I’d call this unlikely
I am certainly pro T2A but your argument doesn't hold - laws to regulate arms are not effective only in a binary way - if they reduce the number of arms they are doing what they say on the tin.
Whether we should be trying to regulate arms is another issue.
I am not arguing laws need to be binary-effective. You are right, most of the current laws are designed to slowly erode public support for the 2nd amendment by making the barrier to entry so absurdly high that the average person cannot feasibly own firearms.
I am arguing that the new laws being proposed (e.g serializing other firearms components, ammo serialization, assault weapons bans, higher gun-owner standards) have absolutely no bearing on an entirely new source of firearms. Many Dem-controlled states have passed "ghost gun" regulation, but there is no real enforcement mechanism and it's mostly an additional charge to tack on after an actual crime has been committed.
You can see states like CA trying to go after 3D printers, but I suspect this will fail. There is no software out there that can realistically determine whether a part is a firearm component, other than dumb hashes of known parts. 3DP is a general tool, it is like trying to ban milling machines, files, or basic handtools.
I see it the other way round: there's no way to achieve public safety without drastically reduced gun ideology and availability, but there's no way to do that while the second amendment is in place, so you get both illiberal, ineffective and irrelevant laws and regular mass shootings.
Let's assume you get rid of the second amendment and totally ban civilian gun ownership in the US. No legal firearms other than for the police/military, full confiscation of guns, etc. Let's also assume the public is broadly supportive of this effort, and that there are not large black-market caches for sale.
I am arguing there will still be a significant number mass shootings/casualty events, political assassinations using a firearm, etc, and that the only way to effectively prevent them is to roll back most of the bill of rights.
The gun is a very old piece of technology and you do not need a sophisticated one to kill people effectively. Shinzo Abe was assassinated with a gun that could be described as primitive at best. Mangione used a 3dp firearm to kill the United Health CEO. Rebels in Myanmar are fighting the military junta with 3d printed small arms.
I am fundamentally arguing that the capacity of any one person has dramatically (100,000x) increased since the bill of rights was written, for better and for worse.
To be clear, I fully support the bill of rights and want to see it expanded. However, I reject the idea that simply eliminating the 2nd amendment and removing guns from civilian ownership can fix the underlying issues. I think you will see "casual" shootings and hopefully even mass shootings go down, but they will not go away and I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world.
> I am arguing there will still be a significant number mass shootings/casualty events
These are extremely rare in other countries? It's very hard to achieve true zero, yes, but the UK has about 30 gun deaths per year, almost all of which are crime-related rather than mass casualty events. Those tend to be rare, and tend to be bombs. The Shinzo Abe assassination was also such a "black swan".
> I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world
Why do you think that would be, given (important!) your premise "the public is broadly supportive of this effort"?
We're skipping a lot of discussion to focus on the UK, which has arms measures that exceed (in some, but not all, cases) even the far-fetched hypothetical I threw out above. Shinzo Abe is not a black swan in the context of Japanese political history nor the history of political assassinations generally, but I digress.
To answer the point, there is no technical limitation keeping people in the UK from building, creating and shooting homemade or otherwise improvised guns that I am aware of.
What the UK does have is universal healthcare, a 3-4x lower incarceration rate and dramatically improved social safety services.
I think you can group the majority of shooters into three buckets -- ideologically driven (think white supremacists, Islamic terrorists, anarchists, etc), the mentally ill, and the criminally motivated (gang shootings mostly). The US has only amplifying factors for all three groups.
For idealgoues, there is no wider span of acceptable discourse than in the US. Commonly espoused views in the US legislative and executive branches are criminal offenses in a number of peer countries, e.g hate speech is still constitutionally protected speech in the US. The rhetoric is insane, accusations of nazism, faciscm from the left and similar accusations from the right, and generally a very high degree of polarization.
For the mentally ill, the support system in the US is abysmal, with cracks big enough to drive a truck through. There are multiple books written about the failures of America's mental health system, I will not belabor the point.
For the criminally motivated, gun crime is concentrated in young, mostly black men in decaying post-industrial cities in the midwest and (south)east. They have almost zero political capital, low social mobility and very little pubic support. Other countries certainly have their ghettos, but take a trip to Gary, IN or Jackson, MS. You would be hard pressed think you are in the richest, most powerful country in the world.
Fundamentally, the point still stands. There is not a feasible technical path to keep firearm technology out of a massive number of hands. The skills needed to produce a functional firearm have never been lower, and they will keep declining until almost zero. The only technical (preventative) measures run squarely into the bill of rights -- think a lowered bar for a warrant or infringements on the 1st amendment limiting the sharing of technical knowledge. Changing the culture -- around mental health, around poverty, and around power is very difficult, so we will see an attempted erosion of civil liberties, just like 9/11 was used to erode civil liberties with the introduction of the Patriot Act and similar legislation.
Obama and Biden were the best gun salesman the USA has had in awhile. It's not clear they reduce the number of arms, depending on the culture. In USA culture we've seen the number of arms in civilian hands expand even as regulations increase.
I think with the proliferation and effectiveness of countermeasures passive target acquisition and first shot accuracy with traditional ballistic methods might be a better place to focus but I understand that's very hard to do nonprofessionally as an individual thanks to the rules and laws.
On the other hand, there is a lot to be said for making them blow their $1k active countermeasures on your $500 missiles before sending a real one in to finish the job. Heck, even just forcing your adversary to treat every sky like it's hostile is worth a lot.
Both approaches are clearly worthy of development.
The $4 million is the sticker price of the PAC-3 payload, not the launch system (reports put the missile battery + radar setup at ~$350 million, before you load any ammo)
On the defensive side, see perhaps this phased array radar system with a 20km range:
* https://github.com/NawfalMotii79/PLFM_RADAR
Expanding on that, for interest:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array
* https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2003/02/11/294058...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-role_Electronically_Scan...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-7_Wedgetail
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-7_Wedgetail
Somewhat interesting in that the Pentagon did not want the E-7 (as a replacement to the E-3):
* https://www.twz.com/air/e-2-hawkeye-replaces-usaf-e-3-sentry...
nominally because it wanted to spend the money on more E-2s, which can operate on smaller and rougher airfields, which would be handy in (e.g.) the Pacific where tiny islands don't necessary 'fancy' runways that the E-7 needs.
But they're actually very handy in tracking tiny targets—like drones—so Australia is sending E-7(s) to the Middle East:
* https://www.twz.com/air/massive-leap-in-ability-to-spot-iran...
Congress rebuffed the Pentagon's attempted to 'completely kill' E-7 acquisitions, and the USAF has now put in an order, and it may be that people now realizing having some number of E-7s may be handy:
* https://breakingdefense.com/2026/03/following-congressional-...
What a time to be alive.
In fact, I think I now have all I need to start a war with my neighbours.
you could have started a war with your neighbors using only sticks and stones - indeed, much of human history is people starting wars with their neighbors using weapons that we today would call primitive.
But now you can start a very destructive war with your neighbors. Thanks to modern technology, you don't have to bother beating your neighbor to death with a wooden club, you now can annihilate them, and basically anything in their immediate vicinity, from a comfortable distance :D
For the non-Americans, the modern technology you're referring to is the HOA.
Lol!
Convenient warfare!
> you now can annihilate them [...] from a comfortable distance
The problem is: they can, too.
Don't worry, US government's already got you covered!
How is DIY radar regulated by the FCC?
Emitting in the regulated part of the spectrum must comply with the regulations, regardless of the origin of the transmitter.
There are actually a few exempted categories, such as test and measurement equipment (because something like a signal generator can obviously generate whatever the user selects).
You need a license for most frequencies.
I wonder if there’s an argument to made regarding the second amendment
In the two test launches shown in the video, the "missile" doesn't fly straight nor does it demonstrate ability to be "guided" by the launcher towards any particular target.
It's also incredibly slow. There are children's rocket kits that fly significantly faster than this.
Yeah, neither article nor the video itself talks about "accuracy" AFAIK, which seems like a kind of important thing in this whole concept, otherwise it's just a "horizontal rocket launcher" which is cool I guess, but not so close to a MANPAD.
The video is also cut in a way so you cannot tell that the launch seems to have been a complete failure? The rocket is vertical at the last frame: https://i.imgur.com/e2Kld6I.png
Baby steps ... with a few more contributors, this could be turned into, say, a $500.00 missile that works quite effectively.
The engine and the warhead are two of the biggest challenges in making a missile, in large part because anything high performance is also going to be spectacularly dangerous to manufacture.
I frankly would care little about the speed; it can always be improved with a better propellant. I would care about a cheap ability to guide the rocket. If it's there, it may be consequential for a real (para)military application.
(A quadcopter is perfectly guidable, but it must be slower than a rocket, and costs more than $96.)
Guidance systems have speed limitations. Just because it works when slow does not mean it will work if you upgrade propellant.
When everyone started working on 3D-printed guns, I was sitting here thinking that if it comes to actual revolution, one is going to need anti-tank/anti-air a whole lot more than (relatively easy to acquire) small arms... Nice to see movement on this front
In the American context, hopefully it never comes to an actual revolution, because life for everyone will be much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better afterward. We should do what we can to avoid one, especially because while it's fun to fantasize about your side being the one to start a revolution, there's no reason to think that the other side won't also think the same way and maybe they'll beat your side and make your life really, really awful.
Secondarily, there's a lot to say about anti-tank and anti-air power in the context of a "revolution". Most of it is pure fantasy including the idea that 3D printed missiles are going to start striking US strike aircraft at 40k feet in the equally absurd fantasy that those aircraft are going to just be bombing American cities and towns and countrysides. It's really just pure Internet-driven fantasy to think that these scenarios are plausible or the least bit desirable in any fashion.
If its a revolution you probably aren't hitting them 40k in the air, your hitting them when they park similar to how Ukraine sent drones after bombers behind enemy lines. I really hope we can avoid any kind of conflict, with the way American's think I could see one or both sides resorting to biological/chemical weapons faster than they start making missiles. There is also no reason to assume what starts out as your side will remain such, revolutions are crazy risky.
> If its a revolution you probably aren't hitting them 40k in the air, your hitting them when they park similar to how Ukraine sent drones after bombers behind enemy lines.
Right, and you don't need to conjure up anti-tank missiles (sure those could be nice to have) to do this. You could seize a bulldozer and drive it into the airframes, or just shoot them to bits. At this point if you have access to American jets on the ground to destroy them, you've already lost the manufacturing capacity to repair them.
> There is also no reason to assume what starts out as your side will remain such, revolutions are crazy risky.
Absolutely. Robespierre learned that lesson. Putin is learning that lesson from the perspective of starting a war but not being able to predict the outcome. The status quo is pretty great and we should be very careful and guarded about changing that, especially through violent means. Most things that are problems today can be resolved through legislation and the existing democratic mechanisms. Throwing that out (not suggesting you are suggesting that) would be almost certainly profoundly unwise. It's very much like the Monty Hall Problem.
> hopefully it never comes to an actual revolution, because life for everyone will be much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better afterward.
In the situations a revolution comes to exist, it is because life for everyone is already getting much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better. Nobody starts a revolution for funsies, so you're supposing a false dichotomy where the choice is between "plunge into hell for no reason" or "continue living a great life", when in fact the latter is not an option at all.
> In the situations a revolution comes to exist, it is because life for everyone is already getting much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better.
Some folks want to hasten "a revolution" because (a) they think it's going to happen 'eventually' anyway so might as well get it over with, and (b) they think they can come out 'on top' and set up the new system the way they want it (because the current Enlightenment-based system(s) suck in their opinion):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
> Some folks want to hasten "a revolution"
well some folks are doing that all the time, but only sometimes does it take. what's the difference between one time and another?
> Nobody starts a revolution for funsies
They definitely do, see the 1900s.
I think modern day Americans do not understand how bad war is because they’ve been engaged in it for nearly 30 years continuously without directly feeling the consequences.
Which revolutions in the 1900s were started for fun? Unless you're considering CIA backed coups in that count?
Loads, the various attempts to overthrow the Weimar Republic for one, but many smaller, like the Impresa di Fiume.
Maybe not “for fun” but largely for justifications that pale in comparison to the suffering they unleashed.
Americans ready to go to war because eggs and gas are too expensive, or their trans teen’s top surgery was delayed, might be making similar mistakes. But Americans are good at making mistakes, perhaps supernaturally gifted.
Counterpoint: no matter how bad you think your life is, it's nowhere near as bad as it would be if a civil war occurred in your country.
Even people living a quite miserable life have a lot to lose.
This is obviously true now in places that aren't currently revolting, which is why they aren't revolting. But it can definitely get bad enough that it's worth gambling on the chance of a better life (as well as the chance of a worse life) vs. a guaranteed chance of a horrible life, or imminent death.
>Nobody starts a revolution for funsies,
They do when they're convinced it's a walk in the park.
See the Spanish civil war, which was a two week coup by military worried about conspiracy theories turned into a years long war turned into a 40 year dictatorship (with decades of hunger).
Exactly. Revolutions are awful things that are only defensible if the conditions are brutal enough. And even then, there has to be the caution that the revolution can be co-opted by infinitely worse people than those that were overthrown (take the Russian revolution, for example)
Also, actual revolutions require a significant chunk of "excluded elite". People who have nothing can generally manage a riot, maybe burn down some buildings until the police open fire, but nothing more coordinated. Revolutions require more money and organization. I'm reminded of how the convicted Jan 6th rioters were a lot more middle-class than you might expect.
No American revolution would succeed without a significant chunk of US military support. Either from above ("autogolpe"), or entire units defecting en masse.
The Russian revolution is not a good example if you are talking about the October revolution. It cannot be stated objectively that it turned out to be worse, and, in fact, for many replacing the czars with the Bolsheviks led to a lot better living conditions.
> Nobody starts a revolution for funsies
I mean... we're 4 years into a little Russian jaunt that was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks. And a certain someone just picked a war with Iran pretty much for funsies
I don't want to underestimate the level of arrogance/stupidity that might be involved in sparking a revolution at this point
I wouldn't call either of those a revolution; they're both top-down directed foreign offensives. A revolution is generally domestic and sparked by widespread popular internal unrest, even if it's sometimes led by elites.
Yes, my point is more that entering into a war for funsies is a similarly stupid decision, and we have a whole bunch of guardrails that are supposed to prevent it, but somehow it just keeps on happening
It is easy to see that South Korea is much better off now as a democracy than under the generals. It is easy to see the Philippines are better off than under Marcos. What countries move away from democracy to become better?
It’s practically impossible for an indigenous insurgency to be effective without state backing, so the real question is who would be willing provide such support and under what circumstances. Similar to how France supported US independence as a way to hurt the UK. Or the UK supporting Native Americans to attack the US (war of 1812).
Being able to effectively organize enough to create home grown weapons and fight an insurgency is a signal to a 3rd party that you are organized and committed and worthy of further support. From there it can snowball.
> Most of it is pure fantasy including the idea that 3D printed missiles are going to start striking US strike aircraft at 40k feet
Nobody is really talking about hitting supersonic jets at 40k feet, nor even destroying a fully-armoured tank. More about making your opponent think twice about deploying close air support, and have move cautiously with their APCs and supply trucks.
We can see some version of this playing out in Ukraine, and I guess it is possible that FPV drones have pretty much invalidated the role a DIY missile launcher would play
Or worse. Neither your side nor your opponents side wins, an unknown threat swoops in and takes over and now you have a drastically worse system than either “side” would have at least tried to implement. Instability is a great opportunity for Russia to swoop on in, or China. The next American Civil War hopefully never happens because it will end worse than anyone realizes.
For anyone that thinks a "civil war" scenario might be fun, I recommend watching Alex Garland's 'Civil War' - a highly realistic portrait of what an inter-US war would actually look like.
I did not find that movie to be realistic at all but I can see why other people do. I think it it’s far more likely to be a CIA faction led ‘attempted coup’ similar to the 2016 on in Turkey. I think Turkeys coup was likely run by their secret police as a way to flush out dissidents and heavily suppress them. So I would expect a Jan 6 but with more of a real actionable plan created by informants and doomed to quickly fail followed by a de-MAGAfication program similar to de-Baathification in Iraq or de-Nazification in Germany.
Times have changed since then but the first Chechen war heavily works against the theory of your second paragraph. Instrumental was their seizure of anti-tank and heavy weaponry during ambushes of Russian forces entering into Grozny and other chokepoints. Eventually they used these weapons to capture even more heavy weapons and then won a few years of outright independence.
It didn't exactly matter in the end. Russia eventually encircled them with artillery and pounded them until they gave up and brokered a deal. Their fighting skills and spirit have since been added as an asset on the Russian military's balance sheet.
it doesn't really matter in the end because the human species will one day be extinct.
would the chechens be in their position now had they never fought? impossible to say, counter-factual conditionals are all unconditionally true. though i'm not sure why you'd assume so...
In exchange for two brutal wars they got 9 years of de facto independence. That's not even very long.
You dont need counterfactuals to ask if it was worth it or compare 9 years to the age of the universe.
Armed revolutions are often lionized and glorified because they form part of most countries' national mythos - the binding agent holding together most national identities.
But, the ugly truth is that most of them are just a tragic waste of human life. Chechnya was very much that.
Right but seizing military equipment and building your own are very different things.
Everyone with the “only solution is revolution” mentality needs to read this comment. Anyone salivating over/romanticizing armed conflict has never experienced it and can’t fathom how awful it is. I know I can’t, and that’s why I don’t want to find out.
nobody needs to read a comment, tbh, any comment.
revolutions are like earthquakes or pandemics: created by forces beyond our control and a matter of when, not if. people romanticizing or anti-romanticizing armed conflict online doesn't even enter the frame <zizekian sniff>.
From my experiences with the YPG in the Syrian Civil War --- You'd be surprised how many people that have seen combat absolutely loved it. There was one guy that would go in a state of ecstasy while being shot at, literally expressing happily "ha ha they try to shoot me" and this is a guy who had seen many of his comrades die. Once you accept you are dead it's actually far less mundane than normal life, while at the same time you have a fairly straightforward sense of meaning and purpose. Plus life is much simpler -- 99% of (that) war is just standing guard, smoking cigarette, drinking tea, moving sandbags, etc, much less complicated than say something like trying to juggle a dentistry practice while driving the 2 kids to school events and then going home to patch drywall on the house.
There's a reason why Hemingway wrote "There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter." Going home just to have a toddler scream at you for the wrong color cup or walking into the grocery store and just effortless picking one of 1000 brands of cereal just seems so -- hollow -- afterwards.
This is a large component of the alt-right, isn't it.
> much less complicated than say something like trying to juggle a dentistry practice while driving the 2 kids to school events and then going home to patch drywall on the house
There is genuinely a group of people who'd rather fantasize about mass murder than do chores. Every now and again one of them actually picks up a gun. Then some school kids never have to go to events, or anywhere, ever again.
I have some sympathy for people who can't adapt to peace. When I was a kid one of my neighbours was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Calvert ; I knew him as an old man who drank too much and never talked about the war. This is not an excuse to restart the war.
>This is a large component of the alt-right, isn't it.
I couldn't tell you. YPG was dominantly left-wing and looked up to the former communist 'Apo'. I imagine the phenomenon is fairly politically universal.
>There is genuinely a group of people who'd rather fantasize about mass murder than do chores. Every now and again one of them actually picks up a gun. Then some school kids never have to go to events, or anywhere, ever again.
Yes there are people like that. Although most of the Kurds I met started fantasizing about fighting ISIS only after Islamic theocrats starting murdering and raping their population. I doubt many of them who gained a taste for combat were doing chores one day and started fantasizing they could live under a tyrannical regime so they'd have an "excuse" to "restart" the war.
Personally I don't think soldiers in need of a war have to fantasize too hard to come up with a morally acceptable outlet. I wouldn't look down on those who fought against the Russians in Ukraine or against ISIS in Mali because they need an outlet for their escape from civil life.
Anyone salivating over/romanticizing surrendering to a dictatorship hellbent on committing genocide has never experienced it and can't fathom how awful it is. I know I can't, and that's why I don't want to find out.
With attitudes like this, Americans might just go from exporting revolutions to domestic consumption within a generation!
I whish I coule upvote you more than once: as shitty as your country may feel to you, it's not remotely close to how bad it would be in the advent of a civil war (which come pretty much after any revolution).
Even if “your side” won in the end, you'd have lost a lot in the process.
In order for that to happen, there has to be a way for regular people to live good lives without needing a revolution. Unfortunately, the Epstein class has and is doing everything in their power to get rid of those alternatives.
America is not going to have a Tahrir Square. It just about managed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
no one knows.
Fuck that. South Korea constantly worked toward progress and went from generals to democracy.
America won a Civil war against traitors like the Epstein class, but we want to just give up today because democracy is hard and what, hope the new dictator class is more benevolent? When has that ever been the case?
The US is ours, Democracy is ours. That is why they constantly undermine it. Why would we give up the stronger position that is easier to win from just because they keep trying to undermine it? That makes zero sense.
It’s not about combatting the state and more of supplanting the state. Where the state has abandoned the streets to crime a local neighborhood watch can pick up the slack. People can then pay their neighborhood watch and vote to cut their local government taxes. The state is strangely ok with a high degree of street level violence in that it mostly affects those without power and provides a continuing justification for increased state powers - actually fixing the problem would undermine the justification. An example of this would be in South Africa where private security is playing an ever increasing role in policing. Once private security becomes large enough they become a real threat to the government as they are usually better organized and suffer less corruption.
I read a paper that was published by the US military about twenty years ago and a line that I'm going to paraphrase struck out at me: "The home made cruise missile will be the AK-47 of the 21st century.
I found this paper when I was reading about that guy in NZ who was trying to build a missile at home for $20k in around 2003-2004.
The cost for what he was trying to achieve is likely below $5k now, if you don't include access to machines like 3d printers that are pretty ubiquitous now.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47385935 (439 points 3 days ago, 388 comments)
Here's a link to the actual video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDO2EvXyncE
This appears to be flight stabilized and guided via direct command coming from the launcher. It is not an autonomous guided missile.
I think this violates ITAR. You aren't allowed put a guidance system on a rocket. And even if you were allowed to do it for your own fun/education, you certainly aren't allowed to provide instructions to foreign entities about how it do it.
A friend of mine interested in model rocketry demoed a sun tracking model rocket at a state convention. Pretty soon after, he had a chat he described as "terrifying but friendly" with "a few dudes in windbreakers" who wanted to know what he was up to. He didn't get into any trouble but decided he'd stick to unguided rockets from then on.
Between that and playing spot the fed at the local machine gun shoot, I was surprised at just how much attention the state pays to these kind of hobby conventions, but I guess I shouldn't be.
It absolutely does. So many youtube projects do! Autonomous drones? Sorry, that's a guidance system.
(Edit: ^f 'itar' brought me straight here)
It's life imprisonment just to possess a launcher (not even the rocket) that is intended to launch a rocket/missile that guides towards an aircraft. And the guy has another youtube short where he explicitly says the intended guidance system is cameras that update the location of a missile and then he shows a real drone and also the emblem of an aircraft as intended targets for this guidance system, while also calling it a MANPADS launcher.
That's before you even get to ITAR.
Those of us who have seen people get nailed to the wall for having a almost to scale picture of a machinegun part on a piece of metal, or people convicted of possessing rocket launchers because the ATF put an entirely different gun inside of an deactivated tube and claims it is a rocket launcher because the ATF's own gun could fire inside of it, are watching this with our jaws dropped because we've seen that even bad faith representation of intent that were so much looser than this end in serious convictions.
That man must really hate his dog. I'm sure there's some ATF agents just salivating to Waco this guy.
> Despite the tech-cool factor of the project, Tom's Hardware does not condone making your own weapons system at home.
Not that this matters for the topic, but I don't see why people have started saying "weapons system" instead of "weapon".
price bump -> value alignment
layoffs -> right sizing
censorship -> content moderation
tracking -> personalization
secretary -> executive assistant
gambling -> event contracts
inflation -> price pressure
protestors -> domestic terrorists
bailout -> liquidity support
invasion -> stabilization effort
war -> special military operation
war of aggression -> preventive action for national security purposes
lies -> misstatements
lmao so true
I think ultimately it's a consequence of weapons manufacturers in the US is trying to make their products sound more impressive, and in general military terminology is a huge nonsensical mess.
Just consider that "self propelled gun" and "main battle tank" are very different things despite the first being a quite accurate description of what the latter consists of. Or the distinction between a cruise missile and a one way drone...
Guns, swords, and bombs are weapons. The same, attached to fancy computers that can use them autonomously are weapon systems. At least that's how I've always hears the terms used.
It's a "weapon system" when there is a computer that runs various aspects of the weapon.
Guided missile launchers are weapons systems, because the projectile and the launcher each are a component of a complete system which requires significant technology. This is in contrast to a firearm, which has all of the technology in the gun and not the ammunition (for the most part) or more simply a knife or sword.
I suppose I'd say: well, no, a gun's ammunition does something significant, but also even if that disambiguation were necessary in a particular circumstance, this article is not that.
> This is in contrast to a firearm
This changed long ago. Optic, light, IR illuminator, IR pointer, NVG/thermals. The rifle or carbine is now a component of the weapon system.
It’s a bit silly for this situation, but the basic idea of moving from “weapon” to “weapon system” is reasonable, in a 20th century kind of way.
Basically, WWII showed planners they were in the war business not in the ship/plane/tank business. Take navies, for example. For most of the history of the professional navy, the overwhelming cognitive container for “unit in the navy” was a ship. Planners paid for ships to be laid down, admirals planned where they went and captains were responsible for them in all regards. You could reasonable count a navy’s capability by counting the kind and number of their ships: thus and such frigates, ships of the line, etc. However, even before the 20th century naval planners knew and acted like ships weren’t atomic: counting guns on ships of the line as a distinguishing feature or planning a sortie based on available marines both herald what would come later. But mostly we thought of ships as ships. If the enemy was to have 3 battlecruisers then we ought to have 4.
WWII shuffled all that around. At the scale of fighting and industrial demand, the idea of a “ship” or a “tank” or a “fighter” as a unit of analysis started to look tenuous. Successful commanders and (especially) planners noticed that the math worked out much better if we considered units of analysis larger than individual technological objects. The immediate consequence is one starts to think in terms of weapons delivery to the enemy and not the Sherman tank. The primary concerns then (often but not always) shift from characteristics of the weapon as a weapon to: can this system as a collective be built cheaply, can it be deployed + trained on easily, and can it achieve goals in mixed employment.
The same basic idea animated the operations research revolution in warfare, the bam changes from thing to thing_system or thing_platform are consequences of that.
Nobody has started saying weapon systems instead of weapon. Its just precise terminology.
i don't like the framing of $96 that pops up with this topic. There are so many reasons why the pricing point is completely irrelevant. Yet it frames it as if it were a similarly helpful option to fpv drones for the underdog nation - It's not, nor would it be if it were $9.60 or $0.96. This launcher has not even hit a PoC state - to mention the production cost of the prototype at this point is an extremely weak talking point - it means nothing.
I find how technology changes warfare to be fascinating. Usually the impact isn't fully predicted beforehand.
The American Civil War was defined by being the first large-scale war fought with accurate long range rifles and the casualties reflect that, being higher than any subsequent war America has been in (600k+).
WW1 was defined by artillery and the machine gun. In many ways, the horrors of WW1 are actually worse than WW2.
WW2 was defined by tanks, air power and aircraft carriers. Although, interestingly, the concept of mobile warfare goes back to the Mongols.
Vietnam was defined by asymmetric warfare and the inability for a vastly superior, imperial power to win a land war against a vastly inferior but motivated foe.
One of the more significant inventions in military technology was the AK-47 (named because it was invented in 1947 btw). This became the tool of choice for insurgencies everywhere for decades. It's cheap and highly reliable.
And this brings us to Afghanistan, which interestingly is called the graveyard of empires. Through a sequence of events the USSR invaded in 1979 and quickly captured Kabul, installing a puppet government, and then weathering a decade of insurgency that resulted in defeat (sound familiar?). The the defining weapon was the Stinger should-mounted SAM [1]. Why? Because it devastated helicopters that the USSR was dependent on in a highly mountainous region.
In the 1980s, the Stinger launcher cost $30-40k and that completely changed warfare.
We're now firmly in the drone era. This really began in the 2000s when fairly expensive drones became the tool of choice for the US to assassinate people. A reaper drone [2] still costs $20M+. But that has all changed with how cheap commercial drones have become and the crucible for that change is of course Ukraine.
We've seen all sorts of military uses of drones, from as simple as a commercial drone silently dropping hand grenades on Russian troops in trenches to more sophisticated attacks that make it virtually impossible for the Russian Navy to operate in the theater.
And now we're seeing it in Iran where the US, despite spending $1 trillion every year on the military has no answer to Iran's Shahed drones, that cost probably $10-20k each and Iran can produce thousands of them every month. These will only get cheaper. It's fair to say that drones will impact every conflict going forward. The US has sought Ukraine's innovations against Russian drones, specifically the bullet drone [3].
So up until now it requires a state actor to make a shoulder-mounted SAM like the Stinger but with advances like the submission, how will the world change if any bunch of insurgents with $100 in chips and sensors and a 3D printer can manufacturer a nearly comparable weapons system?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrain...
Whenever I see something like this it reminds me of the Demolition Ranch YouTube channel, one of my all time favorites. It will be missed. :(
I will be a negative yancy, and regurgitate things from the previous thread in combination with my pattern-matching brain and experience with making UAS firmware/hardware etc.
Cool project, but this is the 1% of the work that's required to get an initial platform in place. It cannot intercept an airborne target, and it will take the rest of the 99% of the work on testing, refining guidance/propulsion/sensors etc, finding and fixing errors, finding and fixing incorrect assumptions that will lead to re-building various subsystems etc.
Another way of phrasing it is that this is a cargo cult MANPADS.
A slingshot is a MANPADS. It's not a very good one, but it's portable, and an air defense system. The Fliegerfaust was a manpads, and it just yeeted a few tubes into the air.
Regardless of whether this actually works (I have my doubts, but also understand it might be difficult to get range time on a device like this :)), it exposes a fundamental issue with arms control today.
Small firearms are hundreds of years old. Drones have been commercially available for many years and are easily modifiable into something that is 80% as good as what is currently being fielded in Ukraine.
It is not technically feasible to restrict someone from assembling basic, non-firearm-specific components to build a firearm. In the US, there is an increasing effort at the state level to serialize, restrict, and document individual firearm parts. However, an 80% good barrel can be fabricated at home, a 100% as good receiver can be printed on any recent 3D printer, and the rest of the parts (bolt, trigger assembly, etc) can be designed around easy home fabrication (see FGC-9). There is no practical way to trace, regulate, or stop behavior.
It isn't possible to restrict someone from building a capable drone either. The firmware is opensource, the parts can be ordered from almost any marketplace, and an energetic payload can easily be made by any amateur chemist from chemicals in any hardware or camping store. EW is often touted as a solution, but is frequently beaten by tethered drones. Cheap COTS IMUs are getting good enough to provide surprisingly accurate short-term INS, to say nothing of autonomous systems that need no external input past initial targeting.
I personally think this is a far bigger risk than most countries realize, largely because they are 10-15 years behind the technology. I believe this will force most governments into spending an order of magnitude more to defend their institutions at every level, not just core government security.
At least in the US, these threat vectors will absolutely be used to justify intrusions into civil liberties, but no amount of infringement will be able to even partially mitigate these threats. I think this should start to play out over the next 5-10 years.
These discussions always focus around enforcement and never on alignment. The moat for this stuff historically has never been strict enforcement; it has been that the people who have the know-how on how to do it have nothing to gain by doing it, since they are well-educated and benefit from the current socioeconomic order (they have no motive to change it; rather, they want to climb it).
This is shifting. First, economic stratification is getting worse, and as economic mobility declines people start looking for alternatives. (See all of Gen Z cheering for Luigi Mangione). Second, AI will enable people who are less educated to build these kinds of weapons.
For example, you can use a Kalman filter to greatly improve the data you get from an IMU and GPS via sensor fusion. Before, this required a specialist skillset; now you can get a "good enough" implementation by prompting Claude.
I really wish the debate around this stuff wasn't framed in terms of preventative enforcement because it naturally leads towards more enforcement (when your only tool is a hammer...). The root of the issue is that the government does not trust its citizenry to follow the law without Big Brother watching. That in and of itself is a symptom of a larger grave political crisis in America: the decay of the state's political legitimacy.
> The root of the issue is that the government does not trust its citizenry to follow the law without Big Brother watching.
People did fly two planes into the World Trade Center. That was a thing that happened. Along with all the regular mass shootings, all the way up to Vegas.
> That in and of itself is a symptom of a larger grave political crisis in America: the decay of the state's political legitimacy.
Well, only because people are actively chiselling away at it because they think they will be able to loot the ruins.
your argument here rests on whether someone with the know how to do these types of things will not be able to find a job in the near future. I’d call this unlikely
I am certainly pro T2A but your argument doesn't hold - laws to regulate arms are not effective only in a binary way - if they reduce the number of arms they are doing what they say on the tin.
Whether we should be trying to regulate arms is another issue.
I am not arguing laws need to be binary-effective. You are right, most of the current laws are designed to slowly erode public support for the 2nd amendment by making the barrier to entry so absurdly high that the average person cannot feasibly own firearms.
I am arguing that the new laws being proposed (e.g serializing other firearms components, ammo serialization, assault weapons bans, higher gun-owner standards) have absolutely no bearing on an entirely new source of firearms. Many Dem-controlled states have passed "ghost gun" regulation, but there is no real enforcement mechanism and it's mostly an additional charge to tack on after an actual crime has been committed.
You can see states like CA trying to go after 3D printers, but I suspect this will fail. There is no software out there that can realistically determine whether a part is a firearm component, other than dumb hashes of known parts. 3DP is a general tool, it is like trying to ban milling machines, files, or basic handtools.
I see it the other way round: there's no way to achieve public safety without drastically reduced gun ideology and availability, but there's no way to do that while the second amendment is in place, so you get both illiberal, ineffective and irrelevant laws and regular mass shootings.
Let's assume you get rid of the second amendment and totally ban civilian gun ownership in the US. No legal firearms other than for the police/military, full confiscation of guns, etc. Let's also assume the public is broadly supportive of this effort, and that there are not large black-market caches for sale.
I am arguing there will still be a significant number mass shootings/casualty events, political assassinations using a firearm, etc, and that the only way to effectively prevent them is to roll back most of the bill of rights.
The gun is a very old piece of technology and you do not need a sophisticated one to kill people effectively. Shinzo Abe was assassinated with a gun that could be described as primitive at best. Mangione used a 3dp firearm to kill the United Health CEO. Rebels in Myanmar are fighting the military junta with 3d printed small arms.
I am fundamentally arguing that the capacity of any one person has dramatically (100,000x) increased since the bill of rights was written, for better and for worse.
To be clear, I fully support the bill of rights and want to see it expanded. However, I reject the idea that simply eliminating the 2nd amendment and removing guns from civilian ownership can fix the underlying issues. I think you will see "casual" shootings and hopefully even mass shootings go down, but they will not go away and I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world.
> I am arguing there will still be a significant number mass shootings/casualty events
These are extremely rare in other countries? It's very hard to achieve true zero, yes, but the UK has about 30 gun deaths per year, almost all of which are crime-related rather than mass casualty events. Those tend to be rare, and tend to be bombs. The Shinzo Abe assassination was also such a "black swan".
> I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world
Why do you think that would be, given (important!) your premise "the public is broadly supportive of this effort"?
We're skipping a lot of discussion to focus on the UK, which has arms measures that exceed (in some, but not all, cases) even the far-fetched hypothetical I threw out above. Shinzo Abe is not a black swan in the context of Japanese political history nor the history of political assassinations generally, but I digress.
To answer the point, there is no technical limitation keeping people in the UK from building, creating and shooting homemade or otherwise improvised guns that I am aware of.
What the UK does have is universal healthcare, a 3-4x lower incarceration rate and dramatically improved social safety services.
I think you can group the majority of shooters into three buckets -- ideologically driven (think white supremacists, Islamic terrorists, anarchists, etc), the mentally ill, and the criminally motivated (gang shootings mostly). The US has only amplifying factors for all three groups.
For idealgoues, there is no wider span of acceptable discourse than in the US. Commonly espoused views in the US legislative and executive branches are criminal offenses in a number of peer countries, e.g hate speech is still constitutionally protected speech in the US. The rhetoric is insane, accusations of nazism, faciscm from the left and similar accusations from the right, and generally a very high degree of polarization.
For the mentally ill, the support system in the US is abysmal, with cracks big enough to drive a truck through. There are multiple books written about the failures of America's mental health system, I will not belabor the point.
For the criminally motivated, gun crime is concentrated in young, mostly black men in decaying post-industrial cities in the midwest and (south)east. They have almost zero political capital, low social mobility and very little pubic support. Other countries certainly have their ghettos, but take a trip to Gary, IN or Jackson, MS. You would be hard pressed think you are in the richest, most powerful country in the world.
Fundamentally, the point still stands. There is not a feasible technical path to keep firearm technology out of a massive number of hands. The skills needed to produce a functional firearm have never been lower, and they will keep declining until almost zero. The only technical (preventative) measures run squarely into the bill of rights -- think a lowered bar for a warrant or infringements on the 1st amendment limiting the sharing of technical knowledge. Changing the culture -- around mental health, around poverty, and around power is very difficult, so we will see an attempted erosion of civil liberties, just like 9/11 was used to erode civil liberties with the introduction of the Patriot Act and similar legislation.
Obama and Biden were the best gun salesman the USA has had in awhile. It's not clear they reduce the number of arms, depending on the culture. In USA culture we've seen the number of arms in civilian hands expand even as regulations increase.
I expect the Yautja to file a patent infringement.
A prototype without an explosive warhead? Congrats on doing the easy bits.
And this is why it will soon be a felony to possess hollow cylinder CAD or CNC files in the state of Washington.
Your used wrapping paper tubes are munitions.
Well, yes: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/12/25/the-eldren
This guy is so preoccupied with whether or not he COULD manufacture his own guided missile, he didn’t stop to think if he SHOULD.
Of course he could, anyone can these days. So the most important question is the latter.
If he can get a good cheap design to Ukraine - without Russia getting a hold of it - he should.
old article but still relevant. some things don't change
I think with the proliferation and effectiveness of countermeasures passive target acquisition and first shot accuracy with traditional ballistic methods might be a better place to focus but I understand that's very hard to do nonprofessionally as an individual thanks to the rules and laws.
On the other hand, there is a lot to be said for making them blow their $1k active countermeasures on your $500 missiles before sending a real one in to finish the job. Heck, even just forcing your adversary to treat every sky like it's hostile is worth a lot.
Both approaches are clearly worthy of development.
> $1k active countermeasures
Sure you didn't forget a few zeros there bud?
They are currently trying to shoot down Iranian drones with $4 million Patriot missiles
>Sure you didn't forget a few zeros there bud?
The IR flare or 30mm bullets or whatever, not the whole system that fires it.
The $4 million is the sticker price of the PAC-3 payload, not the launch system (reports put the missile battery + radar setup at ~$350 million, before you load any ammo)
This is called the shot exchange problem and is a very, very active area of work.
>> This is called the shot exchange problem and is a very, very active area of work.
And addressing that should also bring down the defense budget. Oh wait...
why? what's happening with the world?
But do the computers have age verification? /s
We might want to prepare ourselves for the fact that the Strait of Hormuz might not be reopened to US traffic any time in the near future.