Drones That Fire Pepper Spray Bullets

Using a BBC technology article as a source, Bruce Schneier tells us about these newly available weapons:

Desert Wolf's website states that its Skunk octacopter drone is fitted with four high-capacity paintball barrels, each capable of firing up to 20 bullets per second.

In addition to pepper-spray ammunition, the firm says it can also be armed with dye-marker balls and solid plastic balls.

The machine can carry up to 4,000 bullets at a time as well as "blinding lasers" and on-board speakers that can communicate warnings to a crowd.

If you're planning the next-generation Occupy movement, you may want to consider the casualties to be inflicted on practitioners of a legal and once-respectable civic activity, and prepare by having several hospitals at your disposal. Given the thirst for violence evidenced by some big-city police departments in the original Occupy protests, one may be confident this isn't going to be pretty.

Drone Arrested!!1!

What's that? A fighter-shaped drone aircraft performed an arrested landing on an aircraft carrier? Oh. Well, that's completely different. <emily_litella_voice> Nevermind! </emily_litella_voice>

Actually, that's quite a technological achievement. I wonder if anyone seriously thought about the reaction of America's potential enemies to its possession of a completely new, arguably offensive weapon. Do we really want to start a new arms race? Whether we want it or not... that's what we just did. Welcome to the post-nuclear arms race.

How Does Obama Really Feel About His Drone 'Kill List'? And Will It Pass To The Next President?

Kevin Gosztola of FDL's The Dissenter reveals that "an unnamed official with the Obama administration" told Scott Shane of the New York Times that in seeking to answer that question, the Obama administration contemplated the very real possibility that the levers of power might pass from Obama's to Rmoney's hands, and sought to codify and restrict the targeted assassination powers. From Shane's article:

...

... With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said.

...

Gosztola's concerns are much like my own:

...

The revelation is remarkable in that it shows GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney—not the fact that the power to extrajudicially kill people suspected of committing or having ties to terrorism was being claimed—was why the administration began to have increased concerns over drone warfare.

...

Clearly there needs to be a formal policy in place regarding targeted assassinations using drones: they are sloppy weapons liable to kill far more people than the intended target, and in those few cases where the targeted person has been an American citizen, that citizen had no opportunity for a trial, a proof of his/her guilt before a court of law, and a formal sentence by such a court. In other words, if drone use were not bad enough on the grounds that America is murdering babies, it is still worse because it is used unapologetically to violate the Fourth Amendment. All of this needs to be thought out, debated and decided by a team of advisors not given to thinking in lock-step with the president.

That said, drone warfare is liable to continue and even increase into the indefinite future, including, yes, into a Republican presidency, if indeed that would be any worse. (I always said Obama is the lesser evil, not that he is not capable of evil.) If this haphazard, cowboy-shoot-first attitude continues, it will not be long before America has no friends among the nations and leaders of the world... and who can blame them. We need three things: real rules in place and implemented in the field, clear accountability for every drone strike, and... most of all... transparency. These acts are being committed in my name, and in yours if you're an American citizen: you deserve to know as specifically as possible who is being killed and why, what their nationality is, if they are noncombatants, whether their due process rights were preserved, and who dies as "collateral damage" from this most indiscriminate of weapons.

And Mr. Obama... well, he needs to pull out the book from which he used to teach Review of Constitutional Law (or whatever it's called), and spend some time with his nose in it. Apparently he's forgotten some things. Apparently, many of the rest of us have forgotten those same things. It's time for a serious review of the rightful limits on presidential power.

Droning On Forever

Droning on for hours

The BBC says that DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has succeeded in flying a pair of drones "closely" (necessarily at most 100' apart) at an altitude of 48,000' for a period of 2½ hours, long enough for one drone, at least in theory, to refuel the other. Neither drone had a pilot aboard.

No Pakistani doctors near the border reported advance complaints from civilians of potential neck injuries from looking skyward 24x7. [/snark]

Drones refueled in this manner would be able to increase their wedding party kill ratio (WPKR) to better than 50%, including presumably the bride and groom on their wedding night, DARPA did not announce. [/snark]

I'm sorry. I still fail to see the moral difference between these drones and Germany's V‑2s in W.W.II. Both kill(ed) noncombatant civilians far from any battlefield. And drones will soon be able to fly essentially forever, or until the vendor needs a new contract, whichever comes first. Isn't modern technology wonderful? [/snark]

(H/T fatster at FDL.)

" 'Once The Rockets Are Up...' "

" '... who cares where they come down; / That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun."

V‑2 Replica,
Peenemünde

Thus sang the incomparable Tom Lehrer in a deeply bitter song (YouTube) about the infliction of more than 3,000 V‑2 rockets by Nazi Germany on five nations (Belgium, UK, France, Netherlands, and Germany itself), starting in September 1944 and continuing for several months. The fatalities were not heavy... in London, each V‑2 killed on average two people... but the effect was terrifying, and there was basically nothing the Allies could do in response, except to pursue the European war effort as vigorously as possible. I have been reading Studs Terkel's "The Good War" (quotes are a part of the title), especially interviews regarding Londoners' reaction to the V‑2 strikes, and it is clear that for all the people's courage, the V‑2 was a terrorist's weapon, as surely as an IED or other homemade bomb today. And Wernher and company were therefore terrorists.

Predator Drone

Today, the US military, and two US presidents so far, are distressingly fond of UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, "drones" for short. Drones in one form or another have been around since 1916, and, again in one form or another, in actual use since the Vietnam War. Today's drones, UASs (unmanned aircraft systems, including ground control), in use since 2005, piloted remotely from the battlefield (if indeed a battlefield is involved at all), launching missiles at ground targets, are less than precise in their targeting:

... Since 2006, drone-launched missiles allegedly had killed between 750 and 1,000 people in Pakistan, according to the report. Of these, about 20 people were said to be leaders of Al Qaeda, Taliban, and associated groups. Overall, 66% to 68% of the people killed were militants, and 31% to 33% were civilians. US officials disputed the percentage for civilians.^[29] ...

You can find most any value you want for the percentage civilians killed, depending on the political views of a given web site's author, but there is little dispute among non-US-government sources that the number is relatively high. It almost seems at times as if any person killed by a missile launched from an American drone is automatically classified as a "militant," and how are they to defend their names? Many of the civilians have been killed while going about their daily business, not participating in any hostile activity... in one well-known incident, a wedding party was attacked, killing 37 people, mostly women and (more than half) children. Given the imprecision of remotely piloted drone attacks and the (relatively) small numbers of people killed, the UAV is ultimately a terrorist's weapon. And hence Barry and company are terrorists.

Eventually, Wernher von Braun became one of "our boys," and his image was rehabilitated for public consumption. (Clearly, Tom Lehrer didn't get that memo.) The question is whether Barack Obama, who is not a bad human being, can be made to see that engaging in terrorism makes one a terrorist, no matter how virtuous one's person, no matter how noble one's cause. Every child needlessly killed in a drone attack is not only a moral atrocity but also a motivation for future terrorist attacks against the US, and I for one will not be surprised when they happen. If Mr. Obama wins a second term (which I sincerely hope he does, because his opponent is a man of no virtue whatsoever that I can perceive), we have to begin his reeducation in the content of the Geneva Conventions and the limits of warfare to which any civilized nation must be subject. As he is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, perhaps we can hope for the best. [/mild irony]

ADDED: worth reading is Glenn Greenwald's New Stanford/NYU study documents the civilian terror from Obama's drones.