F6 .. entrance foyer to your evolution and growth of the drone/worldwide extrajudicial assassination counter-terrorism strategy library .. haha .. sigh .. :)
could that little boy ever get to thinking something like .. 'you have your "Gorgon Stare", your drone if you don't know .. ok .. well .. i have mine ..
that image is inside the 5th in your "More of this Story"
It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.
True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.
Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:
“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”
Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:
“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.
Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:
Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.
“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”
Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:
Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.
“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”
There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.
But out of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.
Why? It's not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.
It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.
So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enough in our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.
But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.
You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.
And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.
The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.
An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.
But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.
Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep [ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/403fbffa-735d-11df-ae73-00144feabdc0.html ], and they get it killed.
Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon – the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” – had an excellent method of guaranteeing that the Federal Reserve system’s doors would always be open to him. What he did was, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed [ http://www.ny.frb.org/aboutthefed/orgchart/board/dimon.html ].
And in 2008, in that moonlighting capacity, he helped orchestrate a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120569598608739825.html ]. You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout. Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?
Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.
Hmm. Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.
Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.
Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?
Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.
Just look at how banks like Chase behaved in Greece, for example.
Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” countries like Greece and Italy mask their debt problems for years by selling a similar series of swaps to those governments [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/business/global/14debt.html ]. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs (who were also major purveyors of those swap deals) to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/business/global/25swaps.html ], which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.
In other words, banks like Chase and Goldman knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.
Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?
Operations like the Greek swap/short index maneuver were easy money for banks like Goldman and Chase – hell, it’s a no-lose play, like cutting a car’s brake lines and then betting on the driver to crash – but they helped create the monstrous European debt problem that this very minute is threatening to send the entire world economy into collapse, which would result in who knows what horrors. At minimum, millions might lose their jobs and benefits and homes. Millions more will be ruined financially.
But why should Chase and Goldman care what happens to those people? Do they have any skin in that game?
Of course not. We’re talking about banks that not only didn’t warn the citizens of Greece about their future debt disaster, they actively traded on that information, to make money for themselves.
People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.
What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.
Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It's called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.
But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.
Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.
But these people don’t have shame. What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls. Just listen to Cooperman, the former Goldman exec from that country club in Boca. According to Cooperman, the rich do contribute to society:
Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be” and the wealthy aren’t “a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot,” Cooperman wrote. They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas…”
Unbelievable. Merry Christmas, bankers. And good luck getting that message out.
The Rich Bastards Have Made the Mistake of Saying What They Really Think
Getty
By Hamilton Nolan Dec 20, 2011 10:39 AM
Bloomberg reporter Max Abelson should receive every last Pulitzer for his story today, "Look at These Atrocious Rich Fuckers Hang Themselves With Their Own Quotes." Or if you prefer the "formal" headline, "Bankers Seek to Debunk Attack on Top 1% [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-20/bankers-join-billionaires-to-debunk-imbecile-attack-on-top-1-.html (below)]." Good god. I mean really. It is almost Christmas. You bastards.
In this story, Max Abelson quotes a variety of America's best candidates for being put up against the wall when the revolution comes, explaining why they are, I don't know, not evil, evil, fuckers. "Hey, I'm talking to a Bloomberg reporter, I can just fire off my stupid fat rich idiot mouth at will," is the thought process that many of the individuals in question utilized. Let's just pull some grafs at random, eh?
Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP (BX) CEO Stephen Schwarzman [pictured] spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.
"You have to have skin in the game," said Schwarzman, 64. "I'm not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system."
For example, poor people could be "part of the system" by languishing in for-profit prisons, selling their "skin in the game" to Stephen Schwarzman, who will turn that skin into decorative lamps for one of his chalets. We highly recommend you read every last paragraph of this Pulitzer-deserving Max Abelson story aloud to your family around the dinner table at your meager Christmas, while teaching your youngest how to sharpen up hunks of scrap metal to form handy shivs. The kicker:
[Former Goldman Sachs money management unit CEO Leon] Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can't walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.
"You'll get more out of me," the billionaire said, "if you treat me with respect."
Bankers Join Billionaires to Debunk ‘Imbecile’ Attack on Top 1%
Protestors march through downtown Los Angeles' financial district October 6, 2011 during an anti-Wall Street demonstration. Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
Video [embedded] Wall Street Speaks Up Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s Jamie Dimon, the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks, joined billionaires including hedge-fund manager John Paulson and Home Depot Inc. co-founder Bernard Marcus in using speeches, open letters and television appearances to defend themselves and the richest 1 percent of the population targeted by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. Sheila Dharmarajan reports on Bloomberg Television's "InBusiness With Margaret Brennan." (Source: Bloomberg)
Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
By Max Abelson - Dec 19, 2011 11:01 PM CT
Jamie Dimon, the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks, turned a question at an investors’ conference in New York this month into an occasion to defend wealth.
“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” the JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) CEO told an audience member who asked about hostility toward bankers. “Sometimes there’s a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole.”
Dimon, 55, whose 2010 compensation was $23 million, joined billionaires including hedge-fund manager John Paulson and Home Depot Inc. (HD) co-founder Bernard Marcus in using speeches, open letters and television appearances to defend themselves and the richest 1 percent of the population targeted by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.
If successful businesspeople don’t go public to share their stories and talk about their troubles, “they deserve what they’re going to get,” said Marcus, 82, a founding member of Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit that develops talking points and op-ed pieces aimed at “shaping the national agenda,” according to the group’s website. He said he isn’t worried that speaking out might make him a target of protesters.
“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”
‘Feels Lonely’
The organization assisted John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp. (BBT), the ninth-largest U.S. bank, and Staples Inc. co- founder Thomas Stemberg with media appearances this month.
“It still feels lonely, but the chorus is definitely increased,” Allison, 63, a former CEO of the Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based bank and now a professor at Wake Forest University’s business school, said in an interview.
At a lunch in New York, Stemberg and Allison shared their disdain for Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires public companies to disclose the ratio between the compensation of their CEOs and employee medians, according to Allison. The rule, still being fine-tuned by the Securities and Exchange Commission, is “incredibly wasteful” because it takes up time and resources, he said. Stemberg called the rule “insane” in an e-mail to Bloomberg News.
“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive,” Allison said. “This attack is destructive.”
Income Tripled
The top 1 percent of taxpayers in the U.S. made at least $343,927 in 2009, the last year data is available, according to the Internal Revenue Service. While average household income increased 62 percent from 1979 through 2007, the top 1 percent’s more than tripled, an October Congressional Budget Office report showed. As a result, the U.S. had greater income inequality in 2007 than China or Iran, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook [ https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html ].
Not all affluent Americans are on the defensive. Billionaire Warren Buffett, 81, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has called for increasing taxes on the wealthy, as has Patriotic Millionaires, a group whose supporters include Ask.com co-founder Garrett Gruener and Peter Norvig, director of research at Google Inc., according to its website.
“Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs,” Nick Hanauer, co-founder of aQuantive Inc., an online advertising company he sold to Microsoft Corp. for about $6 billion, wrote in a Dec. 1 Bloomberg View article. “Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth.”
Two out of three Americans support raising taxes on households with incomes of at least $250,000, according to a Bloomberg-Washington Post national poll conducted in October.
Schwarzman, Paulson
Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP (BX) CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.
“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”
Some of Schwarzman’s capital gains at Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity firm, are taxed at 15 percent, not the 35 percent top marginal income-tax rate. Attacking the banking system is a mistake because it contributes to “a healthier economy,” he said in the interview.
Paulson, the New York hedge-fund manager who became a billionaire by betting against the U.S. housing market, has also said the rich benefit society.
“The top 1 percent of New Yorkers pay over 40 percent of all income taxes,” Paulson & Co. said in an e-mailed statement on Oct. 11, the day Occupy Wall Street protesters left a mock tax-refund check at its president’s Upper East Side townhouse.
‘Going to Vomit’
Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of payroll processer Paychex Inc. (PAYX) and a former New York gubernatorial candidate, said in an interview this month that while there are examples of excess, it’s “ridiculous” to blame everyone who is rich.
“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.
Ken Langone, 76, another Home Depot co-founder and chairman of the NYU Langone Medical Center, said he isn’t embarrassed by his success.
“I am a fat cat, I’m not ashamed,” he said last week in a telephone interview from a dressing room in his Upper East Side home. “If you mean by fat cat that I’ve succeeded, yeah, then I’m a fat cat. I stand guilty of being a fat cat.”
Job Creators
Wilbur Ross, 74, another private-equity billionaire, said in an e-mail that entrepreneurship and capitalism didn’t cause the financial crisis.
“Tearing down the rich does not help those less well- off,” said the chairman of New York-based WL Ross & Co. LLC. “If you favor employment, you need employers whose businesses are flourishing.”
That view is shared by Robert Rosenkranz, CEO of Wilmington, Delaware-based Delphi Financial Group Inc., a seller of workers’-compensation and group-life insurance.
“It’s simply a fact that pretty much all the private- sector jobs in America are created by the decisions of ‘the 1 percent’ to hire and invest,” Rosenkranz, 69, said in an e- mail. “Since their confidence in the future more than any other factor will drive those decisions, it makes little sense to undermine their confidence by vilifying them.”
‘Persecuted Minority’
Peter Schiff, CEO of Westport, Connecticut-based broker- dealer Euro Pacific Capital Inc., is delivering the message directly. He went in October to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where Occupy Wall Street protesters had camped out, with a sign that said “I Am the 1%” and a video camera.
“Somebody needs to do it,” Schiff said in an interview.
Schiff, 48, disclosed assets of at least $64.7 million before losing the 2010 Republican primary for a Connecticut U.S. Senate seat, according to filings. He’s wealthier now, even though his taxes are “more than a medieval lord would have taken from a serf,” he said.
Neither term appeared in a Nov. 28 open letter [ http://www.thestreet.com/tsc/common/images/pdf/Omega%20Advisor1.pdf ] to President Barack Obama from hedge-fund manager Leon Cooperman, the Omega Advisors Inc. chairman and former CEO of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)’s money-management unit. Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be” and the wealthy aren’t “a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot,” Cooperman wrote. They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas” and provide health care to millions.
Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.
“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Max Abelson in New York at mabelson@bloomberg.net. To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Scheer at dscheer@bloomberg.net.
New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who's accountable?
The X-47B drone, above, marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. With the drone’s ability to be flown autonomously by onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently. (Chad Slattery, Northrop Grumman / January 25, 2012)
The Navy is testing an autonomous plane that will land on an aircraft carrier. The prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many.
By W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times
January 26, 2012 The Navy's new drone being tested near Chesapeake Bay stretches the boundaries of technology: It's designed to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, one of aviation's most difficult maneuvers.
What's even more remarkable is that it will do that not only without a pilot in the cockpit, but without a pilot at all.
The X-47B marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. With the drone's ability to be flown autonomously by onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently.
Although humans would program an autonomous drone's flight plan and could override its decisions, the prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many.
"Lethal actions should have a clear chain of accountability," said Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist and robotics expert. "This is difficult with a robot weapon. The robot cannot be held accountable. So is it the commander who used it? The politician who authorized it? The military's acquisition process? The manufacturer, for faulty equipment?"
Sharkey and others believe that autonomous armed robots should force the kind of dialogue that followed the introduction of mustard gas in World War I and the development of atomic weapons in World War II. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the group tasked by the Geneva Conventions to protect victims in armed conflict, is already examining the issue.
"The deployment of such systems would reflect … a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities," committee President Jakob Kellenberger said at a recent conference. "The capacity to discriminate, as required by [international humanitarian law], will depend entirely on the quality and variety of sensors and programming employed within the system."
Weapons specialists in the military and Congress acknowledge that policymakers must deal with these ethical questions long before these lethal autonomous drones go into active service, which may be a decade or more away.
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said policy probably will first be discussed with the bipartisan drone caucus that he co-chairs with Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-Santa Clarita). Officially known as the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, the panel was formed in 2009 to inform members of Congress on the far-reaching applications of drone technology.
"It's a different world from just a few years ago — we've entered the realm of science fiction in a lot of ways," Cuellar said. "New rules have to be developed as new technology comes about, and this is a big step forward."
Aerial drones now piloted remotely have become a central weapon for the CIA and U.S. military in their campaign against terrorists in the Middle East. The Pentagon has gone from an inventory of a handful of drones before Sept. 11, 2001, to about 7,500 drones, about one-third of all military aircraft.
Despite looming military spending cuts, expenditures on drones are expected to take less of a hit, if any, because they are cheaper to build and operate than piloted aircraft.
All military services are moving toward greater automation with their robotic systems. Robotic armed submarines could one day stalk enemy waters, and automated tanks could engage soldiers on the battlefield.
"More aggressive robotry development could lead to deploying far fewer U.S. military personnel to other countries, achieving greater national security at a much lower cost and most importantly, greatly reduced casualties," aerospace pioneer Simon Ramo, who helped develop the intercontinental ballistic missile, wrote in his new book, "Let Robots Do the Dying."
The Air Force wrote in an 82-page report that outlines the future usage of drones, titled "Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047," that autonomous drone aircraft are key "to increasing effects while potentially reducing cost, forward footprint and risk." Much like a chess master can outperform proficient chess players, future drones will be able to react faster than human pilots ever could, the report said.
And with that potential comes new concerns about how much control of the battlefield the U.S. is willing to turn over to computers.
There is no plan by the U.S. military — at least in the near term — to turn over the killing of enemy combatants to the X-47B or any other autonomous flying machine. But the Air Force said in the "Flight Plan" that it's only a matter of time before drones have the capability to make life-or-death decisions as they circle the battlefield. Even so, the report notes that officials will still monitor how these drones are being used.
"Increasingly humans will no longer be 'in the loop' but rather 'on the loop' — monitoring the execution of certain decisions," the report said. "Authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions."
Peter W. Singer, author of "Wired for War," a book about robotic warfare, said automated military targeting systems are under development. But before autonomous aerial drones are sent on seek-and-destroy missions, he said, the military must first prove that it can pull off simpler tasks, such as refueling and reconnaissance missions.
That's where the X-47B comes in.
"Like it or not, autonomy is the future," Singer said. "The X-47 is one of many programs that aim to perfect the technology."
The X-47B is an experimental jet — that's what the X stands for — and is designed to demonstrate new technology, such as automated takeoffs, landings and refueling. The drone also has a fully capable weapons bay with a payload capacity of 4,500 pounds, but the Navy said it has no plans to arm it.
The Navy is now testing two of the aircraft, which were built behind razor-wire fences at Northrop Grumman Corp.'s expansive complex in Palmdale, where the company manufactured the B-2 stealth bomber.
Funded under a $635.8-million contract awarded by the Navy in 2007, the X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Carrier Demonstration program has grown in cost to an estimated $813 million.
Last February, the first X-47B had its maiden flight from Edwards Air Force Base, where it continued testing until last month when it was carried from the Mojave Desert to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in southern Maryland. It is there that the next stage of the demonstration program begins.
The drone is slated to first land on a carrier by 2013, relying on pinpoint GPS coordinates and advanced avionics. The carrier's computers digitally transmit the carrier's speed, cross-winds and other data to the drone as it approaches from miles away.
The X-47B will not only land itself, but will also know what kind of weapons it is carrying, when and where it needs to refuel with an aerial tanker, and whether there's a nearby threat, said Carl Johnson, Northrop's X-47B program manager. "It will do its own math and decide what it should do next."
Project Wing: Google unveils prototypes for its delivery drones
Sunday, 31 August 2014 - 4:01pm IST | Agency: DNA Webdesk
Google has finally unveiled Project Wing, its secret project to develop drones in a bid to create a new delivery system. The project has been running for two years
Project Wing has been developed by Google[x], the company's clandestine tech research arm that has been responsible for developing technology such as the Google Glass, Google contact lens, Project Loon – high altitude balloons for internet – and the driverless car.
"We are removing another chunk of friction in moving things around," says Astro Teller, Captain Moonshots of Google[x].
The YouTube video introducing the drone prototype says: "Project Wing is a Google[x] project that is developing a delivery system that uses self-flying vehicles. As part of our research, we built a vehicle and travelled to Queensland, Australia for some test flights. There, we successfully delivered a first aid kit, candy bars, dog treats, and water to a couple of Australian farmers. We’re only just beginning to develop the technology to make a safe delivery system possible, but we think that there’s tremendous potential to transport goods more quickly, safely and efficiently. "
Google revealed that its long-term goal was to develop drones that could be used for disaster relief by delivering aid to isolated areas. They could be used after earthquakes, floods, or extreme weather events, the company suggested, taking small items such as medicines to people in areas that conventional vehicles cannot reach.
The CIA appears to have cut civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan: why can’t the US do the same in Yemen, asks Owen Bennett-Jones
.. i was looking for the one in which you said (as we all agreed) you would like to see the drone decision process tightened up so less civilian casualties .. was a fun look about, but didn't find it so decided on the evolution of ..
"Rise of the drone: From Calif. garage to multibillion-dollar defense industry"
February 3, 2015 by Owen Bennett-Jones Published in: All Stories, Covert Drone War, Drone Warfare, Views from the Bureau
In May 2013, faced with persistent reports of drones killing civilians, President Obama announced that no strike would be authorised unless there was: “near certainty that no civilians would be killed or injured.” It was, he said, “the highest standard we can set.”
Since the speech, 42 strikes have killed between 0 and six civilians. Or, put another way, there has been no confirmed civilian death as a result of a drone strike in Pakistan since the speech.
The drop in the number of strikes is not solely explained by the near-certainty standard constraining drone operators. The Pakistan government’s attitude has also affected the frequency of drone attacks.
In late 2013, for example, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif complained that US drone strikes had ruined his attempt to open up a dialogue with the Taliban.
Accepting Sharif’s demand for a ceasefire so that he could try to negotiate a settlement, the US suspended its strikes for several months.
As for the sharp drop in the number of civilians killed per strike, improved technology is making a difference. Drones can now stay airborne longer and their missiles have smaller explosive yields.
There is also speculation about new methods of marking targets. According to the rumour mill in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, the US now has some kind of dust that can be sprayed or brushed onto a vehicle. Invisible to the human eye, the dust can be seen by drones that can then fire on the vehicle once it is in an isolated area away from civilians.
Bureau consultant Owen Bennett-Jones
Asked about the dust by the Bureau, a former UK drone programme operative did not deny that the dust exists but he refused to discuss how it works, saying the issue was too sensitive.
The civilian fatality rate is also affected by the quality of the intelligence provided to drone operators. As part of its decade-long campaign against the Afghan Taliban, the US spent huge sums building up an increasingly accurate picture of militant activity both in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Whatever the precise reasons for the post-speech figures, the data suggests that if it wants to the US can reduce the number of civilian casualties.
But there has been no equivalent trend in Yemen. Before the Obama speech there had been at least 54 strikes in Yemen killing between 49 and 56 civilians. Since the speech 23 strikes killed between seven and 24 civilians.
One explanation for the disparity between drone casualty rate in Pakistan and Yemen is that the US has relatively poor intelligence in Yemen.
But it could also be a management issue. Because the US drones in Pakistan are unacknowledged, the CIA has been the lead agency there. In Yemen, the government in Sanaa publicly backed the US drone campaign against Al Qaeda. As a result the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command has had more control of the programme in Yemen.
It’s not clear why the US military might have failed to implement the “near-certainty” standard with as much rigor as the CIA. But there have been hints that in other parts of the world the military has been resistant to Obama’s approach.
When the US announced it would use drones against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (Isis), the Pentagon’s press secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby announced a dilution of the near-certainty standard.
He said the military was taking “extreme care and caution” in air operations which he said “carried a special kind of risk”. Asked why the policy had changed, the White House spokesperson Caitlin Hayden said the near certainty-standard applied “only when we take direct action outside areas of active hostilities”.
The relatively low number of civilian casualties in Pakistan suggests that the US is capable of assessing whether or not it has sufficient information to mount an attack with a good chance – or even a near-certainty – of avoiding civilian casualties.
Yemeni civilians as well as those in Iraq and Syria can only hope that US officials will start applying those standards not only in Pakistan but in their country too.
Owen Bennett-Jones is a Consultant to the Bureau. He is one of the UK’s most distinguished and experienced journalists specialising in South Asia and the Middle East. He has worked for the BBC for 25 years and has published widely on Pakistani politics and society.
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If Only We’d Just Spent More Blood and Treasure in Yemen
Five lessons from misadventures in the Middle East that Washington just can’t seem to learn.
By Stephen M. Walt January 23, 2015
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The U.S. government decides that some ill-governed authoritarian country in the Arab and/or Islamic world is a potential source of serious trouble. It sends some troops and/or sophisticated weaponry to eliminate the problem, and backs some local leaders in the hope of establishing a better government. But instead of eliminating the bad guys Washington was worried about and producing a new and improved regime, the U.S. intervention merely fuels anti-American hostility and reinforces a simmering internal conflict. The people we back turn out to be corrupt, ineffective, or both, and are either incapable of gaining power or unable to hold on to it. After spending tens of millions of dollars and blowing a bunch of stuff up, we’re back where we started (or worse).
Sound familiar? If reading that first paragraph gave you a profound sense of déjà vu, it’s hardly surprising. With certain variations, this sad story has been playing itself out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya .. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/world/africa/libyan-fighters-seize-benghazi-branch-of-central-bank.html?ref=world&_r=0 , Somalia, Syria, and now Yemen. In each case, the United States has used military force and covert action to combat terrorists and reorganize the politics of some distant country. In each case, U.S. intervention has made a bad situation no better, and often made it worse. Yet despite this long string of failures, there doesn’t seem to be any official recognition that we might be dealing with these problems in the wrong way.
The Yemen debacle is especially instructive in this regard. Yemen is the poorest country .. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/29/yemen-tackle-multiple-crisis-arab-worlds-poorest-country .. in the Arab world, and one with a long history of political division and outside interference. There was a bitter civil war there in the 1960s, and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt eventually sent some 50,000 troops to the country in a costly and futile attempt to support sympathetic “revolutionary” forces. The country was divided into rival northern and southern halves in 1967, and the so-called People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen was a nominal Soviet client state for the next 20 years or so. The two countries agreed to unify in 1990, but deep divisions remained and former President Ali Abdullah Saleh faced several challenges to his own heavy-handed and corrupt rule. Yemen remains a tribal society to this day, and it is also home to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a terrorist group that has organized several attempted attacks on the United States or other Western countries.
Not surprisingly, U.S. counterterrorism policy has focused considerable attention on Yemen. The United States has conducted repeated drone strikes .. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/yemen-instability-reveals-limits-of-u-s-counterterrorism-strategy/ .. against suspected AQAP members, including the controversial targeted killing of U.S. citizen and extremist imam Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011. When popular protests against President Saleh broke out that same year, Washington helped broker the resignation of Saleh and backed his successor, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. But on Thursday, Hadi was forced to resign ..http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/world/middleeast/yemen-houthi-crisis-sana.html?_r=0 .. after the Houthi movement, a Shiite militia group, seized the capital, surrounded the presidential residence, and demanded a more equitable division of Yemeni resources.
I’m hardly an expert on the intricacies of Yemeni politics, but there are some broader lessons here that transcend the details of this particular case. And these lessons offer a sobering warning to unrepentant neoconservatives and liberal interventionists, who remain convinced that officials in Washington can control what happens in distant corners of the world with a handful of drones, some well-trained special forces, and occasional infusions of cash.
The first lesson is that the United States lacks a detailed and sophisticated understanding of many societies, and especially those whose history, culture, social networks, and aspirations are radically different from our own. It is hard enough to manage political and social processes in places that we understand pretty well — like the United States itself — but it’s exceedingly difficult to conduct social engineering of this sort in places where one’s understanding is limited. Without detailed local knowledge, it’s impossible to know which leaders to back and which to oppose, or to identify who is competent and who is an unpopular bumbler. Moreover, if outsiders don’t understand the local players, their rulebook, or the complex interrelations between different groups, they won’t be able to anticipate the actual impact of their well-intentioned interventions and they’ll be surprised by all sorts of unintended consequences. State-creation and social engineering is hard enough when you know the landscape and the players; it’s a fool’s errand when you don’t.
A second lesson — and one that is constantly being forgotten — is that military power is a crude instrument that always produces unintended effects.
Third, as Sarah Chayes documents in her important new book .. http://www.amazon.com/Thieves-State-Corruption-Threatens-Security/dp/0393239462/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1422034967&sr=1-1&keywords=SARAH+CHAYES , even well-intentioned outside interference often reinforces the corruption that makes local governments unpopular and ineffective. When the United States and other aid providers start dispensing bundles of cash to chosen clients, those clients are invariably tempted to pocket some (if not most) of the loot. This was true back when former president Saleh ran Yemen .. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/world/middleeast/05saleh.html?_r=0 , and it was certainly the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sad truth is that sometimes there just aren’t many effective tools available to try to shape a country’s politics in the right direction. In these cases, even well-intentioned carrots and smartly wielded sticks won’t have much positive impact.
Fourth, politicians in foreign lands will tell us what we want to hear, whether it’s true or not. This is especially true of America’s various allies in the Middle East, who work overtime to drag the United States into their own local quarrels. In Yemen, Saleh won U.S. support for years by claiming to be a staunch enemy of al Qaeda, though it’s not clear he ever did much .. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/21/playing-a-double-game-in-the-fight-against-aqap-yemen-saleh-al-qaeda/ .. to address the problem. And once we get committed to their supposed success, we lose most of the leverage we might have had over their subsequent conduct.
The last lesson is actually a bit of good news: Our counterproductive interference in the greater Middle East is probably unnecessary. To be sure, the usual alarmists .. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/396989/emerging-iranian-empire-charles-krauthammer .. are already hyperventilating about an emerging “Iranian empire” (a curious development indeed, given that these hawks also believe U.S. sanctions are bringing Tehran to its knees), but in fact what’s happening in Yemen isn’t critical to U.S. security. To be sure, AQAP does devote some effort to fashioning small-scale plots against the United States or its allies, and AQAP propaganda probably attracts some degree of sympathy among marginalized Muslims in Europe and elsewhere. But as I argued in my column last week .. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/16/think-before-you-march-charlie-hebdo-islamist-terrorism/ , the actual danger that these plots present is minimal, and the best response to them is not to keep interfering in these countries, because that just wins them more followers. Instead, the best response is good old-fashioned intelligence work, effective information-sharing with key allies, a vigilant defense of the United States itself, and a greatly reduced footprint in that part of the world.
Remember, we have a terrorism problem in part because the United States has been repeatedly interfering in the greater Middle East, and not always for the right reasons or with much skill or effectiveness. We aren’t going to reduce that problem by doubling down on the policies that helped produce it in the first place, and especially when even our well-intentioned interventions seem to make things worse instead of better. Do No Harm remains a pretty good principle, and the latest sad chapter in Yemen is just more evidence for that fact. The only question is: Will anyone in Washington take a look at our recent track record, and start working on an alternative approach?
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa saying the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons was forbidden under Islam. The fatwa was cited in an official statement by the Iranian government at an August 2005 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.
Iran's nuclear program has been a subject of international debate for decades. The Iranian government claims the purpose of its nuclear development is to produce electricity, while some western countries accuse it of trying to create nuclear weapons.
Guest post: Using religion to restrain Iran's nuclear program .. bit ..
No other national leader anywhere has ever asserted that nuclear weapons are, say, "un-Christian" or "un-Jewish" (although Western religious leaders and scholars have expressed such views).
Iran's leaders could be dissembling, of course, as part of their effort to mislead the international community. But no one forced them to say this -- let alone to repeat it publicly -- and Khameini has not repudiated this fatwa even as Iran's nuclear program has advanced. It would be strange for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its adherence to Islam to keep asserting this point if it were really totally insincere.
We don't need to take the Iranians at face value, but why not take advantage of the opening their own words provide? The international community should capitalize on this element of restraint. We should hold them to it.
How might this work? Diplomats should refer to the statements approvingly and frequently. President Obama should use his rhetorical gifts to publicly acknowledge the Iranian prohibition and state that, as a person of faith himself, he respects and welcomes the testament. The goal would be to invoke Islamic moral values as a positive contribution to both Iranian and global nuclear restraint.
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