On the Nature of Things | Forum

Exclusive photographs of once-classified inventions from Lockheed’s famous brain trust.

By 2014, the U.S. Air Force was training more remote drone pilots than pilots for all of its warplanes combined.

Drones were once an exclusive technology of the United States, but it did not stay that way for long.

America’s military is, after all, the world’s largest, and a shift in its priorities toward drone warfare did not go unnoticed by the rest of the world. This has meant the rise of cheaper combat drone manufacturers in China, opening the technology up to arsenals around the world. Even cheaper civilian technology has also emerged, giving terrorist organizations access to their own makeshift fleets.

This is where it gets scary. Not surprising, mind you, but disturbing nonetheless.

Tech-savvy ISIS is now at the forefront of developing improvised military drones. Starting as America did with simple surveillance and modifying civilian camera drones using off-the-shelf components, ISIS quickly followed the American path of militarizing the drones.

Much like the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that confounded our conventional forces on the battlefield, killing and wounding thousands of American soldiers over the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, the dramatically less resourced, “ragtag” insurgency is again using our own weapons against us.

It’s not that ISIS has a “drone program” as such. Rather, drones have become so ubiquitous, in no small part because of the American military’s substantial investment, that off-the-shelf options are everywhere, and little know-how is needed to modify retail drone solutions to drop explosives on enemy forces. The drones are so cheap that ISIS has at times decided even this isn’t necessary, and simply straps the explosives to drones and uses them as unmanned “suicide” bombers.

Many warned about America’s use of drones as a largely extra-judicial means of assassination. It was a dangerous precedent, and one that would inform nations and organizations around the world as they too embraced the killer technology. We all knew that someday the “bad guys” would get it too, maybe just not this soon.

Nations are now joining “the drone club” by the dozens, and militant groups are not far behind. Nations like Nigeria have embraced drones for killing on the cheap, and without the pesky oversight that comes from having an identifiable pilot. ISIS has been a proof of concept for unconventional drone warfare at what appears to be little cost. This has the Pentagon scrambling to develop anti-drone technology, and adding it to the world’s largest drone fleet.

But drone technology marches on at a rapid pace. Costly anti-drone weapons may appear on the battlefield and work for a time, but will likely function as air defense technology did, on a more rapid time frame: an endless cycle of improvements to circumvent defenses, and new defenses to take their place.

Mr. Perfect wrote:I wonder how he deals with speed wobbles.

Both the rate of EV adoption and the environmental benefits the vehicles will produce have been oversold

Miss_Faucie_Fishtits wrote:Richard Fernandez AKA Wrechard speaks intelligently on many things. He touches obliquely on what may happen with self-driving cars, A.I. and windmill farms. Also why it may not have been a good idea to dam the Straits of Gibraltar..........

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/th ... omplexity/

Miss_Faucie_Fishtits wrote:Richard Fernandez AKA Wrechard speaks intelligently on many things. He touches obliquely on what may happen with self-driving cars, A.I. and windmill farms. Also why it may not have been a good idea to dam the Straits of Gibraltar..........

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/th ... omplexity/

noddy wrote:

take the next left.

Simple Minded wrote:

too cool, where is it?

we were promised flying cars and jet packs.....