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Tuesday, May 20, 2014

The Ultra-Lethal Drones Of The Future

The Ultra-Lethal Drones Of The Future

May 20, 2014 | Sharon Weinberger

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In 13 short years, killer drones have gone from being exotic military technology featured primarily in the pages of specialized aviation magazines to a phenomenon of popular culture, splashed across daily newspapers and fictionalized in film and television, including the new season of “24.”

What has not changed all that much — at least superficially — is the basic aircraft that most people associate with drone warfare: the armed Predator.

The Predator, with its distinctive bubble near the nose and sensor ball underneath, is the iconic image of drone warfare, an aircraft that grew out of 1980s work supported by the Pentagon’s future-thinking Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Originally developed to perform surveillance, the CIA added Hellfire missiles and began using the Predator to hunt down members of the Taliban and al Qaeda after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Though the CIA and Air Force now fly an updated version of the Predator — named Reaper — the drone is still relatively easy to detect, and easy to shoot down, at least for a country with a modern military.

In fact, as terrifying as drones sound, they actually aren’t all that sophisticated compared to other weapons in the US arsenal. The original Predator plodded along at a pokey 84 miles an hour.

Its missiles, though lethal, are decades-old technology developed to destroy tanks, not terrorists. And despite concerns about autonomous killing machines, the Predator must be operated by a pilot (albeit remotely). The Predator has proved effective, but it is not exactly the sci-fi miracle that many might imagine.

Under development, however, is a new generation of drones that will be able to penetrate the air defenses of even sophisticated nations, spotting nuclear facilities, and tracking down — and possibly killing — terrorist leaders, silently from high altitudes. These drones will be fast, stealthy and survivable, designed to sneak in and out of a country without ever being spotted.

In fact, the Predator may someday be to drone warfare what the V-2 was to long-range ballistic missiles: a crude, but important, first step in a new era of warfare.

The Past

1980 — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launches “Teal Rain,” a top-secret study on high altitude, long endurance unmanned aircraft.

1984 — DARPA contracts with Abe Karem to design a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) called “Amber.”

1990 — General Atomics buys Abe Karem’s company, Leading Systems. It sells Karem’s UAV, now called “Gnat,” to the CIA. In 1994, General Atomics is given contract to develop the Predator, a successor to the Gnat.

1990s — Pentagon secretly funds development of an unmanned successor to the SR-71 Blackbird (a stealth plane introduced in 1964 and famous in popular culture; it’s even used by the “X-Men”). Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed compete.

Modal Trigger

The Dark Star at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
Photo: US Air Force

1998 — Retirement of SR-71 Blackbird. The Pentagon pursues two new spy drones: the Global Hawk, a high-altitude surveillance drone, and the RQ-3 DarkStar, a stealthy spy drone, which crashes and is cancelled.

2001 — October 7: First armed Predator strike in Afghanistan. The CIA attempted to kill Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

2007 — General Atomics delivers the Reaper, an upgraded version of the Predator, to the Air Force. The Reaper can fly higher and faster than the Predator, and carries a variety of weapons.

2009 — A photographer in Kandahar, Afghanistan, captured an image of the stealth RQ-170 drone, which aviation watchers called the “Beast of Kandahar.” Its mission: slip past air defense radar into countries like Pakistan and Iran.

US officials soon leaked that RQ-170 had been used to keep tabs on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad in 2011. One RQ-170’s life was cut short, however, when it was captured by Iran later that year, possibly after Iran intercepted the signal used to control it. Last week, Iran claimed it had cloned the drone. It’s unclear how many RQ-170s exist.

The Future

After the retirement of the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, the military had an obvious gap in its arsenal.

In 2007, satellite pictures emerged showing new construction at Area 51, the Pentagon’s top-secret testing area in the Nevada desert. Veteran watchers of “black,” or secret, aircraft, immediately suspected that the Pentagon was preparing to test a new secret aircraft, and the most likely candidate was a stealth drone.

Now, two unmanned spy drones are under development. One that appears almost ready for combat is the RQ-180, a stealthy spy drone built by Northrop Grumman. Though the Pentagon refuses to confirm its existence, Aviation Week & Space Technology ran this artist’s concept earlier this year and revealed a little about its rumored design.

The RQ-180 is designed to fly very high, for a very long time (perhaps as long as 24 hours). According to Aviation Week, it has a 130-foot wing span and a “cranked kite” stealthy design that would allow it to slip past enemy radar. Chances are it will only be used for surveillance, not attack, though it could carry out an electronic attack.

Another, recently revealed project is a high-altitude drone being developed by Lockheed Martin that can travel up to six times of the speed of sound. The drone would be both a spy and strike aircraft, according to Lockheed. But the SR-72, as Lockheed is calling the twin-engine aircraft, wouldn’t be ready to fly until 2030.

What about a replacement for a Predator? The original Predator was essentially a surveillance aircraft that was turned into an armed drone, so any future replacement aircraft would likely look very different. The Pentagon has openly funded work on unmanned combat aircraft, including Northrop Grumman’s X-47, a diamond-shaped drone that can take off and land from aircraft carriers. But aerospace watchers have long presumed that these programs are hiding even more secretive work.

Part of the difficulty of deciphering the world of drones is that the Pentagon for over three decades has run a series of overlapping projects, often using unclassified programs as “covers” for more secret unmanned aircraft work.

Aviation Week, for example, says the RQ-180 was part of a secret, three-way contest that involved competing drones from Lockheed and Boeing. What happened to those other unmanned aircraft is unclear. Figuring out which are “real” drone project meant for deployment, and which are covers for secret drones, is a shell game.

Small & ubiquitous

Even the stealthy killer drones known or suspected to be under development fall short of some of the unmanned aircraft depicted in science fiction or thriller novels, which often feature swarms of autonomous killing machines. It is true that the Pentagon has been funding work to make drones operate with greater autonomy — for example, one of DARPA’s latest proposals calls on researchers to design ways to have drones collaborate with each other, such as having drones share information about a target.

But drones that can operate completely without the need for a pilot sitting in an air-conditioned trailer on a base in Nevada are still several years away, at least, and the Pentagon has long insisted that drones won’t be allowed to use weapons without a “man in the loop.”

Yet another longtime goal of military work is to create tiny drones, possibly disguised as birds or even insects (the CIA did develop a robotic dragonfly, though it never proved useful).

In terror expert Richard Clarke’s new novel, “Sting of the Drone,” the CIA operates stealthy mini-drones that are capable of assassinating someone inside a bar, and there is certainly evidence such drones are of interest. A four-minute animated video created by the Air Force Research Laboratory showed up on the Web in 2009, illustrating the lab’s work on micro aerial vehicles. The video featured a kamikaze insect-sized drone loaded with high explosives.

But drones of that level of sophistication — able to perch on telephone wires or hunt down terrorists inside a building — still belong to the future.

The real drone revolution may come not through sophistication of drones, but the proliferation of drones. So far, unmanned aircraft have largely been the weapons of technologically advanced nations, but that is changing as drone technology becomes cheaper and more accessible.

Indeed, Hezbollah has already bragged of sending spy drones into Israeli territory, and Israeli leaders have warned of the possible drone threat that Hamas could pose from Gaza.

And a recent report by the Rand Corporation warned that, in the future, terrorist groups might be able to buy small, armed drones: “Smaller systems could become the next IEDs: low-cost, low-tech weapons that are only of limited lethality individually but attrite significant numbers of US or allied personnel when used in large numbers over time.”

The US military holds an annual exercise called Black Dart, which looks at ways to counter hostile drones, particularly small drones. Among the possible defenses are lasers to shoot down drones or systems that can jam the radio signals used to control drones. But this sort of counter-drone technology is scarce today.

Hating The Jew You’ve Never Met

Hating The Jew You’ve Never Met

May 20, 2014 | Haviv Rettig Gur

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The ADL’s massive Global 100 survey of worldwide anti-Semitic attitudes, published Tuesday, offers some sobering statistics. Some 1.1 billion adults harbor anti-Semitic views. In the Middle East, 74 percent of adults agreed with a majority of the survey’s 11 anti-Semitic propositions, including that “Jews have too much power in international financial markets” and that “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars.”

The complexities uncovered by the study are fascinating and important. They include, for example, the jarring discovery that 52% of Germans and Austrians believe Jews talk too much about the Holocaust — but also that young Germans and Austrians are shedding their parents’ anti-Semitic attitudes.

The number of Germans holding such views dropped steeply from 33% among those over 50 to 15% among those under 34, and among Austrians from 41% to 12%. The German-speaking world is simultaneously growing tired of hearing about the Holocaust and more accepting of Jews.

We find similar complexity in the discovery that Britain, a hub of global efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state, is nevertheless one of the least anti-Semitic countries in the world, while Greece, Israel’s newfound regional ally, is one of the most.

And while the Internet has toppled tyrants and created new opportunities for openness and development in the Muslim world, Internet use is also a significant factor in a Muslim becoming anti-Semitic. The prevalence of anti-Semitic views grew by some 20 percentage points among Muslims who get their news primarily online compared to those who get their news from television, newspapers or even religious leaders, the study found.

These are valuable insights, and the survey offers many others.

Yet the study shines not in the details, but in its sweeping international perspective. In interviewing over 53,000 people in 93 languages across 102 countries and regions, the survey pieces together a global picture of the web of stereotypes and hatreds through which a significant swath of humanity views the Jews.

It enables us to go beyond the narrow confines of each nation’s politics and prejudices and think more deeply about the phenomenon and the essential question that lies at its root: Why do they hate us?

The question is put into sharp relief by the finding that fully 27% of people who have never met a Jew nevertheless harbor strong prejudices against him. Or, indeed, that a huge majority, 77%, of those who hate Jews have never met one. Even more starkly, the survey found an inverse relationship between the number of Jews in a country and the spread of anti-Semitic attitudes there. As a general rule, the fewer the Jews in a particular country, the more numerous the anti-Semites.

This should not surprise us. We already understood that anti-Semitism is skyrocketing in precisely those parts of the world where Jews fled from or perished in the last century, primarily the Middle East and Eastern Europe. But by giving numbers to these beliefs, the study allows us to think more carefully about the sources of the phenomenon.

A wrench in the works

No anti-Semitism has been better studied than that of modern Europe. It is there that we learned how little anti-Semitism has to do with the actual living Jews who are its subject, and how much with the ideological and social tensions that torment the anti-Semites themselves.

For 19th- and 20th-century Europe, the Jews were anomalies.

In an age of consolidating national identities, of the birth of “Germanness” and “Polishness” and other national movements, the distinctive duality of Jewish identity as both a religion and a quasi-ethnic peoplehood resisted easy national categorization, and thus called the immutability and authenticity of the new national identities into question.

What does it mean to be a German nationalist, wrapped in the imagery of the Volksgemeinschaft and imagining oneself the heir to an ancient, ennobling, and ultimately biological national community, when one’s Jewish neighbor demonstrates that it is also possible to be at once German and something other than German?

By straddling the boundaries of national identity, by sharing “Germanness” with his German neighbors and “Jewishness” with coreligionists in far-flung lands, the Jew’s very existence belied and endangered the organic immutability and exclusivity that nationalists sought from their new identities.

At its most extreme, this tension was the reason the Nazis made the eradication of the Jews a fundamental war aim. As Adolf Hitler indicated years before the Holocaust, in “Mein Kampf,” the Jews weren’t murdered for being different, but for being dangerously, indistinguishably similar, for implying by their very existence that the borders of “Germanness” are permeable, and thus, perhaps, not as real and innate as the romantic nationalist would like to believe.

In their unwanted role as the ubiquitous Other through two centuries of Europe’s struggles to understand itself, the Jews served as a kind of canvas onto which Europeans projected their own national insecurities and dilemmas.

It’s not about the Jews

Thus we find in the ADL survey that the two statements most affirmed by Greek anti-Semites – indeed, by a vast majority of Greeks – are “Jews have too much power in the business world” (85%) and “Jews have too much power in international financial markets” (82%). Battered by the global financial havoc of the past few years, Greeks have attached a human face to the actual, amorphous source of their suffering.

Similarly in Britain, the sixth-least anti-Semitic country in the survey, few people view the Jews as exceptionally evil or duplicitous – except when it comes to the Middle East. The two sentences that found the most agreement among Britons were “Jews have too much control over the United States government” (19% agreed) and “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country” (27%).

This questioning of the loyalty of British Jews is actually growing among the young — perhaps a sign that it is growing on the political left. Less than a quarter (24%) of Britons aged 35 and older agreed that British Jews are more loyal to Israel, compared to more than one-third (34%) among Britons aged 34 and younger.

These high figures are remarkable precisely because there is so little prejudice against Britain’s Jews in other areas. Just 12% say Jews have too much control in the global financial markets (the Western European average is 34%). Just 7% agree that “people hate Jews because of the way Jews behave” (Western European average: 22%).

It is not hard to draw a connecting line from Britain’s post-colonial guilt over the Middle East and the surprisingly high prejudices expressed about British Jews on that subject alone.

The Arab world may be the most startling example of this projection of national insecurities onto the Jews. The survey offers dramatic evidence that none of the reasons usually given to explain the astronomical levels of anti-Semitism in the Arab world — Islam, political tensions, the experience of war — are sufficient.

While huge majorities of Middle Easterners (74% region-wide) were found to hold anti-Semitic views, it is significant that the two least anti-Semitic peoples among the 18 polled were the two non-Arab ones. Over half of Iranians (56%) and two-thirds of Turks (69%) hold anti-Semitic views, but that still compares favorably to the whopping 82.5% average among the 16 Arab states surveyed.

Among all Muslims (Arabs included), less than half (49%) are anti-Semitic.

In some places, such as Eastern Europe, Muslims are less likely to be anti-Semitic (20%) than Christians (35%), while the Middle East’s Christians are much more likely to be anti-Semitic (64%) than non-Middle Eastern Muslims.

Political tensions also don’t offer a clear-cut explanation. Iran’s government, controlled by Holocaust deniers and viewed by Israel as its number-one enemy, rules a population far less anti-Semitic than Saudi Arabia, which proposed the Arab Peace Plan with Israel and whose geopolitical interests align closely with those of the Jewish state.

It is not surprising, considering the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that the Palestinians are the most anti-Semitic people in the world (94%); it is surprising that anti-Semitism is more widespread in Algeria (87%), Iraq (92%) and Morocco (80%) than in Lebanon (78%), though only the latter can offer ongoing conflict as an explanation.

Arab hatred of Jews is thus not explainable as a function of Muslim religious affiliation (Arab Christians are more anti-Semitic than non-Arab Muslims), by political friction (Iranians are less anti-Semitic — 56% — than Jordanians — 81%), or by the actual experience of conflict (Moroccans and Algerians are more likely to hate Jews than Lebanese).

Is it too much to suggest, then, that the Arabs’ problem with the Jews is not actually about the Jews, but about the Arab world’s own struggles with modernity, identity and political dysfunction?

Blessedly disinterested

Of course, there is good news, too. The ray of light in the dismal findings — and it is a powerful beam indeed — is the English-speaking world, where just 13% hold anti-Semitic views.

While Laos took the prize as the world’s least anti-Semitic country, with less than 1% expressing such views, it is far more remarkable that only 9% of Americans did the same. After all, the United States is the only country outside Israel that is home to millions of Jews. And American Jews, unlike their brethren in Europe or Asia, are visible, cacophonous, politically engaged and unabashedly influential.

In a world where the Jews serve as convenient foils for every sort of identity crisis and social tension, there is something hopeful about the way in which the Jews of America don’t appear to symbolize or evoke anything of note in the imaginations of their compatriots.

Perhaps Americans are less imaginative in their prejudices, or simply have a comparatively benign attitude toward what it means to be American. Either way, from the perspective of the Jewish experience highlighted in the ADL’s remarkable study, and bearing in mind that some three-quarters of the Jews outside Israel live in the United States, America’s blessed disinterestedness in the Jewishness of its Jews is cause for celebration.

The Final Babylon - America and the Coming of Antichrist (Book)

» The Final Babylon - America and the Coming of Antichrist (Book)

» Against All Odds: Israel Survives 6 DVD Set

The Final Babylon Book - What if the Antichrist were an American leader? What if he were alive today and living in the U.S.A? What if he were only a few years away from revealing himself to the world? Instead of being omitted from Bible prophecy as many of the major eschatology scholars have taught for decades, what if America were at the very center of Bible prophecy? What if the U.S.A., rather than Europe, Rome, or Babylon, were the power base of Satan's conspiracy against the Kingdom of God? These three authors, Douglas W. Krieger, Dene McGriff, and S. Douglas Woodward, argue just that. Together, they have written what may be seen as a landmark book rethinking the traditional prophetic scenario in light of developments in America and the Middle East. Combined, these authors bring over 100 years of study, teaching, and writing to the subject of Bible prophecy. The amazing blend of their respective backgrounds in the foreign services, evangelical ministries, and corporate America, lends unsurpassed credibility to their stunning and remarkably fresh presentation. In some respects, The Final Babylon is a classic prophecy book, rich in exegesis of key scriptures most often overlooked or misinterpreted. The implications are life changing. Reading The Final Babylon, America and the Coming of Antichrist will awaken you to what has been happening right in front of our eyes that we simply couldn't see due to our love of country and our faulty assumptions concerning the antagonists in the traditional prophetic scenari o. This book may change your politics, your view of the Bible, and what you do day-to-day.

Against All Odds: Israel Survives DVD Series - Many Bible scholars believe the time period of the Blood Moon Tetrads (April 15, 2014 - Sept 28, 2015) hold special significance for the nation of Israel. Given the circumstances surrounding Israel's

Saturday, May 17, 2014

The World To Come

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