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Advanced Surveillance Tech for Unmanned Drones Credited In Iraq
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Sep 13, 2008 08:03 AM
from the eye-in-the-sky dept.
from the eye-in-the-sky dept.
mathoda writes "Investigative reporter Bob Woodward states that America has developed secret capabilities 'to locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups. The operations incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques and information in the US government.' The LA Times now reports, 'As part of an escalating offensive against extremist targets in Pakistan, the United States is deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems that were instrumental in crippling the insurgency in Iraq, according to US military and intelligence officials.' Part of the capabilities appear to be that the unmanned flying drones can track targets even inside of buildings." Update by J : Bruce Schneier's readers have some thoughts.
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Ask a what? (Score:2, Funny)
Does anyone else find it erie that we're (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Does anyone else find it erie that we're (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there some way that we could get further and further away from the plot in a Terminator movie?
Parent
Re:Does anyone else find it erie that we're (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there some way that we could get further and further away from the plot in a Terminator movie?
We stop using robotic drones?
Personally, I like them, It saves our troops' lives and I'd really would like to know what the Taliban are thinking when a robot comes for them.
It's not a human with a family. It's not a human that thinks it's going to heaven to 42 virgins or whatever. It's a machine with the sole purpose of killing them. I just like to image that these things are their worst nightmare and it's striking more terror into them than the Taliban and al-Queida could ever have produced in their innocent victims.
Parent
Re:Does anyone else find it erie that we're (Score:4, Informative)
The Predators actually have very limited offensive capabilities such as 2 Hellfire missiles, normally what happens is the Predator paints the target with a laser designator and a near by gunship shoots the bird to nail the target. After the smoke clears the troop ship puts boots on the ground to do cleanup, damage assessment and take care of any squirters that manage to jump the arrow. If the Predators shot the mission, they would have to spend way too much time returning to base for re-loading and only shoot as a last resort
Parent
Re:Does anyone else find it erie that we're (Score:5, Funny)
I get 72 virgins in my heaven.
What cartoon was it? A guy dies and goes to heaven expecting his virgins and low and behold, there they are: a bunch of geeks at their computers.
Parent
Re:To clarify (Score:4, Insightful)
"Personally I was in favor of kicking Saddam out, however when in the first few days of the war the US disbanded ALL of Iraq's existing military and civil institutions, I knew they had stepped into quicksand."
What the hell WERE they thinking? New Orleans went to hell within days of Katrina. Remember the blackout riots in New York? What made them think an entire country could exist without a police force? GOD it still pisses me off to think about it. We could have been out by now with thousands of soldiers lives saved if they had been smarter about it. Fuck people like Saddam but that was the height of stupidity.
Parent
Re:Does anyone else find it erie that we're (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, unmanned does not mean autonomous. There's still someone in a pilot seat pushing the buttons.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm picturing the "hunter-seekers" from the Dune novels. They were anti-gravity hypodermic needles of death, guided by a hidden operative nearby. Ultra cool, and it's almost impossible to see them coming.
So, maybe we have ultra quiet electric R/C planes flying around with a single-shot weapon of some sort (perhaps it's explosive.) Maybe they're carried to the site by a Predator at a high altitude, then dropped and silently glide to their targets where they detonate.
Of course the bigger problem with
Asymmetric warfare (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Asymmetric warfare (Score:5, Insightful)
If it works, does it matter? The US military has mostly been very good with the use of disinformation over the years. Plenty of reason to be very skeptical of any story about this.
They have obviously figured out how to leverage some technology. Whether it's this or some other method it appears to be working. It could be a less advanced system being used in a new way, or it could be a more advanced system that hasn't been disclosed. They get the coolest toys first.
The best part is that this will allow them to seriously reduce US military presence in Iraq and finally finish the job in Afghanistan. It seriously pissed me off that they would screw up in Iraq for so long, getting so many people killed in the process. These new techniques will go into standard practice and hopefully make any future operations easier and faster.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, but that's just false. We never lost more than 3000 men in Vietnam in a single month. The most KIA was 543 in April 1969.
http://members.aol.com/warlibrary/vwc24.htm [aol.com]
Contrast this with the Meuse-Argonne Offensive [wikipedia.org] in World War I, in which over 26,000 American soldiers died in one battle. That's almost half as many as the entire Vietnam war.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, I wouldn't leave out the Civil War (in many ways deadlier, because Americans died on both sides). I only brought up Meuse-Argonne because it's considered the "deadliest battle" in U.S. history. By contrast, trying to make Iraq (or even Vietnam) seem like especially bloody wars is kind of pointless.
WWII brought the U.S. about 7 times as many casualties as Vietnam:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_casualties_of_war [wikipedia.org]
Heck, more U.S. soldiers died at Iwo Jima than have died in Iraq to date!
BTW
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well something definitely changed in Iraq.
There really has been a severe decrease in violence and whilst it's still not exactly going to be your first pick holiday destination it's certainly been cleaned up a whole lot.
Was it tech like this taking out key targets?
Was it the conversion of Sunni groups to the US' cause?
Was it the surge?
If it is down to tech and intelligence that can take out key targets that seems like a real good way of fighting this kind of war. Effectively it would be a case of using terro
Re:Asymmetric warfare (Score:4, Insightful)
We can only hope a nation like Germany will grow the balls to send it's troops to the much tougher combat areas
The problem is constitutional and cultural. In Germany is a crime to prepare an agression war while the Bush doctrine explicitly permits that. Don't expect Germans to consent with attacks on sovereign nations as Pakistan which by the way has an atom bomb, so it makes sense to care a bit more about public opinion in these states and the stability of the regime.
The United States government finds it appropriate to apply torture techniques to insurgents while it is off the radar in Europe. And of course you openly question if its illigitimate to fight a foreign military occupation and their puppet regime. Where does terrorism start and where does the national freedom fighter come in? It is a matter of perspective. Note that it is a civil war scenario. Everyone knows that Bremer's decision to resolve the republican guard made the Iraq situation possible.
Further you can raise the question if the insurgency in the areas under American control is not a violent response to their cultural insensivity. Use of force is natural in a war scenario but in a nation with blood revenge family members of yesterday's collateral damages tend to take it personal. I don't really know why...
What I do know is that the nazis invented the secret weapon endsieg propaganda. So the same scheme from the Americans in the context of an election campaign sounds frightening...
I mean, no one wants the Americans to lose. It is more like Gates-Seinfeld. You feel compassion for them.
Parent
Re:Asymmetric warfare (Score:4, Interesting)
And of course you openly question if its illigitimate to fight a foreign military occupation and their puppet regime.
Puppet regime? How does it differ from the post-WW2 Federal Republic of Germany? Was Konrad Adenauer the puppet?
Parent
Re:Asymmetric warfare (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe he was but the BRD only started in 1947. Before the military occupation did not work very well and people just wanted to start to get things going again. Adenauer was an old man with a pre-war political career. The main advantage was that the whole political class learned its lessons and the extremists were wiped out. They started from zero. It was that post-Endsieg scenerio. People were tired with revolutionary politics and wanted to get things running again. Adenauer had this strong catholic conservative bias. Other politicians like his old opponent social democrat Otto Braun wanted to get Prussia back which was a stronghold of protestantism. Unfortunately the Americans resolved Prussia. But the tradition for which Prussian social democracy stood for, and its bias against authoritarian rule, was adopted by the conservatives. The overall social situation forced politicians to solve problems. And under the Soviets things went much worse. No experiments. You had a political class that had an experience of prosecution and no surprise they were progressive on civil liberties and rule of law. Basically what post-war Germany helped was the total surrender, the whole game was played by the nazis till the very end. As a contrast after WWI it was anarchy and civil war.
Another reason why it was irrational to oppose the occupation was that the occupation was the lesser evil as opposed to the Soviet (Stalin!) occupation. Note that the Soviets troups expelled millions of people from their land in Eastern Prussia, Pommern and Schlesien and drove them west. Also the Russian troups raped women on a large scale. The Americans just appeared to be the guys to go with.
In Afganistan there was quite a chance because the taliban installed a terror regime. Same in Iraq but there the brutal dictator kept the different tribes in check. Americans were told there were "the Iraqi people". Their whole campaign was a bit autistic. And then they find out, oh, there are different tribes and groups which hate each other, how could we know. The learning curve of the American public was horrible to watch.
Parent
Re:Asymmetric warfare (Score:5, Insightful)
perhaps it was just a combination of the surge, elimination of key targets and conversion of sunni groups
Most likely a combination of the three. The surge plus the high value target elimination apparently made the "foreign fighters/al qaeda in iraq" redouble their efforts by escalating their methods. They were always vicious borderline insane fanatics (you'd have to be to go running to Iraq to support your cause), but this escalation apparently made it abundantly clear to the Sunnis that they weren't interested in Iraq and its people so much as killing infidels and infidel "collaborators". When the local Sunnis stop hiding and feeding you and instead run to the police stations and say "hey, the Syrian motherfuckers who killed my neighbor for selling a Pepsi to a US soldier are in the building next door making bombs", well, then you are pretty much fucked.
Parent
Re:Asymmetric warfare (Score:4, Insightful)
They were always vicious borderline insane fanatics (you'd have to be to go running to Iraq to support your cause.
I was going to point out that when a similar group of people went running to afghanistan to push Russia out, they were hailed as heroes.
But then when I quoted your statement I realized that on its own, it is hard to tell which side of the conflict in Iraq it applies to.
Or Vietnam.
Parent
How much is propaganda? (Score:5, Informative)
And remember the source here. Whatever he was in 1972, Woodward has been the asshole buddy of the Bush administration for a very long time now, who, whatever his attempts to make himself look good now may be, played a key role in sabotaging the career of CIA agent Valerie Plame to back Bush administration policy. Not to mention having helped the Reagan administration use Casey as cover for many of their most egregious crimes. Frankly, anybody getting repeated positive endorsements from folks like Peggy Noonan isn't somebody whose word I'm going to trust.
Parent
Re:How much is propaganda? (Score:5, Informative)
played a key role in sabotaging the career of CIA agent Valerie Plame to back Bush administration policy
Are you sure you aren't talking about Novak? The guy who actually published the details on Plame that Cheney was shopping around? I thought I read that Woodward specifically chose not to take Cheney's bait.
Parent
You're right. I was wrong. (Score:3)
Ah - finally, (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
how long until (Score:3, Insightful)
they easily forget we are the constituents (not the enemy).
Re:how long until (Score:4, Insightful)
Where do you think they tested it first? ;)
Parent
Re:how long until (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And you don't think it already is?
X Ray vision (Score:2)
Identifying targets within buildings? (Score:2, Interesting)
Key bit from TFA:
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, this PDF pointed to by Bruce Schneier is very interesting:
Continuous Tagging Tracking Locating [wired.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My experience with thermal imagers shows that even imaging through ordinary window glass is difficult (I won't say impossible). Windows are opaque for all intensive purposes. Wood, brick, adobe, whatever are going to block the IR enough to prevent imaging anybody. You can see where heat
Bush and McCain don't want to admit this (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Your link does not work.
About your sig: Why do you hate "krauts"? I live amongst "them". So you hate me too. You better have a good explanation!
Re:Bush and McCain don't want to admit this (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, interestingly enough, listening to "fucktard Bush" or not, that was the entire goal of keeping troops over there in the first place. The entire "stay the course" message was to was supposed to let the Iraqi people know we weren't going to hand them over to the insurgents or Al Qaida.
What people seem to ignore is that after tossing saddam out of power, the goal was to get Iraq back on it's own. When the dems though arbitrarily losing a war would help get them elected, the violence went up exponentially. The more they screamed "immediate withdraw" or "when I'm president, I will hold my head high while telling out military to hold their head in shame, tuck their tails between their legs and come back home", the more the violence and recruiting happened. Then, when in spite of all this, even after Al qaida issued support for democrats in 2004 and again in 2006, Bush sends more troops over which not only allowed us to change how we were operating but it showed the people of Iraq that we weren't giving up on them and they could expect us to keep our word. And our word has always been, we would leave when Iraq was stable enough to take care of themselves.
The surge brought more then just troops into Iraq. It brought renewed hope for the people. It brought security to certain areas that others saw and said I want that so they started pointing out where the road side bombs were. They started pelting th people planting them with rocks when they came into their neighborhoods. We were able to maintain security around things like tankers filled with ammonia or chlorine that have been driven into crowded markets and exploded in some insane attempt to turn opinion against us.
The surge itself didn't create everything we see today in Iraq. But what it did was bring conditions into Iraq that encouraged and allowed the progress we see today so in a way, it is responsable for it even though the credit needs to go to some of the people in Iraq, their security forces, police, government, and communities that just said I've had enough, too.
Parent
Why not use this tech to avoid bombing children? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if this technology will decrease or increase incidents like this:
Harrowing video film backs Afghan villagers' claims of carnage caused by US troops [timesonline.co.uk]
"Villagers and the UN insist that 92 were killed, including as many as 60 children. Locals say that the US and Afghan troops who came into the village looking for a Taleban commander, with US air support, used excessive force... Local people say that US forces bombed preparations for a memorial ceremony for a tribal leader. Residential compounds were levelled by US attack helicopters, armed drones and a cannon-armed C130 Spectre gunship."
If you can track people in buildings, you'd think you'd be able to tell if they're children.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the problem when the local population actively supports terrorism. If any of the supporters gets killed(or god forbid, children of a man hiding a terrorist in his house) we get to hear all the "The US forces are killing innocent people."
Yes, there are some deaths that could have been avoided, but those are the minority.
And before you guys flame me, I'm an Arab living in Israel, and I'm sick of hearing people here wail the same thing over and over again when an "innocent" person gets killed in Gaza.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
>And before you guys flame me, I'm an Arab living in Israel,...
From here you look like an Anonymous Coward.
We do (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not use this tech to avoid bombing children (Score:3, Insightful)
A simpler explanation for the civilian deaths is the USA abhors it, and insurgents (or terrorists or freedom fighters or whatever you want to call them - I don't care) know it. Its avoidance of civilian deaths means that by living with civilians you ensure the US will be more reluctant to attack you and will take a very real propaganda hit every time it does.
Nobody with respect for innocent life would ever a
Your "logic" is failing. (Score:4, Insightful)
So you admit that there have been lots of civilian deaths.
Ummm, did you somehow miss your own statement about "a lot of civilian deaths"?
It doesn't seem like it is "a good way to avoid getting shot" when we are shooting them and anyone near them.
Seeing as how that would require that the "insurgents" be both dead (lots of civilian deaths) and alive (good way to avoid getting shot) I think you should really review what "Occam's razor" is.
Parent
TTL FUD. (Score:2)
"Part of the capabilities appear to be that the unmanned flying drones can track targets even inside of buildings." But not in Afganistan or Pakistan apparently.
I am sorely tempted to say... pictures or it didn't happen.
Electronic Tracking (Score:2)
If the person has any type of electronic device on them, they could profile that device or devices and the typical use of those devices; including voice prints and keystroke profiles, and anything else particular devices does and then track that person.
They could then ident. that persons "network" of contacts through both proximity and cell calls, and with traffic analysis find the key node of that "network" and destroy them.
Sounds like the story I made up on Crooks & Li (Score:2, Funny)
Not people. bomb making materials
Last week I posted a made up story on Crooks & Liars where I stated that the surge was just a cover for the deployment of aerial drones that could detect bomb making materials through walls. Hmmm, maybe my fiction is actually fact.
What it is (Score:4, Interesting)
This effectively gives the military an "electrical output" somewhere on your body that they can use to read your signal. What is being output? Why, your biological signature. So the military fly over you while emitting microwaves, or otherwise light you up. Then they get a positive read on a Mr. Sadiq Abbad from Pakistan...and what's he doing with these other characters? Etc.
velly velly unlikely (Score:2)
>"unmanned flying drones can track targets even inside of buildings."
Very, very unlikely. If the drone is using passive sensors, it would have to be sensing some emanations from the buildings. Assuming the baddies are smart enough to not use cell-phones or WiFi, that leaves infrared. Adobe and brick are darn good insulators in the infrared.
If the drones are using active means, the baddies can use lo-tech sensors (the eyeball, Fuzzbuster radar detectors, binoculars) to spot them and act casual.
Maybe t
OK, I've had enough (Score:5, Informative)
Air Force here- spent a lot of time around Predators and the equipment they are discussing. This article did not come as a surprise to me at all; in fact, I would say that this story was a non-story. Airborne weapons and avionics are designed to be modular and interchangeable. Outside of the actual flight computers, there is no reason that electronics like, for example, a laser targeting pod from an F-16 can't be mounted on an F-15. Heck, even the mounting hardware is the same.
This story is yet another "We're doing X, but IN SPAAAAACCE!!!" or "We're doing Y, but on WEEEEEEEED!!!".
This article could be about installing a Sony CD deck in a chevy. OMG!!!
I don't know what it is about the predator that gets /. stories up to 400-600 comments. Transformers was a movie. Robocop was a movie. These things are simply unmanned, remotely-piloted aircraft. They are slow and ungainly and prone to malfunction*. We've been using unmanned, remotely-piloted aircraft as drones since the early cold war. Your paranoia about the coming police state would be better spent on issues like voting machines and unconstitutional laws- you know, things that actually matter at this point. When the predators start coming for you, it will be because your elected officials passed laws to make it legal to hunt you down. Make your votes count this year.
*Need proof? here is a picture of one that decided to taxi off the runway and crash for reasons known only to it and the predator god: http://homepage.mac.com/hylic/vacation/index4.html [mac.com]
This was not uncommon during the time I spent there.
-b
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That comment is so ironic that I really don't know what to say.
Where the Taliban live has absolutely nothing to do with grammar. It's more like geography and political science.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The way it usually works in real life is
1 part better technology,
1 part better strategy,
2 parts better tactics,
3 parts better trained troops
2 part less foreign financial aid to the insurgents,
1 part insurgents getting scared shitless because they are getting killed left and right