Tag Archives: drones

Troubling Questions Over U.S. Drone Crash Near Crimea… An Inevitable Collision Made in Washington, by The Strategic Culture Editorial Board

Posted on March 18, 2023 | 1 comment

The U.S. claims the imperial right to be wherever it wants to be. From The Strategic Culture Editorial Board at strategic-culture.org:

A $32 million drone buried unceremoniously at sea says a lot about a failing empire.

A U.S. spy drone operating 8,000 kilometers from Washington on Russia’s borders, helping a Nazi regime at war against Russia, crashes into the Black Sea – and yet, insanely, Moscow is arraigned for taking defensive action?

One has to be amazed by the total dissonance among American politicians and media over the incident this week when an unmanned U.S. military aircraft crashed into the Black Sea near Russian territory. The righteous indignation speaks of ineffable double-think and hypocrisy.

Russia was condemned for “reckless” and “unlawful” conduct after two of its fighter jets intercepted an MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The Reaper is deployed both as a surveillance aircraft and as an attack weapon capable of firing missiles. This drone was detected approaching airspace that Moscow has designated off-limits in connection with its special military operation in Ukraine.

The Pentagon claimed that one of the Russian Su-27 jets collided with the drone causing damage to one of its propellers. The U.S. Air Force says its operators brought down the Reaper which crashed in international waters. Why was a $32 million UAV so readily ditched?

For its part, Russia claims that its fighter jets buzzed the American drone causing it to make sharp maneuvers whereupon the UAV lost aeronautical control and crashed into the sea. Moscow has put the blame on the United States for creating a provocation and called on the U.S. to halt hostile flights near its borders. An effort to recover the drone debris is underway by Russia. Sensitive flight data may show what kind of mission the UAV was really undertaking. Was it gathering offensive targeting coordinates, as many such American UAVs have been doing over the past year to enable the Kiev regime?

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Propaganda, War

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Pentagon Secretly Working To Unleash Massive Swarms of Autonomous Multi-Domain Drones to Dominate Enemy Defenses, from The Debrief

Posted on February 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

The military will soon have incredible drone and drone swarm technologies. It takes no imagination at all to see how they could be used against the citizens they were nominally meant to protect. From The Debrief at thedebrief.org:

(This Article was updated on February 6, 2023, to include statements from DARPA officials.) 

The U.S. Department of Defense has quietly launched a new program to develop the ability to unleash thousands of autonomous land, sea, and air drones capable of overwhelming and dominating an enemy’s area defenses. 

Details of the project are largely shrouded in secrecy. However, language in recently updated pre-solicitation documents suggests the development of massive autonomous vehicle swarms likely has a specific focus on deterring or defeating a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. 

According to documents, the effort will be managed by the Strategic Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

And while DARPA has yet to formally announce the new program, DARPA confirmed to The Debrief that the project will be operating under the moniker “Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms” program, or “AMASS.”

“DARPA’s singular and enduring mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security,” said a DARPA spokesperson via email.

“The DARPA AMASS program is exploring the use of swarms-of-swarms to conduct military operations in highly contested environments that pose great risk to our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines. It is meant to inform future military programs of record and not to be a military program of record itself.” 

AMASS is hardly the first, or only, DARPA project currently underway leveraging autonomous drone swarm technology to give the U.S. military an advantage on future battlefields. 

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The Age of Drones, by Karen Hunt aka KH Mezek

Posted on December 18, 2022 | Leave a comment

Maybe drones can be used against governments. They can’t be that hard to build. From Karen Hunt aka KH Mezek at khmezek.substack.com:

Imagine our world as a giant petri dish and we are all inside of it. Experiments can be conducted on our “wetware.” There will be no escape from the drones.

 

See the source image
 

While researching my piece, The Truth about Luciferase, I came across a patent that blew my mind and I absolutely had to write about it.

The patent is described as “Systems and Methods for Mobile Sample Collection” and it has to do with drones.

 

We’re talking armies of drones of all shapes and sizes, down to the smallest gnat, working together in a “swarm” to take samples, administer drugs and regulate the health and behavior of ordinary citizens. The promise is that these drones will be deployed to make our lives easier—for our health and safety.

Embarking on this read, I would like to start with some important words:

metaverse, meatverse, wetware, software, hardware

 

Metaverse: a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.

Meatverse: you will not find this word defined anywhere on the internet. It is the word technocrats derisively use when describing the real world.

In June 2018, Oculus executive Jason Rubin sent an email to Facebook board member Marc Andreessen with the subject line “The Metaverse.” This paper was like the first page in the history of a new world, written by one of the gods.

Ruben described the Metaverse as a place where users “float through a digital universe of virtual ads, filled with virtual goods that people buy. There would be virtual people that they marry, while spending as little time as possible in the so-called ‘MEATVERSE’ — referring to the real world because humans are flesh and blood.”

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SCOTT RITTER: Washington’s Russian Drone Fantasy

Posted on July 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

The U.S. and Europe have sold short Russian military capabilities every step of the way in the Ukraine war, so it should come as no surprise that they continue to do so concerning Russian drones. From Scott Ritter at consortiumnews.com:

The information warfare campaign by the U.S. and its allies on behalf of Ukraine appeared to engulf Putin’s visit to Iran last week. 

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, center, with NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana, left, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Oct. 7, 2021. (NATO)

According to the official U.S. government narrative, a “desperate” Russia — suffering significant battlefield reversals in Ukraine including the loss of “large numbers” of reconnaissance drones while its own military industrial capacity lacks the ability to provide adequate replacements due to Russia’s “economic isolation” — has turned to Iran for assistance.

“Our information,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared, “indicates that the Iranian government is preparing to provide Russia with up to several hundred UAV’s [unmanned aerial vehicles], including weapons-capable UAVs on an expedited timeline.” Sullivan said. “It’s unclear whether Iran has delivered any of these UAVs to Russia already.”

Sullivan’s assessment was drawn from U.S. intelligence reports indicating that Russian officials had twice visited Iran — on June 8 and July 5 — for the purpose of observing at least two versions of Iranian UAVs in operation.

Both visits took place at Kashan Airbase, in central Iran. The Kashan facility has been publicly identified by Israel as the main training facility for Iran’s UAV program. According to Sullivan, these visits represent the first by Russian officials. “This suggests ongoing Russian interest in acquiring Iranian attack-capable UAVs,” Sullivan noted.

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Wings of Death: How Availability of Combat Drones Will Change War Forever, by Scott Ritter

Posted on November 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

Drones level the military playing field, even for non-state actors. They are another advance in the asymmetric warfare that has bedeviled regular military forces since at least WWII, and another nail in the coffin of monster governments. From Scott Ritter at RT News via lewrockwell.com:

Drones used to be the exclusive purview of advanced military powers. Today, almost any military can afford cheap drones with high-quality sensors and lethal munitions, and, in doing so, change the course of any future conflict.

The proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, commonly referred to as drones) has brought about a sea-change in the way nations wage war today, ranging from the ability to gather intelligence in ways unthinkable using manned aircraft, to the discreet and precision employment of lethal weapons in a way which delivers a bigger bang for the buck when it comes to battlefield impact. While this technology is well known to the professionals who employ it daily, it remains a relatively obscure capability for the layperson, who often sees the term “drone” used without fully comprehending its implications.

The US military has long had an interest in the potential of remotely piloted unmanned aircraft. During the Second World War, Operation Aphrodite employed modified B-17 bombers which were taken off by an aircrew, who then bailed out of the aircraft. The bomber was then taken over using radio-control by a crew in a following B-17, which then used on-board television cameras to guide the crewless B-17 filled with explosives to its intended target, which it would then crash into, destroying it in the resulting explosion. The program had poor results and was scrapped after a number of missions went astray.

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The Price of Conscience — Hale Sentenced to 45 Months, by Chris Hedges

Posted on July 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

As Orwell said, truth is dangerous in the empire of lies, especially to the truth teller. From Chris Hedges at consortiumnews.com:

Drone warfare whistleblower Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison on Tuesday for telling the American people the truth.

Daniel Hale, a former intelligence analyst in the drone program for the Air Force who as a private contractor in 2013 leaked some 17 classified documents about drone strikes to the press, was sentenced Tuesday to 45 months in prison.

The documents, published by The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”

The Justice Department coerced Hale, who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Law, Media, Military, Politics, War

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Bless the Traitors, by Chris Hedges

Posted on July 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

Daniel Hale’s conscience wouldn’t let him keep secret what he knew about the US military’s drone programs. Too bad so many in the military and intelligence have no such qualms. From Chris Hedges at consortiumnews.com:

Daniel Hale, an active-duty Air Force intelligence analyst, stood in the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park in October 2011 in his military uniform. He held up a sign that read “Free Bradley Manning,” who had not yet announced her transition. It was a singular act of conscience few in uniform had the strength to replicate. He had taken a week off from his job to join the protestors in the park.

He was present at 6:00 am on Oct. 14 when Mayor Michael Bloomberg made his first attempt to clear the park. He stood in solidarity with thousands of protestors, including many unionized transit workers, teachers, Teamsters and communications workers, who formed a ring around the park. He watched the police back down as the crowd erupted into cheers. But this act of defiance and moral courage was only the beginning.

At the time, Hale was stationed at Fort Bragg. A few months later he deployed to Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Force Base. He would later learn that that while he was in Zuccotti Park, Barack Obama ordered a drone strike some 12,000 miles away in Yemen that killed Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of the radical cleric and U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been killed by a drone strike two weeks earlier.

The Obama administration claimed it was targeting the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Ibrahim al-Banna, who it believed, incorrectly, was with the boy and his cousins, all of whom were also killed in the attack. That massacre of innocents became public, but there were thousands more such attacks that wantonly killed noncombatants that only Hale and those with top-security clearances knew about.

Starting in 2013, Hale, while working as a private contractor, leaked some 17 classified documents about the drone program to investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, although the reporter is not named in court documents. The leaked documents, published by The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people.

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The Overlapping Infrastructure of Urban Surveillance, and How to Fix It , by Matthew Guariglia

Posted on June 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

Would you like to know who’s monitoring you, and how they’re doing it? From Matthew Guariglia at activistpost.com:

Between the increasing capabilities of local and state police, the creep of federal law enforcement into domestic policing, the use of aerial surveillance such as spy planes and drones, and mounting cooperation between private technology companies and the government, it can be hard to understand and visualize what all this overlapping surveillance can mean for your daily life. We often think of these problems as siloed issues. Local police deploy automated license plate readers or acoustic gunshot detection. Federal authorities monitor you when you travel internationally.

But if you could take a cross-section of the average city block, you would see the ways that the built environment of surveillance—its physical presence in, over, and under our cities—makes this an entwined problem that must be combated through entwined solutions.

Thus, we decided to create a graphic to show how—from overhead to underground—these technologies and legal authorities overlap, how they disproportionately impact the lives of marginalized communities, and the tools we have at our disposal to halt or mitigate their harms.

A cityscape showing 13 types of common surveillance

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Armies Of Unidentified Drones Are Appearing Over The Western U.S. At Night, And It Is Really Freaking People Out, by Michael Snyder

Posted on January 9, 2020 | 3 comments

Nobody has explained why masses of drones are flying over parts of the midwest and west at night. From Michael Snyder at endoftheamericandream.com:

Since just before Christmas, armies of unidentified drones have been appearing each night in the skies above Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas.  The drones are approximately 6 feet wide and they have red and white lights, but nobody knows where they are from or who owns them.  This is a story that is now receiving national attention, and the FBI, the FAA and the U.S. Air Force are all investigating this mystery.  According to eyewitnesses, these drones can move “much faster than a regular aircraft”, and that would seem to indicate that they are highly sophisticated.  So far, the U.S. military, every government agency that has been asked, and many of the major companies in the area have all denied operating the drones.  Federal, state and local law enforcement officials have been doing all that they can to solve this mystery, but so far they have come up completely empty.

And even though these drones are now receiving so much attention, they just keep coming back night after night.  According to one northern Colorado resident, when the drones come out it looks like “something from a movie”…

For the last week, Michelle Eckert has spotted a high-flying, night-time mystery above her rural northern Colorado home. She has seen drones, sometimes a dozen or more with wingspans 6 feet wide.

“The sky is lit up with Christmas lights basically,” she told CBS News. “There’s lights and things flying all over. It reminded me of something from a movie.”

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Watch Chile Protesters Kill a Police Drone Using Hundreds of Laser Pointers, by Elias Marat

Posted on November 16, 2019 | 1 comment

This sort of thing should be encouraged. From Elias Marat at themindunleashed.com:

A police drone was disabled and fell to the ground after hundreds of protesters aimed their laser pointers at it.

Chile Protesters Drone Laser

As the people of Chile enter the second month of massive protests against the neoliberal government of President Sebastian Piñera, clashes have continued unabated between demonstrators and the militarized security forces of the South American state.

The protests, which began October 14 as a response to rising public transit costs, have quickly become radicalized as social movements, students, workers’ unions, and a vast cross-section of Chilean society have focused their anger on high levels of inequality in the country, rising living costs, and a constitution inherited from the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

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