Tag: drones

Actually, Hordes of Highly Sophisticated Unidentified Aircraft Have Been Flying Over U.S. Territory

Things are starting to get really strange.  First, a “Chinese spy balloon” was shot down off the coast of South Carolina after it had traveled across much of the continental United States.  Then, another “unidentified object” was shot down over Alaska.  Subsequently, at the request of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a third “unidentified object” was shot down over Canada.  And now we have just learned that a fourth “unidentified object” has been shot down over Lake Huron.  In addition, a congressman from Montana is reporting that there is an “unidentified object” flying over his state.  On top of everything else, China is telling us that an “unidentified object” has been flying near the Chinese port city of Qingdao.

All of a sudden, these sightings have become the biggest news story in the entire country, and I think that it is likely that there will be even more sightings in the days ahead.

But let’s put all of this into perspective.

The only reason why most people are freaking out about this story is because the mainstream media is freaking out about this story. If the mainstream media was ignoring this story, they would also be ignoring this story.

We have been trained to believe that a story is important only when the mainstream media tells us that it is important.

If millions of Americans want to get excited about some balloons, that is fine. I will get excited with them. But the truth is that hordes of highly sophisticated unidentified aircraft have been flying over U.S. territory for years.

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US Pentagon is developing a new ‘weapon of mass destruction’: Thousands of drones will work together to destroy enemy defenses – but experts fear humans will lose control of the ‘swarms’

The US Pentagon is planning a new ‘weapon of mass destruction’ that involves thousands of drones that strike by air, land and water to destroy enemy defenses – but experts fear humans could lose control of the ‘swarms.’

The top-secret project, dubbed AMASS (Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms), would represent automated warfare on an unprecedented scale.

AMASS is still in the planning stages, but DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) has been collecting bids from suppliers for the $78 million contract.

Small drones would be equipped with weapons and tools for navigation and communication, along with abilities ranging from radar jamming to launching lethal attacks.

While the technology would change how the US goes to war, experts in the industry raise concerns.

Zachary Kallenborn, a policy fellow at George Mason University in Virginia, said: ‘As the swarm grows in size, it’ll become virtually impossible for humans to manage the decisions.’

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Ukrainian Forces Using Drone-Dropped Chemical Weapons in Donbass, DPR Chief Says

Donbass People’s Militias and Russia’s regular Army began finding evidence of suspected Ukrainian preparations to employ chemical weapons last spring. Kiev and its Western sponsors have issued counterclaims, accusing Russia of using or preparing to use its non-existent chemical weapons stocks.

Ukrainian forces have resorted to the use of chemical weapons in the Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) and Ugledar directions on the front line in the Donbass, Donetsk People’s Republic head Denis Pushilin has announced.

“According to the statements of our forces, and commanders who came forward with such information, there are facts of the use of chemical compounds causing sickness among our servicemen not only in the Artyomovsk direction, but also in the Ugledar direction,” Pushilin said in an interview with Russian media on Monday.

Pushilin said he has been receiving such reports for at least three weeks now. “They are dropping [chemical weapons] from drones on the locations of our forces,” the DPR head clarified.

Earlier in the day, Yan Gagin, an advisor to Pushilin, similarly told Russian media about the employment of chemical agents by the Ukrainian side, and said the agents being used were causing severe dizziness, nausea, and vomiting among some fighters.

Gagin indicated that chemical weapons have been used by the Ukrainian side for some time now, with attacks happening “along the entire front line as substances causing nausea, choking and coughing,” and the chemicals being “sprayed from special containers installed on drones.”

According to the World Health Organization, symptoms like dizziness, nausea, and coughing may be signs of exposure to potentially deadly nerve agents.

The official said some Ukrainian troops have been openly boasting of their possession of these illegal weapons online, posting videos of specially-designed drones and imported gas grenades on social media. Gagin urged for information about the use of these illegal weapons to be systematically gathered and sent to the United Nations.

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Death From Above: Drones Are Changing the Landscape of War

On the third floor of an abandoned factory in Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, 39-year-old “Rem” struggles to light a cigarette while holding the remote control of his Chinese-made drone. He swears. Several feet behind him, clad in a bulletproof vest and helmet, a soldier known as “Duke” is surveying a map of the eastern approach to the city on his tablet. A dozen Russian positions have been marked with red crosses, bearing such evocative names as “mattress,” “putin,” and “machine gun.”

The ping of a notification coming from Duke’s phone finally breaks the silence. “Fire,” says Duke in Ukrainian, staring intently at the screen of his tablet. A loud bang rattles the walls and windows, followed by a whizzing sound rapidly rising above the building, getting fainter, and then stopping. A couple of seconds later, the live feed from the drone’s camera shows the shell landing right on a Russian position. “That’s perfect,” exclaims Rem, also in Ukrainian. “Exactly where we needed it.” The two men rejoice. Thanks to their store-bought DJI Matrice drone, the accurate fire from a Polish-made Krab self-propelled howitzer has silenced a Russian automatic grenade launcher.

Both from the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro, Rem and Duke have been serving in the Skala intelligence battalion since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Created and led by Iurii Skala, a veteran of the Donbas war, this battalion is made up of mostly inexperienced volunteers like Rem, who was a car dealer prior to the invasion. 

For three weeks, he and Duke have been surveying enemy movements and directing artillery fire from their position, somewhere in the center of Bakhmut. This small salt-mining town of roughly 70,000 inhabitants has been devastated by months of shelling and gruesome trench warfare that has prompted comparisons to the First World War and the battles of Verdun or Passchendaele. But even as exhausted soldiers shoot at the enemy from mud-filled trenches and men perish by the dozens every day from unending artillery fire, the ever-growing use of drones has revolutionized the nature of the fighting in Bakhmut — and in Ukraine at large.

In the basement of a residential building located a few blocks from their position, a portly officer is bent over a table, listening intently to a walkie-talkie. Facing him is a flat screen television that transmits live footage from a drone circling above the city. The air is thick with anticipation. When word of a successful strike finally comes through, the officer triumphantly throws his fist in the air before slumping back in his chair. “Now we can move easily,” he says, grinning. Guided by one of the Skala battalion’s drones, artillery fire has silenced a Russian position.

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Russia Says It Shot Down a UFO

Amystery object described by one local news outlet as a “UFO” has been shot down in the southern Russian region of Rostov.

Vasily Golubev, the governor of Rostov oblast, wrote on Telegram that a “small-size object in the shape of a ball” had been discovered flying “in the wind” at an altitude of around one and a half miles on January 3. With the object spotted above the village of Sultan Sala in the region’s Myasnikovsky district, Golubev said “the decision was taken to liquidate it.”

“I urge everyone to remain calm. To ensure security, all forces and means are involved. The sky is covered with anti-aircraft defenses,” he added, without specifying what the object was.

In reporting his comments, local news outlet Pivyet Rostov carried a headline that said “a UFO in the form of a ball was shot down in the sky.”

Telegram channels that night described how air defense systems in Rostov had been operating. The channel Ostorozhna, Novosti (Caution, News) published a video showing a shining object flying and then exploding in the sky.

“Look, another one has gone,” someone is heard saying in the clip, which was captioned, “another video of the work of Rostov regional air defenses.” A witness told the channel how “there was a very strong explosion” and that “everything in the house shook. We realized that the air defenses were in operation.”

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Drone advances in Ukraine could bring dawn of killer robots

Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.

The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers.

That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven. But there are no confirmed instances of a nation putting into combat robots that have killed entirely on their own.

Experts say it may be only a matter of time before either Russia or Ukraine, or both, deploy them.

“Many states are developing this technology,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a George Mason University weapons innovation analyst. ”Clearly, it’s not all that difficult.”

The sense of inevitability extends to activists, who have tried for years to ban killer drones but now believe they must settle for trying to restrict the weapons’ offensive use.

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NATO Chief Voices Fear Of War With Russia While US Greenlights Drone Strikes On Russian Territory

In what Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp describes as “a rare acknowledgment of the dangers of backing Ukraine,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg acknowledged a fear of something going “horribly wrong” and leading to a hot war between the nuclear-armed alliance and Russia.

In an article titled “‘I fear a full-blown war between the West and Russia’, Nato chief warns,” The Telegraph writes the following:

“I fear that the war in Ukraine will get out of control, and spread into a major war between Nato and Russia,” said Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, responding to a question about his greatest fears for the winter in an interview.

He told Norwegian broadcaster NRK on Friday that he was confident such a scenario could be avoided but that the threat was there.

“If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” he added.

And things absolutely can go horribly wrong when dealing with an increasingly aggressive standoff between nuclear superpowers, as we have seen from history. The last cold war saw many nuclear close calls as a result of technical malfunctions and misunderstandings, including an incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the only thing which prevented a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine from deploying its weapon on the US military was one officer refusing to go along with two others who were giving the orders to fire.

We got a taste of this horror once again last month in the long minutes following erroneous reports that Russia had launched missiles at NATO member Poland. The fact that cooler heads have prevailed up until this point does not mean that nuclear brinkmanship is safe, anymore than a game of Russian roulette not ending after the first couple of trigger pulls would mean that Russian roulette is safe to play.

So Stoltenberg is correct to be afraid. There absolutely are too many things that can go horribly wrong in such a standoff, and there are simply too many unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that this will not happen.

And it’s pretty crazy to hear Stoltenberg voice these concerns even while the Pentagon gives the go-ahead for Ukraine to begin launching long-range attacks on targets inside Russia in its war that is being backed by the United States, because those two positions would seem to be pretty strongly at odds with each other.

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Senators Press Pentagon To Give Ukraine Advanced Drones

A group of bipartisan senators is urging the Biden administration to provide Ukraine with advanced MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones that would give Kyiv longer-range capability.

The Biden administration has been hesitant to send the drones due to the risk of escalation with Russia and concerns that the sensitive technology in the drones could end up in the wrong hands.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Biden administration has decided not to provide the drones, although other reporting disputed that claim and said a final decision hadn’t been made.

In a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, 16 senators expressed “concern” over the reports that said the administration has declined to send the MQ-1C. The senators asked the administration to give “careful reconsideration” to the Ukrainian request.

The letter was led by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) and was signed by many members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including ranking member James Inhofe (R-OK).

The senators said the MQ-1C and other long-range capabilities would provide “Ukraine additional lethality needed to eject Russian forces and regain occupied territory.”

Providing MQ-1Cs would be a major escalation in US military aid to Kyiv as the drones can be armed with powerful hellfire missiles and can fly for up to 30 hours. The drones would give Ukraine the capability to strike targets inside Russian territory.

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Killing By Drone: Hunting Enemies In Urban Combat

A new drone from Israel’s Elbit Systems called Lanius combines a number of technologies that put it at the forefront of how drones are transforming war.

At the same time, reports about the drone may raise questions about how this technology may make war more controversial as “robots” play a larger role in it.

The more armies and defense companies invest in new technology that enables combat to take place remotely — without soldiers interacting with civilians, for instance — the more it seems like “robot wars.”

Elbit Systems has said that Lanius is “part of the Legion-X robotic and autonomous combat solution.” Elbit is one of Israel’s three largest defense companies and is at the forefront of defense technology.

Its website says the drone “is a highly maneuverable and versatile drone-based loitering munition designed for short-range operation in the urban environment.”

The drone can scout and map buildings, flying around small corridors and through doorways. This means it can help a user find “points of interest for possible threats, detecting, classifying and syncing to Elbit Systems’ Legion-X solutions. Lanius can carry lethal or non-lethal payloads, capable of performing a broad spectrum of mission profiles for special forces, military, law enforcement, and HLS.”

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Kiev slated to receive drone-killing VAMPIREs

Ukraine is expected to soon receive a number of so-called VAMPIRE counter-drone systems, according to Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder, who confirmed Washington’s commitment to supply Kiev with air defense capabilities. The statement came amid Russia’s continued strikes targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. 

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Ryder said the US government has yet to secure a contract for the laser-guided missile launchers but expects one to be reached within the next few months. “Right now we’re anticipating delivery to be mid-2023,” he explained, noting that “air defense continues to be a priority.”  

The VAMPIRE, or Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment, can be installed on the cargo bed of almost any civilian truck and uses laser-guided munitions capable of hitting both ground and airborne targets, including unmanned aerial vehicles. Although it is not explicitly advertised as an anti-drone weapon, systems similar to the VAMPIRE have been used extensively in Ukraine for that purpose.   

These systems are part of a $3 billion arms package for Ukraine announced by the Pentagon back in August. This also includes the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, or NASAMS, which Washington also says will be arriving in Ukraine “in the very near future.” 

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