Slashdot Mirror
Pentagon Documents the Military's Growing Domestic Drone Use (zdnet.com)
New data on the Pentagon's domestic drone use documents 11 missions during the 2018 fiscal year. That's up from 11 missions over the entire span of 2011 through 2017, as noted by Dan Gettinger, co-director of Bard College's Center for the Study of the Drone. ZDNet reports: Most of the military's 2018 missions fell under the category of "Defense Support of Civil Authorities." That meant responding to requests from the governors of California and Oregon for support during last year's wildfire season, as well as helping the South Carolina National Guard with its Hurricane Florence flood response. Defense Department drones were also on call throughout 2018 to provide Southern Border support for a regiment of the Army. In 2018, the military also used its unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in three cases to provide Defense Department installation and airspace support. It also responded to a request from the governor of New York for support during an emergency response training exercise. And for five months during the fiscal year, it used drones to support the US Customs and Border Patrol's counterdrug operations.
With the upcoming Fascism, the military will mostly serve to keep the masses under control. They see that clearly and are preparing for that mission.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The police already have actual assault rifles, armored assault vehicles, and grenade launchers. Why would you need the military?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Using drone to help civil authorities during a wildfire, hurricane relief, or National Guard training exercise.
And I like how TFA shows a drone armed with missiles; those are useful for fighting a wildfire I suppose.
Unarmed drones are just sky cameras - fairly cheap, and basically a slightly different shade of the other sky cameras we have in the form of satellites.
As long as they're coordinating with the FAA, and validly serving the public interests rather than doing it for income or favors to third parties, I'm generally cool with it. It's actually a relatively cheap way to keep those folks busy and maintaining a large-scale force of pilots and software that would likely be useful in future intelligence-focused hot zones.
Armed drones on the other hand have WAAAY too many forms of major liability - from theft, to crashes, to irresponsible use, to accidents even with responsible use. I say don't even have them installed with hard points to install weapons, and make converting them to armed drones require several forms of permission and emergency confirmation at the least - and even then, that's more the job of the police during emergencies.
If you want to train with armed drones, do it in simulations, or rarely in the desert in existing ordinance testing zones. Don't risk the liability of using them anywhere near populated areas or in any kind of unrestrained use - that's way outside the military's realm of responsibility.
Ryan Fenton
may be handy in the elimination of police high speed pursuits. They could either track or target the vehicle...
Drones could also be useful in surveillance of high crime areas that have not deployed sufficient camera coverage.
Not that anybody would ever take advantage of drones for their own personal/political gains.
Around the DC / Northern Virginia area, I occasionally see military drones flying at night.
(Yes, that's what they are. I'm an aircraft pilot and I know what I'm looking at.)
I've seen them at very low level flying above the road, and also flying around on military bases that are bisected by public highways. At first you think it's a helicopter until it gets close enough.
Big surprise...
The US mil had a few options in the past.
:)
:)
1. An expensive mil jet with cabin pressure and a lot of tracking and detection that cant be detected as its flight path is in one direction and it looks like any normal mil flight. Collect it all over a state, city like over any US global war zone.
Cost and crew make that a unique mission as to not show who/what was collected on. Police methods cant show the origins of such mil flights in open court.
2. A smaller aircraft with a lot of the same equipment. More easy to track as they need a regional airport and have to stay in one area to collect it all.
Cant carry as much equipment and so the needed flight pattern, aircraft upgrades and front company used can be linked back to an investigation.
3. The FBI style flights that stay up over part of the US city doing usual collection flights as they need to circle for hours to collect it all.
Easy to detect due to a set repeated flight pattern, airport they start and return to, hours in flight, the law enfacement upgrades register for that aircraft, the way the front company is set up.
US law enforcement want more of option one. Nobody knows of the flight path, can find any easy to sort/map/front company record of the flights and who was collected on in what part of the USA
Criminal groups can slowly detect such collection flights due the repeated flight times, patterns of the flights, owners, recorded law enfacement upgrades to the aircraft.
Any new US police drone would still show some domestic ownership, use patterns that can be tracked day to day.
Nobody should know what a US mil drone flight did.
Now the idea is to use a mil drone as a drone did flying over a part of the USA in one direction. Collect it all in one pass, just like in a war zone
Low cost and no hours of flight patterns over a part of the USA anyone can detect.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"