War Is Boring

It’s finally happened. I got flamed by Code Pink, the fringe anti-war group famous for … well, wearing pink and being annoying. Tony Blome from Code Pink’s San Francisco operations wrote to scold me for my recent Wired article “Hidden History: America’s Secret Drone War in Africa,” in which I detailed drone operations over Somalia since 2007.

More secret bases. More and better unmanned warplanes. More frequent and deadly robotic attacks. Some five years after a U.S. Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle flew the type’s first mission over lawless Somalia, the shadowy American-led drone campaign in the Horn of Africa is targeting Islamic militants more ruthlessly than ever.

The Russian military will acquire long-range, presumably jet-powered strike drones to help replace its arsenal of decrepit Cold War-era Tupolev heavy bombers, according to Moscow’s long-range aviation commander, Lt. Gen. Anatoly Zhikharev.

It’s one of the most dangerous missions on the modern battlefield — and one of the most important. Crews flying big, vulnerable and sometimes unarmed helicopters brave gunfire, bad weather and rugged terrain to snatch wounded troops from a firefight or the scene of a bomb blast.

Sometime in the next few years the world’s most sophisticated drone prototypes will likely face off in what could be a multi-billion-dollar competition to shape the future of air warfare. And now we finally know what all four contestants look like.

Via The DEW Line blog, here’s Lockheed Martin art depicting the company’s newest killer drone, the Sea Ghost. The flying-wing, jet-powered robot is Lockheed’s entry into the Navy’s competition for a carrier-launched strike and surveillance drone. Northrop Grumman’s X-47B, Boeing’s X-45C and the General Atomics Sea Avenger are all contenders.

Since at least February the Syrian government has been using Iranian-built Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to track and target Free Syrian Army rebels in their strongholds, including Homs and Hamah. Now some fresh commercial satellite imagery provides new details about the drone’s possible tactics and capabilities.

Lethal strikes by armed drones are America’s best and less obtrusive method of killing Islamic militants and dismantling their terror networks while minimizing civilian casualties. Or they’re a misguided and counter-productive attempt at sterilizing the dirty work of counter-terrorism — one that serves as a rallying cry for terrorist recruiters and ends up creating more militants than it eliminates.

Video outtakes from the U.S. Army’s Robotics Rodeo at Ft. Benning last month.

Video outtakes from the U.S. Army’s Robotics Rodeo at Ft. Benning last month.

Video outtakes from the U.S. Army’s Robotics Rodeo at Ft. Benning last month.

Video outtakes from the U.S. Army’s Robotics Rodeo at Ft. Benning last month.