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There are two astonishingly cheap asymmetric weapons that can be used even against powers like the United States. They are mines and drones. Commercial ships are even more helpless before mines and drones.

As for countermeasures, commercial drones are all built based on what the US government says they must use for control frequencies. The present “electronic guns” jam those frequencies and can bring the drones down. But it won’t take long before some grad student at Berkely has put a counter measure online so anyone can change the operating frequencies. (Ninety percent of the computer hacking attempts against one of the defense companies I worked for came from Berkely.) Also, a pre-programmed drone is probably only a year away at most.

Mines. I was program manager on OASIS, a mine sweeping device. It was cancelled by the Navy, I’m sure, because mines had become too sophisticated to be fooled by our engine noise maker and wimpy magnetic field. Your cell phone has enough smarts to tell the difference between a ship’s magnetic field and engine noise as both are really hard to replicate underwater. You can’t just put an underwater speaker on your instrument as you can’t put enough power into the water to make the right noise and combine it with the right magnetic signature to fool a mine. A mine sweeping device makes two passes, and the Navy declares the area free of mines. But now, some mines can be programmed to let two, ten, or fifty “ships” go by without detonating, then...boom!

If you wanted to bring all shipping in an area, say the Straite of Hormuz, all you’d need is a handful of smart mines. They can’t be swept. You must go down and “hunt” them. The next move will be to disguise them as rocks and then you can hunt them all day and not find them. So, forget about powerful navies and land-based missiles. All it takes to bring all shipping to a standstill is a few mines.