Public Intelligence Blog

Chuck Spinney

“The Moral is to the Material as Three to One” …or as the Taliban said about the US exit strategy, “You may have the clock, but we have the time.”

Drone pilot burnout triggers call for recruiting overhaul

EXTRACT:

The coming swarm
As the Air Force’s drone program grows, so does the importance of pilot selection. What started in 2004 as five drone combat patrols — four aircraft each — will to swell to 65 patrols by 2014. By 2010, Predators had logged more than a million combat hours, more than any other military bird. And today’s population of 1,300 combat drone pilots will be joined by 500 more in the next few years.

And as autonomous systems evolve, the capabilities of unmanned craft will, too. The Air Force will shift to a system with multiple vehicles flown in tandem, answering to a single pilot. These “swarm” handlers will have more complex tasks heaped on them earlier in their career.

“In terms of who we need to have, I think we’re on a learning curve there,” Anthony Tvaryanas, a doctor of aerospace medicine and technical advisor with the 711th Human Systems Integration Directorate at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, told NBC News.

“If [a pilot is] operating a swarm, what are you looking for in that person? I don’t think anyone’s looking into those concepts,” Tvaryanas said.

“As we get from a pilot in an airplane to a pilot outside the airplane to a pilot controlling 100 airplanes, I think we’re approaching the limits of what [prior experience and studies] can inform us. There’s a need to look back at training,” he added.

Read full article.

David Isenberg

What Rules Should Govern US Drone Attacks?

April 4, 2013

Kenneth Roth

Larry Towell/Magnum Photos

Drone aircraft at a US base, Afghanistan, 2011

As bits and pieces of the Obama administration’s legal justifications for its drone attacks trickle out, what is most striking is their deliberate ambiguity. The recent Justice Department “White Paper,” for example, is meant to give the impression that, at least for US citizen targets, the program has been carefully reviewed by lawyers, but it seems written to maximize the program’s latitude.¹ That is obviously troubling for people who believe that the United States should conduct its counterterrorism operations in accordance with international law. It also sets a worrying precedent as other governments inevitably develop their own drone programs.

Larry Towell/Magnum Photos – Drone aircraft at a US base, Afghanistan, 2011

What does international human rights and humanitarian law require? Not necessarily abolition of the drone program. Yes, there is something disconcerting about drone operators killing their targets from the comfort and safety of their office—making war too easy, as some contend. But discrepancies of power have been inherent in warfare since the advent of the bow and arrow. And from the perspective of avoiding civilian casualties, drones are an advance. Like all weapons, they are only as good as the information available to their operators and their operators’ willingness to abide by legal constraints. But with their pinpoint accuracy and ability to hover for lengthy periods to verify a target and select the most propitious moment for attack, they have the potential to reduce the costs of war to civilians.

However, drones have set off controversy since they do kill civilians and are deployed far from any traditional battlefield where combatants are fighting the United States. Some have suggested they are counterproductive, arousing much resentment in the targeted countries and creating more terrorists than they stop. Killing Taliban and al-Qaeda forces fighting US troops may be a necessary evil in a traditional armed conflict like the one in Afghanistan. But what is the justification in places like Yemen, Somalia, or possibly soon Mali? And where does northwestern Pakistan fit?

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David Wood

Obama Drone War ‘Kill Chain’ Imposes Heavy Burden At Home

Huffington Post, 5 May 2013

EXTRACT:

In Afghanistan, the military struck at targets 494 times last year with armed drones, according to data that has since been removed from the Air Forces Central Command website. Information on the number of Afghan civilians killed in these strikes is anecdotal, but powerful.

These attacks are often portrayed as a highly technical, robotic form of warfare. But behind every strike are hours, days and even weeks of surveillance and analysis by the airmen who work inside this Air Force Distributed Common Ground Station. It is the largest of five globally networked facilities that receive and analyze the data flowing back from drones and manned spy planes like the venerable U-2, and then package the intelligence for operations.

Senior Air Force officers acknowledge that in this vast, darkened room where hundreds of analysts struggle to keep up with the deluge of data, the potential for error — the possibility of taking innocent life — is ever-present, just as it is in ground combat operations.

“Burn-out is obviously a big concern for us,” said Air Force Col. Mike Shortsleeve, a veteran intelligence officer who commands the 497th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group that mans and operates the center here.

Air Force researchers and others who have studied the airmen here know that the stress and tension that build during weeks and months of staring at monitors can lead to loss of concentration. What is not clear is whether fatigue plays a role in the tragic errors that occur in wartime, as happened in the NATO air strike in Aghanistan earlier this month that reportedly killed 11 children.

Read full article.

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DefDog

Insane as it may sound, some of the smart money is betting that DHS is making a major drone play and trying to find a way to claim that drones everywhere will help them detect and stop IEDs.

The Federal Aviation Administration has finally released a new drone authorization list. This list, released in response to EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, includes law enforcement agencies and universities across the country, and—for the first time—an Indian tribal agency. In all, the list includes more than 20 new entities over the FAA’s original list, bringing to 81 the total number of public entities that have applied for FAA drone authorizations through October 2012.

Some of these new drone license applicants include:

• The State Department
• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
• Barona Band of Mission Indians Risk Management Office (near San Diego, California)
• Canyon County Sheriff’s Office (Idaho)
• Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office (Northwest Oregon)
• Grand Forks Sheriff’s Department (North Dakota)
• King County Sheriff’s Office (covering Seattle, Washington)

Click on Image to Enlarge

Who? Who?

Look at this astonishing visualization of deaths in Pakistan from drones, it was made by a professional studio that specializes in visualizations:  “The visualization, seen below, tracks the victims of the strikes using data from the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, specifically noting children and civilian collateral damage. Note the sharp uptick after President Obama takes office in 2009″:

Out of Sight Out of Mind — Drone deaths in Pakistan:  3,105+, less than 2% valid targets

Also note at the top right corner the number of “high-profile” or “bad guys” killed, which amounts to 1.5%, or 47 out of a total of 3,105 killed. The rest killed, 98.5%, should not have been, are innocents.   Watch a brief interview of the creator of this amazing graphic (which is regularly updated):

Drones Visualization: Every U.S. Drone Strike In Pakistan Since 2004 (GRAPHIC)

“We want to shock people,” Grubbs said. “What we tried to do though with this was not just shock people with the number of casualties, but to shock people with the amount of information that we really don’t know.”

This is an insightful comment about the visualization that appears in the link:

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John Robb

How Drones Can Live off the Land for Years

Cyberweapons and synthetic biological weapons (GMOs) can self provision.

They have the ability to live off the land (hosts, like human bodies and PCs) once they are unleashed.

NOTE:  In many cases, they can also make perfect copies of themselves (copies in the trillions).

But what about drones?

Aren’t they limited by quantity of energy in their batteries?

Yes, drones do have the capacity to self provision too.  One of the more elegent ways is for a drone to use power lines to “induct” the energy it needs.

A drone that can recharge itself from a power line has the potential to operate for years — monitoring, relaying, etc. — without returning to base.

If the decision making software is good enough it could source its energy and target data for years without referencing any command system.

In fact, with wireless access to the Internet (including RSS feeds), GPS, and other easily accessible data sources… it decision making can be very dynamic.

Here’s a video showing some US DoD contractors working on making that a reality, right now:

John Robb

DRONENET The next BIG thing.

Here’s the next BIG thing. Something that has the potential to be as big as the Internet.

It’s one of those ideas that hits you like a ton of bricks once you figure it out.

Given the rise in the entrepreneurial backchatter I’m getting on it, I supect it’s going to roll out very quickly.

Click on Image to Enlarge

More quickly than most people think once it gets going, since most of the infrastructure required to put it into motion is already in place.

What is it?

It’s an Internet of drones.

A short distance drone delivery service built on an open protocol.  Think short haul logistics.

It’s a system that will explode in a way that is very similar to the way the Internet grew up — where connections were bought by individuals and installed one modem and IP address at a time, and where the early providers are local geeks with shelves full of modems and an expensive T-1 lines.

It’s an approach that uses “uncontrolled airspace” and incremental purchases of cheap, standards compliant pads/drones to roll itself out (very similar to the way the Internet was able to piggy back on the old telephone system).

As a result of this open approach and decentralization, it’s something that could grow VERY fast.

Here’s a simplified version of what I’m talking about:

Read full article.

David Isenberg

Drones: The Morality of War From the Sky

By Jeffrey Goldberg

Bloomberg BusinessWeek, October 11, 2012

President Obama, who is putatively a civil libertarian—or, at the very least, the preferred candidate of most civil libertarians—has achieved something remarkable over the course of his term. He has led an expansive war against America’s enemies using lethal flying robots that not infrequently incinerate innocent civilians, and he’s been rewarded for it. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted earlier this year, 83 percent of Americans support Obama’s drone policy.

This is especially noteworthy because those who support the policy don’t actually know what it is. It’s discussed by the administration in only the most cursory and circumspect manner. Obama has provided the public with very little information about its revolutionary consequences.

. . . . . . . . .

One reason the people of North Waziristan—the innocent as well as the guilty—find drones so frightening is the matter of “signature strikes,” or “atmospheric strikes.” The U.S. national security infrastructure allows the targeting in certain benighted places of clusters of young men whose identities are not known but whose behavior is deemed suspicious. This policy is as remarkable as the president’s decision to use drones to assassinate American citizens on foreign soil, as he did with the al-Qaeda strategist Anwar al-Awlaki, based in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was a despicable figure, but isn’t it just a bit strange that the federal government can’t eavesdrop on a U.S. citizen’s phone conversation without a court order but can assassinate him without one?

Read full article.

See Also:

Berto Jongman: US Drone Strike Death Numbers — At What Cost? + Drone Meta-RECAP

Who? Mini-Me?

CIA chiefs face arrest over horrific evidence of bloody ‘video-game’ sorties by drone pilots