Monday, December 26, 2011 4:36:23 PM
Rise of the drone: From Calif. garage to multibillion-dollar defense industry
Abe Karem, inventor of the Predator drone, stands with the Albatross drone at Karem Air in Forest Lake, Calif. Karem built the Albatross in his garage. His work led to the invention of the Predator drone, used by military forces around the world.
Bret Hartman / For The Washington Post
View Photo Gallery — ?The emergence of hunter-killer and surveillance drones as revolutionary new weapons in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in counter-terrorism operations in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-booming-drone-sector/2011/12/23/gIQAUtFREP_gallery.html
Video [embedded]
AeroVironment, a California company, designs and manufactures small military drones such as the Raven, Wasp and Puma systems. AeroVironment exhibits its drones in this promotional video. (No audio)
The growing U.S. drone fleet
In the next decade, defense spending on known medium- and large-size drones will be nearly $40 billion, increasing inventory by 35 percent. Ranging in size from a private aircraft to a commercial jet, nearly 800 of these bigger drones are operating around the world, observing, collecting data and in some cases attacking the enemy. The military also has thousands of mini-drones used for battlefield surveillance. Since 2001, the U.S. government is estimated to have killed more than 2,000 militants and civilians in drone attacks.
Sources: Congressional Budget Office; staff reports.
Graphic: Todd Lindeman and Bill Webster/The Washington Post.
By Peter Finn, Published: December 23, 2011
Lake Forest, Calif. — In 1980, Abraham Karem, an engineer who had emigrated from Israel, retreated into his three-car garage in Hacienda Heights outside Los Angeles and, to the bemusement of his tolerant wife, began to build an aircraft.
The work eventually spilled into the guest room, and when Karem finished more than a year later, he wheeled into his driveway an odd, cigar-shaped craft that was destined to change the way the United States wages war.
The Albatross, as it was called, was transported to the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where it demonstrated the ability to stay aloft safely for up to 56 hours — a very, very long time in what was then the crash-prone world of drones.
Three iterations and more than a decade of development later, Karem’s modest-looking drone became the Predator, the lethal, remotely piloted machine that can circle above the enemy for nearly a day before controllers thousands of miles away in the southwestern United States launch Hellfire missiles toward targets they are watching on video screens.
The emergence of hunter-killer and surveillance drones as revolutionary new weapons in the wars in Iraq [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/iraq-war-ends-today/2011/12/15/gIQAAcksvO_blog.html ] and Afghanistan [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/war-zones/life-and-war-in-afghanistan-december-2011/2011/12/08/gIQATF73iO_gallery.html ], and in counterterrorism operations [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-building-secret-drone-bases-in-africa-arabian-peninsula-officials-say/2011/09/20/gIQAJ8rOjK_story.html ] in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry, much of it centered in Southern California, once the engine of Cold War military aviation.
Over the next 10 years, the Pentagon plans to purchase more than 700 medium- and large-size drones at a cost of nearly $40 billion, according to a Congressional Budget Office study [ http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/121xx/doc12163/06-08-UAS.pdf ]. Thousands more mini-drones will be fitted in the backpacks of soldiers so they can hand-launch them in minutes to look over the next hill or dive-bomb opposing forces.
This booming sector has its roots in the often unsung persistence of engineering dreamers who worked on the technology of unmanned aviation when the military establishment and most major defense contractors had little or no interest in it. Innovators such as Karem were often sustained by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) [ http://www.darpa.mil/ ] and a handful of early believers, including the CIA [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-shifts-focus-to-killing-targets/2011/08/30/gIQA7MZGvJ_story.html ].
Karem said he imagined his drones involved in a “tactical conflict with the Warsaw Pact, be it on the plains of Germany or as part of our Navy and Marines.” He had to sell his company, and with it the prototype of the Predator, long before it became the icon of a new kind of warfare.
“I did not envision the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of warfare with non-state adversaries,” said Karem, an aeronautical engineer who served for nine years in the Israeli air force before settling in the United States in 1977.
In the past decade, drones have become an integral part of U.S. military doctrine — so much so that it is difficult to recall how marginal they once seemed. The military had less than 200 drones the day before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; today it has more than 7,000, including mini-drones.
Before Sept. 11, drones weren’t “on the road map,” said Tim Conver, chairman and chief executive of AeroVironment [ http://www.avinc.com/ ], which builds close-in surveillance drones for the military. “It wasn’t something that [the Defense Department] had said: ‘We need this. Let’s build a program around this.’?”
Before 2001, AeroVironment, through various small contracts, sold a drone called the Pointer in small numbers to the military. “Nobody ever really used them,” Conver said. Since the invasion of Afghanistan, the company has sold the military thousands of small drones.
The companies that design and manufacture drones have experienced massive growth that shows no sign of slowing, even with the end of the war in Iraq [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/iraq-war-ends-today/2011/12/15/gIQAAcksvO_blog.html ] and the planned drawdown in Afghanistan. The technology is significantly cheaper than traditional aircraft, and its potential uses increase as the craft become faster and stealthier.
Teal Group [ http://tealgroup.com/ ], a Fairfax market analysis firm, estimates that nearly $100 billion will be spent globally on drones between now and 2019.
“The needs for [unmanned aerial vehicles] are unsatisfied,” said Phil Finnegan [ http://tealgroup.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=21:philip-finnegan-director-corporate-analysis&catid=6&Itemid=18 ], Teal Group’s director of corporate analysis. “The military wants a lot more. Worldwide you have very limited adoption of UAVs, but foreign militaries have seen the success in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they want them.”
The rise of drones has been a small boon for Southern California, where the aerospace industry has contracted painfully in the past two decades. About 10,000 state residents are directly employed in the drone sector. And for national security reasons, much of the supply chain is kept onshore, generating jobs among contractors and subcontractors.
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems [ http://www.ga-asi.com/ ], which makes the Predator and the next-generation Reaper drone, is in Poway, north of San Diego. AeroVironment, which makes an array of backpackable mini-drones, such as the Raven and the Wasp, is in Simi Valley.
Northrop Grumman is testing the X-47B, a carrier-based fighter drone, for the Navy in Palmdale. The RQ-170, the stealth drone manufactured by Lockheed Martin and used by the military and the CIA [ https://www.cia.gov/ ], is believed to have emerged from the company’s classified facility, the Skunk Works, also in Palmdale, near Edwards Air Force Base [ http://www.edwards.af.mil/ ].
The Gossamer Condor
In the mid-1970s, Paul MacCready [ http://www.avinc.com/about/dr_maccready/bio/ ], an aeronautical engineer and the first American to become a world gliding champion, needed cash fast to cover a bad loan he had guaranteed. MacCready, the founder of AeroVironment, and a team of engineers at the company decided to chase the Kremer Prize, the reward for besting a challenge that had gone unmet for 20 years: a human-powered aircraft capable of flying a figure eight around two markers half a mile apart. In 1977, MacCready’s Gossamer Condor, piloted by Bryan Allen, took the prize, then worth about $100,000. Two years, later Allen flew another version of the bird across the English Channel.
AeroVironment, which consulted on air quality, began a sideline in aviation firsts.
“You had these incredibly talented people attracted to something this cool,” Conver said. “All the airplanes were extraordinarily light. All were focused on things that hadn’t been done before.”
The group eventually flew a solar-powered craft from Paris to England, built a working model of Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine and created a flying model of a pterodactyl.
In 1987, AeroVironment flew the first backpack-portable unmanned military aircraft, a nine-pound plane with a camera in its nose. It was called the Pointer.
“They were bought for evaluation,” Conver said. “They were prototypes.”
When the first Special Operations teams went into Afghanistan in October 2001, they brought with them two Pointer systems that they used for low-altitude surveillance. Soon, word was going up the chain that the troops wanted more Pointers for Afghanistan’s difficult terrain. High above them, the Predator and Global Hawk were also proving themselves.
“The Predator is my most capable sensor in hunting down and killing al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership and is proving absolutely critical to our fight,” Gen. Tommy Franks wrote in a 2003 Air Force background paper.
The drive for drones was on, and the effect on companies such as AeroVironment was profound. In 2001, the company had annual revenue of $29.4 million. In the decade that followed, that number swelled to nearly $300 million, nearly 85 percent of it from the sale of drones. The company, which employs 768 people, up from 163 in 2001, went public in 2007.
Since 2003, AeroVironment has won four bidding contests for drone contracts. It now dominates the mini-drone industry with its Raven, Wasp and Puma systems. All are controlled by a common console that looks like a handheld video game. With it, soldiers maneuver the craft and view a stabilized picture of what the drone is circling.
AeroVironment continues to create new models. It recently received a $5 million contract for the Switchblade, a miniature killer drone laden with explosives that pinned-down troops could activate instead of calling in airstrikes. This flying bomb could be guided to a target from the console and then detonated.
The aerial torpedo
The concept behind the very first drones has a lot in common with that of the Switchblade. Toward the end of World War I, Charles Kettering, an American engineer and inventor, developed what was called an aerial torpedo. It was guided by a gyroscope and could be flown at a target 40 miles away. It never saw action.
During World War II, the Germans deployed drone bombs that were launched from planes and steered to the target by a pilot using a radio-controlled stick. The United States manufactured 15,000 drones for anti-aircraft practice at a plant in Southern California during the war, and the career of a woman then known as Norma Jean Dougherty, later Marilyn Monroe, was launched when an Army magazine published a photograph of her working in a drone factory. During the Vietnam War, unmanned craft were programmed to fly a particular route and take still photographs.
All this activity took place on the margins of warfare. The great problem afflicting drones was a lack of endurance in the air. The things kept crashing. That was the defect Karem set out to fix.
Karem wanted to increase the endurance of drones, some of which were crashing every 20 hours, by a factor of 100.
Karem was born in Baghdad, the son of a Jewish merchant who moved the family to Israel in 1951. He developed an early fascination with building aircraft and gravitated toward drones in the early 1970s when Israeli aviation engineers tried to satisfy an operational need for real-time, front-line intelligence.
“My preoccupation with UAVs continued for 30 years,” Karem said.
After leaving the Israeli air force and working for a defense contractor, Karem grew frustrated at his efforts to start his own business building drones in Israel and thought he would have more success in California.
The flight of the Albatross led Karem, with the support of DARPA, to develop the Amber drone, which was stocked with custom-built components, including a powerful flight control computer, and could be configured for surveillance or attack missions. He also developed a lower-technology, export version called the Gnat 750.
Karem’s drones were met with some skepticism. The military, he said, thought “they were skinny in shape” and unlikely to be robust enough for operations.
“Luckily for me, industry didn’t take my efforts all that seriously until Amber” proved successful, Karem said.
Karem began to scale up to full production but found himself overextended financially when the military decided not to pursue large-scale development of the Amber. Karem sold his company to Hughes Aircraft, which, in turn, sold it to General Atomics, a privately held firm that earns an estimated $600 million per year from defense contracts. Karem remained on as a consultant.
In 1993, James Woolsey, then the new director of the CIA, found himself frustrated by the intelligence from satellites flying over Bosnia. He had known Karem for several years and turned to General Atomics and Karem for a vehicle that could provide what drone builders call a “persistent stare.” Pentagon experts had said it would take years and many millions to develop a prototype.
The Gnat 750, operated from an abandoned airfield in Albania, first flew over Bosnia in February 1994.
“I could sit in my office, call up a classified channel and in an early version of e-mail type messages to a guy in Albania asking him to zoom in on things,” Woolsey said.
The data had a long way to go to reach Woolsey. It was relayed from the Gnat to a manned aircraft and then to the ground station and then to a satellite and from there to CIA headquarters in Langley.
To streamline the process, and fit in a satellite communications system, General Atomics enlarged the airframe and added a bulbous nose to the Gnat’s fuselage.
The Predator A was born. It first flew in July 1994.
By then, Karem had moved on. He later helped develop a drone helicopter, the A160 Hummingbird, a venture that was acquired by Boeing in 2004.
He has abandoned drones to pursue a new dream at his offices in Lake Forest: A Boeing 737-size passenger plane capable of taking off vertically and landing like a helicopter. Such an advance, Karem said, would scupper the need for high-speed rail and allow planes to commute between the downtowns of different cities.
Karem calls it an “aerotrain,” and the 74-year-old wants it built before he retires.
“I never fail,” he said.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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A future for drones: Automated killing
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/a-future-for-drones-automated-killing/2011/09/15/gIQAVy9mgK_story.html (below)
Global race on to match U.S. drone capabilities
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/20/AR2011022003785.html
With Air Force’s drone, ‘We can see everything’
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/01/AR2011010102690.html
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Pentagon seeks to crowd-source drones
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U.S. drone base in Ethiopia is operational
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-drone-base-in-ethiopia-is-operational/2011/10/27/gIQAznKwMM_story.html
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© 2011 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/rise-of-the-drone-from-calif-garage-to-multibillion-dollar-defense-industry/2011/12/22/gIQACG8UEP_story.html [with comments]
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A future for drones: Automated killing
Future war: drones that talk to each other and coordinate an attack
Researchers are working on software that ultimately could allow drones to work autonomously to hunt, target and kill enemy forces. Advances in technology are raising questions about whether or how systems capable of lethal autonomy should be deployed.
Source: Georgia Tech Research Institute.
Alberto Cuadra and Peter Finn/The Washington Post.
By Peter Finn, Published: September 19, 2011
One afternoon last fall at Fort Benning, Ga., two model-size planes took off, climbed to 800 and 1,000 feet, and began criss-crossing the military base in search of an orange, green and blue tarp.
The automated, unpiloted planes worked on their own, with no human guidance, no hand on any control.
After 20 minutes, one of the aircraft, carrying a computer that processed images from an onboard camera, zeroed in on the tarp and contacted the second plane, which flew nearby and used its own sensors to examine the colorful object. Then one of the aircraft signaled to an unmanned car on the ground so it could take a final, close-up look.
Target confirmed.
This successful exercise in autonomous robotics could presage the future of the American way of war: a day when drones hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans. Imagine aerial “Terminators,” minus beefcake and time travel.
The Fort Benning tarp “is a rather simple target, but think of it as a surrogate,” said Charles E. Pippin, a scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, which developed the software to run the demonstration. “You can imagine real-time scenarios where you have 10 of these things up in the air and something is happening on the ground and you don’t have time for a human to say, ‘I need you to do these tasks.’ It needs to happen faster than that.”
The demonstration laid the groundwork for scientific advances that would allow drones to search for a human target and then make an identification based on facial-recognition or other software. Once a match was made, a drone could launch a missile to kill the target.
Military systems with some degree of autonomy — such as robotic, weaponized sentries — have been deployed in the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea and other potential battle areas. Researchers are uncertain how soon machines capable of collaborating and adapting intelligently in battlefield conditions will come online. It could take one or two decades, or longer. The U.S. military is funding numerous research projects on autonomy to develop machines that will perform some dull or dangerous tasks and to maintain its advantage over potential adversaries who are also working on such systems.
The killing of terrorism suspects and insurgents by armed drones, controlled by pilots sitting in bases thousands of miles away in the western United States, has prompted criticism that the technology makes war too antiseptic. Questions also have been raised about the legality of drone strikes when employed in places such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, which are not at war with the United States. This debate will only intensify as technological advances enable what experts call lethal autonomy.
The prospect of machines able to perceive, reason and act in unscripted environments presents a challenge to the current understanding of international humanitarian law. The Geneva Conventions require belligerents to use discrimination and proportionality, standards that would demand that machines distinguish among enemy combatants, surrendering troops and civilians.
“The deployment of such systems would reflect a paradigm shift and a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities,” Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said at a conference in Italy this month. “It would also raise a range of fundamental legal, ethical and societal issues, which need to be considered before such systems are developed or deployed.”
Drones flying over Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen can already move automatically from point to point, and it is unclear what surveillance or other tasks, if any, they perform while in autonomous mode. Even when directly linked to human operators, these machines are producing so much data that processors are sifting the material to suggest targets, or at least objects of interest. That trend toward greater autonomy will only increase as the U.S. military shifts from one pilot remotely flying a drone to one pilot remotely managing several drones at once.
But humans still make the decision to fire, and in the case of CIA strikes in Pakistan, that call rests with the director of the agency. In future operations, if drones are deployed against a sophisticated enemy, there may be much less time for deliberation and a greater need for machines that can function on their own.
The U.S. military has begun to grapple with the implications of emerging technologies.
“Authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions,” according to an Air Force treatise called Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047. “These include the appropriateness of machines having this ability, under what circumstances it should be employed, where responsibility for mistakes lies and what limitations should be placed upon the autonomy of such systems.”
In the future, micro-drones will reconnoiter tunnels and buildings, robotic mules will haul equipment and mobile systems will retrieve the wounded while under fire. Technology will save lives. But the trajectory of military research has led to calls for an arms-control regime to forestall any possibility that autonomous systems could target humans.
In Berlin last year, a group of robotic engineers, philosophers and human rights activists formed the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) and said such technologies might tempt policymakers to think war can be less bloody.
Some experts also worry that hostile states or terrorist organizations could hack robotic systems and redirect them. Malfunctions also are a problem: In South Africa in 2007, a semiautonomous cannon fatally shot nine friendly soldiers.
The ICRAC would like to see an international treaty, such as the one banning antipersonnel mines, that would outlaw some autonomous lethal machines. Such an agreement could still allow automated antimissile systems.
“The question is whether systems are capable of discrimination,” said Peter Asaro, a founder of the ICRAC and a professor at the New School in New York who teaches a course on digital war. “The good technology is far off, but technology that doesn’t work well is already out there. The worry is that these systems are going to be pushed out too soon, and they make a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes are going to be atrocities.”
Research into autonomy, some of it classified, is racing ahead at universities and research centers in the United States, and that effort is beginning to be replicated in other countries, particularly China.
“Lethal autonomy is inevitable,” said Ronald C. Arkin, the author of “Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots,” a study that was funded by the Army Research Office.
Arkin believes it is possible to build ethical military drones and robots, capable of using deadly force while programmed to adhere to international humanitarian law and the rules of engagement. He said software can be created that would lead machines to return fire with proportionality, minimize collateral damage, recognize surrender, and, in the case of uncertainty, maneuver to reassess or wait for a human assessment.
In other words, rules as understood by humans can be converted into algorithms followed by machines for all kinds of actions on the battlefield.
“How a war-fighting unit may think — we are trying to make our systems behave like that,” said Lora G. Weiss, chief scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
Others, however, remain skeptical that humans can be taken out of the loop.
“Autonomy is really the Achilles’ heel of robotics,” said Johann Borenstein, head of the Mobile Robotics Lab at the University of Michigan. “There is a lot of work being done, and still we haven’t gotten to a point where the smallest amount of autonomy is being used in the military field. All robots in the military are remote-controlled. How does that sit with the fact that autonomy has been worked on at universities and companies for well over 20 years?”
Borenstein said human skills will remain critical in battle far into the future.
“The foremost of all skills is common sense,” he said. “Robots don’t have common sense and won’t have common sense in the next 50 years, or however long one might want to guess.”
© 2011 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/a-future-for-drones-automated-killing/2011/09/15/gIQAVy9mgK_story.html [with comments]
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Abe Karem, inventor of the Predator drone, stands with the Albatross drone at Karem Air in Forest Lake, Calif. Karem built the Albatross in his garage. His work led to the invention of the Predator drone, used by military forces around the world.
Bret Hartman / For The Washington Post
View Photo Gallery — ?The emergence of hunter-killer and surveillance drones as revolutionary new weapons in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in counter-terrorism operations in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-booming-drone-sector/2011/12/23/gIQAUtFREP_gallery.html
Video [embedded]
AeroVironment, a California company, designs and manufactures small military drones such as the Raven, Wasp and Puma systems. AeroVironment exhibits its drones in this promotional video. (No audio)
The growing U.S. drone fleet
In the next decade, defense spending on known medium- and large-size drones will be nearly $40 billion, increasing inventory by 35 percent. Ranging in size from a private aircraft to a commercial jet, nearly 800 of these bigger drones are operating around the world, observing, collecting data and in some cases attacking the enemy. The military also has thousands of mini-drones used for battlefield surveillance. Since 2001, the U.S. government is estimated to have killed more than 2,000 militants and civilians in drone attacks.
Sources: Congressional Budget Office; staff reports.
Graphic: Todd Lindeman and Bill Webster/The Washington Post.
By Peter Finn, Published: December 23, 2011
Lake Forest, Calif. — In 1980, Abraham Karem, an engineer who had emigrated from Israel, retreated into his three-car garage in Hacienda Heights outside Los Angeles and, to the bemusement of his tolerant wife, began to build an aircraft.
The work eventually spilled into the guest room, and when Karem finished more than a year later, he wheeled into his driveway an odd, cigar-shaped craft that was destined to change the way the United States wages war.
The Albatross, as it was called, was transported to the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where it demonstrated the ability to stay aloft safely for up to 56 hours — a very, very long time in what was then the crash-prone world of drones.
Three iterations and more than a decade of development later, Karem’s modest-looking drone became the Predator, the lethal, remotely piloted machine that can circle above the enemy for nearly a day before controllers thousands of miles away in the southwestern United States launch Hellfire missiles toward targets they are watching on video screens.
The emergence of hunter-killer and surveillance drones as revolutionary new weapons in the wars in Iraq [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/iraq-war-ends-today/2011/12/15/gIQAAcksvO_blog.html ] and Afghanistan [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/war-zones/life-and-war-in-afghanistan-december-2011/2011/12/08/gIQATF73iO_gallery.html ], and in counterterrorism operations [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-building-secret-drone-bases-in-africa-arabian-peninsula-officials-say/2011/09/20/gIQAJ8rOjK_story.html ] in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry, much of it centered in Southern California, once the engine of Cold War military aviation.
Over the next 10 years, the Pentagon plans to purchase more than 700 medium- and large-size drones at a cost of nearly $40 billion, according to a Congressional Budget Office study [ http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/121xx/doc12163/06-08-UAS.pdf ]. Thousands more mini-drones will be fitted in the backpacks of soldiers so they can hand-launch them in minutes to look over the next hill or dive-bomb opposing forces.
This booming sector has its roots in the often unsung persistence of engineering dreamers who worked on the technology of unmanned aviation when the military establishment and most major defense contractors had little or no interest in it. Innovators such as Karem were often sustained by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) [ http://www.darpa.mil/ ] and a handful of early believers, including the CIA [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-shifts-focus-to-killing-targets/2011/08/30/gIQA7MZGvJ_story.html ].
Karem said he imagined his drones involved in a “tactical conflict with the Warsaw Pact, be it on the plains of Germany or as part of our Navy and Marines.” He had to sell his company, and with it the prototype of the Predator, long before it became the icon of a new kind of warfare.
“I did not envision the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of warfare with non-state adversaries,” said Karem, an aeronautical engineer who served for nine years in the Israeli air force before settling in the United States in 1977.
In the past decade, drones have become an integral part of U.S. military doctrine — so much so that it is difficult to recall how marginal they once seemed. The military had less than 200 drones the day before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; today it has more than 7,000, including mini-drones.
Before Sept. 11, drones weren’t “on the road map,” said Tim Conver, chairman and chief executive of AeroVironment [ http://www.avinc.com/ ], which builds close-in surveillance drones for the military. “It wasn’t something that [the Defense Department] had said: ‘We need this. Let’s build a program around this.’?”
Before 2001, AeroVironment, through various small contracts, sold a drone called the Pointer in small numbers to the military. “Nobody ever really used them,” Conver said. Since the invasion of Afghanistan, the company has sold the military thousands of small drones.
The companies that design and manufacture drones have experienced massive growth that shows no sign of slowing, even with the end of the war in Iraq [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/iraq-war-ends-today/2011/12/15/gIQAAcksvO_blog.html ] and the planned drawdown in Afghanistan. The technology is significantly cheaper than traditional aircraft, and its potential uses increase as the craft become faster and stealthier.
Teal Group [ http://tealgroup.com/ ], a Fairfax market analysis firm, estimates that nearly $100 billion will be spent globally on drones between now and 2019.
“The needs for [unmanned aerial vehicles] are unsatisfied,” said Phil Finnegan [ http://tealgroup.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=21:philip-finnegan-director-corporate-analysis&catid=6&Itemid=18 ], Teal Group’s director of corporate analysis. “The military wants a lot more. Worldwide you have very limited adoption of UAVs, but foreign militaries have seen the success in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they want them.”
The rise of drones has been a small boon for Southern California, where the aerospace industry has contracted painfully in the past two decades. About 10,000 state residents are directly employed in the drone sector. And for national security reasons, much of the supply chain is kept onshore, generating jobs among contractors and subcontractors.
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems [ http://www.ga-asi.com/ ], which makes the Predator and the next-generation Reaper drone, is in Poway, north of San Diego. AeroVironment, which makes an array of backpackable mini-drones, such as the Raven and the Wasp, is in Simi Valley.
Northrop Grumman is testing the X-47B, a carrier-based fighter drone, for the Navy in Palmdale. The RQ-170, the stealth drone manufactured by Lockheed Martin and used by the military and the CIA [ https://www.cia.gov/ ], is believed to have emerged from the company’s classified facility, the Skunk Works, also in Palmdale, near Edwards Air Force Base [ http://www.edwards.af.mil/ ].
The Gossamer Condor
In the mid-1970s, Paul MacCready [ http://www.avinc.com/about/dr_maccready/bio/ ], an aeronautical engineer and the first American to become a world gliding champion, needed cash fast to cover a bad loan he had guaranteed. MacCready, the founder of AeroVironment, and a team of engineers at the company decided to chase the Kremer Prize, the reward for besting a challenge that had gone unmet for 20 years: a human-powered aircraft capable of flying a figure eight around two markers half a mile apart. In 1977, MacCready’s Gossamer Condor, piloted by Bryan Allen, took the prize, then worth about $100,000. Two years, later Allen flew another version of the bird across the English Channel.
AeroVironment, which consulted on air quality, began a sideline in aviation firsts.
“You had these incredibly talented people attracted to something this cool,” Conver said. “All the airplanes were extraordinarily light. All were focused on things that hadn’t been done before.”
The group eventually flew a solar-powered craft from Paris to England, built a working model of Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine and created a flying model of a pterodactyl.
In 1987, AeroVironment flew the first backpack-portable unmanned military aircraft, a nine-pound plane with a camera in its nose. It was called the Pointer.
“They were bought for evaluation,” Conver said. “They were prototypes.”
When the first Special Operations teams went into Afghanistan in October 2001, they brought with them two Pointer systems that they used for low-altitude surveillance. Soon, word was going up the chain that the troops wanted more Pointers for Afghanistan’s difficult terrain. High above them, the Predator and Global Hawk were also proving themselves.
“The Predator is my most capable sensor in hunting down and killing al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership and is proving absolutely critical to our fight,” Gen. Tommy Franks wrote in a 2003 Air Force background paper.
The drive for drones was on, and the effect on companies such as AeroVironment was profound. In 2001, the company had annual revenue of $29.4 million. In the decade that followed, that number swelled to nearly $300 million, nearly 85 percent of it from the sale of drones. The company, which employs 768 people, up from 163 in 2001, went public in 2007.
Since 2003, AeroVironment has won four bidding contests for drone contracts. It now dominates the mini-drone industry with its Raven, Wasp and Puma systems. All are controlled by a common console that looks like a handheld video game. With it, soldiers maneuver the craft and view a stabilized picture of what the drone is circling.
AeroVironment continues to create new models. It recently received a $5 million contract for the Switchblade, a miniature killer drone laden with explosives that pinned-down troops could activate instead of calling in airstrikes. This flying bomb could be guided to a target from the console and then detonated.
The aerial torpedo
The concept behind the very first drones has a lot in common with that of the Switchblade. Toward the end of World War I, Charles Kettering, an American engineer and inventor, developed what was called an aerial torpedo. It was guided by a gyroscope and could be flown at a target 40 miles away. It never saw action.
During World War II, the Germans deployed drone bombs that were launched from planes and steered to the target by a pilot using a radio-controlled stick. The United States manufactured 15,000 drones for anti-aircraft practice at a plant in Southern California during the war, and the career of a woman then known as Norma Jean Dougherty, later Marilyn Monroe, was launched when an Army magazine published a photograph of her working in a drone factory. During the Vietnam War, unmanned craft were programmed to fly a particular route and take still photographs.
All this activity took place on the margins of warfare. The great problem afflicting drones was a lack of endurance in the air. The things kept crashing. That was the defect Karem set out to fix.
Karem wanted to increase the endurance of drones, some of which were crashing every 20 hours, by a factor of 100.
Karem was born in Baghdad, the son of a Jewish merchant who moved the family to Israel in 1951. He developed an early fascination with building aircraft and gravitated toward drones in the early 1970s when Israeli aviation engineers tried to satisfy an operational need for real-time, front-line intelligence.
“My preoccupation with UAVs continued for 30 years,” Karem said.
After leaving the Israeli air force and working for a defense contractor, Karem grew frustrated at his efforts to start his own business building drones in Israel and thought he would have more success in California.
The flight of the Albatross led Karem, with the support of DARPA, to develop the Amber drone, which was stocked with custom-built components, including a powerful flight control computer, and could be configured for surveillance or attack missions. He also developed a lower-technology, export version called the Gnat 750.
Karem’s drones were met with some skepticism. The military, he said, thought “they were skinny in shape” and unlikely to be robust enough for operations.
“Luckily for me, industry didn’t take my efforts all that seriously until Amber” proved successful, Karem said.
Karem began to scale up to full production but found himself overextended financially when the military decided not to pursue large-scale development of the Amber. Karem sold his company to Hughes Aircraft, which, in turn, sold it to General Atomics, a privately held firm that earns an estimated $600 million per year from defense contracts. Karem remained on as a consultant.
In 1993, James Woolsey, then the new director of the CIA, found himself frustrated by the intelligence from satellites flying over Bosnia. He had known Karem for several years and turned to General Atomics and Karem for a vehicle that could provide what drone builders call a “persistent stare.” Pentagon experts had said it would take years and many millions to develop a prototype.
The Gnat 750, operated from an abandoned airfield in Albania, first flew over Bosnia in February 1994.
“I could sit in my office, call up a classified channel and in an early version of e-mail type messages to a guy in Albania asking him to zoom in on things,” Woolsey said.
The data had a long way to go to reach Woolsey. It was relayed from the Gnat to a manned aircraft and then to the ground station and then to a satellite and from there to CIA headquarters in Langley.
To streamline the process, and fit in a satellite communications system, General Atomics enlarged the airframe and added a bulbous nose to the Gnat’s fuselage.
The Predator A was born. It first flew in July 1994.
By then, Karem had moved on. He later helped develop a drone helicopter, the A160 Hummingbird, a venture that was acquired by Boeing in 2004.
He has abandoned drones to pursue a new dream at his offices in Lake Forest: A Boeing 737-size passenger plane capable of taking off vertically and landing like a helicopter. Such an advance, Karem said, would scupper the need for high-speed rail and allow planes to commute between the downtowns of different cities.
Karem calls it an “aerotrain,” and the 74-year-old wants it built before he retires.
“I never fail,” he said.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
*
U.S. assembling secret drone bases in Africa, Arabian Peninsula
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-building-secret-drone-bases-in-africa-arabian-peninsula-officials-say/2011/09/20/gIQAJ8rOjK_story.html
A future for drones: Automated killing
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/a-future-for-drones-automated-killing/2011/09/15/gIQAVy9mgK_story.html (below)
Global race on to match U.S. drone capabilities
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/global-race-on-to-match-us-drone-capabilities/2011/06/30/gHQACWdmxH_story.html
U.S. drone strikes hitting fewer high-value targets
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/20/AR2011022003785.html
With Air Force’s drone, ‘We can see everything’
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/01/AR2011010102690.html
Privacy issues hover over police drone use
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/privacy-issues-hover-over-police-drone-use/2011/01/22/ABEw0uD_story.html
Pentagon seeks to crowd-source drones
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/defense-department-looks-to-crowd-source-new-drone-innovations/2011/10/07/gIQANp3AUL_story.html
U.S. drone base in Ethiopia is operational
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-drone-base-in-ethiopia-is-operational/2011/10/27/gIQAznKwMM_story.html
*
© 2011 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/rise-of-the-drone-from-calif-garage-to-multibillion-dollar-defense-industry/2011/12/22/gIQACG8UEP_story.html [with comments]
===
A future for drones: Automated killing
Future war: drones that talk to each other and coordinate an attack
Researchers are working on software that ultimately could allow drones to work autonomously to hunt, target and kill enemy forces. Advances in technology are raising questions about whether or how systems capable of lethal autonomy should be deployed.
Source: Georgia Tech Research Institute.
Alberto Cuadra and Peter Finn/The Washington Post.
By Peter Finn, Published: September 19, 2011
One afternoon last fall at Fort Benning, Ga., two model-size planes took off, climbed to 800 and 1,000 feet, and began criss-crossing the military base in search of an orange, green and blue tarp.
The automated, unpiloted planes worked on their own, with no human guidance, no hand on any control.
After 20 minutes, one of the aircraft, carrying a computer that processed images from an onboard camera, zeroed in on the tarp and contacted the second plane, which flew nearby and used its own sensors to examine the colorful object. Then one of the aircraft signaled to an unmanned car on the ground so it could take a final, close-up look.
Target confirmed.
This successful exercise in autonomous robotics could presage the future of the American way of war: a day when drones hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans. Imagine aerial “Terminators,” minus beefcake and time travel.
The Fort Benning tarp “is a rather simple target, but think of it as a surrogate,” said Charles E. Pippin, a scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, which developed the software to run the demonstration. “You can imagine real-time scenarios where you have 10 of these things up in the air and something is happening on the ground and you don’t have time for a human to say, ‘I need you to do these tasks.’ It needs to happen faster than that.”
The demonstration laid the groundwork for scientific advances that would allow drones to search for a human target and then make an identification based on facial-recognition or other software. Once a match was made, a drone could launch a missile to kill the target.
Military systems with some degree of autonomy — such as robotic, weaponized sentries — have been deployed in the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea and other potential battle areas. Researchers are uncertain how soon machines capable of collaborating and adapting intelligently in battlefield conditions will come online. It could take one or two decades, or longer. The U.S. military is funding numerous research projects on autonomy to develop machines that will perform some dull or dangerous tasks and to maintain its advantage over potential adversaries who are also working on such systems.
The killing of terrorism suspects and insurgents by armed drones, controlled by pilots sitting in bases thousands of miles away in the western United States, has prompted criticism that the technology makes war too antiseptic. Questions also have been raised about the legality of drone strikes when employed in places such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, which are not at war with the United States. This debate will only intensify as technological advances enable what experts call lethal autonomy.
The prospect of machines able to perceive, reason and act in unscripted environments presents a challenge to the current understanding of international humanitarian law. The Geneva Conventions require belligerents to use discrimination and proportionality, standards that would demand that machines distinguish among enemy combatants, surrendering troops and civilians.
“The deployment of such systems would reflect a paradigm shift and a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities,” Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said at a conference in Italy this month. “It would also raise a range of fundamental legal, ethical and societal issues, which need to be considered before such systems are developed or deployed.”
Drones flying over Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen can already move automatically from point to point, and it is unclear what surveillance or other tasks, if any, they perform while in autonomous mode. Even when directly linked to human operators, these machines are producing so much data that processors are sifting the material to suggest targets, or at least objects of interest. That trend toward greater autonomy will only increase as the U.S. military shifts from one pilot remotely flying a drone to one pilot remotely managing several drones at once.
But humans still make the decision to fire, and in the case of CIA strikes in Pakistan, that call rests with the director of the agency. In future operations, if drones are deployed against a sophisticated enemy, there may be much less time for deliberation and a greater need for machines that can function on their own.
The U.S. military has begun to grapple with the implications of emerging technologies.
“Authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions,” according to an Air Force treatise called Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047. “These include the appropriateness of machines having this ability, under what circumstances it should be employed, where responsibility for mistakes lies and what limitations should be placed upon the autonomy of such systems.”
In the future, micro-drones will reconnoiter tunnels and buildings, robotic mules will haul equipment and mobile systems will retrieve the wounded while under fire. Technology will save lives. But the trajectory of military research has led to calls for an arms-control regime to forestall any possibility that autonomous systems could target humans.
In Berlin last year, a group of robotic engineers, philosophers and human rights activists formed the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) and said such technologies might tempt policymakers to think war can be less bloody.
Some experts also worry that hostile states or terrorist organizations could hack robotic systems and redirect them. Malfunctions also are a problem: In South Africa in 2007, a semiautonomous cannon fatally shot nine friendly soldiers.
The ICRAC would like to see an international treaty, such as the one banning antipersonnel mines, that would outlaw some autonomous lethal machines. Such an agreement could still allow automated antimissile systems.
“The question is whether systems are capable of discrimination,” said Peter Asaro, a founder of the ICRAC and a professor at the New School in New York who teaches a course on digital war. “The good technology is far off, but technology that doesn’t work well is already out there. The worry is that these systems are going to be pushed out too soon, and they make a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes are going to be atrocities.”
Research into autonomy, some of it classified, is racing ahead at universities and research centers in the United States, and that effort is beginning to be replicated in other countries, particularly China.
“Lethal autonomy is inevitable,” said Ronald C. Arkin, the author of “Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots,” a study that was funded by the Army Research Office.
Arkin believes it is possible to build ethical military drones and robots, capable of using deadly force while programmed to adhere to international humanitarian law and the rules of engagement. He said software can be created that would lead machines to return fire with proportionality, minimize collateral damage, recognize surrender, and, in the case of uncertainty, maneuver to reassess or wait for a human assessment.
In other words, rules as understood by humans can be converted into algorithms followed by machines for all kinds of actions on the battlefield.
“How a war-fighting unit may think — we are trying to make our systems behave like that,” said Lora G. Weiss, chief scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
Others, however, remain skeptical that humans can be taken out of the loop.
“Autonomy is really the Achilles’ heel of robotics,” said Johann Borenstein, head of the Mobile Robotics Lab at the University of Michigan. “There is a lot of work being done, and still we haven’t gotten to a point where the smallest amount of autonomy is being used in the military field. All robots in the military are remote-controlled. How does that sit with the fact that autonomy has been worked on at universities and companies for well over 20 years?”
Borenstein said human skills will remain critical in battle far into the future.
“The foremost of all skills is common sense,” he said. “Robots don’t have common sense and won’t have common sense in the next 50 years, or however long one might want to guess.”
© 2011 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/a-future-for-drones-automated-killing/2011/09/15/gIQAVy9mgK_story.html [with comments]
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