Bloomberg.com: Pentagon Takes Aim at Bomb-Carrying Consumer Drones

More awareness about one of the deadliest "reality" shows that could hit American life: ISIS coming to America.  

A Marine general, talking about battlefield conditions, says someone can get a drone by going "down to Sam's Club and buy [it] for $400."

No kidding.   Think about all the people who hate America coming openly and anonymously into our country. 

15 years ago very bad people, who had visas, stayed in the U.S. and did what they intended to do: they hijacked airplanes and flew them into buildings and killed thousands of Americans.   By the way, our media never show those images anymore. 

So, yes, the general is rightly concerned about drones affecting our soldiers in war.

This same awareness about the deadly capability of drones operating in the U.S. by enemies who hate America is something else for all of us to take very seriously.  That is, we need to worry about it today.

Imagine a drone in your neighborhood dropping a bomb at a school event, a mall, a football game in the fall at an outdoor stadium, a festival at a church, or anywhere where we live, work and pray.   

How do we really know ISIS hasn't already inserted hundreds of future killers into our country? 

Just an oblique reference to our November elections: Is occasional bad language in a political campaign worse than the real potential of deadly drones dropping bombs or toxic material throughout all the places we live, shop, gather, play or pray?     What is more important to pay attention to?  PB
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From Bloomberg.com:

They’re cheap, they’re light, and they can carry a small bomb: The commercial drone is essentially a new terror gadget for organizations such as Hezbollah, Islamic State, or anyone else looking to wreak havoc on a budget.

“That’s the same quad copter you can get on Groupon or go down to Sam’s Club and buy for $400,” U.S. Marine Corps Commandant General Robert Neller said last week at a Washington forum on future warfare.

The elusive nature of small drones is one reason the federal government has designated the District of Columbia a “national defense airspace” and prohibited drone flights there. A recent spate of drone-related incidents, including one last year in which a drone crashed on the White House lawn, probably didn’t help, either.

But the problem is no longer about enthusiasts with a bad sense of direction.

Weaponized to various degrees of sophistication, such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are now being used in the Syrian civil war and along parts of Lebanese and Syrian borders with Israel, where Hezbollah holds sway.

“There has been an increasing concern in the military and a wider acceptance of how pernicious this problem is going to be, moving forward,” says Andrew Metrick, an intelligence security analyst at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. “From a U.S. and allies perspective, we haven’t had to think about how to fight where we don’t have total aerial supremacy....”

...A Marine or soldier who spots a drone overhead would typically shoot it down, but smaller drones can operate surreptitiously and elude radar since they are barely larger than a bird.

Their small motors make acoustic detection enormously hard, and while wide-area camera sensors deployed on the ground might detect a drone, they usually require large computational resources in the field.

One solution is an electronic signal jammer to prevent a drone’s operator from flying within a certain vicinity, an approach that U.S. forces have studied....

“When was the last time an American military force worried about being bombed by enemy air? World War II?” Neller said. “So what capabilities do we have to defend ourselves from enemy air or enemy unmanned air?”

Such drones also represent only one facet of a future battlefield on which the U.S. military will no longer enjoy complete dominance, the general said. Technology has given potential adversaries new advantages, especially as the U.S. has “developed a system of war fighting that is very dependent upon the internet, the network, and space.”

All three are vulnerable because they establish an electronic signature as they operate. Mobile phones, for example, put soldiers in harm's way in the new digital conflict zone, because a drone might home in on them and explode...
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-23/the-pentagon-takes-aim-at-bomb-carrying-consumer-drones