[tt] Drone Race to a Known Future

[Sarad AV]

Plus any drone they(future whoever) make outside US will be cheaper when they
have the technology! Probably this will be the beginning of small scale
asymmetric warfare.

Sarad.

--- On Wed, 11/11/09, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> From: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
> Subject: [tt] Drone Race to a Known Future
> To: cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
> Date: Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 3:29 PM
> ----- Forwarded message from Arlind
> Boshnjaku <arlindboshnjaku at yahoo.com>
> -----
>
> From: Arlind Boshnjaku <arlindboshnjaku at yahoo.com>
> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:20:38 -0800 (PST)
> To: transhumanist news <tt at postbiota.org>
> Subject: [tt] Drone Race to a Known Future
> X-Mailer: YahooMailRC/211.6 YahooMailWebService/0.7.361.4
>
> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175137/droning_on
>
> Drone Race to a Known Future
> Why Military Dreams Fail -- and Why It Doesn't Matter
> By Tom Engelhardt
>
> For drone freaks (and these days Washington seems full of
> them), here's the good news: Drones are hot! Not long ago --
> 2006 to be exact -- the Air Force could barely get a few
> armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air at once;
> now, the number is 38; by 2011, it will reputedly be 50, and
> beyond that, in every sense, the sky's the limit.
>
> Better yet, for the latest generation of armed surveillance
> drones -- the ones with the chill-you-to-your-bones sci-fi
> names of Predators and Reapers (as in Grim) -- whole new
> surveillance capabilities will soon be available. Their
> newest video system, due to be deployed next year, has been
> dubbed Gorgon Stare after the creature in Greek mythology
> whose gaze turned its victims to stone. According to Julian
> Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, Gorgon Stare will offer a
> "pilot" back in good ol' Langley, VA, headquarters of the
> CIA, the ability to "stare" via 12 video feeds (where only
> one now exists) at a 1.5 mile square area, and then, with
> Hellfire missiles and bombs, assumedly turn any part of it
> into rubble. Within the year, that viewing capacity is
> expected to double to three square miles.
>
> What we're talking about here is the gaze of the gods,
> updated in corporate labs for the modern American
> war-fighter -- a gaze that can be focused on whatever runs,
> walks, crawls, or creeps just about anywhere on the planet
> 24/7, with an instant ability to blow it away. And what's
> true of video capacity will be no less true of the next
> generation of drone sensors -- and, of course, of drone
> weaponry like that "5-pound missile the size of a loaf of
> French bread" meant in some near-robotic future to replace
> the present 100-pound Hellfire missile, possibly on the
> Avenger or Predator C, the next generation drone under
> development at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems.
> Everything, in fact, will be almost infinitely upgradeable,
> since we're still in the robotics equivalent of the age of
> the "horseless carriage," as Peter Singer of the Brookings
> Institution assures us. (Just hold your hats, for instance,
> when the first nano-drones make it onto the scene! They
>  will, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, be able
> to "fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open
> window.")
>
> And here's another flash from the drone development front:
> the Navy wants in. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary
> Roughead, reports Jason Paur of Wired's Danger Room blog, is
> looking for "a robotic attack aircraft that can land and
> take off from a carrier." Fortunately, according to Paur,
> the X-47B, which theoretically should be able to do just
> that, is to make its first test flight before year's end. It
> could be checking out those carrier decks by 2011, and fully
> operational by 2025.
>
> Not only that, but drones are leaving the air for the high
> seas where they are called unmanned surface vehicles (USVs).
> In fact, Israel -- along with the U.S. leading the way on
> drones -- will reportedly soon launch the first of its USVs
> off the coast of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The U.S. can't be
> far behind and it seems that, like their airborne cousins,
> these ships, too, will be weaponized.
>
> Taking the Measure of a Slam-Dunk Weapons System
>
> Robot war. It just couldn't be cooler, could it? Especially
> if the only blood you spill is the other guy's, since our
> "pilots" are flying those planes from thousands of miles
> away. Soon, it seems, the world will be a drone fest. In his
> first nine months, President Obama has authorized more drone
> attacks in the Pakistani tribal borderlands than the Bush
> administration did in its last three years in office and is
> now considering upping their use in areas of rural
> Afghanistan where U.S. troops will be scarce.
>
> In Washington, drones are even considered the
> "de-escalatory" option for the Afghan War by some critics,
> while CIA Director Leon Panetta, whose agency runs our drone
> war in Pakistan, has hailed them as "the only game in town
> in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al-Qaeda
> leadership." Among the few people who don't adore them here
> are hard-core war-fighters who don't want an armada of robot
> planes standing in the way of sending in oodles more troops.
> The vice president, however, is a drone-atic. He loves 'em
> to death and reportedly wants to up their missions,
> especially in Pakistan, rather than go the oodles route.
>
> Secretary of Defense Robert Gates jumped onto the drone
> bandwagon early. He has long been pressing the Air Force to
> invest ever less in expensive manned aircraft -- he's called
> the F-35, still in development, the last manned fighter
> aircraft -- and ever more in the robotic kind. After all,
> they're so lean, mean, and high-tech sexy -- for Newsweek,
> they fall into the category of "weapons porn" -- that what's
> not to like?
>
> Okay, maybe there's the odd scrooge around like Philip
> Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial
> executions, who recently complained to the press that the
> U.S. program might involve war crimes under international
> law: "We need the United States to be more up front and say,
> 'OK, we're willing to discuss some aspects of this program,'
> otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line that
> the CIA is running a program that is killing significant
> numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability
> in terms of the relevant international laws."
>
> But as Christmas approaches, somebody's always going to
> say, "Bah, humbug!" And let's face it, just about everyone
> who matters to the mainstream media swears that the drones
> are just so much more "precise" in their "extrajudicial
> executions" than traditional air methods, which can be so
> messy. Better yet, when nothing in Afghanistan or Pakistan
> seems to be working out, the drones are actually doing the
> job. They're reportedly knocking off the bad guys right and
> left. At least 13 senior al-Qaeda leaders and one senior
> Taliban leader (aka "high-value targets") have been killed
> by the drones, according to the Long War Journal, and many
> more foot soldiers have been taken out as well.
>
> And they're not just the obvious slam-dunk weapons system
> for our present problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
> they're potentially the royal path to the future when it
> comes to war-fighting, which is surely something else to be
> excited about.
>
> The Wonder Weapons Succeed -- at Home
>
> So why am I not excited -- other than the fact that the
> drones are also killing civilians in disputed but
> significant numbers in the Pakistani tribal borderlands,
> creating enemies and animosity wherever they strike, and
> turning us into a nation of 24/7 assassins beyond the law or
> accountability of any sort? Thought of another way, the
> drones put wings on the original Bush-era Guantanamo
> principle -- that Americans have the inalienable right to
> act as global judge, jury, and executioner, and in doing so
> are beyond the reach of any court or law.
>
> And here's another factor that dulls my excitement just a
> tad -- if the history of air warfare has shown one thing,
> it's this: it never breaks populations. Rather, it only
> increases their sense of unity, as in London during the
> Blitz under Winston Churchill, in Germany under Adolf
> Hitler, Imperial Japan under Emperor Hirohito, North Korea
> under Kim Il Sung, North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, and of
> course (though we never put ourselves in such company, being
> the exceptions to all history), the United States after 9/11
> under George W. Bush. Why should the peoples of rural
> Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands be any different?
>
> Oh, and there's just one more reason that comes to mind: it
> so happens that I can see the future when it comes to
> drones, and it's dismal. I'm no prophet -- it's only that
> I've already lived through so much of that future. In fact,
> we all have.
>
> Militarily speaking, we might as well be in the film
> Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell are
> forced to live out the same 24 hours again and again -- with
> all the grimness of that idea and none of the charm of those
> actors. In my lifetime, I've repeatedly seen advanced
> weapons systems or mind-boggling technologies of war hailed
> as near-utopian paths to victory and future peace (just as
> the atomic bomb was soon after my birth). In the Vietnam
> War, the glories of "the electronic battlefield" were limned
> as an antidote to brute and ineffective American air power.
> That high-tech, advanced battlefield of invisible sensors
> was to bring an end to the impunity of guerrillas and
> infiltrating enemy armies. No longer capable of going
> anywhere undetected, they would have nowhere to hide.
>
> In the 1980s, it was President Ronald Reagan's Strategic
> Defense Initiative, quickly dubbed "Star Wars" by its
> critics, a label that he accepted with amusement. ("If you
> will pardon my stealing a film line -- the Force is with
> us," he said in his usual genial way.) His dream, as he told
> the American people, was to create an "impermeable"
> anti-missile shield over the United States -- "like a roof
> protects a family from rain" -- that would end the
> possibility of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union and so
> create peace in our time (or, if you were of a more cynical
> turn of mind, the possibility of a freebie nuclear assault
> on the Soviets).
>
> In the Gulf War, "smart bombs" and smart missiles were
> praised as the military saviors of the moment. They were to
> give war the kind of precision that would lower civilian
> deaths to the vanishing point and, as the neocons of the
> Bush administration would claim in the next decade, free the
> U.S. military to "decapitate" any regime we loathed. All
> this would be possible without so much as touching the
> civilian population (which would, of course, then welcome us
> as liberators). And later, there was "netcentric warfare,"
> that Rumsfeldian high-tech favorite. Its promise was that
> advanced information-sharing technology would turn a
> Military Lite into an uplinked force so savvy about changing
> battlefield realities and so crushing that a mere demo or
> two would cow any "rogue" nation or insurgency into
> submission.
>
> Of course, you know the results of this sort of magical
> thinking about wonder weapons (or technologies) and their
> properties just as well as I do. The atomic bomb ended
> nothing, but led to an almost half-century-long nuclear
> superpower standoff/nightmare, to nuclear proliferation, and
> so to the possibility that, someday, even terrorists might
> possess such weapons. The electronic battlefield was
> incapable of staving off defeat in Vietnam. That impermeable
> anti-missile shield never came even faintly close to making
> it into our skies. Those "smart bombs" of the Gulf War
> proved remarkably dumb, while the 50 "decapitation" strikes
> the Bush administration launched against Saddam Hussein's
> regime on the first day of the 2003 invasion of Iraq took
> out not a single Iraqi leader, but "dozens" of civilians.
> And the history of the netcentric military in Iraq is well
> known. Its "success" sent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld into
> retirement and ignominy.
>
> In the same way, robot drones as assassination weapons will
> prove to be just another weapons system rather than a
> panacea for American warriors. To date, in fact, there is at
> least as much evidence in Pakistan and Afghanistan that the
> drones are helping to spread war as that they are staunching
> it.
>
> Yet, the above summary is, at best, only half the story.
> None of these wonder weapons or technologies succeeded in
> their moment, or as advertised, but that fact stopped none
> of them from embedding themselves in our American world.
> From the atomic bomb came a whole nuclear landscape that
> included the Strategic Air Command, weapons labs, production
> plants, missile silos, corporate interests, and an enormous
> world-destroying arsenal (as well as proliferating versions
> of the same, large and small, across the planet). Nor did
> the electronic battlefield go away. Quite the opposite -- it
> came home and entered our everyday world in the form of
> sensors, cameras, surveillance equipment and the like, now
> implanted from our borders to our cities.
>
> True, Reagan's impermeable shield was the purest of nuclear
> fantasies, but the "high frontiersmen" gathered and, taking
> a sizeable bite of the military budget, went on a
> decades-long binge of way-out research, space warfare plans
> and commands, and boondoggles of all sorts, including the
> staggeringly expensive, still not operational anti-missile
> system that the Bush and now Obama administrations have
> struggled to emplace somewhere in Europe. Similarly, ever
> newer generations of smart bombs and ever brighter missiles
> have been, and are being, developed ad infinitum.
>
> Rarely do wonder weapons or wonder technologies disappoint
> enough to disappear. Each of these is, in fact, now
> surrounded by its own mini-version of the
> military-industrial complex, with its own set of corporate
> players, special lobbyists in Washington, specific
> interests, and congressional boosters. Each has installed a
> typical revolving door that the relevant Pentagon officials
> and officers can spin through once their military careers
> are in order. This is no less true for that wonder weapon of
> our moment, the robot drone.
>
> In fact, you can already see the
> military-industrial-drone-robotics complex in formation.
> Take just one figure, Tony Tether, who for seven years was
> the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
> (DARPA), which did its share of advanced robotics research.
> When he left the Pentagon in September, it was, according to
> Noah Shachtman, who runs Wired's Danger Room blog, to join
> "an advisory panel of Scientific Systems Company, Inc.,
> which works on robotics projects for the Pentagon. In June,
> he joined the board of Aurora Flight Sciences, Inc.,
> developers of military unmanned aircraft." He has also
> become "a part-time technical consultant and 'strategic
> advisor' for the influencers at The Livingston Group" which
> represents some large defense contractors like Northrup
> Grumman and Raytheon.
>
> The drone industry, too, already has its own congressional
> representatives. Republican Congressman and former House
> Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, for
> instance, is a major drone booster. In April 2009, he
> insisted that "we must also press forward with the
> development of the next generation of UAVs, including the
> Predator C. During my service in the Marine Corps, I engaged
> targets with the Predator A and B Series, and I recognize
> the advantages offered by Predator C." In 2008, General
> Atomics, whose "affiliate" makes the Predator drone, gave
> $6,000 to Hunter's election campaign committee, making it
> his 13th largest contributor. That company was also the
> number two contributor to his Peace Through Strength
> political action committee.
>
> In the American Grain
>
> This, then, is the future that you can see just as well as
> I can. When the Obama administration decides to up the ante
> on drone use in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as it's soon
> likely to do, it will be ensuring not the end of al-Qaeda or
> the Taliban, but the long life of robot war within our ever
> more militarized society. And by the time this set of
> robotic dreams fails to pan out, it won't matter. Yet
> another mini-sector of the military-industrial complex will
> be etched into the American grain.
>
> Whatever the short-term gains from introducing drone
> warfare in these last years, we are now locked into the 24/7
> assassination trade -- with our own set of non-suicide
> bombers on the job into eternity. This may pass for sanity
> in Washington, but it's surely helping to pave the road to
> hell.
>
> Haven't any of these folks ever seen a sci-fi film? Are
> none of them Terminator fans? Are they sure they want to
> open the way to unlimited robot war, keeping in mind that,
> if this is the latest game in town, it won't remain mainly
> an American one for long. And just wait until the first
> Iranian drone takes out the first Baluchi guerrilla
> supported by American funds somewhere in Pakistan. Then
> let's see just what we think about the right of any nation
> to summarily execute its enemies -- and anyone else in the
> vicinity -- by drone.
>
> Is this actually what we Americans want to be known for?
> And if we let this happen, and General Atomics is working
> double or triple shifts to turn out ever more, ever newer
> generations of robot warriors, while the nation suffers
> 10.2% unemployment, who exactly will think about shutting
> them down?
>
>
>      
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> ----- End forwarded message -----
> --
> Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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