From an interesting post at the Chapati Mystery blog which speculates on how to create a city with architecture that makes it impervious to drone strikes:
“The drone may conceive of itself – if it was armed with the ordinance of self-awareness – as a tool beyond architecture.In the end of the 1990’s society was able to get used to CCTV on street corners in stores and on the street. We were even able to accept the use of Tomahawk missiles, at least in Tom Clancy books. The strangeness of the United States treating its enemies this way, as though they were the New England colonies in a strange reuse of King Philip’s lexicography, was brushed off in the excitement over new uses of adaptable technology. However, security cameras and fly-by-wire missiles still were part of a world that defined itself with concrete walls, cliffs-as-barriers,and other principles of formal architecture. Drones scoff at such conventionalities.
Drones’ ability to move through extraordinarily varied environments for extraordinarily long periods of time is of course unparalleled. They can scoff at conventional architecture by waiting out the inhabitants (if the goal is to eliminate a single person or a small group) or to poke and prod at the space from infinite angles using any number of conventional or digital imaging systems. Or,alternatively, the drone operator has the opportunity to decide to simply blow the whole place up. Much of the publicized fear over the expansion of drone warfare and reconnaissance is not distress at the collateral damage in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere but rather the very real fear that we in the United States and United States-like environs have no native way to defend ourselves from them or their operators.
However, as those who depended on castle walls discovered against Ottoman artillery and as the finest horsemen discovered during trench warfare, no invincible force of arms stays that way for long. Architecture against drones is not just a science-fiction scenario but a contemporary imperative. Such creations are not needed for the John Connors but for the Abdurahman al-Awlakis. The successful check against the machines is not a daydream but an inevitability, and the quicker more creative solutions are proposed, the more likely such answers can be disseminated widely and kept from the patent-wielding hands of some offshore-utopian type. (Thanks Browser.)