Something I've been thinking about is that with the emergence of weapons like the NLAW and Javelin, the Secret Service probably will have to rethink the security of the
US president.
I'm not sure the country of three hundred million guns needs advanced weapons. The President might be heavily secured, but as we saw on Jan 6 it's possible to overrun the security of Congress. Then there are all the various state buildings.
There are a lot of Americans who talk up the "right" to armed resistance against their government. There are also an alarmingly large number of mass shootings in America. It's almost surprising that these rarely overlap and you get people shooting up their school, university, a nightclub, or random people in Las Vegas rather than directed terrorism towards the actual government.
>but as we saw on Jan 6 it's possible to overrun the security of Congress
The Capitol Police, despite being both armed and trained to use their arms, inexplicably did not use their weapons until something like 90 minutes into the riot. The only fatality from the riot, one unarmed protester, was the result.
The Capitol Police is wholly under the control of Congress. Keep that in mind as you read this Time article <https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/>, which specifically discusses how leftist groups that also had planned protests at the Capitol that day were specifically told to stand down.
>On June 14, 2017, during a practice session for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity in Alexandria, Virginia, James Hodgkinson shot U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, U.S. Capitol police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika. A ten-minute shootout took place between Hodgkinson and officers from the Capitol and Alexandria Police before officers shot Hodgkinson, who died from his wounds later that day at the George Washington University Hospital.[7][8] Scalise and Mika were taken to nearby hospitals where they underwent surgery.[9]
Hodgkinson was a left-wing political activist[10][11] from Belleville, Illinois, while Scalise was a Republican member of Congress. The Virginia Attorney General concluded Hodgkinson's attack was "an act of terrorism... fueled by rage against Republican legislators".[12] Scalise was the first sitting member of Congress to have been shot since Arizona Representative Gabby Giffords was shot in 2011.[13]
In a 2021 report, the FBI classified the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism, and the perpetrator of the shooting as a "domestic violent extremist" with a "personalized violent ideology."
Unlike firearms, the critical and expensive part of these weapons is the round, not the launcher. And they're being used up at a huge rate.
What exactly is the worry scenario, that after the war is over the Ukranian state, newly forged in adversity, will immediately lose operational control over its units which will then decide they aren't imminently going to need these weapons for homeland defence, so they can sell them on the black market?
The gear is lying scattered on the ground everywhere. Total chaos - that's war. These weapons will be spirited away and sold to nefarious actors. Airlines, world leaders etc.
Trophy and similar weapons work by sending a cloud shard of metal shards in the direction of the target. Given that a presidential convoy will often be in the presence of large amounts of civilians, using active defense system may mean shredding a couple dozen voters (possibly on live television). I can't imagine many politicians being very happy about that.
I think DIY weapons would be the more dangerous threat btw. A sharpened stick on one of those racing drones could rest on top of (say) a small shack until the target comes by, then strike extremely quickly.
It's not so much for when it actually happens, but publicly driving around in a car that will kill bystanders when attacked is still a no-no from a PR perspective. Just imagine how many attack ads you could create off that one thing alone.
No need for heavy weapons, a pistol or a rifle and a picked time will still get you a decent shot at anyone in government. It's almost as if they're not actually scared of the population they live with. Its not like the President / etc are actually all that important. The Government is more than them, and will live on and continue doing the objectionable stuff regardless.
Huh?! Have you seen the security detail of the US president? They're very afraid of their citizens – or at least of the occasional nutjob. And rightly so, as evidenced by the various assassination attempts in the last decades.
> Its not like the President / etc are actually all that important. The Government is more than them, and will live on and continue doing the objectionable stuff regardless.
The US president is a very important symbol and therefore a potential target, even though the whole of the US government consists of much more than just that one person.
What if we don't actually hear about assassinations of people making actual decisions or their relatives? Like most people still believe Anders Breivik killed a bunch of random kids on the island, while in fact, many of them were children of prominent politicians