X-47B Drone Gets Upgrade

The U.S. Navy has quietly added a capability to its future carrier-launched unmanned warplane that has the potential to tilt the Pacific balance of power. On November 2, the Navy announced it would add equipment and software for aerial refueling to one of its two in-development X-47B armed drones built by Northrop Grumman.
The change could extend, by thousands of miles, the useful striking range of the Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, starting in around seven years’ time. That could put them beyond the effective range of the fast attack vessels, diesel-powered submarines and anti-ship ballistic missiles that China is developing in order to create a defensive perimeter around the Western Pacific.


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'Too Many Screens': Why Drones Are So Hard To Fly - And So Easy To Crash

LAS VEGAS: The US military depends on drones. But amidst the justifiable excitement over the rise of the robots, it's easy to overlook that today's unmanned systems are not truly autonomous but rather require a lot of human guidance by remote control -- and bad design often makes the human's job needlessly awkward, to the point of causing crashes. Fixing that is the next big challenge for the unmanned industry.

"Too many screens with too much information, folks" -- that's the bottom line, said Col. John Dougherty, a Predator operations commander with the North Dakota National Guard, speaking at a workshop on the first day of 2012 conference of the Association for Unmanned Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) here in Vegas. "I am tired of all these black panels all over the place," Dougherty went on, urging designers to "de-clutter for sanity." But instead, he lamented, "they keep strapping the stuff on," adding more and more sub-systems each with its own unique and user-unfriendly display.




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A new nanodrone developed in the UK

BCB's SQ-4 Recon.

LONDON (PTI): A new 'nanodrone' weighing just 198 grammes, one of the smallest unmanned aerial vehicles in the world, has been devised in the UK and is currently being examined by the US military to take on the Taliban.

It fits in the palm of a hand could become a potent new weapon for the forces in the fight against the Taliban.

Military chiefs believe the spy drone called the SQ-4 Recon, worth 20,000 pounds and one of the smallest unmanned aerial vehicles in the world, will save soldiers' lives in Afghanistan.



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How Drones Changed the Game in Pakistan

Regardless of what the news agencies in Pakistan claim about the negative effects of drone strikes, the weapon is proving to be a game changer for the U.S. war on terrorism. And surprisingly, the Pakistani Army quietly admits to this fact. Just the way Stinger missiles shifted the balance of power in favor of the United States in the 1980s, drones are producing the same results.
The critics of unmanned strikes, who claim that drones are contributing to growing radicalization in Pakistan, haven’t looked around enough—or they would realize that much of the radicalization already was established by the Taliban in the 1990s. The real tragedy is that it is acceptable for the Taliban to radicalize and kill, but it is considered a breach of sovereignty for the United States, in pursuit of those radicalizing Pakistan’s people, to do the same.


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Drone race will ultimately lead to a sanitised factory of slaughter

A US air force pilot controls a Predator drone from the command centre in Kandahar. Photograph: David Bathgate/Corbis

The CIA has killed more than 200 children in drone strikes outside of legitimate war zones since 2004, it is alleged. In Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia an estimated total of between 451 and 1,035 civilians were killed in at least 373 strikes according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the most accurate source of "kill statistics".
Who in their right mind would give a powerful unmanned air force to a covert organisation with such a track record for unaccountable and illegal killing? The number of strikes in Pakistan has dramatically increased from 52 under George W Bush during his five years of conflict to 282 during Obama's three and a half-year watch. Obama is establishing a dangerous precedent that is, at best, legally questionable in a world where more than 50 countries are acquiring the technology.


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Drone warfare: a new generation of deadly unmanned weapons

The base's burgeoning fleet is enabling the Obama administration to track Islamist radicals in Afghanistanm Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Photograph: Getty Images

The electronic cavern is dark, save for the glow of consoles, and Lt Col Mike Weaver surveys his apprentice warriors with satisfaction as they project American might halfway around the world. One crew – two young men in flight suits seated before half a dozen screens – prepares to fire missiles from a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) at a boatload of suspected insurgents in Afghanistan. Another crew circles a suspicious bulge by a roadside in Iraq and feeds co-ordinates to ground troops. Another tracks what appears to be a vehicle in Yemen.


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The philosopher making the moral case for US drones: 'There's no downside'

Bradley Strawser: 'We need to shift the burden of the argument to the other side. The positive reasons are overwhelming at this point.' Photograph: Rory Carroll

At first sight, Bradley Strawser resembles a humanities professor from central casting. He has a beard, wears jeans, quotes Augustine and calls himself, only half in jest, a hippie. He opposes capital punishment and Guantánamo Bay, calls the Iraq invasion unjust and scorns neo-conservative foreign policy hawks. "Whatever a neocon is, I'm the opposite."
His office overlooks a placid campus in Monterey, an oasis of California sun and Pacific zephyrs, and he lives up the road in Carmel, a forested beauty spot with an arts colony aura. Strawser has published works on metaphysics and Plato and is especially fond of Immanuel Kant.

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U.S. Allies Have Intense Interest In Military Drones

The U.S. military's Predator unmanned aircraft, made by General Atomics, has been one of the stars of the Afghanistan war.

America's allies are extremely interested in buying U.S.-made military drone aircraft, positioning American firms well for an expected explosion of unmanned plane sales.
In his global travels, Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro says he detects "an intense interest" among U.S. allies to purchase military drones.
Shapiro was measured in his description of how the State Department and other agencies will handle other nations' request to buy U.S. drones.


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Russia Is Stockpiling Drones to Spy on Street Protests

A Zala 421-06, a drone that can fly for 90 minutes at 6,500 feet above sea level. Photo by Wikimedia Commons.

Small surveillance drones are starting to be part of police departments across America, and the FAA will soon open up the airspace for more to come. This drone invasion has already raised all kinds of privacy concerns. And if you think that’s bad, across the ocean, Russia seems hell-bent on outdoing its former Cold War enemy.
Russia’s leading manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicles, Zala Aero, has provided the Russian government with more than 70 unmanned systems, each containing several aircraft. According to an article published yesterday on Open Democracy Russia, the Kremlin’s romance with drones started in 2006, when the Interior Ministry deployed a Zala 421-04M to monitor street protests at a G8 summit in St. Petersburg. The Russian government has also bought drones from Israel.


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Drone strike casualty tally questioned

Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic is calling into question the tally of drone strike casualties in Pakistan done by the  New America Foundation’s National Security Studies Program — a tally used by plenty of publications and agencies to include CNN.
Friedersdorf takes aim at the program’s estimation that zero civilians have been killed in drone strikes in 2012 saying the statistic is misleading Americans about the repercussions of the drone war being waged by the U.S. in Pakistan.
The New America Foundation uses media reports of drone strikes in Pakistan done by international publications to include ones based in Pakistan to populate its database of resulting casualties. Peter Bergen, director of the National Security Studies Program, breaks casualties into two groups the same way the U.S. military and CIA does: militants and civilians.

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