Yesterday, Mossad used smuggled explosive drones to assassinate the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, the entire…
Yesterday, Mossad used smuggled explosive drones to assassinate the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, the entire IRGC Air Force senior staff, and several top nuclear scientists in a surprise attack.
Given the hundreds of Israeli sorties flying uncontested in Iranian airspace in the last 24 hours, the drone attacks appear to have completely neutralized Iran’s air defenses.
Two weeks prior (June 1), the Ukrainian domestic intelligence service (SBU) struck five Russian airbases across a distance of 3,000 miles in a smaller attack, inflicting billions of dollars in damage on a strategic bomber fleet that will take years, if not decades, to replace.
Like 9/11 or Lashkar-e-Taiba’s 2008 Mumbai terror raid, Ukraine’s attack was symbolic and mediagenic — they deliberately chose hard targets, at a scale and distance that mandated extremely sophisticated planning, coordination, and secrecy. The intent was at least as much about demonstrating Ukraine’s strike capability as it was about degrading Russia’s.
These attacks now force military planners all over the world to look over their shoulders, treating all civilian vehicles as potential threats in their own country — introducing massive new psychological and logistical costs in the same way that the Israeli pager bombings did.
But the self-conscious exquisiteness and surprise of these attacks almost obscures their consequences, because the next hit doesn’t need to be anywhere near as skillful.
[What follows is a personal anecdote I heard at a dinner party. I have no ability to verify any of the details.]
Years ago, a friend of mine attended a terrorism red-team seminar, where some military novelists and think-tank types were invited to dream up terror attacks (apparently DoD does this).
The worst thing they came up with was “any premeditated violence on a highway during rush hour.”
A roadside IED, or even just a guy on the back of a bike firing into traffic — or, first one and then the other.
Disabled vehicles and drivers colliding at speed immediately create a kill-box full of helpless and immobilized targets behind the attackers, and a clear getaway path ahead of them.
While the direct damage would be modest, the real money would be in the “immune response” — the economic paralysis of trying to secure countless miles of interstate in every major city.
In a hyper-mobile, distributed global economy, you can destroy billions of dollars in value just by reducing the speed at which goods and people can securely travel.
An attack of this kind requires no new technology, minimal funding, and can have devastating consequences even if not terribly well-planned — it’s essentially just “a school shooting on the freeway”.
Even if a low-powered attack failed to destroy a piece of vital infrastructure like a bridge or overpass, the need to shut a major artery down, inspect the damage, and assess repairs could impose hundreds of millions of dollars in economic disruption.
America’s defense apparatus (and, by extension, the “liberal world order” itself) is built around standoff capability.
We build no defensive fortifications tougher than a razor-wire fence (pace a handful of exceptions like NORAD) because, for the last hundred years, the dominant defense paradigm has featured massive returns to scale.
The biggest and wealthiest countries enjoyed “full spectrum dominance”: smaller and poorer players could not hope to compete with tanks and ICBMs and aircraft carriers.
We could strike a hostile actor from the other side of the planet before they could coalesce into a threat — so the vast majority of the world’s territory went uncontested and undefended.
The open sprawl of the global economy is built around this paradigm of security, and would not be possible without it.
In the aftermath of 9/11, both terrorists and counter-terrorism analysts warned of bombing campaigns against civilian “soft targets” which might overturn that paradigm — providing small players (“rogue states”, terrorists, cartels) with the means to jam the global economy, forcing incumbents to adopt unsustainably costly and invasive defensive interventions (checkpoints, armed escorts, ubiquitous fortification).
From the terrorists’ perspective, this was to be totally unanswerable within the envelope of global liberal capitalism — the killing stroke that would bring down the Great Satan.
But the threat of soft-target suicide terrorism never came to much, because a suicide bomber is a targeting system with an ego.
Terrorist handlers struggled to persuade young men to take the risk to disrupt unsexy, low-profile targets — especially once the Arab Spring made jihadi tourism more attractive.
This narrowed the aperture of what needed protecting, so that counter-terrorism authorities could focus resources on securing high-profile, symbolic sites, and surveilling the group chats where Islamists egg each other on.
Eventually terror bombings in the West became geopolitically irrelevant. (They still happen, but they don’t motivate policy, except to drive radicalization against immigrants in Europe.)
But a drone is a suicide bomber without the expensive bottleneck in targeting.
Partly that means you get a lot more shots-on-goal against conventional suicide-bomber targets (symbolic landmarks, military bases, etc.) — which is how these drones have been used by the Israelis and Ukrainians over the last two weeks.
Far more important, though, is the capacity to spam boring targets — hills that even a suicide bomber won’t die on. A commuter overpass, a power transformer, a water treatment facility, a railyard.
It will be expensive, but Russia can change some security protocols and harden its airbases. Both sides of the Ukraine War have demonstrated credible counters to drone operations against recognized military targets.
What the Russians can’t do is harden every mile of highway, every bridge, every dam. Neither can the United States, and — critically — neither can the Chinese.
Soft-target drone warfare will transform the global political order as profoundly as the stirrup or gunpowder.
The 20th century world was carved up between two gigascaled superpowers, and finally conquered by one, because there were insurmountable returns to scale: only the biggest boys could field ICBMs, satellites, cruise missiles, fighter jets, mass-media infrastructure, etc. — and those big expensive weapons systems were utterly dominant.
But a $500 drone destroying a hangar full of $150 million supersonic nuclear bombers is an existential threat to that whole geopolitical architecture.
Srinivasan argues that China will dominate in drone warfare because they have the manufacturing capacity. If drones are the winning tech, then the player that can build the most drones will inevitably win.
But, just like the stirrup, drones have created a new equilibrium in which highly advanced and industrialized societies are fundamentally vulnerable for reasons that have nothing to do with output.
The Song Dynasty had far more men and much greater production capacity than the Mongols, but it didn’t matter, because it simply wasn’t a question of manufacturing more stirrups, or raising more horses and horsemen. The new technology fundamentally altered the returns to scale in defense.
Likewise, a drone factory is as vulnerable to drone attack as any other big, static, expensive piece of defense infrastructure.
We can credibly control nukes because enriched nuclear material has few deniable civilian applications.
But drone technology is too cheap, too modular, and with too many useful civilian applications for the big players to control their manufacture.
What would you restrict, if you wanted to prevent any other actor from building drones? Batteries? Rotors? 3D printers? $17 Raspberry Pis?
Even if the Chinese embargoed all electronics manufacture to the whole planet and the Raspberry Pi cost you 100X more to produce natively, that still means state-actor force projection capability for the cost of a gaming laptop.
The Westphalian order is already in the process of collapse for other reasons — but drone tech will also upend the dominance of big exquisite military systems on which that order depends.
So what structures will be most adaptive under the new conditions?
The monopoly on violence at scale will simply be much weaker, and the scope of defensible infrastructure much smaller.
This means that there won’t be one Big Winner stepping into America’s place.
Collective security as an “industry” (i.e. the business model of statehood, the service states provide) — will no longer take the form of colossal networked managerial bureaucracies. Those will no longer be defensible, and neither will the defense products that made them dominant.
An adaptive state will look less like a multinational logistics corporation, and more like a classic “small business” — inherently fragmented by technology, deeply personal/reputational, and with low barriers to entry.
In fact, until some as-yet-unknown countermeasure is developed, it’s entirely possible that the equilibrium is “we blow up the global-scaled manufacturing apparatus with cheap drones until the drones aren’t cheap anymore.”
Drones probably won’t do all of this alone — but we are receding from a historically anomalous high water mark in the returns to scale across all domains.
Crypto now provides individuals with state-level capacity to secure and transmit capital, weakening sovereign control of capital markets. Social media has shattered sovereign capacity to dictate narrative through broadcast media. AI and the global expansion of the internet are jamming all large-scale information networks with oceans of slop.
Big players have fewer levers of power that are exclusively their own, and a growing set of physical and cognitive vulnerabilities that smaller, more nimble players don’t have to worry about.
The Pax Americana is not the end of history. It will be remembered as an unusual but easily explainable artifact of technological scale.
The future will be more like the past.
As the scale of effective communication, transportation, maintenance, and influence recedes, society will become more human and more personal, with weaker and multifarious institutions.
The collapsing institutional monopoly on violence will yield a renewal of local and personal violence, and a very messy working-out of a hierarchy suited to the new conditions.
Anyway, it’s a great time to make friends.
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Comments
I would love to find a fundamental flaw in this reasoning, but I can't. It was, I guess, naïve to not expect exponential technological progress not to reflect in the political structures. The world is changing, and changing very quickly.
The article doesn't get much into what can be the next step - fully autonomous drones that travel by night, charge by day, and find a target by themselves. A bit like landmines, with a shorter half-life, but highly mobile and intelligent enough.
By snickerbockers 2025-06-1418:575 reply He failed to consider that small actors won't have a monopoly on drones. The best counter is for the defending authority to have even more drones on constant patrol looking out for any drones that don't satisfy whatever the criteria is for a "good drone". This brings its own host of problems because the people have to become accustomed to constantly being surveilled by a swarm of government drones with the ability to assassinate anybody at any moment and nobody to hold criminally accountable, but my point is that this technology is available to the defenders too.
I am not sure if you realize how hopelessly impossible that is.
You're aware that the (to my knowledge, which is entirely based on documentaries) primary way drugs are shipped to the USA are drones nowadays? Some via air, some underwater etc
There is just to much area and drones are tiny. It's infeasible to track them without spending insane amounts of money (and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product)
By snickerbockers 2025-06-1420:021 reply >I am not sure if you realize how hopelessly impossible that is.
It's not impossible if it's predominantly automated. You have swarms of "police drones" on patrol actively scanning for other drones and when they see one that they don't like (some sort of signed certificate that authenticates the owner and their license) they shoot it down. It works as long as the "police drones" are plentiful and well dispersed to the point of maintaining dominance.
>and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product
that's what i meant when i said this brings its own host of problems. My point's not that our way of life will continue unabated my point is that this particular force multiplier goes both ways, and the defense will be a sort of "drone police corps". The biggest problems will be whatever happens outside of the "margin of error" (ie accidentally shooting down the wrong drones, civilians caught in crossfire, people hurt by falling debris) and the general end of any notion of privacy (not that America isn't already going in that direction anyways).
This concept's conclusion is fully sketched out in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age.
By snickerbockers 2025-06-1420:531 reply I guess I'll have to check that one out. I read Snow Crash a decade ago and it's one of my favorite books ever written but I never read anything else he wrote because (from what i understand looking at reviews and plot synopses) it's not all bizarre cyberpunk "not-quite-parody but also not-entirely-serious" like Snow Crash.
By LargoLasskhyfv 2025-06-1421:26 Do so! It's great.
By r721 2025-06-159:57 This subthread also reminded me of Sheckley's Watchbird story (written in 1953!)
By trod1234 2025-06-1420:25 Agreed. This is the most likely outcome of this, and it won't be regular drones it will be a race to toner wars from Neal Stephenson's "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer."
Floating clouds of molecular drones ever-present designed to destroy other unauthorized drones, and that technology will enable the long walk on a short pier for those that violate phyle rules. Cookie cutters.
By Teever 2025-06-1520:05 It isn't about whether or not they'll have a monopoly on drones, it's about the power balance shifting to be not so one sided on defense.
For decades we've lived in a society where defending against these kinds of violent acts was far easier than committing them. That's changing, and it only has to change a little bit to have radical effects on society.
By HDThoreaun 2025-06-1515:17 This does not seem realistic. The number of drones you’d need to pull this off has got to be in the trillions
By rightbyte 2025-06-1420:40 In theory I guess the anti-drone drones could be armed with non-lethal things like nets or balls or whatever.
By madaxe_again 2025-06-1418:404 reply The reasoning is sound, but incomplete.
The reality is that a majority of people are simply too lazy to do this stuff. We are talking about populations that call a guy to come change a lightbulb - rigging a drone with explosives, figuring out control at a distance - this is beyond the scope of capability for the majority of malcontents. Most would-be pipe bombers end up nabbed at the point where they try to purchase a charge for their devices. Same deal here. Yes, there’s scope for a small number of bad actors to wreak havoc, but the thing about small numbers is that they are readily dealt with through existing law enforcement frameworks.
On a state level, war is war, and arms races are never static. You send flotillas of drones? I manufacture flotillas of counter-drone drones.
Yes, there is an asymmetry currently, but just as air supremacy was once seen as “well, this makes war practically impossible”, and became just another battleground, the same will happen here.
It only takes a few dedicated true believers to fundamentally change how society works. 9/11 only happened once.
I often have to point out they won. They wanted to change the US, and the country is, today, almost unrecognizable. Patriot Act, FISA courts, and now illegal deportations and an alliance with Russia at the top level.
By madaxe_again 2025-06-1421:07 The US wanted to change. PNAC spelled out almost all of what happened after 9/11, before 9/11, and it was a gift to the security industrial complex hawks. They literally said in their report that a Pearl Harbor type event would likely be necessary:
“Further, the process of transformation… is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
By FridayoLeary 2025-06-1419:22 You put that quite bluntly but i agree with you. Just look at all the dumb mistakes would be terrorists make. If drone warfare was so easy then hamas - a (once) decently competent militant organisation would be using it as a great equaliser against israeli troops. The truth is that besides for on october 7 when they were used extremely effectively they have been absent. Israeli troops on the other hand are all using them for surveillance. It looks like only states have the abilities to maintain drone tactics.
By BriggyDwiggs42 2025-06-1517:47 Domestically this seems to be the wisdom, but not in occupied countries and/or countries where you killed a lot of peoples’ family members. These will 100% be a good tactic for various guerrilla fighters.
By sieabahlpark 2025-06-1418:47 [dead]
By consumer451 2025-06-150:121 reply Technology advancing faster than society has always seemed like the most likely "great filter" to me.
The recent advancements in the normalization of hate and suffering, while tech keeps advancing, makes me feel like I have Cassandra Syndrome, aka, I feel like I am taking crazy pills.
Yes, a lot of us feel the same way. It's clear to me the next step is for us to start coming together, grouping up and sharing our ideas. I read on the internet every single day people expressing these feelings and for some reason we remain impotent and helpless when we could be uniting and inventing. Where is the will? I can only hope it's simply happening outside the scope of my vision. But it really needs to be happening faster.
We are coming face to face with the concept of exponential growth itself. Humanity versus the feedback loop. And it will take coordinated genius to best such a naturally powerful foe.
By consumer451 2025-06-153:10 > Where is the will?
The memory of what happens when hate takes control died, literally. The people who survived WWII are mostly gone. Now, without their knowledge, without their shame, we are swinging back to the other side.
My concern is that the swing happens to go the wrong way, at the same time that we happen to have an incredibly asymmetric ability to destroy each other.
We might be 1 or 5 swings away from that being a truly end-of-times situation. At this point, that seems to me like it would be when a pissed off kid, whose parents were killed as "collateral damage," could create a novel pathogen with only a $10k lab.
If tech and hate keeps advancing at the current rate, what is that, 100 years max? We really need to get our shit together.
By Gigachad 2025-06-1423:57 Feel like there is something comforting that the state of things hasn’t been bigger bombs, more destruction, and more harm, but instead became highly targeted attacks that massively cripple a countries military infrastructure with almost no harm to anyone else.
How would they charge? The watt hours needed to fly a medium sized VTOL uav of any type for any reasonable amount of time can't be collected by the size of pv panel that can be reasonably carried by the same craft. Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
> The watt hours needed to fly a medium sized VTOL uav of any type for any reasonable amount of time can't be collected by the size of pv panel that can be reasonably carried by the same craft.
Drones aren't limited to quadcopters.
> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
So do that?
Humans are persistance predators, or so I'm told. We didn't domesticate horses by running faster than them, but by because they had to rest, and when they stopped we'd catch up, and then they'd run again, a cycle that repeated until they couldn't run any more.
But these days, we humans are no longer nomadic: we live in predictable homes, and most of us who work do so at predictable locations.
A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there.
By rbanffy 2025-06-1420:41 > A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there.
As someone in the IRA once told Margaret Thatcher, "We only need to be lucky once. You need to be lucky every time".
By eszed 2025-06-1418:39 > sits still for a week
Why would that be an issue? Planners have to think further ahead, but the threat is only marginally decreased.
So called “vampire drones” have the capacity to identify electrical transmission lines and leech off them
By BriggyDwiggs42 2025-06-1517:411 reply I remember seeing a demo. It doesn’t honestly seem very hard.
By rcruzeiro 2025-06-1520:25 I don’t think induction alone would cut it. Having the drone make contact and step down hundreds of kilovolts seem pretty hard to me. Plus the EM interference on the drones systems would be a challenge under the best circumstances.
By rbanffy 2025-06-1420:42 I bet it won't by next month or so.
> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
Isn’t that the answer to your question, then?
Kind of, but it seems such things would be obvious and exposed to being easily located if just sitting around idle in sunlight collecting charge. Not exactly like a landmine.
By snickerdoodle12 2025-06-1418:541 reply A drone sitting on a roof where no one ever goes isn't exactly obvious
By dotancohen 2025-06-1419:072 reply Will militaries or civilian operators soon operate fleets of drones that scan rooftops and other exposed sunny locations for charging drones?
Even if they do, can still be camouflaged as e.g. a bunch of leaves, or other detritus.
By dotancohen 2025-06-1420:221 reply Sounds like an arms race to me.
In any case, the solar cells should still be visible.
(solar cells can be non-reflective black, the reflectivity is just to double-dip the suns rays)
By dotancohen 2025-06-165:431 reply I had no idea, thank you!
Such cells would be half as efficient I suppose, so would need to be twice as large and probably at least twice as heavy. I wonder how that might affect design and payload constraints as it scales.
By snickerdoodle12 2025-06-1618:09 Or you just wait twice as long, which seems fine for sleeper drones parked on a rooftop waiting for the target to come in range.
How many drones would it take to do that? We’re talking potentially thousands of square miles. The resources required to scan all those areas—and scan them often enough to catch all the drones slowly working their way through—would be monumental.
By dotancohen 2025-06-165:461 reply It would be not unlike scanning all US aircraft passengers to the extent that it is done. At the time, that looked quite infeasible and expensive as well. You would be surprised at how much resources can be diverted to security firms under guise of national security.
By mcphage 2025-06-1615:36 My assumption is that it would be several orders of magnitude more than that, but, maybe we’ll find out.
By jeremyjacob 2025-06-1418:39 For the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-uekD6VTIQ
By strtok 2025-06-1418:37 Find an outdoor wall socket?
By BurningFrog 2025-06-1418:44 You can have other drones swap in fully charged batteries when needed.
By hackernewds 2025-06-1418:341 reply they don't need to be constantly flying. as long as work is not done, there isn't much energy being burned. and most of the energy burned is not with the rotors
By walrus01 2025-06-1418:36 If you mean something that is put in place with a full charge and just uses PV to trickle charge keep itself awake and alive, sure. I was thinking a scenario where something is dropped off, flies 10-15 minutes and lands somewhere to await a target. It would need many days to charge before it could fly again for ten minutes.
By snickerdoodle12 2025-06-1418:54 Drop a charging pad on a roof somewhere
power lines are AC, same tech as wireless phone charging, you just need to coil wires properly
By idiotsecant 2025-06-1418:521 reply Charging isn't needed or even very helpful. It's a million times easier, cheaper, and more efficient to just drop a few cheap drones in areas your target might go, then have someone monitoring remotely activate them at the appropriate time.
Dropping the drones is an opportunity for surveillance to catch you via license plate, gait, et cetera.
By justsomehnguy 2025-06-1419:361 reply Drone dropping drone doesn't have a license plate nor gait.
By NewJazz 2025-06-1523:18 Yeah guess you could have a self driving semi-truck (full of quadrocopters) programmed to flip its plate and truck on.
By ben_w 2025-06-1419:34 The range of even an inefficient quadcopter drone being what it is, if your target is somewhere in San Diego then "in the area" of your target includes bits of Mexico.
(For competently designed fixed-wing drones, Canada is "in the area" of San Diego).
By idiotsecant 2025-06-1422:36 Ok, I guess I will drop it in some unimportant ditch 20 miles away at 1am on a nondescript stolen bicycle. That cost me about 1% of the cost of this hypothetical recharging hunter-killer terminator.
By spwa4 2025-06-1421:07 Well, how about this: there is a lot of knowledge that if it were publicly available in a useful form, could do incredible amounts of damage. From viral DNA/RNA sequences to the exact procedure to get a fission cascade. The exact chemical formula to a lot of different nasty concoctions, or in some cases just the fact that particular things even exist (e.g. you don't need radioactive material to create radiation poisoning ... even mass radiation poisoning)
Advanced knowledge has only once been used in a terror attack, and not very effectively.
These types of drone would need to collect a lot of not-so-easy-to-get knowledge. You'd need weapons, mechanical design, electronic fuses ... but mostly an AI good enough to make decisions on their own. And frankly, with good AI you could do a lot more damage than this without ever killing anyone.
By aaron695 2025-06-154:12 [dead]
By directevolve 2025-06-1419:041 reply Counterpoints and questions:
- Non-wired drones can be jammed. It’s early days for building defenses against these attacks.
- Non-state actors have far less access to the sophisticated intelligence needed to strike hard targets or secure against counter strikes.
- Setting up hidden bombs for remote detonation on soft targets, like the freeway, has been possible, no need for drones. What other factors have been preventing these types of attacks? How do drones change those factors?
If America was hunting Osama bin Laden today, I bet we’d have used a drone to kill him rather than sending in special forces. Likewise, if I was a cartel in the jungle or rebel force in the mountains, I’d be damned scared of the military or police coming after me with an endless wave of drones.
> Non-wired drones can be jammed. It’s early days for building defenses against these attacks.
AI drones can't be jammed. And I wouldn't count on terrorists having qualms about how unethical this would be.
By directevolve 2025-06-151:342 reply True, but then terrorists need to have access to AI bombs, drones and AI targeting systems.
By wltr 2025-06-159:11 What if they’d manage to help some incompetent amateurs come to power? Then use them to get what they need.
This essay is about state actors and the future of warfare, not terrorists.
By lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2025-06-1514:14 We must not have read the same essay. You are correct that it is about state warfare but it is also about terrorists. (The word “terrorism” is in the title!)
> Drones will realize the promise of suicide terrorism
> But the threat of soft-target suicide terrorism never came to much, because a suicide bomber is a targeting system with an ego.
> But a drone is a suicide bomber without the expensive bottleneck in targeting.
Their whole point is that the reason terrorists do not employ these tactics is that suicide bombers want to be remembered for destroying the White House rather than some numbered interstate highway; even if said highway is critical national infrastructure. Drones take that ego out of the equation. They don’t care if they’re used to blow up a highway and they especially don’t care that the last thousand drones failed.
By FerretFred 2025-06-1418:332 reply Maybe this is one reason why in the US and latterly in the UK, the authorities are scrambling to introduce remote ID for drones with 249gm flying weight upwards: this includes operator/pilot ID. No doubt there'll eventually be some sort of AI-assisted pattern recognition/prediction that'll enable pre-emptive prediction of attacks.
By therein 2025-06-1418:43 Yeah RemoteID is absolutely stupid. Legislators acting like only DJI makes drones.
By FridayoLeary 2025-06-1419:03 The truth is most domestic terrorists don't stand out for their intellect. State aided terror cells or a large organisation might be able to pull that off, but i don't think some random jihadist would think of it. Off the shelf drones get geoblocked.
The possibilities of drone warfare is terrifying, but imo the author is overstating the danger that they pose in the hands of domestic terrorists.
By snickerdoodle12 2025-06-1418:521 reply Even simpler to buy a drone and replace the electronics
By skavi 2025-06-1423:53 I would not expect that to be simpler. Working within that was designed as an integrated system sounds more annoying than putting together components that are intended to be used in DIY quadcopters.
By FerretFred 2025-06-1418:45 It is, but if you're in a hurry and not bothered about the consequences just nip down to your local store and get one off the shelf.
By theamk 2025-06-1418:52 .. and if it does not have remote ID, in the future it might be shot on sight by an automatic system.
Firearms all have unique ID, but it is relatively easy to get one on black market for illegal use.
By nradov 2025-06-1419:05 It's also possible to craft build certain types of small arms in home workshops without serial numbers. People have been doing this for centuries but the necessary tools have become cheaper and easier to use in recent years.
