War Movies Worth a Damn: Eye in the Sky

For well over a decade the film and television industry has ranged over the political and moral terrain generated by the 9/11 era and the West’s subsequent foreign policy interventions during the “war on terror.” From the brilliantly satirical (Team America: World Police), the conspiratorial (Syriana), the trenchantly critical (Redacted), the intensely personal (American Sniper), to the quasi-factual (United 93 and Zero-Dark Thirty), a whole genre of movies and TV dramas have arisen depicting this most turbulent of ages.

Although ostensibly intended to entertain, which inevitably leads to over-simplification, no one can accuse the contemporary visual arts of shirking any engagement with the zeitgeist. As the overt Western involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan have been scaled back, the “war” has moved increasingly into the shadows of intelligence-led counter-actions against the forces of transnational jihadism. And this presents further opportunities for creative talents to explore the dramatic space that this facet of the conflict engenders.

The increasing reliance of Western operations on remotely piloted drones to conduct surveillance and targeted kill operations was notably dramatized in the fourth season of Homeland (2014) and has also briefly found its way into other series like season three of House of Cards (2015). With South African director Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky (U.S. release April 2016) we have the first concentrated cinematic dissection of the acute moral and political dilemmas that drone warfare generates.

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Part of the film’s novelty is that the action takes place over the course of a few hours in a day. Col. Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) is coordinating a complex multinational operation from the United Kingdom’s Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) in Northwood, on the outskirts of London. The mission is to arrest Susan Danford, a British convert to Islam and now fanatical jihadist suspected of involvement in the Westgate shopping mall attacks in Kenya. She has been traced to a compound in Eastleigh, a suburb of Nairobi known as “Little Mogadishu.”

The figure of Danford is an almost exact simulacrum of the real-life persona of Samantha Lewthwaite, the so-called White Widow. She remains one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, a suspected member of the Somali based Al-Shabaab movement and a culprit behind a series of deadly jihadist attacks in East Africa. The appeal to authenticity in the film, referencing actual places and events, lends an added sense of relevance and plausibility. (Note: Some spoiler alerts follow, but the U.S. trailer already reveals most of the plot).

The surveillance part of the operation is conducted via a Reaper drone piloted by two U.S. Air Force personnel, Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) and Carrie Gershon (Phoebe Fox). They pilot the drone from their darkened, air-conditioned, lair in Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, while the arrest team led by the Kenyan Army is to be given the go-ahead once Danford and other assorted militants are confirmed in place. Meanwhile, back in London, a small team of the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBRA) committee, led by Lt. Gen. Frank Benson (Alan Rickman) and composed of various ministers and legal advisors, is monitoring events. The intention is to witness the final capture of the infamous Danford, who has been on the run for over six years.

The mission intensifies, however, when Kenyan surveillance of the compound reveals that the occupants are unmistakably preparing two operatives for a double-suicide attack. The operational imperative shifts from capture to kill and the Reaper is prepped to fire its Hellfire missiles into the compound. The likelihood of limited collateral damage is accepted, but the ethical stakes clearly dictate that the prospect of allowing the suicide bombers to do their worst outweighs the potential that a few innocents will likely be killed and injured in a precisely targeted missile strike.

The moral calculus changes dramatically when the presence of a young girl selling bread by the side of the compound is detected. Undoubtedly, a drone strike will place her life in mortal danger. This sets in train a tense and suspense-laden dialogue among the participants about how to weigh the life of a young child against the possibility of even more innocents being killed if the suicide bombers are allowed to escape the compound.

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Time is of the essence. Military necessity and, indeed, a legitimate utilitarian ethical calculation, demand that the missiles be released. Political expediency and other equally potent moral arguments about not knowingly risking civilian deaths argue against. The politicians recognize the case for action yet, in contrast to the military, are reluctant to sanction a missile strike. In addition to a pricked conscience, harming young children in the attack could reflect badly on them and undermine the propaganda war against the jihadists.

The legal advisors are torn. The British attorney general, George Matherson (Richard McCabe) accepts, reluctantly, that the rules of engagement do permit an attack. In contrast, the parliamentary advisor, Angela Northman (Monica Dolan), adamantly refuses to countenance any thought that a child should be put in harm’s way, even if dozens of others might lose their lives later in suicide attacks. The ministers responsible for giving clearance for the strike therefore feel pressed constantly to request higher authority, leading to the film’s lighter moments as the British foreign secretary (Iain Glen) is compelled to offer his less than clear-cut view in the midst of a bout of food poisoning in Singapore, while the U.S. secretary of state (Michael O’Keefe) is clearly irritated to have his ping pong diplomacy in China interrupted by what he considers to be a trivial non-issue. Is all this an evasion of ministerial responsibility, or an entirely understandable need for political top cover?

The great strength of the film is that no side of the argument is subject to caricature. A complex and absorbing point versus counterpoint exchange ensues with the sympathies of the viewer continually being challenged. The character of Col. Powell (incidentally, a very welcome and convincing female lead performance) is plainly highly driven having been on Danford’s tail for years. She is certainly prepared to push and stretch the rules of engagement but never to breach them. Though endlessly frustrated by the political prevarication she now has to endure, she nevertheless strives to always maintain a cool head and remains respectful of the chain of command.

Likewise, the roles of the drone pilots, Watts and Gershon, both impressively controlled performances by Paul and Fox, are deeply troubled by what they are being tasked to undertake. Yet, while they properly question aspects of the mission, they never give in to the histrionics of disobeying orders, which would lead other, weaker, plots into the realm of implausibility. Their characters remain professional, and therefore provide a more faithful, and powerful, portrayal of moral complexity.

The cost of moral complexity is that inevitably tragedy will befall someone, somewhere. The film never glosses over the likely human consequences on the ground but neither does it ignore the painful psychological effects inflicted on those who have to make the decisions that result in life or death, be it those whose purpose is to sanction the action, for those who oversee it, or for those who in the end have to squeeze the trigger that releases the Hellfire missiles. The fact that the decisions are undertaken remotely, thousands of miles away from the scene of the action, by operatives flying drones from the sanctuary of Creech Air Force Base, at PJHQ in Northwood, or over “tea and biscuits” in Whitehall, doesn’t lessen the trauma.

The psychological price paid by the participants is conveyed in an understated manner, being particularly inscribed on the faces of Watts and Gershon at the end of the mission, whose characters, the film intimates, are likely to suffer a lifetime of pain as their reward for services to their country. Even with the steely character of Col. Powell, it is hinted that her long pursuit of Danford is not without its personal regrets and consequences.

The great German sociologist Max Weber stated in Politics as a Vocation that when one enters the political realm one contracts with diabolical powers. “Anyone who fails to see this,” he memorably declared, “is, indeed, a political infant.” Above all, this film is about how people engage with these diabolical powers of utilitarian calculation that lead to the weighing up of costs, benefits, and ultimately lives. It invites us not to revile those in positions of power, be it political or military, or to regard their actions primarily as cynical maneuvering, but asks us to empathize with the acute moral dilemmas they have to face.

In fact, if any critical message is contained in the movie, it is that moral posturing is easy, cheap and, perhaps, in some ways just as cynical, or at least self-interested: a point forcefully made by the character of Gen. Benson, a fitting goodbye to the late Alan Rickman in his final role. He reminds the principled, if somewhat pious, Angela Northman, that while she may feel offended by an airstrike that kills civilians, she should never tell a soldier that they don’t understand the cost of war.

If you like your movies colored in the moral tones of black and white, with obvious heroes and villains, then this is not the film for you. If, however, you recognize that the best of art imitates, and speaks to, the human condition in all its complexity and ambiguity then you will see in Eye in the Sky perhaps the most powerful and intelligent of films of the post-9/11 epoch. Like the very best visual dramas of our times, it does not provide its audience with an easy resolution, but poses the viewer with the question: What would you do?

Read the Original Article at War on the Rocks

Espionage Files: The Brave New World of Drone Hacking

The Israel Police and Shin Bet security service arrested a Gaza resident suspected of hacking into the feeds from Air Force drones and collecting information on troop movements and civilian flights for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group, police said Wednesday.

A police statement named the suspect as Majd Ouida, 22, describing him as an “electronics engineer” from the Gaza Strip.

Ouida, who also held the position of chairman of the “Palestinian talents society,” was arrested on February 23 while en route to a meeting with young candidates on a television singing contest, the statement said but did not detail where or how he was arrested.

A police spokesperson for the Israel Police clarified that Ouida was not arrested inside the Gaza Strip, implying he was en route from the coastal enclave to the West Bank when security forces scooped him up.

According to the indictment, he was recruited by Islamic Jihad in 2011 while working as a radio broadcaster and was made their “computer administrator.”

“He carried out tasks that he received from his handlers, including coding a computer program that enabled the viewing of road cameras, hacking into the computers of the Hamas interior ministry in Gaza, and more,” police said.

According to the indictment filed against the suspect, he was asked by the Islamic Jihad in 2012 to hack into the IDF’s network of drones in operation above the Gaza Strip.

He purchased the requisite equipment from dealers in the United States and created a computer program that could intercept the broadcast feed, the prosecutor claimed.

His first two attempts at intercepting the feed failed, according to the indictment, but on his third try he was successful, allowing his handlers to see some of the footage captured by the IDF drone cameras.

“While watching the broadcasts, the defendant realized the drone was collecting intelligence on terrorist operatives working on launching and storing missiles in the Gaza Strip,” according to the indictment.

Ouida also succeeded in accessing footage from highway cameras inside Israel, obtaining for his organization information on the movement of Israeli security forces and civilians during wars in the Strip and rocket strikes, the indictment said.

Further, the man allegedly developed an application that compiled information on the movement of planes at Israel’s Ben Gurion international airport, as well as gaining access to passenger manifestos, plane weights and makes, and takeoff and landing times.

Ouida faces a litany of charges for his actions, including espionage, conspiracy to commit a crime, computer hacking and transferring information to an enemy with the intent to harm national security.

Read the Original Article at Times of Israel

This Forgotten 1950s Flying Trick Could Be the Secret of Future Drone Warfare

The “bucket drop”, invented by a missionary trying to airdrop​ gifts to natives in Ecuador, would let warplanes release a swarm of drones and lasso them back.

 

The warplane of the future is a drone mothership, able to dispatch swarms of small air-launched UAVs for close-up reconnaissance, to act as jammers or decoys, or even to carry out airstrikes. Those drones may be cheap enough to be expendable, but what if you want to recover them?

The Air Force has the answer, using a technique developed by a 1950’s jungle pilot and missionary. Researchers are now experimenting with ways to use his deceptively simple idea—dragging a long tether behind a plane—to let a plane pull its drones back in.

The Perfect Spiral

Nate Saint was a missionary to remote villages in Ecuador. He knew that the best way to prove friendly intentions to new groups of Waodani, a notoriously dangerous people, was to offer gifts, but he wanted a better way of delivering them than haphazard parachute drops. So he developed what he called the “bucket drop.”

The bucket drop involved reeling out a basket loaded with gifts on the end of a line behind the plane, then flying in a circle so the line becomes a spiral with the basket at the center of the circle. Saint then let out more line. Nate’s son Steve Saint, a missionary and pilot like his father whose projects include a flying car, explains what happened next:

“When enough line was extended behind the plane, the end of the line would actually hang motionless in the air. Letting out more line at that point would make the line drop straight down where it could be made to hover just above the ground.”

Nate Saint perfected the bucket drop in California, controlling the line first with a fishing reel and then with the motor from an electric drill. The bucket drop could also make pick-ups. The family dog became the bucket drop’s first passenger, in a safety harness made from a T-shirt.

Nate Saint’s flying pattern was not a matter of calculation but skill and practical experience. Saint was less interested in the theory than in making it work. “Once you get a few principles down, the human brain works out its own system, without the person understanding all that his or her mind is computing,” Steve Saint says.

The technique worked equally well in Ecuador. Waodani accepted the gifts, and signaled their friendship by giving presents in return: a feather headdress and a parrot which was adopted by the young Steve Saint. There were other uses for the bucket drop too, such as lowering a telephone handset to talk to missionaries on the ground. The at the top of this piece shows Steve Saint demonstrating the bucket drop.

Nate Saint and four other missionaries were murdered by Waodani in June 1956; Life magazine published their story. Amazingly, his son Steve Saint later befriended the Waodani, including some who killed his father but later converted to Christianity. And that was far from the end for Nate’s idea.

Read the Remainder at Popular Mechanics

How the Reagan-Era CIA Predicted Our Drone Dystopia

It is mind numbing how an agency with the resources and manpower like the CIA has can predict things like this but yet miss earth shaking Geo-Political events like the Soviets Invading Afghanistan in 1979 or the Soviet Union Collapse in 1991 or my favorite: being blindsided on 9/11. As a person who understands the extreme necessity of intelligence in warfighting, you can say I am the CIA’s biggest fan but also their biggest critic (and at times, skeptic). -SF

As far back as 1986, the agency saw a future of proliferating drones that would be used for ‘attack missions’ by armies and terrorists alike, according to a now-declassified report.

The drone craze has set off a wave of pundit hand-wringing about the global spread of unmanned technology and its consequences.

But a declassified report from the CIA’s analytical arm shows that the agency was predicting a wave of drone proliferation as far back as the mid-1980s, at a time when the iconic Predator drone was only a glint in Langley’s eye.

The 1986 intelligence assessment, “Remotely Piloted Vehicles in the Third World: A New Military Capability,” prepared by the CIA’s Office of Global Issues, shows that the trickle of unmanned technology into the developing world first began decades ago.

The CIA’s assessment argued that advances in technology had made drones a more capable, accessible, and popular purchase than ever before—a trend the agency expected only to continue in the years to come. Israel’s innovative use of drones in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, in particular, had “heightened Third World interest in [unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)].”

The growing interest in unmanned systems around the world, according to the assessment, was a sign that “a number of other Third World nations with relatively large and professional militaries will become users of RPVs by the mid-1990s, especially with the development of inexpensive and easy-to-use systems.”

By the time of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, drones were already well known to the world’s militaries. The United States had used them extensively in the Vietnam War. Israel’s use of drones during the invasion of Lebanon, however, represented an altogether more innovative application of the technology.

The Israeli air force used UAVs not only to provide reconnaissance on Syrian air defenses in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley (PDF) but also to trick surface-to-air missile system (SAM) operators into thinking the aircraft were manned Israeli jets. When the SAM operators switched on their radars or fired missiles at the decoy drones, they exposed their positions to real Israeli jets nearby, which jammed and bombed them.

Israel’s wider war in Lebanon would drag on for years, but the battle against Syrian air defenses in the Bekaa Valley—in preparation for about a year—was won in short order, after Israel was able to destroy 17 of the 19 Syrian SAMs deployed there.

While Israel’s drone use acted as a demonstration point for drones on the battlefield, technological advances in the 1980s meant that purchasing drones would be increasingly attainable for smaller militaries viewing from the sidelines.

 According to the agency’s analysis, lighter airframes, made possible by new composite materials, were increasing drones’ ability to carry heavier and heavier payloads. Cheaper solid state television cameras coming onto the market would also make basic video cameras a go-to sensor for smaller, more affordable drones, while a new crop of faster chips would help speed up the processing of videos feeds.

Until the 1980s, militaries used drones almost overwhelmingly for intelligence and surveillance. But by 1986, there were already signs that drones would take on a strike role.

South Africa’s National Dynamics was at work on a UAV that could fire unguided 2.75-inch rockets. In the United States, the Army was expressing interest in the Sky Eye, capable of firing the unguided rockets and carrying Hellfire missiles (PDF)—the same missile later used on armed Reaper and Predator drones. Sky Eye’s cousin, the Army’s ill-fated MQM-105 Aquila drone program, used a laser designator to identify targets for artillery systems and other aircraft to fire laser-guided Copperhead artillery shells and Hellfire missiles.

These developments helped convince the CIA that a new generation of drones would be used for “attack missions” and could “deliver standoff munitions.”

Back then, as now, the declining barriers to drone ownership raised the specter of their use as a terrorist weapon. Given terrorists’ prior use of gliders and other small transport vehicles in attacks, they might see drones as a kind of poor man’s missile, “effectively converting the [UAV] into a guided bomb capable of surprise attacks at short and medium ranges.”

The report warned that “a bomb-laden [UAV] provided to a terrorist group by a patron state could be used against a US embassy or target in a dramatic fashion.” Libya and Iran loomed as the largest threats for terrorist use of UAVs, with the report judging larger Palestinian terrorist groups as the most capable of employing them in kamikaze fashion.

Overall, though, the agency viewed drone proliferation in the “Third World” as mostly a good thing that could “help prevent conflict and maintain stability in tense Middle Eastern and Asian areas.” It argued that the intelligence the drones collected in conflict-prone regions could provide transparency about neighbors’ intentions and reduce the kinds of miscalculations that can lead to larger wars—all without the escalatory risk of losing a flesh-and-blood pilot.

So how does the CIA’s 1986 vision of the drone future line up with today? The report only extended its analysis into the mid-1990s, making 2016 a slightly unfair yardstick by which to judge the agency’s analytical skills. Still, though the report missed some of the politics and technologies that were most important in turning the drone trickle into a flood, some of its analysis has held up pretty well, even long past its sell-by date.

Drone interest in the Middle East and South Asia did pick up in the 1990s. The 1999 Kargil war between India and Pakistan spurred India to buy Israeli-made UAVs, starting a drone trade with Israel that continues to this day. In the Middle East, Iraq experimented with ill-fated drone development programs of varying size from the late 1980s until the 2003 U.S. invasion (PDF). And Iran continued its UAV development begun during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1990s, while Israel was still a drone export powerhouse.

Today that trend has only intensified, as at least 86 countries’ militaries have some kind of UAV, according to a study by the New America Foundation. Even armed drones, once an exclusive preserve of a handful of advanced militaries, are an ever more common sight in the developing world, with Iraq, Pakistan, and Nigeria becoming the latest armed forces to use them in combat.

And as the CIA feared, terrorists have made use of bomb-laden drones, albeit not to great effect. During the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon war, Hezbollah strapped explosives to a crude Iranian-made Ababil-II drone and flew it over Israel, where it was shot down by an F-16. Jihadist groups in Iraq. Also, Syria, like ISIS and the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, has used small commercial quadrotor drones for propaganda and limited reconnaissance.

The report did miss in a few key areas, however. “It’s not so much their assumptions of the technology, it’s their assumptions of geopolitics,” said Peter Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

Little could the analysts working on narrow weapons technology issues have expected that the Soviet Union would collapse in five short years or that some 30 years later China would rise to become a weapons powerhouse and prolific drone supplier. As a result, the report viewed the near future of the UAV trade as dominated by Western development and exports, with China as a customer of drone technology rather than the export rival it is today.

On the technology side, improvements in the size, weight, and power of drones and their sensors were key to the success of UAVs, but “it wasn’t until unmanned systems were married up with GPS that they became truly useful,” said Singer. He told a story of an unarmed Air Force Predator drone scouting for Serbian military targets hiding among civilians during the war in Bosnia. The UAV managed to find a Serb tank, but the lack of precise coordinates for either the tank or the Predator prevented U.S. forces from being able to do much about it.

Five years after the Predator’s integration with GPS, President Clinton ordered the federal government to make more precise coordinates from the satellite navigation system’s civilian channel available to the world. Up to that point, the U.S. had intentionally degraded the accuracy of civilian GPS signals in an effort to prevent their use in weapons systems. The May 2000 order reversed that policy, unlocking the potential for a myriad of GPS applications, including both civilian and military drones.

While views on the merits and morality of unmanned systems in war are by no means uniform, some of the CIA’s cautious optimism about drones is shared by analysts today.

Even today, the intelligence drones provide could make them a stabilizing force in international relations as more countries adopt them, argues Michael Horowitz in a working paper written with colleagues Sarah E. Kreps and Matthew Fuhrmann.

“A lot of conflict happens because of uncertainty and fear about what adversaries might be doing,” Horowitz, an associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania who has written extensively about U.S. drone and technology policy, told The Daily Beast. “To the extent that UAVs increase the information that both sides have about a given situation, it makes them less likely to inadvertently stumble into a conflict.

Read the Original Article at The Daily Beast

Leave it to the Russians: Flying Bazooka Drones

When you look at the tactic of drone swarm warfare using these bad boys, suddenly the Battlefield changes in the Russians favor. -SF

The latest apocalyptic drone news out of Russia.

A new video from Russian arms maker United Instrument Manufacturing Corporation (UIMC) shows its aerial drone attacking targets with anti-tank rockets. The video debuted earlier this week at the Robotics of the Russian Armed Forces exhibition, along with a number of new drones. Since then it’s been making the rounds, maybe because it looks like a wild scaled-up version of the ramshackle handgun-firing quadcopter rigged up by a teenager. A closer look, though, reveals something much scarier.

The Russian multicopter can be controlled from a range of three miles and has a flight time of twenty minutes. It is armed with an unspecified rocket launcher, possibly the sort of “rocket flamethrower” weapon mounted on a drone that was promised earlier. The armed drone, made by the Systemprom subsidiary of UIMC (that itself is part of Russian arms giant ROSTEC) can work as part of a hunter-killer team.

“The flying robots were designed to observe distant objects, record video and still images including thermal imaging, transmit video in real time, deliver goods to a specified point, and destroy enemy targets on the battlefield,” says Sergey Skokov, Deputy CEO of UIMC in a press release.

A remote-controlled flying bazooka is a cool enough idea on its own. It gets around the infantryman’s problem of getting close enough to a tank to shoot at it without exposing himself to danger. Also, a drone can attack the thin armor on the tank’s side, rear, or top. The problem with a radio control link is that it can be jammed, and there are already anti-drone jamming systems on the market, but the Russians have thought of that: Once set loose, these drones do not need human control.

“These robots can navigate through the air without the support of an operator, choose their own routes, carry out reconnaissance work, and interact with other drones and robotic systems,” says Skokov.

This autonomy is not limited to flying around and taking pictures of pre-planned locations. These drones can fight on their own, too. “The attack multicopter can detect and destroy enemy targets, including tanks and armored vehicles.” While U.S. military has always insisted on having a “man in the loop” with armed drones, and having a human push the button to fire a deadly weapon, the Russians appear to have a more… relaxed approach to letting killer robots loose.

The Russian drone itself isnt’ that impressive. Judging from the video, it did not hit close enough to its target to damage it if it were a real tank. But this is only the start. Future versions are likely to be faster, smarter, more accurate, and may be cheap enough to deploy in large numbers. TheDJI S1000 which has similar specs costs around $5,000, compared to around $100,000 for a Hellfire anti-tank missile. Expect to see more like it in future.

Read the Original Article at Popular Mechanics