Tag: drones

So They’re Experimenting With Military Robots In Gaza Now

One of the most horrifying facts about this dystopia we live in is that large-scale military operations are routinely used as testing grounds for new war machinery, using human bodies as guinea pigs for experimentation in what amount to giant blood-soaked field laboratories — all to benefit the strategic objectives of empire managers and the profit margins of the military-industrial complex.

Haaretz has a new article out titled “Gaza Becomes Israel’s Testing Ground for Military Robots”, which reports that “In an effort to avoid harming soldiers and dogs, the IDF has been experimenting with the use of robots and remote-controlled dogs in the Gaza War.”

(Yeah because my gosh, can you imagine how terrible it would be if Israeli soldiers and dogs got harmed while carrying out a genocide?)

The article’s author Sagi Cohen reports that drone-mounted robot dogs and remotely controlled bulldozers are two of the new apocalyptic horrors currently being battle-tested in Gaza, saying “defense establishment officials confirm that there has been a leap in the use and sophistication of robots on the battlefield.” Which is a pretty disconcerting sentence to read.

This news comes out at the same time as a new Public Citizen report warning of the likely imminent arrival of autonomous weapons systems which will kill people with minimal instruction from human pilots, saying “The most serious worry involving autonomous weapons is that they inherently dehumanize the people targeted and make it easier to tolerate widespread killing, including in violation of international human rights law.” 

The more normalized robots become within the world’s militaries the closer we come to this point, and steps are already being taken in that direction. As Common Dreams’ Thor Benson notes in an article about the Public Citizen report, “Israel has purchased and at times deployed self-piloting, lethal drones.”

Back in January I wrote that “Gaza is a live laboratory for the military industrial complex,” saying “Data is with absolute certainty being collected on all the newer weapons being field-tested on human bodies in Gaza (just like has been happening in Ukraine) to be used to benefit the war machine and arms industry.”

What sparked this comment at the time was reports and first-hand witness accounts we’d seen coming out about the prolific use of IDF “sniper drones” in Gaza since October, with Israeli forces frequently shooting Palestinians with quad drones armed with rifles. Copious records are most assuredly being compiled on the effectiveness of these newer weapons and tactics in ending human lives, which will then be used to help market those weapons to other states and to improve their efficiency in killing.

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Strange ‘Flying Saucer’ Filmed by Reconnaissance Drone in Ukraine

A group of Ukrainian soldiers were left scratching their heads when their reconnaissance drone spotted a sizeable saucer-shaped object hovering in the sky. The peculiar UFO sighting reportedly occurred earlier this month as the country’s 406th Battalion was using a thermal-imaging UAV to keep an eye out for Russian adversaries. The exercise took a strange turn, however, when the drone caught sight of a cylindrical craft off in the distance.

The weird anomaly understandably sparked a spirited debate among the soldiers operating the UAV with one of the men wondering what the object could be and why it was not moving. As the group observed the object, one of the soldiers marveled that it was a UFO, while another expressed confusion over the fact that the sizeable object was not firing on the drone. Although they attempted to get a closer look at the oddity by zooming in on it, this provided little clarity as it simply resembled a floating disc.

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Everything New We Just Learned About The Collaborative Combat Aircraft Program

Major new details about the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program emerged at the Air & Space Forces Association’s recent annual Warfare Symposium. This includes a clearer picture of the effort’s autonomy goals, aggressive production plans, and future operational impacts. Though questions remain about the capabilities and costs of these future uncrewed aircraft, the CCA program looks set to have a number of disruptive impacts that could fundamentally reshape the Air Force.

As it stands now, the Air Force is planning to acquire at least 1,000 Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones, and potentially more, as part of an initial tranche known currently as Increment One. Five companies – Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Anduril – are currently working on Increment One air vehicle designs. Dozens of additional firms are supporting the program through the development of autonomous technologies, sensors and other mission systems, command and control capabilities, and more. A down-select on the air vehicle side of the first increment, from the initial five contractors down to two or three, is expected later this year. The goal is to have a CCA design actually in production by 2028.

Increment One CCAs are expected, at least initially, to operate very closely with stealthy crewed combat jets, including a new sixth-generation design now under development as part of the Air Force’s larger Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) initiative, as well as certain F-35As. CCAs could be partnered with other crewed aircraft and operate more independently, in the future.

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Swarms of AI “killer robots” are the future of war: If that sounds scary, it should

Yes, it’s already time to be worried — very worried. As the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shown, the earliest drone equivalents of “killer robots” have made it onto the battlefield and proved to be devastating weapons. But at least they remain largely under human control. Imagine, for a moment, a world of war in which those aerial drones (or their ground and sea equivalents) controlled us, rather than vice versa. Then we would be on a destructively different planet in a fashion that might seem almost unimaginable today. Sadly, though, it’s anything but unimaginable, given the work on artificial intelligence and robot weaponry that the major powers have already begun. Now, let me take you into that arcane world and try to envision what the future of warfare might mean for the rest of us.

By combining AI with advanced robotics, the U.S. military and those of other advanced powers are already hard at work creating an array of self-guided “autonomous” weapons systems — combat drones that can employ lethal force independently of any human officers meant to command them. Called “killer robots” by critics, such devices include a variety of uncrewed or “unmanned” planes, tanks, ships and submarines capable of autonomous operation. The U.S. Air Force, for example, is developing its “collaborative combat aircraft,” an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, intended to join piloted aircraft on high-risk missions. The Army is similarly testing a variety of autonomous unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, while the Navy is experimenting with both unmanned surface vessels, or USVs and unmanned undersea vessels or drone submarines). China, Russia, Australia and Israel are also working on such weaponry for the battlefields of the future.

The imminent appearance of those killing machines has generated concern and controversy globally, with some countries already seeking a total ban on them and others, including the U.S., planning to authorize their use only under human-supervised conditions. In Geneva, a group of states has even sought to prohibit the deployment and use of fully autonomous weapons, citing a 1980 U.N. treaty, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, that aims to curb or outlaw non-nuclear munitions believed to be especially harmful to civilians. Meanwhile, in New York, the U.N. General Assembly held its first discussion of autonomous weapons last October and is planning a full-scale review of the topic this coming fall.

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US Drone Strike in Somalia May Have Killed Two Cuban Doctors

Al-Shabaab has said a February 15 US drone strike in southern Somalia that targeted the group killed two Cuban doctors who were being held hostage, an allegation Cuba is trying to confirm.

US Africa Command did not announce the strike but released a statement after the allegations about the two Cubans surfaced, saying it was assessing the strike. “The command will continue to assess the results of this operation and will provide additional information as available,” said AFRICOM spokeswoman Lennea Montandon.

The doctors, Dr. Landy Rodriguez Hernandez and Dr. Assel Herrera Correa, were kidnapped by al-Shabaab in Kenya back in 2019. Cuba’s Minister of Public Health José Ángel Portal Miranda said the Cuban government is in contact with their families and is looking to verify the claim.

The US frequently launches drone strikes against al-Shabaab in Somalia, but the war gets very little media coverage, and US operations are shrouded in secrecy. AFRICOM is also known for undercounting civilian casualties.

Earlier in the month, AFRICOM reported a drone strike that occurred on February 9 that it claims killed two al-Shabaab fighters. The command said the strike was launched in support of the US-backed Mogadishu-based government, which has been fighting a ground campaign against al-Shabaab.

The US is stepping up military aid for the Somali government and recently signed a deal to build five new military bases for the Danab Brigade, a special unit of the Somali army that’s armed and trained by the US. According to Task & Purpose, the project will cost over $100 million.

The US military hypes the threat of al-Shabaab due to its size and al-Qaeda affiliation, but it’s widely believed the group does not have ambitions outside of Somalia.

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DARPA’S NEW REMA PROGRAM IS TURNING ORDINARY DRONES INTO AUTONOMOUS KILLING MACHINES. KIND OF.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected the contractors for their Rapid Experimental Missionized Autonomy (REMA) program, which will practically turn ordinary commercial and military drones into autonomous killing machines.

By joining a program that was announced less than three months ago, the newly awarded partner companies will create a universal system that can equip existing drones with the capability to act autonomously and finish their mission even when the connection to their human operator has been lost.

“REMA is focused on creating autonomous solutions to maximize effectiveness of stock commercial and small military drones on the battlefield,” said Dr. Lael Rudd, REMA program manager when announcing the new awards. “Through creating an autonomy adapter that works with all commercial drones, regardless of manufacturer, and by developing mission-specific autonomy that is constantly refreshed and easy to upload prior to a mission, we aim to give drone operators the advantage in fast-paced combat operations.”

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FLASHBACK: Air Force research: How to use social media to control people like drones

Facebook isn’t the only organization conducting research into how attitudes are affected by social media. The Department of Defense has invested millions of dollars over the past few years investigating social media, social networks, and how information spreads across them. While Facebook and Cornell University researchers manipulated what individuals saw in their social media streams, military-funded research—including projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Social Media in Strategic Communications (SMISC) program—has looked primarily into how messages from influential members of social networks propagate.

One study, funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), has gone a step further. “A less investigated problem is once you’ve identified the network, how do you manipulate it toward an end,” said Warren Dixon, a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering and director of the University of Florida’s Nonlinear Controls and Robotics research group. Dixon was the principal investigator on an Air Force Research Laboratory-funded project, which published its findings in February in a paper entitled “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity.”

The research demonstrates that the mathematical principles used to control groups of autonomous robots can be applied to social networks in order to control human behavior. If properly calibrated, the mathematical models developed by Dixon and his fellow researchers could be used to sway the opinion of social networks toward a desired set of behaviors—perhaps in concert with some of the social media “effects” cyber-weaponry developed by the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ.

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Ukraine Using Thousands Of Networked Microphones To Track Russian Drones

Ukraine is using a network made up of thousands of acoustic sensors across the country to help detect and track incoming Russian kamikaze drones, alert traditional air defenses in advance, and also dispatch ad hoc drone hunting teams to shoot them down. This is according to the U.S. Air Force’s top officer in Europe who also said the U.S. military is now looking to test this capability to see if it might help meet its own demands for additional ways to persistently monitor for, and engag,e drone threats.

Gen. James Hecker, head of U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE), as well as Air Forces Africa (AFAFRICA) and NATO’s Allied Air Command, provided the details about Ukraine’s acoustic sensor network and related air and missile defense issues at a press roundtable that The War Zone and other outlets attended earlier today. This gathering took place on the sidelines of this year’s Air & Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium, which opened today.

“At the unclassified level, Ukraine’s done some pretty sophisticated things to get after [a] persistent ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance]” picture of “low altitude objects,” Hecker explained. This now includes an acoustic sensor system that makes use of microphones designed to pick up and amplify ambient noise, he added.

“Think if you have a series of sensors, think of your cell phone, okay, with power to it, so it doesn’t die, right? And then you put a microphone to kind of make the acoustics louder of one-way UAVs that are going overhead,” Hecker explained. “And you have … 6,000 of these things all over the country. They’ve been successful in being able to pick up the one-way UAVs like Shahed 136s and those kinds of things.”

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Pentagon Admits It Has No Evidence Iran Was Behind Drone Attack That Killed 3 US Troops in Jordan

The Pentagon on Monday said Iran “bears responsibility” for the drone attack in northeastern Jordan that killed three US troops but admitted it has no evidence that Iran was directly involved.

Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said the responsibility fell on Iran due to its support for Iraqi Shia militias the US believes carried out the attack.

“In terms of attribution for the attack, we know this is an [Iran]-backed militia. It has the footprints of Kataib Hezbollah, but [we’re] not making a final assessment,” Singh said at a press conference. “Iran continues to arm and equip these groups to launch these attacks, and we will certainly hold them responsible.”

When asked if the US knew Iran and Iranian leaders were “actually behind this attack, as in planned, coordinated, or directed it,” Singh admitted the US had nothing to show that.

“We know that Iran certainly plays a role with these groups, they arm and equip and fund these groups. I don’t have more to share on — terms of an intelligence assessment on if leaders in Iran were directing this attack,” she said.

Singh was again asked about the claim that Iran was behind the attack and said the US just knows that “Iran funds these groups” and had nothing more to add. Later in the press conference, she said Iran “bears responsibility” for the killing of three American soldiers.

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Preliminary report suggests enemy drone that killed US troops in Jordan was mistaken for a US drone

An enemy drone that killed three American troops and wounded dozens of others in Jordan may have been confused with an American drone returning to the U.S. installation, two U.S. officials said Monday.

The officials, who were not authorized to comment and insisted on anonymity, said preliminary accounts suggest the enemy drone that struck the installation known as Tower 22 may have been mistaken for an American drone that was in the air at the same time.

The officials said that as the enemy drone was flying in at a low altitude, a U.S. drone was returning to the base. As a result, there was no effort to shoot down the enemy drone.

The preliminary conclusion was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

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