American Drones Ignite New Arms Race From Gaza To Iran To China
A U.S. Predator armed with Hellfire missiles prowls the sky over Afghansitan. (U.S. Air Force photo by Lt. Col. Leslie Pratt)
By David Wood Posted: 11/27/2012 3:01 pm EST
WASHINGTON -- The drone wars are here.
While President Obama ponders new legal and moral guidelines to govern America's growing use of armed robot aircraft, the world outside the White House is engaged in a revolutionary frenzy of building, arming and flying killer drones.
Small, inexpensive and lethal, drones enable everyone from terrorists to the Chinese People's Liberation Army to engage in what the Pentagon acknowledges is a new arms race with "alarming" consequences. More than 50 countries operate surveillance drones and, increasingly, are fitting them with weapons.
The U.S. covertly uses armed drones to assassinate alleged terrorists or insurgents in Pakistan, Sudan and Somalia. In Pakistan alone, some 2,341 people identified as Taliban and al Qaeda leaders have been killed [ http://www.longwarjournal.org/pakistan-strikes.php ], according to one authoritative account. Armed drones are increasingly active in Afghanistan as well, where they've completed 1,160 strike missions since 2009, according to the latest Air Force data [ http://www.afcent.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-121109-007.pdf ]. American spy drones operate globally, from the Western Pacific to Iran, where a secret U.S. spy drone was shot down last December.
But American drones are not alone in the sky. Spy drones routinely shadow U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups and other military exercises. Drones crisscross the Persian Gulf. Israeli drones have circled over Gaza during the recent fighting there. Experts say it's a rare conflict that doesn't attract spy drones; even the United Nations has considered using drones to monitor the fighting in Congo.
Using unmanned aircraft with cameras is nothing new, of course. But armed drone technology is different: the rapidly spreading technology gives attackers a new edge, whether they are clandestine terrorist gangs or global superpowers. Small and highly maneuverable, drones can befuddle air defense systems built to intercept big, lumbering aircraft.
In the dismaying history of war machinery, armed drones are a "game-changing technology, akin to gunpowder, the steam engine, the atomic bomb -- opening up possibilities that were fiction a generation earlier but also opening up perils that were unknown a generation ago," said Peter W. Singer, an expert on drone technology and its ramifications for the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank.
A new Pentagon study frets that enemy drones could be a "very serious threat" [ http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/AutonomyReport.pdf ] to U.S. aircraft carriers in the Pacific and elsewhere, as well as to "supply convoys and other combat support assets which have not had to deal with an airborne threat in generations." On the battlefield, an enemy could create chaos and confusion simply by flooding the airspace with drones, and any U.S. bases within drone range would have to be closed, the report said.
"For UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles], the U.S. currently has limited dedicated defensive capabilities other than fighters or surface-to-air missiles, giving the enemy a significant asymmetric cost advantage," the Pentagon's Defense Science Board report concluded in its July 2012 study.
In essence, the study suggested, armed drones are the equivalent of the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), a simple, cheap and effective weapon which has forced the U.S. to spend billions of dollars in defense [ https://www.jieddo.mil/news_story.aspx?ID=1486 ] while experiencing growing casualties: 1,330 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan by IEDs [ http://icasualties.org/OEF/index.aspx ], including 125 so far this year.
An incident early last month dispelled any doubts about the spread of drone technology. On Oct. 6, a small unmanned aircraft flew high over Israel's Mediterranean coast, headed for its nuclear reactor at Dimona. Soaring for 35 miles through heavily guarded Israeli airspace, the intruder was eventually shot down [ http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/10/07/242310.html ] by an Israeli F-16.
Against such small and maneuverable threats, Israel's missile defenses -- including its Arrow and Iron Dome missile defense systems, so effective against rockets fired from Gaza this month -- are less effective.
Israeli officials speculated the drone in October was on a reconnaissance mission or possibly a practice run for a later suicide attack on the nuclear site. Hezbollah, the radical Islamic militia and political party based in Lebanon, later claimed that it had assembled and launched the drone. Experts said the aircraft was in all likelihood provided by Iran, which already has operational drones and claims its newest drone, the Shahed-129, has a range of 1,250 miles. The distance from Tehran to Tel Aviv: 988 miles.
A day after Israel shot down the Hezbollah drone, an armed Israeli drone fired a missile that wounded two activists and eight passers-by in Gaza [ http://www.idf.il/1086-17231-EN/Dover.aspx ].
On Nov. 1, two Iranian jet fighters fired multiple rounds at an American Predator drone over the Persian Gulf; the spy drone was conducting "routine surveillance," Pentagon spokesman George Little explained. The drone got away unharmed.
Obama administration officials [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/world/white-house-presses-for-drone-rule-book.html?pagewanted=all ] have said they are weighing various options to codify the use of armed U.S. drones, because the increased use of drones has been driven more by perceived necessity than by deliberative policy. But that effort is complicated by the wildfire spread of drone technology: how could the U.S. restrict its use of armed drones if others do not?
Already, the Pentagon is worried that China not only is engaged in an "alarming" effort to develop and field high-tech drones, but it intends to sell drone technology abroad, according to the Pentagon report.
Indeed, the momentum of the drone wars seems irresistible. "The increasing worldwide focus on unmanned systems highlights how U.S. military success has changed global strategic thinking and spurred a race for unmanned aircraft," the Pentagon study reported.
Modern drones were first perfected by Israel, but the U.S. Air Force took the first steps in 2001 to mount sophisticated drones with precision weapons. Today the U.S. fields some 8,000 drones and plans to invest $36.9 billion to boost its fleet by 35 percent over the next eight years.
Current research on next-generation drones seems certain to exacerbate the drone arms race. The U.S. and other countries are developing "nano" drones [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/02/flying-robots-nano-quadrotor-drones-swarm_n_1249442.html ], tiny weapons designed to attack in swarms. Both the U.S. and China are working to incorporate "stealth" technology into micro drones. The Pentagon is fielding a new weapon called the Switchblade [ http://www.avinc.com/uas/adc/switchblade/ ], a 5.5-pound precision-attack drone that can be carried and fired by one person -- a capability sure to be envied by terrorists.
"This is a robotics revolution, but it's not just an American revolution -- everyone's involved, from Hezbollah to paparazzi," Singer, the Brookings Institution expert, told The Huffington Post. "This is a revolution in which billions and trillions of dollars will be made. To stop it you'd have to first stop science, and then business, and then war."
Polarised photons don't lie (Image: Martin Jenkinson/Alamy)
17:17 14 December 2012 by Jacob Aron
Is it a bird, a plane or a speeding car? Police officers might one day be armed with speed guns that cannot be fooled by even the most determined racers, thanks to a new radar technique based on the laws of quantum mechanics. The ultra-secure system could also be used to counter futuristic military cloaking systems that might disguise a plane as a bird.
Radar and lidar systems bounce radio or light signals off an object and measure how long they take to return. That information can be used to determine the object's position and shape – identifying it as a war plane, say – or to calculate its speed. But both military and police systems can be fooled by devices that generate photons of the same frequency as in the outgoing beam. This is how the speed gun jammers installed in some cars work.
To reveal when returning photons have been faked, Mehul Malik [ http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/boyd/publications/malik-m.html ] and colleagues at the University of Rochester, New York, borrowed a trick from quantum cryptography, polarising each outgoing photon in one of two ways according to a sequence.
Wrong polarisation
Their radar system also measures the polarisations of the returning photons. That forces someone creating a false beam to polarise their photons too – but they need to know the correct sequence. However, if they try to measure the photons arriving from the radar transmitter, quantum mechanics ensures that many of the true polarisations will get lost. So a false signal will always contain more photons of the wrong polarisations than the true beam.
In lab tests, photons reflected from a cut-out of a stealth bomber had an error rate of less than 1 per cent, while over half the photons created on the fly to mimic the shape of a bird had the wrong polarisation. In quantum cryptography [ ], the same principle reveals if photons encoding a secret key have been intercepted.
"If it works in practice, it would be super-cool," says Vadim Makarov [ http://www.vad1.com/ ] of the University of Waterloo, Canada. But he warns that reflected photons are more likely to change polarisation outside a laboratory setting.
Navy completes 1st unmanned aircraft landing aboard USS George H.W. Bush in Atlantic Ocean
"Navy Drone Boards Aircraft Carrier for 1st Time"
Steve Helber, File/Associated Press - A Navy X-47B drone is launched off the nuclear powered aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush off the coast of Virginia, in this May 14, 2013 file photo. The Navy says the X-47B experimental aircraft will try to land aboard the USS George H.W. Bush on Wednesday July 10, 2013. By Associated Press,
ABOARD THE USS GEORGE H.W. BUSH — The Navy successfully landed a drone the size of a fighter jet aboard an aircraft carrier for the first time Wednesday, showcasing the military’s capability to have a computer program perform one of the most difficult tasks that a pilot is asked to do.
The landing of the X-47B experimental aircraft means the Navy can move forward with its plans to develop another unmanned aircraft that will join the fleet alongside traditional airplanes to provide around-the-clock surveillance while also possessing a strike capability. It also would pave the way for the U.S. to launch unmanned aircraft without the need to obtain permission from other countries to use their bases.
“It is not often that you get a chance to see the future, but that’s what we got to do today. This is an amazing day for aviation in general and for naval aviation in particular,” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said after watching the landing.
The X-47B experimental aircraft took off from Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland before approaching the USS George H.W. Bush, which was operating about 70 miles off the coast of Virginia. The tail-less drone landed by deploying a hook that caught a wire aboard the ship and brought it to a quick stop, just like normal fighter jets do. The maneuver is known as an arrested landing and had previously only been done by the drone on land at Patuxent River. Landing on a ship that is constantly moving while navigating through turbulent air behind the aircraft carrier is seen as a more difficult maneuver, even on a clear day with low winds like Wednesday.
Rear Adm. Mat Winter, the Navy’s program executive officer for unmanned aviation and strike weapons, said everything about the flight — including where on the flight deck the plane would first touch and how many feet its hook would bounce — appeared to go exactly as planned.
“This is a historic day. This is a banner day. This is a red-flag letter day,” Winter said. “You can call it what you want, but the fact of the matter is that you just observed history — history that your great-grandchildren, my great grandchildren, everybody’s great grandchildren are going to be reading in our history books.”
Less than an hour after that first landing, the jet took off from the carrier and then landed again. On its third and last-planned landing attempt, the Navy said, the jet self-detected a navigation computer anomaly. Instead of landing on the carrier, it flew to Wallops Island Air Field on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The Navy says the plane landed safely there.
The Navy will do some additional tests and analysis on the jet, and possibly some more landings in the next few days if the carrier’s schedule allows for it, but the first landing was the last major benchmark for the program to hit.
The X-47B will never be put into operational use, but it will help Navy officials develop future carrier-based drones. Those drones could begin operating by 2020, according to Winter. Four companies are expected to compete for a contract to design the future unmanned aircraft, which will be awarded in fiscal year 2014.
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he two experimental aircraft that have been built for the first round of testing will be retired and placed in museums at Patuxent River and at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida.
The move to expand the capabilities of the nation’s drones comes amid growing criticism of America’s use of Predators and Reapers to gather intelligence and carry out lethal missile attacks against terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
Critics in the U.S. and abroad have charged that drone strikes cause widespread civilian deaths and are conducted with inadequate oversight. Still, defense analysts say drones are the future of warfare.
The X-47B is far bigger than the Predator, has three times the range and can be programmed to carry out missions with no human intervention, the Navy said.
While the X-47B isn’t a stealth aircraft, it was designed with the low profile of one. That will help in the development of future stealth drones, which would be valuable as the military changes its focus from the Middle East to the Pacific, where a number of countries’ air defenses are a lot stronger than Afghanistan’s.
The X-47B has a wingspan of about 62 feet and weighs 14,000 pounds, versus nearly 49 feet and about 1,100 pounds for the Predator.
While Predators are typically piloted via remote control by someone in the U.S., the X-47B relies only on computer programs to tell it where to fly unless a human operator needs to step in. The Navy says the aircraft relies on precision GPS navigation, a high-integrity network connection and advanced flight control software to guide itself.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert called the first landing a “miraculous technological feat.”
Developed by Northrop Grumman under a 2007 contract at a cost of $1.4 billion, the X-47B is capable of carrying weapons and is designed to be the forerunner for a drone program that will provide around-the-clock intelligence, surveillance and targeting, according to the Navy, which has been giving updates on the project over the past few years.
The X-47B can reach an altitude of more than 40,000 feet and has a range of more than 2,100 nautical miles, versus 675 for the Predator. The Navy plans to show the drone can be refueled in flight, which would give it even greater range.
“It gives us persistence. It gives us the ability to do things that we can’t today because of the limitations on the human body in terms of endurance, in terms of distance, in terms of just how long you can stay on station or do the things like refueling,” Mabus said. “We’re not sending this message to any particular country. This is for us. This is to make sure that we keep the technological edge.”
.. used to be we could only say the worm, oops, the world turns, changes, masticates, masturbates .. now .. and for a long time .. the world drones on ..
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