Tag: drones

Sumerian Anti-Armageddon Device 4,000 Years Older Than Believed

Drone mappers identified a 19 kilometer (12-mile) long canal in rural Iraq. Built over it, archaeologists excavated what was at first thought to be a bizarre-shaped temple. However, it turns out that ,4,000-years-ago, ancient Sumerians built “a one-of-a-kind anti-drought machine.”

Located near the modern city of Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq, the ancient city of Girsu was occupied by the Sumerian civilization from the 3rd millennium BC. Dedicated to the war and agriculture god Ningirsu, artifacts recovered from the site have illustrated both the religious and political history of early Mesopotamian society.

A recent dig by the British Museum at Girsu revealed “a mysterious structure,” which in the 1920s was interpreted as an unusually shaped temple. However, members of the  museum’s Girsu Project have now announced that the curious discovery was a 4,000-year-old “innovative civilization-saving machine.”

The British Museum describe the ancient lifesaving device as a “flume” that was used to deliver water to distant locations for agriculture. Ebru Torun, an architect and conservationist working with the British Museum archeologists in Iraq, said “no other example of it exists in history, really, until the present day. It’s absolutely one-of-a-kind.”

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Secret Pentagon Investigation Found No One at Fault in Drone Strike That Killed Woman and 4-Year-Old

MARIAM SHILOW MUSE was born in the springtime. When relatives dropped by, the bright-eyed 4-year-old bolted through the yard and beyond the fence to greet them. When her father came home, she smothered him with hugs.

In late March 2018, Mariam’s mother, 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed, planned to visit her brother to see his children for the first time, and Mariam insisted on coming along to meet her young cousins. Luul’s brother had planned to pick them up, but Luul couldn’t reach him by phone, so on the morning of April 1, she and Mariam caught a ride with some men in a maroon Toyota Hilux pickup.

That same afternoon, as Luul’s brother Qasim Dahir Mohamed was on his way to pick up his sister and niece, he passed the maroon Toyota pickup. He noticed mattresses and pillows in the bed and, at the last second, caught sight of Luul, with Mariam on her lap, in the passenger seat. He waved and honked, but the truck kept going. 

Qasim’s phone wasn’t working, so he decided to drive on to El Buur, where Luul and Mariam had just spent the night, to see other relatives before returning home to welcome his sister and niece. Seconds after he reached the house, Qasim heard the first explosion, followed by another and, after a pause, one more blast.

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Secret Skunk Works Spy Drone Delivered To Air Force

We have explored the possibilities related to the existence of a high-altitude, long-endurance stealth drone, the so-called ‘RQ-180,’ and how it’s likely poised to eclipse the crewed U-2S Dragon Lady and uncrewed RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance platforms and become one of the most important military aircraft of a generation. Now, there are intriguing indications that a complementary platform or perhaps even a successor to the RQ-180 is not only being developed by Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works, but that this even more advanced spy drone has already been delivered.

These potential revelations come from the latest episode of the Defense & Aerospace Air Power Podcast, hosted by editor-in-chief Vago Muradian, joined by regular guest J.J. Gertler, director of The Defense Concepts Organization and senior analyst at the Teal Group. For the time being, we have no kind of confirmation about these statements, but they are certainly highly interesting, considering what we do know about related programs and emerging requirements.

Speaking about the mysterious new spy drone from the Skunk Works, Muradian explains this is a “much more capable reconnaissance aircraft” than the RQ-180 and that “there are articles that have already been delivered,” although no indication of how many or at what stage the program is at.

Muradian adds that “there have been challenges with that program [and] some speculation that it had been canceled.” He continues: “My understanding is that the program was re-scoped because it is that ambitious a capability that [it] required a little bit of re-scoping in order to be able to get to the next block of aircraft.”

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Pentagon Belatedly Reveals Two Dozen US Personnel Were Wounded In Spate Of Drone Attacks In Iraq, Syria

The Pentagon revealed in a late Tuesday statement that in just the past week, US and coalition forces have been attacked at least ten times in Iraq, as well as three times in Syria “via a mix of one way attack drones and rockets,” according to Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, speaking to NBC.

But the real bombshell development, which Biden’s defense officials have apparently sat on for several days, is that some 24 US personnel were wounded in the attacks. According to the NBC statement:

Two dozen American military personnel were wounded last week in a series of drone attacks at American bases in Iraq and Syria, U.S. Central Command told NBC News on Tuesday.

The Pentagon confirmed the attacks last week, but the number of U.S. casualties has not been previously disclosed.

“Twenty American personnel sustained minor injuries on Oct. 18 when at least two one-way attack drones targeted al-Tanf military base in southern Syria, CENTCOM said,” the report continues. 

It appears all the injuries were deemed minor, given Gen. Ryder described that all personnel returned to duty after being evaluated and threated, and there was no significant damage to base installations. However, in Iraq, “The U.S. shot down the one-way attack drones, but the debris from one destroyed a hanger that contained small aircraft, CENTCOM said.”

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Should Governments Need a Warrant To Spy on You With a Drone?

A Michigan township sued a local family over a minor zoning violation, but the case could determine whether governments can spy on citizens without warrants. Today, the Michigan Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on the case.

Todd and Heather Maxon live in Long Lake Township, on five acres of land with two garages. Todd likes to work on cars, so he keeps some on the property. In 2008, the township sued, accusing them of storing “junk,” a zoning violation. In exchange for dropping the charges, the couple agreed not to expand their collection. Neighbors later complained that the Maxons had indeed acquired more cars, but the collection was not visible from the road.

Instead of getting a warrant—or, since nothing was visible from the road, dropping the issue altogether—the township hired a private drone company to fly over the property and take pictures several times between 2010 and 2018. Citing the pictures, the township sued the Maxons for violating the agreement.

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Little Radar-Toting Robotic Gun Vehicle Aims To Protect Squads From Drones

Atrio of international defense contractors have teamed up to offer a new lower-tier counter-drone system that consists of a turreted infantry rifle with a computerized “smart sight,” a small radar array, and a six-wheeled uncrewed ground vehicle. The resulting combination could potentially be employed against other threats beyond drones and would also offer units on the ground valuable surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

Smart Shooter, headquartered in Israel, collaborated with Leonardo DRS, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Italy’s Leonardo, and American firm HDT Global to develop this system, seen in the picture at the top of this story. It is set to make its public debut at the Association of the U.S. Army’s main annual conference that opens in Washington, D.C. next week.

The weapon component of the system comes from Smart Shooter. It consists of the company’s Smash Hopper remote-controlled turret armed with a standard infantry rifle equipped with a Smash 2000-series computerized optic.

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Artificial Intelligence Goes to War

Uh… gulp… you thought it was bad when that experienced pilot ejected from one of the Air Force’s hottest “new” planes, the F-35 combat fighter, near — no, not China or somewhere in the Middle East — but Charleston, South Carolina. The plane then flew on its own for another 60 miles before crashing into an empty field. And that was without an enemy in sight.

Perhaps we should just be happy that an F-35 ever even made it into the air, given its endless problems in these years. After all, as Dan Grazier of the Center for Defense Information wrote, it’s now “the largest and most expensive weapons program in history.” Yet when it comes to something as significant as “mission availability,” according to the Congressional Budget Office, only about 26% of all F-35s, each of which now costs an estimated $80 million to produce and $44,000 an hour to fly, are available at any moment. Not exactly thrilling, all in all.

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22 Years of Drone Warfare and No End in Sight

In a June 2012 piece headlined “Praying at the Church of St. Drone,” I wrote, “Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.” At that time, President Barack Obama was overseeing what came to be known as “terror Tuesday” weekly meetings in the White House Situation Room with more than 100 national security types, some by “secure video teleconference,” gathering to discuss global assassination targets in America’s never-ending war on terror.

Unlike once upon a time, however, the “assassins” to be dispatched were no longer human, but “unmanned aerial aircraft,” or drones. And they struck across significant parts of the planet, sometimes killing al-Qaeda figures, but all too often, civilians and even children. Drone operators were, in fact, allowed to kill based on nothing more than what was called “patterns of suspicious behavior” and their planes were “roughly thirty times more likely to result in a civilian fatality than an airstrike by a manned aircraft.”

As I wrote then:

“In the [New York] Times telling, the organization of robotic killing had become the administration’s idée fixe, a kind of cult of death within the Oval Office, with those involved in it being so many religious devotees. Of course, thought about another way, that ‘terror Tuesday’ scene might not be from a monastery or a church synod, but from a Mafia council directly out of a Mario Puzo novel, with the president as the Godfather, designating ‘hits’ in a rough-and-tumble world.

“How far we’ve come in just two presidencies!  Assassination as a way of life has been institutionalized in the Oval Office, thoroughly normalized, and is now being offered to the rest of us as a reasonable solution to American global problems and an issue on which to run a presidential campaign.”

Yes, foreign assassination attempts were hardly unknown in previous American history, but they were usually left to the CIA and there was nothing machine-like about them. In this century, it’s been different indeed, whether the targets were unknown figures considered suspicious (from an automated distance) or, as in the case of Donald Trump, whose administration upped such strikes, all too well known, as with the drone assassination of Major General Qassem Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force, on his arrival at Baghdad International Airport on a visit to Iraq.

As Maha Hilal, author of Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11, reports today, President Biden has, after a fashion, reined in the Trumpian version of drone assassination, but he, like the three presidents before him, still remains America’s assassin-in-chief.  With that in mind, consider what such a world looks like to those potentially on the other side of a drone’s missiles.

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New York Police to Use Drones to Monitor Backyard Labor Day Parties

New York police will use drones to monitor backyard Labor Day parties this weekend.

Kaz Daughtry, the assistant NYPD Commissioner made the announcement during a security briefing on J’ouvert, an annual Caribbean festival.

Daughtry’s plan to use police drones to monitor backyard barbecues got immediate backlash from civil liberties groups.

Why a Veteran-Owned Freeze-Dried Beef Company Unabashedly Embraces an America First Worldview

“It’s a troubling announcement and it flies in the face of the POST Act,” said Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, referring to a 2020 city law that requires the NYPD to disclose its surveillance tactics, according to AP. “Deploying drones in this way is a sci-fi inspired scenario.”

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USAF Conducts First-AI Flight With Stealth Drone

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) completed the first-ever flight of an AFRL-developed stealth drone powered by artificial intelligence software.

On July 25, the machine-learning-trained, artificial intelligence-powered XQ-58A Valkyrie flew a three-hour sortie at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base.

“The mission proved out a multi-layer safety framework on an AI/ML-flown uncrewed aircraft and demonstrated an AI/ML agent solving a tactically relevant “challenge problem” during airborne operations,” said Col. Tucker Hamilton, chief, of AI Test and Operations, for the Department of the USAF.

Hamilton continued, “This sortie officially enables the ability to develop AI/ML agents that will execute modern air-to-air and air-to-surface skills that are immediately transferrable to other autonomy programs.”

Eglin has become the testing ground for advanced autonomous systems within the USAF. Last November, the service received two Valkyrie stealth drones assigned to the 40th Flight Test Squadron.

In past press releases, AFRL describes the Valkyrie as a “high-speed, long-range, low-cost unmanned platform designed to offer maximum utility at minimum cost.”

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