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Musings Report 2019-37 9-14-19 The Black Swan Is a Drone
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
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The Black Swan Is a Drone
The coordinated drone attack on Saudi oil facilities is a Black Swan event that is reverberating around the world like a meteor strike, awakening copycats and exposing the impossibility of defending against cheap drones of the sort anyone can buy.
The attack's success should be a wake-up call to everyone tasked with defending highly flammable critical infrastructure: there really isn't any reliable defense against a coordinated drone attack, nor is there any reliable way to distinguish between an Amazon drone delivering a package and a drone delivering a bomb.
Whatever identification protocol that could be required of drones in the future--an ID beacon or equivalent--can be spoofed. Bring down a legitimate drone, swap out the guidance and payload, and away it goes. Or steal legitimate beacons from suppliers--the list of spoofing workaround options is extensive.
This is asymmetric warfare on a new scale: $100,000 of drones can wreak $100 million in damage.
If it's impossible to defend against coordinated drone attacks, and impossible to differentiate "good" drones from "bad" drones, then the only reliable defense is to ban drones entirely from vast swaths of territory.
So much for the widespread commercialization of drones.
What sort of light bulbs are going off in the minds of copycats? It doesn't take much imagination to see the potential for mayhem--and without sacrificing your own life. Any highly flammable target is at risk of a similar attack: fully fueled aircraft, oil/natural gas tankers, trucks carrying fuels, pipelines, etc.
The range and payload of commercially available drones is limited. The big drones can fly hundreds of miles and carry hundreds of pounds of weaponry, but these can be targeted by radar and conventional ground-to-air missiles. So-called hobby drones skimming over the rooftops (or deserts or forests) are difficult to shoot down, especially if the attack is coordinated to arrive from multiple directions.
Small hobby drones may only carry 3 KG (roughly 6 pounds), but how much damage can 3 KG of high explosives cause? The answer is "considerable" if the target is flammable, or lightly shielded electronics.
Larger commercially available drones can carry up to 20 KG or 40 pounds--more than enough explosive capacity to take out any number of targets.
Defense and intelligence agencies have no doubt war-gamed the potential for coordinated drone attacks, and the world's advanced militaries are already exploring the potential for self-organizing "drone hordes" of hundreds or even thousands of drones overwhelming defenders with sheer numbers. The success of the oil facilities attack proves the effectiveness of much smaller scale drone attacks.
Put yourself in the shoes of those tasked with securing hundreds of miles of pipelines carrying oil and natural gas around the world. What's your defense against drone attacks? A.I. or remote-operated gun towers every few hundred yards, along thousands of miles of pipelines?
It's obvious there are no low-cost, effective defenses of thousands of miles of pipelines. (Recall that the Saudis depend on seawater being piped hundreds of kilometers into the desert to inject into oil wells to bring the oil up to the surface. Taking out these water lines and pumps would cripple production, too.)
The only effective way to limit drone attacks is to ban all drones and institute a shoot-on-sight policy for all drones. But that will not negate the potential for coordinated drone strikes or drone attacks on remote facilities.
The mainstream media will be under pressure to downplay the consequences of this attack, but the cat is out of the bag: the Black Swan is a drone. What was "possible" yesterday is now a proven capability, and the consequences are not fully predictable.
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Finished installing a new water heater. It works, yea.
Musings on the Economy: China's Housing Bubble Is Different from our Housing Bubble
That the U.S. and China both have housing bubbles is a fact: by any historical metric, houses in desirable cities in both countries are extremely overvalued when compared to median incomes in those cities.
The difference is the U.S. has an active (though heavily supported) housing market: millions of homes, new and existing, trade hands every year.
(The support comes in two policies:the Federal Reserve has suppressed mortgage rates and bought over $1 trillion in mortgage-backed securities to prop up the housing market. Federal agencies--the FHA and VA--backstop virtually the entire mortgage market. Without these supports, mortgage rates would be higher and mortgages would be harder to get.)
The U.S. housing market is softening, as evidenced by articles such as this: The Death Of The Homebuyer Bidding-War (via CNF)
In contrast, there isn't much of a re-sale market for housing in China, other than in the most desirable sections of Tier 1 cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. This article is 3 years old but nothing has changed in terms of there being no real re-sale market: China: A Housing Market Without Re-sales? (via CNF)
This aligns with the Chinese cultural views that housing is a form of savings, and that new is always better than old.
The problem is the market value of existing housing is only theoretical in China; without real price discovery via millions of existing home sales annually, the value of all housing is unknown.
The Chinese housing market is unprepared for a sudden surge of re-sales hitting a low-volume market. This is the set-up for a market that quickly goes bidless, i.e. a market without any buyers, as nobody wants to buy a house today if they fear it will be cheaper tomorrow.
The Chinese real estate market is not just a bubble, it is an intrinsically precarious bubble due to the illiquidity and narrowness of its re-sale marketplace.
From Left Field
American Renewal: The Real Conflict Is Not Racial Or Sexual, It’s Between The Ascendant Rich Elites And The Rest Of Us (via Cheryl A.) -- I admire Joel Kotkin, but do wonder if he borrowed his "Neo-feudalism" from me....
Early retirement sounds amazing, but it can take a toll on your mental health-- not as wunnerful as it's cracked up to be...
5 money-saving tips people hate--every one is absolute heresy....
Countering Truth Decay: A RAND Initiative to Restore the Role of Facts and Analysis in Public Life -- love the term "truth decay"
Ditch the gym for improved health, says new study (via John F.)
How a Hacked Light Bulb Could Lead to Your Bank Account Being Drained-- a direct result of 5G and the Internet of Things--probably the most hyped and oversold idea in recent history....
Challenges to making California’s grid renewable-- intermittent power requires vast resources for storage...
Universal Basic Income is a neoliberal plot to make you poorer-- another heretic....
The Long Now, Pt. 2 – Make, Protect, Teach
Never Go Full Rhino (Mark J.)
Our Energy and Debt Predicament in 2019-- one of Gail T's best....
‘I was very much a person the most powerful government in the world wanted to go away’ -- hard to avoid being "suicided" once you expose anything that must remain hidden...
"The difference between a sustainable society and a present-day economic recession is like the difference between stopping and automobile purposefully with the brakes versus stopping it by crashing into a brick wall." Donella Meadows
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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