Drones

"With ideal conditions (a clear, calm night) a single aircraft (or UAV) using an aerosol generator to dispense a 100 kg anthrax payload (99 percent of this weight being the suspension material that allows the anthrax to be dispensed in this manner) could adequately cover a 300 km2 area (about the size of Washington, D.C.) and inflict between 1,000,000 and 3,000,000 deaths (assuming a population of 3,000 to 10,000 people per km2). According to a 1970 report by the World Health Organization, "Inhalation of one microscopic (anthrax) spore will result in death within 48 hours. Distributed appropriately, one gram would be enough to kill more than one-third of the population of the United States.""

"In this hypothetical example, assume that the nation or group has access to anthrax spores and also has the capability to produce the chemical agent Sarin. It determines that in order to achieve its objectives, it needs to deliver at least a 50 kg payload (including liquefied biological or chemical agent and the spray equipment) sprayed on a target at least 150 km away. This system would be adequate to disseminate the agent over a battlefield, a water supply, or a small city. An example of a complete UAV system that meets these requirements would be the Pioneer UAV. This system has a payload of 50 kg and a nominal range of 185 km, with a loiter time of nine hours. It has the necessary payload capability to carry the agent and the spraying system. It has the basic range (which could be more than doubled on a one-way mission because the return trip and extended loiter time over the target would not be required), and costs about $500,000 per vehicle (not including the payload)."

"As little as one or two kilograms of biological agent dispensed with a commercial crop sprayer can cause devastating results. It would take substantially more chemical agents to have the same effects. However, in quantities of 50 to 150 kilograms (well within the carrying capability of many low cost UAVs), chemical agents can be very deadly. The research also shows that both chemical and biological weapons are relatively easy to obtain and do not require great technical knowledge to produce, store, or use. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, present greater challenges for employment on UAVs. Acquiring a complete nuclear weapon or the material and technology to fabricate one is extremely difficult and expensive. Additionally, the size and weight requirements for even a small weapon (about 200 kilograms) is right on the edge of the payload capability of all but the most capable and expensive UAVs."

"… the dual-use nature of UAVs (intended to be reconnaissance/ surveillance vehicles but possessing the capability for strike missions) and chemical and biological production facilities (which are used for medical purposes as well as weapons) makes detecting their development as weapons extremely difficult."

"More than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world since 2001, a record of calamity that exposes the potential dangers of throwing open American skies to drone traffic, according to a year-long Washington Post investigation. Since the outbreak of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military drones have malfunctioned in myriad ways, plummeting from the sky because of mechanical breakdowns, human error, bad weather and other reasons, according to more than 50,000 pages of accident investigation reports and other records obtained by The Post under the Freedom of Information Act."

"“Flying is inherently a dangerous activity. You don’t have to look very far, unfortunately, to see examples of that,” said Dyke Weatherington, director of unmanned warfare for the Pentagon. “I can look you square in the eye and say, absolutely, the [Defense Department] has got an exceptional safety record on this and we’re getting better every day.”"

"Pent-up demand to buy and fly remotely controlled aircraft is enormous. Law enforcement agencies, which already own a small number of camera-equipped drones, are projected to purchase thousands more; police departments covet them as an inexpensive tool to provide bird’s-eye surveillance for up to 24 hours straight."

"The military owns about 10,000 drones, from one-pound Wasps and four-pound Ravens to one-ton Predators and 15-ton Global Hawks. By 2017, the armed forces plan to fly drones from at least 110 bases in 39 states, plus Guam and Puerto Rico. The drone industry, which lobbied Congress to pass the new law, predicts $82 billion in economic benefits and 100,000 new jobs by 2025. Public opposition has centered on civil-liberties concerns, such as the morality and legality of using drones to spy on people in their back yards. There has been scant scrutiny of the safety record of remotely controlled aircraft. A report released June 5 by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that there were “serious unanswered questions” about how to safely integrate civilian drones into the national airspace, calling it a “critical, crosscutting challenge.” Nobody has more experience with drones than the U.S. military, which has logged more than 4 million flight hours. But the Defense Department tightly guards the particulars of its drone operations, including how, when and where most accidents occur."

"Air Force leaders circulated briefing materials that quoted an unnamed general as saying, “What I worry about is the day I have a C-130 with a cargo-load of soldiers, and a [drone] comes right through the cockpit window.” The general’s worries were well founded. On Aug. 15, 2011, a C-130 Hercules weighing about 145,000 pounds was descending toward Forward Operating Base Sharana, in eastern Afghanistan. Suddenly, a quarter-mile above the ground, the huge Air Force plane collided with a 375-pound flying object. “Holy shit!” yelled the Hercules’s navigator, according to a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder. “We got hit by a UAV! Hit by a UAV!”"

"Inside ground-control stations, drone pilots sit with binders of checklists that guide them through every conceivable scenario. But costly errors are still easy to make. One recurring mistake: forgetting to turn on the Stability Augmentation System, which prevents the drone from going wobbly or into a spin. In at least five cases, pilots did not switch it on, or accidentally switched it off, then sat perplexed as the aircraft went into a nose dive."

"Unlike the Air Force, the Army does not make the argument that its drones are nearly as safe as regular planes. In June 2013, Army safety officials posted a bulletin noting that their drones had crashed at 10 times the rate of manned Army aircraft over the previous nine months. As bad as that number sounded, the officials said it actually understated the problem. Commanders were not reporting many drone mishaps, as required, to the Army Combat Readiness/Safety Center at Fort Rucker, Ala. About 55 percent of the Army’s MQ-5 Hunter drones, which can carry weapons, have been “lost for various reasons” in accidents during training and combat operations, according to Col. Tim Baxter, the Army’s project manager for unmanned aircraft systems."

"The accident investigation reports describe a profusion of emergencies in which drones swerved so far out of control that crews had to resort to extreme measures to prevent catastrophes. On six occasions between 2006 and 2012, records show, pilots intentionally flew straight into the side of a mountain after their aircraft’s engines began to fail. Under military guidelines, it was considered safer to ram a remote peak on purpose than to risk a drone falling on someone during a Hail Mary landing attempt at an airfield. “He smashed it to smithereens,” an Air Force mission supervisor reported approvingly after a pilot struggling with a broken propeller motor commanded his Predator to strike a mountain in eastern Afghanistan on Oct. 26, 2012. In several other cases, drones simply disappeared and were never found."

"The links can be easily interrupted by various forms of interference. Usually, the outages last only a few seconds and are harmless. Just in case, drones are programmed to fly in a circular pattern until the links are restored. In worst-case scenarios, they are supposed to return automatically to their launch base. Records show that does not always happen. In more than a quarter of the accidents examined by The Post, links were lost around the time of the crash. Several pilots told investigators that they were so accustomed to lost links that they tended not to get nervous unless the disruptions lasted for more than a few minutes. “I’d say after the three- or five-minute period, you sort of get the feeling that the plane just stopped talking to us and we may not recover this one,” a Predator pilot testified after an April 20, 2009, crash in Afghanistan."

"Amazon says in the patent: “As the use of UAVs continues to increase, so does the likelihood of hostility towards UAVs. Such hostility may come in the form of attacks brought for any number of purposes (e.g., steal the UAVs and their payloads, crash the UAVs, and otherwise cause disruption to the operation of the UAVs).” It continues: “Using these attacks, nefarious individuals and/or systems may be able to obtain control of the UAVs by hacking the communication signals being sent to the UAVs from a controller and/or being sent by the UAV to the controller.” Amazon says such attacks “could cause the UAVs to operate unsafely and could also result in considerable financial loss for their operators.”"

"Persistent media attention tends not to differentiate between armed and commercial drones, but rather homogenizes all types, despite the fact that armed drones will be more destabilizing. Though the armed drones acquired by states in the near term likely will not have capabilities equal to those of the United States, their effects will still be destabilizing. States that acquire armed drones will likely use them as probes and for limited attacks in international waters and across borders, against domestic threats, and, potentially, for even more lethal missions, including delivering weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Although other vehicles, such as trucks and manned civilian aircraft, can also be used to deliver WMDs, the ability of drones to hover and wait for the opportune moment in which they can produce maximum effect confers uniquely lethal capabilities."

"Analyzing which countries are pursuing armed drones is difficult, as their development is shrouded in secrecy and misinformation. Some countries, including the United States, hide certain programs to protect sensitive information and capabilities, while others, such as Iran, boast of armed drones to garner national prestige, despite the fact that they have not been demonstrably tested or used. In addition, government announcements of deadlines for internal drone development often go unmet, and publicly proclaimed export orders are never fulfilled."

"Senior U.S. civilian and military officials, whose careers span the pre– and post–armed drone era, overwhelmingly agree that the threshold for the authorization of force by civilian officials has been significantly reduced. Former secretary of defense Robert Gates asserted in October 2013, for example, that armed drones allow decision-makers to see war as a “bloodless, painless, and odorless” affair, with technology detaching leaders from the “inevitably tragic, inefficient, and uncertain” consequences of war. President Barack Obama admitted in May 2013 that the United States has come to see armed drones “as a cure-all for terrorism,” because they are low risk and instrumental in “shielding the government” from criticisms “that a troop deployment invites.” Such admissions from leaders of a democratic country with a system of checks and balances point to the temptations that leaders with fewer institutional checks will face."

"Domestically, governments may use armed drones to target their perceived internal enemies. Most emerging drone powers have experienced recent domestic unrest. Turkey, Russia, Pakistan, and China all have separatist or significant opposition movements (e.g., Kurds, Chechens, the Taliban, Tibetans, and Uighurs) that presented political and military challenges to their rule in recent history. These states already designate individuals from these groups as “terrorists,” and reserve the right to use force against them. States possessing the lower risk—compared with other weapons platforms—capability of armed drones could use them more frequently in the service of domestic pacification, especially against time-sensitive targets that reside in mountainous, jungle, or other inhospitable terrain. Compared with typical methods used by military and police forces to counter insurgencies, criminals, or terrorists—such as ground troops and manned aircraft— unmanned drones provide significantly greater real-time intelligence through their persistent loiter time and responsiveness to striking an identified target."

"Deterring such drone-based attacks will depend on the ability of the United States and other governments to accurately detect and attribute them. Technical experts and intelligence analysts disagree about the extent to which this will be possible, but the difficulties lie in the challenges of detecting drones (they emit small radar, thermal, and electron signatures, and can fly low), determining who controlled it (they can be programmed to fly to a preset GPS coordinate), or assigning ownership to a downed system (they can be composed of commercial, off-the-shelf components)."

"Drone strikes conducted by the United States require actionable intelligence (from human, signal, and imagery sources), sophisticated beyond line-of-sight communications, access to satellite bandwidth, and systems engineering—from internal fire control to ground control stations—that are presently beyond the reach of most states. Several countries with relatively advanced aerospace programs, including Russia, France, and Italy, have not been able to develop and deploy these capabilities."

"Drone strikes in foreign countries that allow for target intelligence collection necessitate a safe air environment and overflight rights, and require bilateral relationships to obtain host nation basing rights for noncontiguous countries. U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia, for example, require airfields in Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, the Seychelles, and Ethiopia, secured with covert and overt aid and security commitments. (The United States does not conduct drone strikes from U.S. Navy ships, though it should be able to within five years.) Few other countries will have reliable access to foreign airbases in coming years from which they can conduct lethal operations, and no other country will develop a [[w:Blue-water navy|blue-water navy capable of supporting intercontinental drone strikes for decades to come. Therefore, it is likely that most drone operations conducted by other countries within the coming years will be across borders or internal."

"To the extent that U.S. policy sets precedents for subsequent drone use, the lack of clarity about U.S. targeted killing policies should be addressed. For example, the Obama administration will not identify which terrorist groups can be lawfully targeted—only that targeted individuals are members of al-Qaeda or “associated forces”—because doing so would enhance the credibility of named groups, according to a Pentagon spokesperson. Identifying these groups would increase transparency, reassuring other countries that the United States can justify who it targets. Additionally, this would give the United States leverage to call on other countries to explicitly define who they are targeting, rather than settle for vague descriptions, such as “associated forces.”"

"The use of unmanned aerial systems—commonly referred to as drones—over the past decade has revolutionized how the United States uses military force. As the technology has evolved from surveillance aircraft to an armed platform, drones have been used for a wide range of military missions: the United States has successfully and legitimately used armed drones to conduct hundreds of counterterrorism operations in battlefield zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. It has also used armed drones in non-battlefield settings, specifically in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines."