1. "The presidents new plan calls for trimming about 100,000 soldiers from the ranks of the Army and the Marines. The president and his advisers are advocating a kind of sterile war-making directed out of air-conditioned cubicles of joystick warriors, who fight a war halfway around the world brought to them on computer screens.
2. This robotic trend has been overtaking the military for the last decade....Including peripheral systems, an mq-9 Reaper drone costs a little more than $30 million, while the manned Joint Strike Fighter will cost about $140 million.
3. 7,494 of the militarys total aircraft are now drones, according to congressional research published in January. Thats about 31 percentabout 5,300 are Raven drones. Built for conventional and counterinsurgency warfare, the $35,000 hand-launched remote-controlled uav has a ceiling of 500 feet and a range of about six miles, and it can return to its launch point with the press of a button. During the Second Gulf War, the Raven was used for advanced reconnaissance and surveillance.
4. But its the Predator drone and Reaper drone that garner the most media attention.... can be outfitted with Hellfire missiles, take high-quality photos and listen to cell phone conversationsand all from 5 to 10 miles above the ground.... As of January 2012, the U.S. has 161 Predators and Reapers.
5. But the advantages and early success of unmanned aerial vehicles comes at a cost, including a bad case of overconfidence....This overconfidence is leading to mistakes that Americas enemies have exploited and will continue to exploit. America may wield a vast technology edge over the Taliban and other tribal terrorists, but more technically advanced enemies are lurking in the shadows, working to take advantage of weaknesses in Americas new robotic army....drones are vulnerable to cyberwarfare. Drone failures and captures have already been made public, underlining the risks Washington is taking by gambling the nations future on robots.
6. ...flaws cyberattackers can build into the systempotential backdoors for sabotage, data mining or worse. And its happening already.
7. An egregious example of American complacency occurred in 2009. An Iraqi insurgent was detained, and his computer confiscated. On its hard drive, authorities found hours of supposedly proprietary and secret drone video feeds. How in the world did a low-level Iraqi insurgent get his hands on American drone video feeds? Someone bought a satellite video capturing program for $26 off the Internet and loaded it on the computer. ...This mind-boggling breach must have caught U.S. commanders off guard, right? Not so. Wired online reported, [H]eres the real scandal: Military officials have known about this potential vulnerability since the Bosnia campaign. That was over 10 years ago (Dec. 17, 2009).
8. Then there is the curious case of Iran capturing a fully intact version of the stealthy Sentinel spy drone last December. Iranian officials claimed they had hacked into its navigation controls, spoofing gps signals and tricking the drones onboard computer to land in Iran. While the U.S. military denies the drone was hijacked, some Western analysts say that, though remote, navigational spoofing is possible and has been possible for the last 20 to 30 years. No other reasonable explanation has been given as to how Iran got its hands on one of Americas most advanced spy drones in pristine condition. Iran has been reportedly offering up the drones secrets to the highest bidders, including China and Russia, who will try to reverse-engineer the drone.
9. ...Cambridge experts have found that some made-in-America-but-assembled-in-China computer chips aboard some military drones have a backdoor built into them.
In a paper that has been published in draft form online and seen by the Guardian, researchers Sergei Skorobogatov of Cambridge University and Chris Woods of Quo Vadis Labs say that they have discovered a method that a hacker can use to connect to the internals of a chip made by Actel, a U.S. manufacturer. An attacker can disable all the security on the chip, reprogram cryptographic and access keys or permanently damage the device, they noted (Guardian, May 29). These chips are in American drones right now."
In Drones We Trust - theTrumpet.com - World News Analysis Based on Bible Prophecy by the Philadelphia Church of God
10. "It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. This robotic trend has been overtaking the military for the last decade....Including peripheral systems, an mq-9 Reaper drone costs a little more than $30 million, while the manned Joint Strike Fighter will cost about $140 million.
3. 7,494 of the militarys total aircraft are now drones, according to congressional research published in January. Thats about 31 percentabout 5,300 are Raven drones. Built for conventional and counterinsurgency warfare, the $35,000 hand-launched remote-controlled uav has a ceiling of 500 feet and a range of about six miles, and it can return to its launch point with the press of a button. During the Second Gulf War, the Raven was used for advanced reconnaissance and surveillance.
4. But its the Predator drone and Reaper drone that garner the most media attention.... can be outfitted with Hellfire missiles, take high-quality photos and listen to cell phone conversationsand all from 5 to 10 miles above the ground.... As of January 2012, the U.S. has 161 Predators and Reapers.
5. But the advantages and early success of unmanned aerial vehicles comes at a cost, including a bad case of overconfidence....This overconfidence is leading to mistakes that Americas enemies have exploited and will continue to exploit. America may wield a vast technology edge over the Taliban and other tribal terrorists, but more technically advanced enemies are lurking in the shadows, working to take advantage of weaknesses in Americas new robotic army....drones are vulnerable to cyberwarfare. Drone failures and captures have already been made public, underlining the risks Washington is taking by gambling the nations future on robots.
6. ...flaws cyberattackers can build into the systempotential backdoors for sabotage, data mining or worse. And its happening already.
7. An egregious example of American complacency occurred in 2009. An Iraqi insurgent was detained, and his computer confiscated. On its hard drive, authorities found hours of supposedly proprietary and secret drone video feeds. How in the world did a low-level Iraqi insurgent get his hands on American drone video feeds? Someone bought a satellite video capturing program for $26 off the Internet and loaded it on the computer. ...This mind-boggling breach must have caught U.S. commanders off guard, right? Not so. Wired online reported, [H]eres the real scandal: Military officials have known about this potential vulnerability since the Bosnia campaign. That was over 10 years ago (Dec. 17, 2009).
8. Then there is the curious case of Iran capturing a fully intact version of the stealthy Sentinel spy drone last December. Iranian officials claimed they had hacked into its navigation controls, spoofing gps signals and tricking the drones onboard computer to land in Iran. While the U.S. military denies the drone was hijacked, some Western analysts say that, though remote, navigational spoofing is possible and has been possible for the last 20 to 30 years. No other reasonable explanation has been given as to how Iran got its hands on one of Americas most advanced spy drones in pristine condition. Iran has been reportedly offering up the drones secrets to the highest bidders, including China and Russia, who will try to reverse-engineer the drone.
9. ...Cambridge experts have found that some made-in-America-but-assembled-in-China computer chips aboard some military drones have a backdoor built into them.
In a paper that has been published in draft form online and seen by the Guardian, researchers Sergei Skorobogatov of Cambridge University and Chris Woods of Quo Vadis Labs say that they have discovered a method that a hacker can use to connect to the internals of a chip made by Actel, a U.S. manufacturer. An attacker can disable all the security on the chip, reprogram cryptographic and access keys or permanently damage the device, they noted (Guardian, May 29). These chips are in American drones right now."
In Drones We Trust - theTrumpet.com - World News Analysis Based on Bible Prophecy by the Philadelphia Church of God
10. "It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
