Don’t we receive millions of containers of cargo annually, not to mention having fewer internal movement restrictions? It certainly doesn’t seem implausible that someone could ship some drones around - the hardest part is avoiding explosives detector, but that’s a hard problem and the defense has the unenviable task of having to get it right millions of times.
I’d certainly plan for that if my job was physical security. It’s cheap by military standards and it’s not like we don’t have precedent with things like Russian deep-cover operatives. The commodification of the tech could make an adversary more confident in their ability to deny it if found, too, if everyone is using parts from China and open source software.
I think the key deterrent is that the U.S. has production capacity for the important systems and overwhelming capacity to strike back, so a rational foreign state isn’t going to think there’s a way they win by trying it. Terrorist groups might be a different story, so I’m really glad this wasn’t an option during Bush’s big adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan because however bad drone strikes are for military defense, they’re even worse for civilians.
I've long-wondered about the use of global container logistics for moving something like a small nuclear or chemical/biological weapon and just having it wait in-situ, until it needs to be activated.
I never considered drones, which is even more obvious, in hindsight.
Yeah, it’s frankly a big terrifying. Nukes are at least plausibly hard to shield from detection but drones don’t have a unique signature and there’s so much dual-use stuff that it seems too plausible that someone could get stuff through customs by claiming it’s civilian and then arming it right before use.
