As noted above, biological agents are hard to weaponize. Explosions and fires tend to kill them. Chemical agents ARE effective, and about a century old, but are relatively bulky. They are also vulnerable to wind shifts, in terms of killing power.
Their main drawback, from a Jihadi perspective, is that they are unforgiving for non-technical people. You’ll lose quite a lot of people perfecting the process of delivery, and relatively poor manufacturing processes mean you will see leakage, which is both deadly to the delivering crew and an opportunity for detection.
My main guess is that if UAVs were to be used as a weapon, that some sort of Napalm would be used. The technology is relatively crude and simple, forgiving of poor containment and manufacture, and potent in killing, without issues of wind shifts or dangers of leaks killing the attacking crew or arousing detection. Use on soft targets is horrifically effective.
For the moment, Jihadis seem to have focused on airliners (various bomb plots discovered at the very last minute, on NWA at the near fatal second). A big bang and aircraft dropping death from the sky. UAVs with napalm is the next logical progression, particularly as they decide to avoid the Maginot Line of airport screening for more tempting soft targets that do not require suicide attackers.
THIS is the most dangerous part — the supply even in the Muslim world seething over polygamy and men without families, even among the wealthy, who are willing to kill themselves is not infinite and is in fact limited. Particularly as we’ve killed many in Iraq. But there are very, very many men who will kill thousands and more of innocents for combinations of money, status, power, fame, and religion as well as sexual frustration, if they think they have a good chance of survival.
I don’t think anyone here has really thought about that. What if Jihad did not run much of a risk of people engaging in it dying? At the worst, Miranda rights, a trial, a fifty-fifty chance of acquital and world-wide celebrity?
How much jihad would we have THEN folks?
