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11·2 days agoThough it must be emphasized that these actions consume a huge amount of planning, logistics and focus from the people doing it, it is easy to react and think attacks like this can come from any direction… and they could theoretically but they also by their very nature take an insane amount of careful planning and execution to work, so there is a very high cost associated with these kinds of attacks that naturally limits their potential frequency.
Geographically, I think the US military and allies pretty much have the Atlantic buttoned up (the Arctic aside) compared to the vastness of the Pacific along with its many potentially opposing powers with long reaches on the other side of it.
Politically, Big Tech is in California.
No, I am talking about a “happy coincidence” for rightwing religious extremism on both sides.
The attack would very likely be Iranian though maybe as an extra middle finger they might build it out of western components for the political symbolism, but no I don’t think the current US regime is competent enough to do such an act of treason behind the backs of all of the different surveillance agencies and branches of military in the US.
It would stink of very bad shit from miles away in the US, thankfully I don’t see that as likely for many different reasons. Everybody worth a damn in the periphery or that was leaned on to do the grunt work by dumb fascists for the actual implementation of the plan would leak the shit out of the details of such a heinous thing.
No it is not baseless fear mongering, a small unmanned sea vehicle can easily transit an entire ocean given enough time especially if it sits low in the water like a “narco sub” type design, we aren’t talking about hard limits on missile ranges here.
Further see designs such as the Sail Drone or Australian Blue Bottle that can easily wander across much of the world on low to almost no power use while employing sensors and potentially even weapons (as in the case of the Sail Drone).
Japan was able to lob weather balloons over the US during WW2, floating a simple long endurance drone launch vehicle across the Pacific Gyre into range of a western US city is absolutely feasible.
Now… if it was the Ukranians we were fighting, they would have already figured out how to do it on mass and would be hitting US littoral infrastructure everywhere, but thankfully we aren’t facing such a competent maritime military, yet even still the possibility is absolutely within the realm of reason and for political objectives it may very well be worth the risk and cost for an actor like Iran to do.
As I have pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it is not something to fear as some kind of apocalyptic mass destruction and shahed attacks, the distance as you have pointed out is far too great for that.
However, a handful targetted to create maximum media panic and influence US politics? That is an entirely different calculation, your attack will work even if the execution is utterly bungled so long as somebody discovers the wreck of your unmanned vessel wrecked on the shore of the West Coast and reports it to the police.
As a final note, your self assured smugness that the US could not come under attack is well inline with historical US naivety around the imperviousness of the US from attack because “that stuff is happening over there far away”. It is well documented how the US failed to properly convoy commercial shipping along the East Coast of the US during WW2 for an egregious length of time even as German U-boats were sinking ships left and right off the US coast. The British in particular got really pissed off that they would convoy a shipping fleet across the Atlantic and then the US would take over in US waters and then leave the door wide open to a U-boat sinking the ship 50 miles from its destination US port after it made it all the way across the Atlantic.
The fact that the U.S. Navy was so unprepared to deal with the arrival of U-boats on the U.S. East Coast has been roundly criticized by many historians, especially since the U.S. Navy had been engaged in an undeclared war with U-boats for many months before Pearl Harbor. Much of the blame has been heaped on King, some deserved, most not. The unlikeable King makes for an easy target, but there were many factors that resulted in what was effectively a disaster as great as Pearl Harbor in terms of ships sunk and lives lost. British naval Intelligence provided timely warning to the U.S. that the first U-boats were on the way, but little was done with it. The Commander of the U.S. Eastern Sea Frontier, Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews, had very little to work with, at least initially, with only 100 or so aircraft along the entire coast, and a number of U.S. Coast Guard cutters that were brought under Navy command. Given the lessons learned from World War I, the U.S. failure to immediately implement a convoy system along the U.S. East Coast has attracted a lot of historical “analysis.” There were certainly cases in which U.S. destroyers were inappropriately apportioned, and some were occasionally idle in port while merchant ships were being sunk almost within sight. Nevertheless, the destroyer force was actually heavily tasked and generally in very short supply. Most were committed to escorting transatlantic convoys providing troops and critical war materials to the British war effort, and others to escorting U.S. Navy ships operating in the Atlantic to guard against forays by the German surface navy, as the battleship Bismarck had done earlier in 1941.
What the U.S. sorely lacked was the large number of small anti-submarine craft (“sub-chasers”) like the hundreds that had been hastily built in World War I, but no longer existed. With insufficient escorts, King, Ingersoll, and Andrews reasoned that congregating coastal merchant ships into inadequately protected convoys would only make the U-boats’ job of sinking large numbers of ships even easier and more efficient. This was not because King was anti-British or anti-convoy, but a matter of scarce resource allocation. It was, however, arguably arrogant on King’s part to initially refuse the British offer to send smaller escort ships to the U.S. east coast. By this point in the war, the British had those types of small escorts in comparative abundance, which is how they had ended the U-boats’ first “Happy Time” in 1940. Eventually, the U.S. relented, and in March 1942, the British deployed 24 anti-submarine trawlers and 10 corvettes to the U.S. East Coast to assist, and 53 Squadron of the Royal Air Force Coastal Command (flying U.S.-made Lockheed Hudson aircraft) operated out of Quonset Point, Rhode Island
Never EVER listen to journalists when they tell you war is new, only listen to people who actually have studied war because the lazy narratives people repeat are ahistorical, very misleading and totally turn you around from understanding things as they truly are and how they fit into the context of military history.
You ever heard of a narco boat? One of those rigged to launch shahed type flying bombs would work wonders on US politics for Republicans.
Even if the boat was a piece of unproperly prototyped trash, just the imagery of it washing up on the shores of California broken would make the price well worth if for those that want to accelerate rightwing extremism on both sides of the Iran-Israel/US War.
It seems absurd to even entertain the idea that Iran would send drone strikes to California.
I know it seems absurd but my point is that this is a collective delusion the US is putting itself through.
This attack wouldn’t be some kind of devastating hit on the US, in terms of impact yes having to launch an attack across the world would make it only feasible for Iran to make a handful of small strikes, but that is irrelevant to the US media and political ruling class. All of that would be completely and utterly invisibilized in the media panic and political narratives as the imagery of a couple of shahed attacks on US soil was repeated over and over again.
Further the nano second attacks like these happened on US soil the government would baselessly declare them intimately tied to Antifa “radical leftists” and up the violence against peaceful protestors in the US tenfold while Chuck Schumer and the mainstream media cheered them on. ICE violence against migrants and perceived migrants could also be raised tenfold without any accountability. Finally, they can integrate the new kid on the block “Narcoterrorists” into the story with immediately baselessly claiming it was narcoterrorist groups in central america that helped facilitate the attack for Iran and that was why murdering the fisherman on boats was necessary blah blah blah… Does this sound familiar?
“Truth be told, this is just a narco boat. You know, we stole the idea from friends down south,” Brig. Gen. Simon Doran, who is currently the director of strategy and plans for the Marine Corps, said in 2024. “And so this is, you know, 55-feet long, completely autonomous. It’s able to go hundreds or thousands of miles. It’s able to carry weapon systems that we have that are new. It can carry fuel. It can carry food. It can carry pretty much anything you want to put in it.”
https://defensescoop.com/2026/03/04/alpv-autonomous-low-profile-vessel-marine-corps-diu/
I have to ask… were you really not paying attention during the 9/11 US years because this is the same bullshit repeated over and over again?
As a final note on this part of what you said…
Are these things capable of flying across the ocean? If so, why would Iran send them across the Pacific instead of the much closer Atlantic? It would make more sense to hit Washington or New York than California.
…let me point you to the Bar-Tailed Godwit
On September 28, one small bird completed a very long flight. An adult, male Bar-tailed Godwit, known by its tag number 4BBRW, touched down in New South Wales, Australia, after more than 8,100 miles in transit from Alaska —flapping its wings for 239 hours without rest, and setting the world record for the longest continual flight by any land bird by distance. And 4BBRW isn’t even done yet. In the next few days, the Godwit is expected to end its southbound migration in New Zealand after its well-earned island stopover, says Adrian Riegen, a builder from West Auckland and a passionate birdwatcher.
…
The exact distance traveled varies from flock to flock and individual to individual. The birds make navigational decisions to optimize favorable winds and avoid severe weather—and one tenth of a degree of difference in the starting angle could add or subtract mileage. Even with all these variables, godwits are startlingly accurate and consistent, returning to the same sites year after year and setting off on their migrations within a window of a few days. “There’s one particular bird that goes [north] almost exactly on the 25th of March every year and has done for 13 years,” Riegen says.
Distance is an illusionary barrier for small unmanned vehicles.
https://nextgendefense.com/us-firm-hybrid-seaglider/
https://www.wesodonnell.com/p/ukraines-drone-boats-are-now-aircraft
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/55694
https://militarnyi.com/en/news/kraken-to-develop-stealthy-naval-drones-for-us-special-operations/
Yes which is why it pisses me off when people say humanity is the worst.
Like, sure people suck but also we are being subjected to an extinctionary cancerous process and that is truly where the real evil is located rather than in some mass moral failing in average people.
I wish I could believe this country wasn’t drowning in ideologically cowardly centrists who are terrified of anything that isn’t the status quo and are always ready to reduce their intellectual thinking around geopolitics to “I am PATRIOTIC” when they get even remotely scared, confused or disoriented…
…and I hope in that moment the US will have shown itself to have evolved.
I am not so sure though, the polling on the US populace definitely shows that Trump’s policies and general thrust of things are massively, historically unpopular but also it is very easy to punch US culture in the face so it forgets what happened in the last 5 minutes and it reverts to its same old instincts… so shrugs I don’t know I have a bad feeling we are about to get punched in the face and it will work entirely as intended.
No, me neither for the record. Kash Patel is a joke as Director and the FBI failed to stop an armed coup organized on facebook in the open from happening… and the FBI was worse than useless BEFORE those things even happened.
However I think the warning here is real, the fundamental design advantage of a shahed-like flying bomb is that they can be built and then launched from almost anywhere. There is no hunting down every drone and launch point the way you could conceivably do so with say missile trucks.
The key point Ukraine has underlined over and over again is that distance is no matter to long range strike drones, even smaller ones can cover large ranges and take circuituous routes to targets, this makes the natural impunity to attack most people in the US assume we have an illusion in a way it never really has been up until this point. Ukraine is thoroughly teaching Russia this lesson the hard way for Russia, the rest of the world would do well to elect to learn these lessons proactively before shit hits the fan for them.
Iran could not likely seriously hurt the US, but it could fly a couple of shaheds into targets and exploit the media coverage to send the whole country into a panic and that would unfortunately likely be enough for the US to completely have amnesia about the existential dangers of supporting fascist domestic politics and Islamophobia. see Iraq and Afghanistan Wars…
I want to emphasize, I am not advocating for being terrified Iran can fly a drone into your house, fearmongering about terrorists from the middle east invading our shores are indeed very dangerous narratives to feed into given the long brutal history of Islamophobia in the US. What I am saying there is the political possibility Iran could leverage a handful of very small scale strikes on the US to impact world politics.
Look at the tiny little fluffy song birds every year making massive migrations up and down the Americas that put to shame any kind of journey you have ever undertaken and think about how that applies to North America’s vulnerability to small aerial UAV attack based on the basic physics logic being expressed here by the counterintuitive reality “tiny thing go far”.
I earnestly do not believe there would be any difference
He is a Warfighter after all, he is just sensitive ok?
No, it is in an attempt to make Pete Hegseth seem as pathetic as Pete Hegseth is.
Almost none of Trump’s policies are popular in the US.
So, no, not really.
I see a fascist coup.
The idea of Gavin Newsom running as a spoiler legitimately terrifies me.
- Newsom isn’t a candidate
The DNC will use the last bit of power and relevance it has to force Gavin Newsom on us as our only option, mark my words.
We must NEVER let this be forgotten in the US.
The only people surprised by this are insufferable centrist liberals.
The US and Britain are engaged in a high stakes competition to see who can shit the bed first, there is like a whole Reality TV show about it and stuff I think.
Florida is a deathcult
I wholeheartedly believe Democratic leaders from this time period will be remembered through acidic caricature as a way to grapple with the damage that was locked in hundreds of years ago during their lifetime. They will become essentially comedia dell’arte characters used to point out how foolish more modern analogues of them are and to remind people how dangerous it is to rely upon ideologically bankrupt centrist cowards to fight fascism.
I mean sure, whether it is a truth or a lie it will be used as justification for our new war in Iran, that is kinda my point but yeah I don’t trust anything they say either to be clear.