We've been at that point, and we took a pass. The Era of the Gun is almost over anyways. A swarm of playing-card-deck quadrotor drones, each equipped with a 1" barrel and a single .22 short cartridge, beats any soldier, insurgent, or civilian.
Defeating a drone is easier than you think. Hijacking a drone is slightly more difficult, but not significantly so.
Fact is, the hackers are moving faster than the manufacturers are.
This is my business. The government has more to protect than the insurgents. With drones, you can deliver a payload to a destination cheaper and with less risk to the operator than I could training six guys to take a building.
I can fly the payload up several stories and wipe out a corner office. I can obtain a cell phone number for a target and task a drone to follow the number. When it gets to a stoplight, you can deliver a payload onto the vehicle from the top, where the protection on civilian and military vehicles is the weakest, and the exposure to the payload from all passengers is the greatest.
I can run control of the drone through proxy servers and I can even hijack a transmitter to carry the signal. Hijack something with enough power, and you can’t jam it.
Close enough in, you can also rig some fairly low tech countermeasures. You can use a system of arrayed tubes to create something like an anti-aircraft battery. Load it with birdshot and you can take out drones that trip electronic sensors that would make it tough for them to get something near or over your position.
However, if you are flying high enough, there’s nothing you can do about it if someone wants to drop something on you.
There are some things you can do - GPS spoofing, etc. You can harden a system against spoofing to a large extent.
If you bury your generator so that it is protected from a blast, and you build a faraday cage around it and your electronics, you could do pretty well against attacking government folks. You would NOT do well defending a large amount of ground, however.
That’s what LASERS are for. You could do serious damage on an attacking force with a Thorium based nuclear plant generating the power you need to supply a perimeter laser protection system with countermeasures.
You can harden the lasers against TEMPEST, and whether it was people or vehicles, you could lay waste with the right set of lasers.
Long as you’ve got power, you’ve got ammo. That is what is so nice about laser-based defense. They are rolling lasers out to the fleet right now.
Eventually, you will see a class of littoral and frigate sized vessels that are built specifically as laser platforms. Ballistic weapons have that nice quality of responding to gravity. No doubt.
However, an effective laser weapon is a thing to behold.
The more work we put into this area, the better these systems are going to be.
A very, very effective way of getting people to surrender from a defended encampment is to use a system that piped in very low frequency sound. The effects of VLF energy on human beings looks very much like what a biological weapons attack might look like: overwhelming nausea, aching in the joints, unbelievable headaches, disrupted vision.
Fly something high enough over a compound, you can direct the sound energy down on a facility and I doubt they’d even be able to detect it. You’d have to leave the shelter and look up in the sky to see it.
You could use radar to find it, but now you are using active radiation around the clock to protect your position. May as well send an email to the DHS that you are located ‘here’.
A second use of those little laser frigates would be as alternate radar transmitters. An Aegis class ship could detect radar homing missiles and decide to shut down its radar and task another ship in the task force to radiate for it and send the data to back to the cruiser. The laser frigate absorbs the incoming missiles. When it gets close enough the laser frigate fries the missile.
Ships are most vulnerable from the top. For the first time, lasers give you a way of protecting the tops of military vehicles as big and power-producing as ships.
Rail guns are also now still viable. Use the right power plant and you could build a ship that lobs Volkswagens on to a city as far inland as 200 miles.
A big rock-like projectile doesn’t radiate like something laser guided or GPS controlled. You just lob big slugs onto an inland location and let Sir Isaac Newton do the honors.
Small bands with guns still work. Big bands with nothing to lose with guns work better, especially against folks with a lot to protect and an image problem.
It won’t come down to using a gun. The folks running things are cowards, at their core. If it is fight or flight, they’ll likely flee.
Hitler had a vision. You see any leader in American Government that has anything resembling a vision?
Jeb Bush is the political reincarnation of Mitt Romney. In fact, he’s a bad cross between the Hapsburg dynasty and Mitt Romney. He and his family are convinced of their families royal standing and right to hegemony, but for no particular popularly unifying reason.