[tt] NYT: Microdrones, Some as Small as Bugs, Are Poised to Alter War

Premise Checker checker at panix.com
Mon Jun 20 13:46:50 PDT 2011


Microdrones, Some as Small as Bugs, Are Poised to Alter War
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/20drones.html

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and THOM SHANKER

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio--Two miles from the cow
pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first
airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in
the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into
Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of
insects and birds.

The base's indoor flight lab is called the "microaviary," and for
good reason. The drones in development here are designed to
replicate the flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other inhabitants
of the natural world. "We're looking at how you hide in plain
sight," said Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, as he held up a
prototype of a mechanical hawk that in the future might carry out
espionage or kill.

Half a world away in Afghanistan, Marines marvel at one of the new
blimplike spy balloons that float from a tether 15,000 feet above
one of the bloodiest outposts of the war, Sangin in Helmand
Province. The balloon, called an aerostat, can transmit live video
--from as far as 20 miles away--of insurgents planting homemade
bombs. "It's been a game-changer for me," Capt. Nickoli Johnson said
in Sangin this spring. "I want a bunch more put in."

>   From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming
the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones,
the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight
since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known
and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer
size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone
universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.

The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer
than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force
anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of
"multirole" aerial drones like the Reaper--the ones that spy as
well as strike--to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force
is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter
and bomber pilots combined.

"It's a growth market," said Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagon's chief
weapons buyer.

The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones
next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction:
"spy flies" equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect
enemies, nuclear weapons or victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a
scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of "Wired for
War," a book about military robotics, calls them "bugs with bugs."

In recent months drones have been more crucial than ever in fighting
wars and terrorism. The Central Intelligence Agency spied on Osama
bin Laden's compound in Pakistan by video transmitted from a new
bat-winged stealth drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel, otherwise known as
the "Beast of Kandahar," named after it was first spotted on a
runway in Afghanistan. One of Pakistan's most wanted militants,
Ilyas Kashmiri, was reported dead this month in a C.I.A. drone
strike, part of an aggressive drone campaign that administration
officials say has helped paralyze Al Qaeda in the region--and has
become a possible rationale for an accelerated withdrawal of
American forces from Afghanistan. More than 1,900 insurgents in
Pakistan's tribal areas have been killed by American drones since
2006, according to the Web site www.longwarjournal.com.

In April the United States began using armed Predator drones against
Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's forces in Libya. Last month a C.I.A.-armed
Predator aimed a missile at Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical
American-born cleric believed to be hiding in Yemen. The Predator
missed, but American drones continue to patrol Yemen's skies.

Large or small, drones raise questions about the growing disconnect
between the American public and its wars. Military ethicists concede
that drones can turn war into a video game, inflict civilian
casualties and, with no Americans directly at risk, more easily draw
the United States into conflicts. Drones have also created a crisis
of information for analysts on the end of a daily video deluge. Not
least, the Federal Aviation Administration has qualms about
expanding their test flights at home, as the Pentagon would like.
Last summer, fighter jets were almost scrambled after a rogue Fire
Scout drone, the size of a small helicopter, wandered into
Washington's restricted airspace.

Within the military, no one disputes that drones save American
lives. Many see them as advanced versions of "stand-off weapons
systems," like tanks or bombs dropped from aircraft, that the United
States has used for decades. "There's a kind of nostalgia for the
way wars used to be," said Deane-Peter Baker, an ethics professor at
the United States Naval Academy, referring to noble notions of
knight-on-knight conflict. Drones are part of a post-heroic age, he
said, and in his view it is not always a problem if they lower the
threshold for war. "It is a bad thing if we didn't have a just cause
in the first place," Mr. Baker said. "But if we did have a just
cause, we should celebrate anything that allows us to pursue that
just cause."

To Mr. Singer of Brookings, the debate over drones is like debating
the merits of computers in 1979: They are here to stay, and the boom
has barely begun. "We are at the Wright Brothers Flier stage of
this," he said.

Mimicking Insect Flight

A tiny helicopter is buzzing menacingly as it prepares to lift off
in the Wright-Patterson aviary, a warehouse-like room lined with 60
motion-capture cameras to track the little drone's every move. The
helicopter, a footlong hobbyists' model, has been programmed by a
computer to fly itself. Soon it is up in the air making purposeful
figure eights.

"What it's doing out here is nothing special," said Dr. Parker, the
aerospace engineer. The researchers are using the helicopter to test
technology that would make it possible for a computer to fly, say, a
drone that looks like a dragonfly. "To have a computer do it 100
percent of the time, and to do it with winds, and to do it when it
doesn't really know where the vehicle is, those are the kinds of
technologies that we're trying to develop," Dr. Parker said.

The push right now is developing "flapping wing" technology, or
recreating the physics of natural flight, but with a focus on
insects rather than birds. Birds have complex muscles that move
their wings, making it difficult to copy their aerodynamics.
Designing insects is hard, too, but their wing motions are simpler.
"It's a lot easier problem," Dr. Parker said.

In February, researchers unveiled a hummingbird drone, built by the
firm AeroVironment for the secretive Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, which can fly at 11 miles per hour and perch on a
windowsill. But it is still a prototype. One of the smallest drones
in use on the battlefield is the three-foot-long Raven, which troops
in Afghanistan toss by hand like a model airplane to peer over the
next hill.

There are some 4,800 Ravens in operation in the Army, although
plenty get lost. One American service member in Germany recalled how
five soldiers and officers spent six hours tramping through a dark
Bavarian forest--and then sent a helicopter--on a fruitless
search for a Raven that failed to return home from a training
exercise. The next month a Raven went AWOL again, this time because
of a programming error that sent it south. "The initial call I got
was that the Raven was going to Africa," said the service member,
who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss
drone glitches.

In the midsize range: The Predator, the larger Reaper and the
smaller Shadow, all flown by remote pilots using joysticks and
computer screens, many from military bases in the United States. A
Navy entry is the X-47B, a prototype designed to take off and land
from aircraft carriers automatically and, when commanded, drop
bombs. The X-47B had a maiden 29-minute flight over land in
February. A larger drone is the Global Hawk, which is used for
keeping an eye on North Korea's nuclear weapons activities. In
March, the Pentagon sent a Global Hawk over the stricken Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan to assess the damage.

A Tsunami of Data

The future world of drones is here inside the Air Force headquarters
at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Va., where hundreds of flat-screen TVs
hang from industrial metal skeletons in a cavernous room, a scene
vaguely reminiscent of a rave club. In fact, this is one of the most
sensitive installations for processing, exploiting and disseminating
a tsunami of information from a global network of flying sensors.

The numbers are overwhelming: Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the hours
the Air Force devotes to flying missions for intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance have gone up 3,100 percent, most of
that from increased operations of drones. Every day, the Air Force
must process almost 1,500 hours of full-motion video and another
1,500 still images, much of it from Predators and Reapers on
around-the-clock combat air patrols.

The pressures on humans will only increase as the military moves
from the limited "soda straw" views of today's sensors to new
"Gorgon Stare" technology that can capture live video of an entire
city--but that requires 2,000 analysts to process the data feeds
from a single drone, compared with 19 analysts per drone today.

At Wright-Patterson, Maj. Michael L. Anderson, a doctoral student at
the base's advanced navigation technology center, is focused on
another part of the future: building wings for a drone that might
replicate the flight of the hawk moth, known for its hovering
skills. "It's impressive what they can do," Major Anderson said,
"compared to what our clumsy aircraft can do."
_______________________________________________
tt mailing list
tt at postbiota.org
http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list