Advanced Surveillance Tech for Unmanned Drones Credited In Iraq

mathoda writes "Investigative reporter Bob Woodward states that America has developed secret capabilities 'to locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups. The operations incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques and information in the US government.' The LA Times now reports, 'As part of an escalating offensive against extremist targets in Pakistan, the United States is deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems that were instrumental in crippling the insurgency in Iraq, according to US military and intelligence officials.' Part of the capabilities appear to be that the unmanned flying drones can track targets even inside of buildings." Update by J : Bruce Schneier's readers have some thoughts.

Comments

Does anyone else find it erie that we're

[BitterOldGUy]

getting closer and closer to a plot in a Terminator movie?

Re:Does anyone else find it erie that we're

[maxume]

Is there some way that we could get further and further away from the plot in a Terminator movie?

Re:Does anyone else find it erie that we're

[BitterOldGUy]

Is there some way that we could get further and further away from the plot in a Terminator movie?

We stop using robotic drones?

Personally, I like them, It saves our troops' lives and I'd really would like to know what the Taliban are thinking when a robot comes for them.

It's not a human with a family. It's not a human that thinks it's going to heaven to 42 virgins or whatever. It's a machine with the sole purpose of killing them. I just like to image that these things are their worst nightmare and it's striking more terror into them than the Taliban and al-Queida could ever have produced in their innocent victims.

Re:Does anyone else find it erie that we're

[BitterOldGUy]

I get 72 virgins in my heaven.

What cartoon was it? A guy dies and goes to heaven expecting his virgins and low and behold, there they are: a bunch of geeks at their computers.

Re:Does anyone else find it erie that we're

[Brain_Recall]

UAVs are inevitable. We have the technology to begin removing people from some dangerous positions, so we are. UAVs kind of remind me of early airplanes. They were used for quite awhile as just simple reconnaissance, then someone had the neat idea of strapping a gun to one.
Of course, unmanned does not mean autonomous. There's still someone in a pilot seat pushing the buttons.

Re:Does anyone else find it erie that we're

[budgenator]

The Predators actually have very limited offensive capabilities such as 2 Hellfire missiles, normally what happens is the Predator paints the target with a laser designator and a near by gunship shoots the bird to nail the target. After the smoke clears the troop ship puts boots on the ground to do cleanup, damage assessment and take care of any squirters that manage to jump the arrow. If the Predators shot the mission, they would have to spend way too much time returning to base for re-loading and only shoot as a last resort

Asymmetric warfare

[Anonymous Coward]

It would seem that hese are exactly the kinds of weapons that are needed to fight this new asymmetric war. Pretty amazing stuff. I wonder how much of this is propaganda and how much is real.

Re:Asymmetric warfare

[aurispector]

If it works, does it matter? The US military has mostly been very good with the use of disinformation over the years. Plenty of reason to be very skeptical of any story about this.

They have obviously figured out how to leverage some technology. Whether it's this or some other method it appears to be working. It could be a less advanced system being used in a new way, or it could be a more advanced system that hasn't been disclosed. They get the coolest toys first.

The best part is that this will allow them to seriously reduce US military presence in Iraq and finally finish the job in Afghanistan. It seriously pissed me off that they would screw up in Iraq for so long, getting so many people killed in the process. These new techniques will go into standard practice and hopefully make any future operations easier and faster.

Re:Asymmetric warfare

[Anonymous Coward]

Well something definitely changed in Iraq.

There really has been a severe decrease in violence and whilst it's still not exactly going to be your first pick holiday destination it's certainly been cleaned up a whole lot.

Was it tech like this taking out key targets?

Was it the conversion of Sunni groups to the US' cause?

Was it the surge?

If it is down to tech and intelligence that can take out key targets that seems like a real good way of fighting this kind of war. Effectively it would be a case of using terror to fight terror- these groups incite violence with terrorism and yet being able to pick off key members of these groups at will with good intelligence backed up by powerful surveillance tech is sure to terrorise the perpetrators as much as the kind of attacks they order can terrorise the people affected.

I'd imagine this is why Muqtada al-Sadr fled to Iran and is yet to return, not because of the fear the US forces could eventually break into his compoud in the middle of the night after a long gun battle with his thousands of supporters and take him into custody but that a well placed hellfire could eliminate him without warning and without the need for such a gun battle.

It's hard sometimes to imagine that taking out just a single individual can have much of an impact but I think the impact it has can be surprisingly large. When the US took out Zarqawi there was at least a major decrease in kidnappings and certainly a decrease in kidnappings that resulted in publicised beheadings.

Perhaps we'll never know what the real reason for such a major shift in the situation in Iraq was or perhaps it was just a combination of the surge, elimination of key targets and conversion of sunni groups but either way it's working and what seemed like a completely unwinnable situation now looks winnable. The only question now is whether the various countries involved have the stomache to finish the job both in Iraq or in Afghanistan, with Harper stating Canadian troops will be out of Afghanistan in 2011 the worrying possibility is that people just don't have the stomache to finish the job and we'll unfortunately just see the two countries slip back into chaos. We can only hope a nation like Germany will grow the balls to send it's troops to the much tougher combat areas Canada has been involved in to fill the gap or that the Canadians realise turning tail and running now would be a major mistake and would be an insult to those who have lost their lives to bring us this far.

I think many of us agree that we should probably not have gone into Iraq at least in the first place now but we did, so let's finish the job properly rather than fail Iraq and Afghanistan yet again shall we?

Re:Asymmetric warfare

[Elektroschock]

We can only hope a nation like Germany will grow the balls to send it's troops to the much tougher combat areas

The problem is constitutional and cultural. In Germany is a crime to prepare an agression war while the Bush doctrine explicitly permits that. Don't expect Germans to consent with attacks on sovereign nations as Pakistan which by the way has an atom bomb, so it makes sense to care a bit more about public opinion in these states and the stability of the regime.

The United States government finds it appropriate to apply torture techniques to insurgents while it is off the radar in Europe. And of course you openly question if its illigitimate to fight a foreign military occupation and their puppet regime. Where does terrorism start and where does the national freedom fighter come in? It is a matter of perspective. Note that it is a civil war scenario. Everyone knows that Bremer's decision to resolve the republican guard made the Iraq situation possible.

Further you can raise the question if the insurgency in the areas under American control is not a violent response to their cultural insensivity. Use of force is natural in a war scenario but in a nation with blood revenge family members of yesterday's collateral damages tend to take it personal. I don't really know why...

What I do know is that the nazis invented the secret weapon endsieg propaganda. So the same scheme from the Americans in the context of an election campaign sounds frightening...

I mean, no one wants the Americans to lose. It is more like Gates-Seinfeld. You feel compassion for them.

Re:Asymmetric warfare

[Dun Malg]

perhaps it was just a combination of the surge, elimination of key targets and conversion of sunni groups

Most likely a combination of the three. The surge plus the high value target elimination apparently made the "foreign fighters/al qaeda in iraq" redouble their efforts by escalating their methods. They were always vicious borderline insane fanatics (you'd have to be to go running to Iraq to support your cause), but this escalation apparently made it abundantly clear to the Sunnis that they weren't interested in Iraq and its people so much as killing infidels and infidel "collaborators". When the local Sunnis stop hiding and feeding you and instead run to the police stations and say "hey, the Syrian motherfuckers who killed my neighbor for selling a Pepsi to a US soldier are in the building next door making bombs", well, then you are pretty much fucked.

Re:Asymmetric warfare

[Dun Malg]

And of course you openly question if its illigitimate to fight a foreign military occupation and their puppet regime.

Puppet regime? How does it differ from the post-WW2 Federal Republic of Germany? Was Konrad Adenauer the puppet?

Re:Asymmetric warfare

[Elektroschock]

Maybe he was but the BRD only started in 1947. Before the military occupation did not work very well and people just wanted to start to get things going again. Adenauer was an old man with a pre-war political career. The main advantage was that the whole political class learned its lessons and the extremists were wiped out. They started from zero. It was that post-Endsieg scenerio. People were tired with revolutionary politics and wanted to get things running again. Adenauer had this strong catholic conservative bias. Other politicians like his old opponent social democrat Otto Braun wanted to get Prussia back which was a stronghold of protestantism. Unfortunately the Americans resolved Prussia. But the tradition for which Prussian social democracy stood for, and its bias against authoritarian rule, was adopted by the conservatives. The overall social situation forced politicians to solve problems. And under the Soviets things went much worse. No experiments. You had a political class that had an experience of prosecution and no surprise they were progressive on civil liberties and rule of law. Basically what post-war Germany helped was the total surrender, the whole game was played by the nazis till the very end. As a contrast after WWI it was anarchy and civil war.

Another reason why it was irrational to oppose the occupation was that the occupation was the lesser evil as opposed to the Soviet (Stalin!) occupation. Note that the Soviets troups expelled millions of people from their land in Eastern Prussia, Pommern and Schlesien and drove them west. Also the Russian troups raped women on a large scale. The Americans just appeared to be the guys to go with.

In Afganistan there was quite a chance because the taliban installed a terror regime. Same in Iraq but there the brutal dictator kept the different tribes in check. Americans were told there were "the Iraqi people". Their whole campaign was a bit autistic. And then they find out, oh, there are different tribes and groups which hate each other, how could we know. The learning curve of the American public was horrible to watch.

Re:Asymmetric warfare

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

They were always vicious borderline insane fanatics (you'd have to be to go running to Iraq to support your cause.

I was going to point out that when a similar group of people went running to afghanistan to push Russia out, they were hailed as heroes.

But then when I quoted your statement I realized that on its own, it is hard to tell which side of the conflict in Iraq it applies to.
Or Vietnam.

Re:Identifying targets within buildings?

[bheer]

Ah, this PDF pointed to by Bruce Schneier is very interesting:

Continuous Tagging Tracking Locating

Re:how long until

[Hurricane78]

Where do you think they tested it first? ;)

Why not use this tech to avoid bombing children?

[HertzaHaeon]

I wonder if this technology will decrease or increase incidents like this:

Harrowing video film backs Afghan villagers' claims of carnage caused by US troops

"Villagers and the UN insist that 92 were killed, including as many as 60 children. Locals say that the US and Afghan troops who came into the village looking for a Taleban commander, with US air support, used excessive force... Local people say that US forces bombed preparations for a memorial ceremony for a tribal leader. Residential compounds were levelled by US attack helicopters, armed drones and a cannon-armed C130 Spectre gunship."

If you can track people in buildings, you'd think you'd be able to tell if they're children.

Re:how long until

[NotBornYesterday]

Starting with subversives like you in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

Re:Why not use this tech to avoid bombing children

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the problem when the local population actively supports terrorism. If any of the supporters gets killed(or god forbid, children of a man hiding a terrorist in his house) we get to hear all the "The US forces are killing innocent people."

Yes, there are some deaths that could have been avoided, but those are the minority.

And before you guys flame me, I'm an Arab living in Israel, and I'm sick of hearing people here wail the same thing over and over again when an "innocent" person gets killed in Gaza.

What it is

[TheModelEskimo]

Enemy combatants are sprayed or otherwise marked (lots of ways to do this) with a marker known as a "perfume" or a "stain." This marker works on a very, very small scale. It contains little devices that convert microwave energy into DC power (rectennae).

This effectively gives the military an "electrical output" somewhere on your body that they can use to read your signal. What is being output? Why, your biological signature. So the military fly over you while emitting microwaves, or otherwise light you up. Then they get a positive read on a Mr. Sadiq Abbad from Pakistan...and what's he doing with these other characters? Etc.

OK, I've had enough

[greyhueofdoubt]

Air Force here- spent a lot of time around Predators and the equipment they are discussing. This article did not come as a surprise to me at all; in fact, I would say that this story was a non-story. Airborne weapons and avionics are designed to be modular and interchangeable. Outside of the actual flight computers, there is no reason that electronics like, for example, a laser targeting pod from an F-16 can't be mounted on an F-15. Heck, even the mounting hardware is the same.

This story is yet another "We're doing X, but IN SPAAAAACCE!!!" or "We're doing Y, but on WEEEEEEEED!!!".

This article could be about installing a Sony CD deck in a chevy. OMG!!!

I don't know what it is about the predator that gets /. stories up to 400-600 comments. Transformers was a movie. Robocop was a movie. These things are simply unmanned, remotely-piloted aircraft. They are slow and ungainly and prone to malfunction*. We've been using unmanned, remotely-piloted aircraft as drones since the early cold war. Your paranoia about the coming police state would be better spent on issues like voting machines and unconstitutional laws- you know, things that actually matter at this point. When the predators start coming for you, it will be because your elected officials passed laws to make it legal to hunt you down. Make your votes count this year.

*Need proof? here is a picture of one that decided to taxi off the runway and crash for reasons known only to it and the predator god: http://homepage.mac.com/hylic/vacation/index4.html

This was not uncommon during the time I spent there.

-b

Re:Why not use this tech to avoid bombing children

[IanHurst]

If killing children were America's goal, every child from Iraq to Afghanistan would be dead already.

A simpler explanation for the civilian deaths is the USA abhors it, and insurgents (or terrorists or freedom fighters or whatever you want to call them - I don't care) know it. Its avoidance of civilian deaths means that by living with civilians you ensure the US will be more reluctant to attack you and will take a very real propaganda hit every time it does.

Nobody with respect for innocent life would ever adopt this tactic, and "civilized" armies are forbidden from it for that and some other reasons. Not realizing this difference represents a major propaganda coup for insurgents.

Re:Bush and McCain don't want to admit this

[sumdumass]

Well, interestingly enough, listening to "fucktard Bush" or not, that was the entire goal of keeping troops over there in the first place. The entire "stay the course" message was to was supposed to let the Iraqi people know we weren't going to hand them over to the insurgents or Al Qaida.

What people seem to ignore is that after tossing saddam out of power, the goal was to get Iraq back on it's own. When the dems though arbitrarily losing a war would help get them elected, the violence went up exponentially. The more they screamed "immediate withdraw" or "when I'm president, I will hold my head high while telling out military to hold their head in shame, tuck their tails between their legs and come back home", the more the violence and recruiting happened. Then, when in spite of all this, even after Al qaida issued support for democrats in 2004 and again in 2006, Bush sends more troops over which not only allowed us to change how we were operating but it showed the people of Iraq that we weren't giving up on them and they could expect us to keep our word. And our word has always been, we would leave when Iraq was stable enough to take care of themselves.

The surge brought more then just troops into Iraq. It brought renewed hope for the people. It brought security to certain areas that others saw and said I want that so they started pointing out where the road side bombs were. They started pelting th people planting them with rocks when they came into their neighborhoods. We were able to maintain security around things like tankers filled with ammonia or chlorine that have been driven into crowded markets and exploded in some insane attempt to turn opinion against us.

The surge itself didn't create everything we see today in Iraq. But what it did was bring conditions into Iraq that encouraged and allowed the progress we see today so in a way, it is responsable for it even though the credit needs to go to some of the people in Iraq, their security forces, police, government, and communities that just said I've had enough, too.

How much is propaganda?

[RustinHWright]

I'm guessing most. From the sensor grids along the Ho Chi Minh trail to the Sargent York gun, our military has a long and embarrassing history of promoting assorted, "can't tell you because that's a secret" crap, most of which turns out to be a combination of defense contractor welfare and those contractors acting out the fantasies of tech-illiterate military and political decisionmakers. (See SDI, aka "Star Wars".)

And remember the source here. Whatever he was in 1972, Woodward has been the asshole buddy of the Bush administration for a very long time now, who, whatever his attempts to make himself look good now may be, played a key role in sabotaging the career of CIA agent Valerie Plame to back Bush administration policy. Not to mention having helped the Reagan administration use Casey as cover for many of their most egregious crimes. Frankly, anybody getting repeated positive endorsements from folks like Peggy Noonan isn't somebody whose word I'm going to trust.

Re:How much is propaganda?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

played a key role in sabotaging the career of CIA agent Valerie Plame to back Bush administration policy

Are you sure you aren't talking about Novak? The guy who actually published the details on Plame that Cheney was shopping around? I thought I read that Woodward specifically chose not to take Cheney's bait.

Your "logic" is failing.

[khasim]

Nevertheless, there have been a lot of civilian deaths, so to explain that you could argue that the world's foremost military is actually a wildly irrational organization incapable of grasping that it's helping its enemies.

So you admit that there have been lots of civilian deaths.

Or you can argue that insurgents have worked out a good way to avoid getting shot.

Ummm, did you somehow miss your own statement about "a lot of civilian deaths"?

It doesn't seem like it is "a good way to avoid getting shot" when we are shooting them and anyone near them.

Personally I'd employ Occam's razor at this point and go with the latter.

Seeing as how that would require that the "insurgents" be both dead (lots of civilian deaths) and alive (good way to avoid getting shot) I think you should really review what "Occam's razor" is.

Re:To clarify

[aurispector]

"Personally I was in favor of kicking Saddam out, however when in the first few days of the war the US disbanded ALL of Iraq's existing military and civil institutions, I knew they had stepped into quicksand."

What the hell WERE they thinking? New Orleans went to hell within days of Katrina. Remember the blackout riots in New York? What made them think an entire country could exist without a police force? GOD it still pisses me off to think about it. We could have been out by now with thousands of soldiers lives saved if they had been smarter about it. Fuck people like Saddam but that was the height of stupidity.