Number 4. Reuters. How drone combat in Ukraine is changing warfare.
While our attention is divided between last week’s LA riots and several days of Israel pounding Iran’s nuclear production facilities with wave after wave of aerial bombardment, the war in Ukraine has taken a terrifying twist for soldiers on both sides.
This Reuters article is over a year old but offers a comprehensive view of the effectiveness of drone warfare. The fact that this was written 15 months ago, and that the technology is now an entire generation ahead of the facts presented, testifies to the rapid pace of accelerating technology.
Not good news for troops on the ground.
In drone warfare, basically there is a spotter drone flying at higher altitudes, maybe 1,000 feet, and payload drones (meaning bomb carriers) at lower range. The spotter controls the bomber and targets him toward a particular objective.
This sounds a lot like a conventional sniper-spotter team.
With the drones, the soldier flying the spotter craft directs the other soldier flying the killer. These are known as “first person view” (FPV) drones, and were originally developed as commercial surveillance assets for things like building construction and land surveys. As the camera capability matured and the drone machinery got lighter-weight, faster and cheaper, it became a backyard toy.
It also morphed into an essential battlefield asset.
Now it is a terrifying weapon of terror at the individual level. Bill Whittle’s Right Angle Podcast calls it “No Escape: Death by FPV.” He asserts that in the Russia-Ukraine theater, soldiers pursued by first person view drones face a mortality rate of 92%.
And now there is an even newer wrinkle.
Radio-controlled drones have ruled the lower skies, directed by their spotter comrades. They can fly inside buildings, down stairs, through tunnels, into the open window of a combat vehicle… there is virtually no safe space.
The solution: radio frequency jamming. A virtual safety net can be constructed with low-cost jammers.
Every measure launches a new counter measure, which ought to be a statement found in Proverbs, but I don’t recall seeing it there. This countermeasure calls for fiber optic controlled drones.
Wait… fiberoptic? Yes. Very, very long, thin tethers.
This is a blindingly fast arms race in low-cost, high-lethal technology.
In the last month, thousands of miles of tiny, shiny fiber optic lines have begun to litter the landscape in contested areas of Ukraine as both sides have turned away from radio control. Instead, they have embraced the drone that carries a small spool of hair-thin fiber optic cable that can let them reach out at distances — wait for it — up to 18 miles. The drone is tied to the controller with a tiny thread, paid out rapidly, streaming behind.
Not unlike the spin-cast reel, racing to keep up with a panicked fish.
The combat sky is crisscrossed with physical lines. With perfect camera clarity, the fiber FPV drone can deliver an explosive payload with pinpoint accuracy.
There are photos of soldiers walking roads with their boots dragging dozens of strands of spent fiber optic lines behind them.
At something like $500 for a fiber FPV exploding drone, it becomes a long-range digitally guided hand grenade. It cannot be intercepted, hacked or avoided. Maybe downed with a shotgun blast, but shotguns are only effective within 40 yards or so. That requires a very quick snapshot.
It also requires a shotgun, awkward to carry alongside your AK.
The grunt always finances the arms race with his body parts. Civil War Confederate troops ran into Spencer repeating rifles at Gettysburg in 1863. The Kaiser’s army did not expect to see tanks, seemingly invincible, show up in France in 1916. The U.S. Navy did not expect shallow-water torpedoes at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
There is no indication how many thousands of the new generation of FPVs have been deployed, but there is such demand that Ukrainian warfighters are seeing production delays. They are all on backorder.
At the pace of this type of war, a 3-week production delay can mean that the product is out of date even before delivery.
It is the new face of 21st-century warfare, and it is terrifying at a very personal level.
Number 3. The Times. Terrorists turn self-driving cars into slaughterbots.
While we’re on the subject of good technology gone bad, consider the self-driving car. We are told that Elon Musk plans to launch his first set of self-driving Teslas in Austin this month. Given the calendar, that would be, like, next week. He plans to roll out full driverless taxi service there by 2027.
Waymo cars, those that were not burned up last week in LA, are already doing so in California. They have had mixed results, to be sure, but they are probably going to continue to chase the learning curve. In this article, Uber announces plans to follow suit in the UK next year. The Jetsons are not far behind.
Driverless vehicles carrying a payload of explosives into a crowd of pedestrians is a gold mine for terrorists.
It used to be they had to recruit a suicide bomber to wear the vest or drive the truck. Imagine how much easier the recruiting is, when you can still promise the kid the 72 virgins, without having to blow himself up first.
(Is that part about the virgins real? It might be, if only in the imagination of the 14-year-old boys who are the target recruits. Spoiler alert: No, it is not real. There is a reward for your actions, but it may not be what you hope. For reference, see Revelation 20:11-15 or 2 Thessalonians 1:8-9.)
Number 2. Redstate. Kentucky man in trouble for weaponizing a raccoon.
At the other end of the technology scale is something a caveman might have considered.
A Kentucky man, apparently upset over some altercation in a local retail establishment, found an accomplice in Rory Raccoon. One Jonathan Mason apparently had been asked to leave the store. He complied, but his resentment grew.
Mr. Mason, country boy that he obviously is, live-trapped a raccoon, transported him back to the store, tossed him inside and then left the premises.
The raccoon, no doubt terrified of the people, the lights and the tile floor, managed to bite one of the customers. This did not have the calming effect the procyonid critter might have been hoping for. Police were called.
It is not clear what happened to the biter, but Mr. Mason was apprehended, charged with various accusations of disrepute, and sent to jail.
One could only hope the ‘coon, which was probably only responding to a difficult situation according to his nature, survived the ordeal and has a story to tell his kits and grand-kits about the night he was trapped twice, tasted one of the big people, and got to ride in a car.
And by the way — children, listen up! — raccoons, possums, skunks and other cute woodland night stalkers tend to disease, living rough as they do. Raccoons in particular are carriers of rabies. Keep your distance.
If you see one in the daytime, keep LOTS of distance.
Meanwhile, I’m not sure which is more distressing: the FPV chasing you into a battle-damaged building, or being confronted by a terrified raccoon in the shampoo isle.
Number 1. AP News. Police chase tractor at a walking pace.
And at last we come to the cops-and-robbers chase story. Some of us remember O.J. Simpson, 1994, running from California police in a slow white Ford Bronco. It led a stately procession of innumerable LAPD patrol cars following OJ, who was being driven by his friend in the Bronco.
I don’t know the speeds exactly, but it seemed like maybe 40 miles per hour, no more. Crowds lined the 405, chanting “The Juice is loose!”
The world was riveted.
That was not quite a scene of such notoriety in South Carolina last week, but the slow-moving aspect of a 3 mile per hour pursuit surely must be some kind of record.
Police received a call sometime after midnight on Sunday that a tractor had been stolen from a jobsite. As one crossed U.S. Highway 78 at 3:30 am, officers who happened to see it noted that it seemed out of place — big construction machine on the highway in the middle of the night — and began to follow.
They did not exactly “chase” the huge yellow Komatsu excavator. The machine was moving down the highway at a walking pace. Cruisers in pursuit had to pause at idle periodically to keep from passing it.
After more than an hour in such a mode, blue lights flashing, patrol units blocking traffic to clear the way, the tractor entered the Charleston County Fairgrounds, where it got stuck. (What??? An excavator can get stuck?? What would you use to pull it out??)
The 53-year-old driver tried to run, but a police canine unit delayed him until officers caught up. The man was apprehended without further incident.
What he was planning to do with the excavator does not bear close examination. I imagine that confusion reigned inside the cab that dark night, and the less speculation about his motives, probably the better.
With each passing year, that sort of aberrant behavior edges closer to something I suspect might one day seem logical to me. That’s life on this rock.
And thanks for joining The Alligator News Roundup for Friday, June 20, 2025. At the pace with which we have started this year — executive orders, tariffs, deportations, riots, hot wars, threatened wars, trade wars, market volatility, the price of gold — I’m not surprised we are already half-way through the year. On the other hand, I’m not hoping we slow down. Watching this go by is really too entertaining.
But that’s only because I have not yet had a wire-guided drone looking for me.
Have a good weekend!
Share this post