I Am Sure that Jeff Bezos Would Want to be Included

You see, the Iranians have declared that Google and Microsoft facilities are legitimate military targets.

Amazon, of course, has already been hit during the war, but I'm pretty sure that Jeff is feeling ignored right now.

Iran should send him a gift as an apology, and in true Amazon manner, they can deliver it by drone.

There’s a new target in 21st century warfare: US tech companies.

According to Al Jazeera, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps made the announcement following attacks on the country by US and Israeli military forces. In retaliation to a specific strike on an Iranian bank — which reportedly killed several civilian employees — Iranian military officials declared that they would now count US- and Israeli-linked financial and tech institutions among their targets.

………

In a document viewed by Al Jazeera, the IRGC listed a number of US tech companies as “Iran’s new targets,” including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, as well as a cloud computing companies in Israel and several Gulf countries. .

………

A sign that Iran’s not bluffing: the announcement comes after its drones inflicted “structural damage” on three Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Those strikes are believed to be the first instance of an adversary targeting US corporate tech facilities in an attack — a sign of the strange new battlefield as commercial tech infrastructure is now visibly embedded throughout the US military apparatus.

It should be noted that the strikes on the Amazon facilities took out much telecommunications capabilities in the region for hours.

It should also be noted that this vulnerability is an unavoidable feature of the cloud.

 

About El Paso

It turns out that the 10 day (rescinded after a few hours) airspace shut-down over El Paso was a party balloon, not any real sort of security threat.

Don't worry though, they shot it down with a laser. 

The abrupt closure of El Paso’s airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation.

The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 days, an extraordinary pause that was quickly lifted Wednesday morning at the direction of the White House.

Top administration officials quickly claimed that the closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military response, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declaring in a social media post that “the threat has been neutralized.”

But that assertion was undercut by multiple people familiar with the situation, who said that the F.A.A.’s extreme move came after immigration officials earlier this week used an anti-drone laser shared by the Pentagon without coordination with the F.A.A. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

C.B.P. officials thought they were firing on a cartel drone, the people said, but it turned out to be a party balloon. Defense Department officials were present during the incident, one person said. 

I'm going to give these incompetent idiots the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that it was one of the shiny silver Mylar balloons, which, because of their aluminum coating, are readily picked up on radar.

The level of incompetence here is stunning. 

 

Must Watch

This video is a bit long, almost an hour, but it is a remarkable look into the mind of a military drone designer. 

The drone make in question is Russian, and much of his observations come from experience in the Ukraine war, though the interview is largely free of  geopolitical content.

It's just a weapons maker talking about his craft and the realities of its deployment. 

Not a Tragic Mistake, a War Crime

Following a New York Times expose revealing that the drone strike against alleged ISIS-K militants in Kabul in fact targeted an aid worker and his family, and that all the victims were civilians, the Pentagon has admitted that they made a mistake.

This was not a mistake, it was deliberate.  Someone at very senior levels decided that they had to drone someone on the flimsiest of evidence to retaliate for the bombing at the Kabul airport.

It's kind of like kicking your cat because your boss chewed you out.

Both are immature, but only one kills children, and only one is a war crime:

The Pentagon acknowledged on Friday that the last U.S. drone strike before American troops withdrew from Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians, including seven children, after initially saying it had been necessary to prevent an attack on troops.

The extraordinary admission provided a horrific punctuation to the chaotic ending of the 20-year war in Afghanistan and will put President Biden and the Pentagon at the center of a growing number of investigations into how the administration and the military carried out Mr. Biden’s order to withdraw from the country.

Almost everything senior defense officials asserted in the hours, and then days, and then weeks after the Aug. 29 drone strike turned out to be false. The explosives the military claimed were loaded in the trunk of a white Toyota sedan struck by the drone’s Hellfire missile were probably water bottles, and a secondary explosion in the courtyard in a densely populated Kabul neighborhood where the attack took place was probably a propane or gas tank, officials said.

I would like to see some accountability.  Every officer who signed off on this action, and everyone who enabled this callous disregard for civilian life and the law of war, needs to be investigated, and prosecuted if the facts bear this out.

Of course, the people who should be prosecuted, General Officers and Colonels, won't be prosecuted.

At best they will find a junior officer, or a non-commissioned officer, to tie this to, and blame them, because that is how military justice (an oxymoron if there ever was one) works.

We just created another few dozen people who want to kill Americans.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan

The last US forces have been withdrawn from Kabul, and we have credible reports that the drone strike targeting ISIS-K instead hit civilians and killed 10 civilians.

A capstone to a miserable failure.

Someone Is Losing Their Job

It appears that the shutdown of Gatwick airport may have been caused by police drones, and not some nefarious terrorist or prankster:

Some of the drone sightings which kept Gatwick Airport on lockdown for 36 hours may have been reports of Sussex Police's own aircraft, the force's highest-ranking officer admitted yesterday.

Police received 115 reports of sightings in the area surrounding the airfield, including 92 confirmed by Sussex Police's Chief Constable Giles York as coming from "credible people".

But the force launched its own drone to search for what officers believed at the time to be malicious aircraft deliberately being flown above the runway in the early hours of December 19 to intentionally force Gatwick to shut down.

Well, the behavior to this point DOES seem to reek of authorities covering up their own incompetence.

Gatwick was shut down for 3 days at the height of the holiday travel season, and if this turns out to be a police screw up, there will be hell to pay.

Not a Surprise

The head of the Pakistani Air Force has announced that they will be shooting down drones in their airspace, including US ones:

Pakistan Air Force (PAF) chief Sohail Aman said here on Thursday that he has ordered his force to shoot down any drones, including those of the US, if they violate the country's airspace.
The announcement was made public about two weeks after a US drone strike targeted a militant compound in Pakistan's tribal region near the Afghan border, killing three militants.

Pakistan had always condemned drone strikes on its soil but had never said they would shoot down the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). "We will not allow anyone to violate our airspace. I have ordered PAF to shoot down drones, including those of the US, if they enter our airspace, violating the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity," Air Chief Marshal Sohail Aman told an audience in Islamabad.

If he meant that US missile strikes on militant positions were a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty, then these violations have been occurring since 2004. The CIA was responsible for all US drone strikes in Pakistan until November 30, 2017.

Such is the price of unilateralism.

It works, until it's can't

Headline of the Day

Thanks, Obama: Trump Plans to Make It Easier to Kill Civilians with Drones

True dat.

Scary Tweet of the Day

DJI did a firmware update on a drone... while mid-flight 😬 pic.twitter.com/YDexjEViFc

— Internet of 💩 (@internetofshit) February 8, 2017

Of course, who cares about a lightweight relatively cheap drone.

Then again, what if this was a self driving car, or even the car that you are driving now? While you are driving it?

Tesla has already done over the air (OTA) updates on their cars, and while you may trust them, (I don't) would you trust the creators of the Chevy Vega?

H/t Naked Capitalism

This is a Sign of Institutional Collapse

It turns out that the shortage of drone pilots in the US military is so unable to meet the basic training needs of even its drone trainers:

American military power in the 21st century relies on the mighty drone. The flying robots watch America’s enemies from the skies — and sometimes blow them apart with Hellfire missiles.

There’s a logic to using drones. Putting a robot in harm’s way is a lot better than putting an actual person in the same place.

America can always build another drone. It’s a lot harder to replace a good pilot.

………

he U.S. Army and the Air Force both need a lot of pilots and technicians to keep the drones flying — literally tens of thousands of people altogether — but it hasn’t been easy filling those job slots. Worse, the two branches started cutting corners during training, according to the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, a congressionally-mandated watchdog.

Often, the Army wasn’t even sure if its pilots were qualified to fly drones. On top of that, it was approving new flight instructors who haven’t finished their own training.

………

But the less obvious answer is that no one wants to pilot drones. It’s an awful job where a pilot — instead of sitting in a cockpit — sits inside a metal box in front of a computer screen for hours. Drone pilots are overworked, over-stressed and pissed off.

No wonder the Pentagon can’t find good pilots.


In May 2015, the GAO released its most recent report on the sorry state of America’s drone force. Concerned about drone pilots’ lackluster training, the agency talked to pilots and instructors and pored over the training logs and materials.

The findings were scary.

“Most Army [drone] pilots are not completing all of their unit training,” the GAO explained. Further, “the Army does not have visibility over whether [drone] pilots … have completed training.”

………

The Air Force was no better. The flying branch’s pilots were so overloaded that they don’t have time to finish required training.

“According to Air Force officials,” the GAO wrote. “Some Air Force UAS pilots have not completed their continuation training because they spend most of their time conducting operational missions due to shortages of UAS pilots and high workloads.”

More than equipment, more than any technological superiority, wars are won with training, tactics, and readiness.

Case in point, the F4F Wildcat, which achieved a 6:1 favorable kill ratio against the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, despite the fact that it was markedly inferior aircraft. (Slower, less maneuverable, etc.)

This was because of better training, situational awareness, and tactics.

And now our training infrastructure is breaking down.

An Inside Out Wankel

The 4 Stroke Cycle for This Engine


An animation, including P-V curves

A company called LiquidPiston has a new take on rotary engine technology, they have basically turned a Wankel engine inside out, which appears to have solved the apex seal problem while improving fuel economy.

It still has ports, instead of valves, so it's also pretty simple:

Military and other operators prefer using kerosene, rather than gasoline, across ground and air platforms, but lightweight, reliable heavy-fuel engines for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have proved challenging to develop.

LiquidPiston, a startup developing a novel powerplant that is smaller and lighter than piston diesel engines and more efficient than gasoline engines, has been boosted by winning Sikorsky’s Entrepreneurial Challenge.

Developing multifuel rotary combustion engines based on its high-efficiency hybrid thermodynamic cycle (HEHC), the Bloomfield, Connecticut-based company has won $25,000 and the opportunity to explore applications for its X-engine on Sikorsky products.

“We are targeting our engine to be up to 10-15 times smaller and lighter than a piston diesel engine of similar power output, and up to 2-3 times more efficient than gasoline engines, especially at part-power,” says founder and CEO Alexander Shkolnik.

I think that the claims here are a bit much, but the shape of the combustion chamber is far less prone to the thermodynamic losses that bedevil the Wankel.

In a Wankel, apex seals on the triangular rotor move in and out at high speed during rotation. “The seals are impossible to lubricate, so they mix oil into the air, but 90% of the oil burns,” says Shkolnik. “In our engines, the seals are on the stationary housing and easier to lubricate.”

HEHC is a four-stroke cycle. The fuel/air mixture enters the X-engine through the rotor and is compressed and ignited. Constant-volume combustion increases efficiency. The combustion gases are then overexpanded before being exhausted through the rotor.

The overexpanded power stroke is similar to that used by the Atkinson Cycle engine used in the Prius to achieve higher fuel economy, though it appears that it does not share the rather low power density of the Prius engine (not an issue in a hybrid, as the electric motor supplies handles need for peak power).

Snark of the Day

Syrian child disappointed she won't get to be drone-striked by the first female president

—Duffelblog

Brilliant!

And yet I find just the opposite to be true. The replacement is even more extreme

What a surprise.  The US policy of assassination makes extremest groups more extreme and more dangerous:

The elimination of Taliban leader Mansour will only increase the danger to Afghan civilians, a US terrorism analyst, whose research focuses on the impact of targeted killings, predicts.

Dr Max Abrahms, from Northeastern University in Boston, said the US Government does not look carefully enough at the strategic implications of its strikes on extremist leaders.

He said he had done a number of studies on leadership decapitation of a militant group and he had not found a statistically significant reduction in the amount of violence perpetrated by the group after a leader was removed.

"In fact these decapitation strikes can actually be counter-productive, because one of the assumptions of the targeted killing campaigns is that the replacement of the leader that you killed will be more moderate," Dr Abrahms said.

"And yet I find just the opposite to be true. The replacement is even more extreme.

"So for that reason, in the immediate aftermath of a successful targeted killing, like over this weekend, the group's violence tends to become even more extreme, in the sense that it's even more likely to attack civilian targets."

………

"What I've seen is that the younger people to emerge in the Taliban are actually even crazier, if you will, than the old guard."

And then Abrams says that, "He did not think the US Government very carefully studied the strategic implications of taking out Mansour."

Gee, you think?

The problem here is that there are way too many people out there who think that our "Freedumb Bomz" will make the world a better place because they are our weapons.

Like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.

H/t Empty Wheel.

Well, it was Only a Matter of Time Until we Killed a White Guy………

And now the Obama administration has been forced to admit that they killed two white hostages in drone strikes:

An American aid worker and another man held hostage by Al Qaeda were killed in an American drone strike in Pakistan in January, government officials disclosed on Thursday, underscoring the perils of a largely invisible, long-distance war waged through video screens, joysticks and sometimes incomplete intelligence.

Intending to wipe out a compound linked to the terrorist group, the Central Intelligence Agency authorized the attack with no idea that the hostages were being held there despite hundreds of hours of surveillance, the officials said. Even afterward, they said, the agency did not realize at first that it had killed an American it had long sought to rescue, with the wrenching news becoming clear over time.

The violent death of an American at the hands of his own government proved a searing moment in a drone war that has come to define the nation’s battle with Al Qaeda, especially since President Obama took office. Visibly upset, Mr. Obama came to the White House briefing room shortly after his staff issued a written statement announcing the deaths to make a rare personal apology.

But no one gave a sh%$ when a 16 year old American kid, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was killed by drones "accidentally", former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business."

His dad was a jihadi, so it was all cool.

One of the important thing to note is that the White House had no idea who was in the al-Qaeda compound:

The targets of the deadly drone strikes that killed two hostages and two suspected American members of al-Qaida were “al-Qaida compounds” rather than specific terrorist suspects, the White House disclosed on Thursday.

The lack of specificity suggests that despite a much-publicized 2013 policy change by Barack Obama restricting drone killings by, among other things, requiring “near certainty that the terrorist target is present”, the US continues to launch lethal operations without the necessity of knowing who specifically it seeks to kill, a practice that has come to be known as a “signature strike”.

Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, acknowledged that the January deaths of hostages Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto might prompt the tightening of targeting standards ahead of lethal drone and other counter-terrorism strikes. A White House review is under way.

“In the aftermath of a situation like this, it raises legitimate questions about whether additional changes need to be made to these protocols,” Earnest said.

………

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the accidental killings revealed on Thursday raise “questions about the reliability and the depth of the intelligence that the government is relying on to conduct drone strikes”.

“In neither of these two cases did the government actually know beforehand who it was killing. It does raise questions about how much the government knows – or how little the government knows – before it pulls the trigger,” Jaffer said.

“Perhaps that doesn’t in itself suggest that the strikes were unlawful, but it certainly raises some questions.”

It appears that the CIA thought that something might be wrong when there were two extra bodies found at the strike sites.

Oops!

I will note two things, said by the inimitable Charlie Pierce:

Am I being unpatriotic if I mention that, at this point, I wouldn't trust the CIA to give me directions to the mall?

There has been a lot of "collateral damage" (Dead innocents) from drone strikes, but it is clear that the CIA is FAR more reckless than the Pentagon over this, though it has improved from the excesses of Petraeus' disastrous stint as DCIA.

His second point is more important:

I've always thought of the drone war in terms of the melon vendor and the guy in the goat cart on the other side of the road. There's an al Qaeda operative buying a melon from a vendor. Meanwhile, a guy with a goat cart comes up the other side of the road. Suddenly, here comes death from above. The terrorist is dead. So is the melon vendor. So is the guy in the goat cart on the other side of the road. They're all blown into equally tiny bits. How do we think the families of the melon vendor and the guy with the goat cart are going to take this? We create a desire for retribution with which our grandchildren may have to cope. And we may never know the names of the melon dealer or the guy with the goat cart, the way we now know the names of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto. We may never know the name of the melon dealer until his grandchild blows up an airplane. And none of that should be surprising because that's also what happens when you make war, any kind of war, in a place.

The drone campaign is clearly excessive, and as a result, we are destabilizing the region, and creating a generation of people who want to make war on America.

Anyone who thinks that our drone campaign makes us safer is insane.

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept it, is to do this with the Starship Enterprise

The Reliant


The Enterprise

Still, this quad-copter Millennium Falcon conversion is unbelievably cool.

Hats off to Robert C. for an inspired bit of modeling.

It helps that the Falcon is largely circular in planform.

Doing the USS Enterprise would be a lot more difficult, if just because, for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to locate the rotors to make that configuration work right now.

I might wimp out, and just go with the Reliant from Wrath of Khan, which as can clearly be seen, would be a bit more amenable to a balanced configuration with the rotors

I'm going to talk to the kids, and see if we can do this as a summer project.

Of course, if I can figure out how to configure rotors for the Constitution class cruiser, I will go with the original Enterprise, from the original series, because, if given a choice, I will always go with the original series.

I'm funny that way.

Anwar al-Awlaki Assassination Memo Released in Redacted Form

The legal justification basically comes down to the fact that the incredibly broad 911 Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) would justify lethal force.

This appears to me to be good law, but remain dubious of the facts.

Basically, and this is on a quick reading of a heavily redacted memo full of legalese, there is no mention of the actual activities that al-Awalki engaged in that had him declared a combatant, just a justification for lethal actions against American citizens who have assumed a combat role against the United States.

So, we still don't know what he did to be declared a combatant. It could be that he was involved in major military decisions, functioning as a military officer in al-Qaida, but I've never seen any sort of release, either officially or through leaks, claiming this.

What we do some of what he was doing.

He produced and distributed sermons supporting Jihad, and we know that he provided religious advice to people in AQAP, including the Underoos bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

If these are the facts that led the US government, and I am inclined to believe that this is the totality of the actual facts against him.  (See my no leaks comment above)

If this is the case, then the US state security apparatus specifically targeted Anwar al-Awlaki on the basis of activities which are purely clerical in nature.

This begs the obvious question, "When do we start droning the leaders of Operation Rescue?"

After all, if pastoral support of terrorism rates assassination, the ongoing terrorism against abortion providers should be at the top of the list.

Memo, such as it is, after the break.

Yes, this is the Very Epitome of Terrorizing the Populace

Peter Schaapveld, a forensic psychologist, has surveyed people Yemenis who live in areas target by drones, and has determined that 92% of the populace is suffering from PTSD:

The people of Yemen can hear destruction before it arrives. In cities, towns and villages across this country, which hangs off the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, the air buzzes with the sound of American drones flying overhead. The sound is a constant and terrible reminder: a robot plane, acting on secret intelligence, may calculate that the man across from you at the coffee shop, or the acquaintance with whom you've shared a passing word on the street, is an Al Qaeda operative. This intelligence may be accurate or it may not, but it doesn't matter. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the chaotic buzzing above sharpens into the death-herald of an incoming missile.

Such quite literal existential uncertainty is coming at a deep psychological cost for the Yemeni people. For Americans, this military campaign is an abstraction. The drone strikes don't require U.S. troops on the ground, and thus are easy to keep out of sight and out of mind. Over half of Yemen's 24.8 million citizens – militants and civilians alike – are impacted every day. A war is happening, and one of the unforeseen casualties is the Yemeni mind.

Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma and anxiety are becoming rampant in the different corners of the country where drones are active. "Drones hover over an area for hours, sometimes days and weeks," said Rooj Alwazir, a Yemeni-American anti-drone activist and cofounder of Support Yemen, a media collective raising awareness about issues afflicting the country. Yemenis widely describe suffering from constant sleeplessness, anxiety, short-tempers, an inability to concentrate and, unsurprisingly, paranoia.

Alwazir recalled a Yemeni villager telling her that the drones "are looking inside our homes and even at our women.'" She says that, "this feeling of infringement of privacy, combined with civilian casualties and constant fear and anxiety has a profound long time psychological effect on those living under drones."

Last year, London-based forensic psychologist Peter Schaapveld presented research he'd conducted on the psychological impact of drone strikes in Yemen to a British parliamentary sub-committee. He reported that 92 percent of the population sample he examined was found to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – with children being the demographic most significantly affected. Women, he found, claimed to be miscarrying from their fear of drones. "This is a population that by any figure is hugely suffering," Schaapveld said. The fear of drones, he added, "is traumatizing an entire generation."

Throughout Yemen, it seems, the endless blue heaven above has become a bad omen.

So, do you think that these folks will learn to hate the United States, and revisit violence with violence?

We are damaging a whole generation, and these damaged people will become tomorrow's warriors determined to get vengeance.

Aviation Week Comes to the Right Decision While Ignoring the Obvious

They have an editorial where they argue (Correctly IMNSHO) that the 50 year old U-2 is a superior reconnaissance platform to the Block 3 Global Hawk UAV:

With the presentation of the Obama administration's fiscal 2015 budget request last week, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced his decision in a battle that had been brewing for some time: U-2 (below) versus Global Hawk. With money as tight as it is, everyone knew it was becoming too expensive to have both options for high-altitude intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance (ISR) missions.

It would be easy to portray this as a contest between modernity and nostalgia, pitting a cutting-edge unmanned system against a piloted Cold War relic—Hal the computer versus an aging jet jockey with a silk scarf. Indeed, when Hagel announced his decision, he said he is opting to phase out the “50-year-old U-2 in favor of the unmanned Global Hawk” beginning in 2016 (see page 30). But that comparison is not just an oversimplification, it is the wrong way to approach the question.

Hagel was more forthright when he acknowledged this was “a close call.” It surely is. The operating costs of the two fleets, for example, have been about the same.

They note that the U-2 is cheaper to buy, more flexible in its operations, flies higher, and has a sophisticated ECM suite.

But their editorial ignores the elephant in the room.

The reason that the Air Force, and the Congress, are supporting the very expensive ($200 million a copy) and inferior solution is because of pork and post-retirement employment opportunities for retired officers at defense contractors.

We really need to move to something like the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV), to take the uniformed military out of the procurement equation.

Additionally, such an agency should have as its remit the analysis of subcontracting, to ensure that work is allocated on the basis of efficiency, and not in an attempt to spread work to politically significant Congressional districts.

The Pentagon is Procuring Weapons at the Expense of Real Capability

Two years after the USAF selected the 50 year old U-2 over the block 3 RQ-4 Global Hawk, drone because the 50 year Dragon Lady was cheaper to buy, cheaper to operate, more reliable, and more capable, the USAF is trying to throw another bone to the military-industrial complex:

Less than two years after proposing termination and premature mothballing of the new Block 30 version—once eyed as a replacement for the venerable, high-flying U-2 reconnaissance aircraft—the Pentagon leadership is toying with a complete reversal on its position as it works through options for the fiscal 2015 budget proposal.

In a resourcing management decision—the mechanism by which the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) responds to the services' annual spending plans—Pentagon budgeters gutted U-2 funding, shifting more than $3 billion into the Global Hawk Block 30 account. The decision is not yet final, and it remains to be seen whether the service will maintain its position from the fiscal 2013 budget. It favored halting Block 30 work and operations and focusing solely on the Lockheed Martin U-2 as the high-altitude, standoff intelligence collector for the next decade or more.

………

At issue for the Global Hawk is a dive in the cost per flying hour (CPFH) for the aircraft. In earlier fiscal years, CPFH was near that of the U-2 at roughly $33,000 per hr. Fiscal 2013 numbers, recently in from the field, point to a CPFH closer to $25,000, according to a program source.

The notable decrease is due to a substantial spike in the number of hours flown, a shift partly related to the fielding of the first Block 40s outfitted with active, electronically scanned array (AESA) radars for ground surveillance, an Air Force official says. The official did not provide a total number for the year, but a larger number of hours allows fixed costs to be more diluted in the calculation. Though the Air Force has not publicly proposed terminating the Block 40 in budget plans, last year senior leaders were eyeing it for a kill. It was likely saved owing to the then open debate on the fate of Block 30.

Even if this new CPFH holds true in coming years, one program official notes that for some regions—such as the Pacific—Global Hawk must fly more hours to have an equitable time on station as the U-2. While CPFH may be lower for the Global Hawk, the figure is not reflective of the total cost to gather the needed intelligence.

To give an example, the unmanned air system (UAS) would have to fly 54% more flight hours to collect intelligence on areas in North Korea, the Middle East and Iran.

Even if this new CPFH (cost per flying hour) holds true in coming years, one program official notes that for some regions—such as the Pacific—Global Hawk must fly more hours to have an equitable time on station as the U-2. While CPFH may be lower for the Global Hawk, the figure is not reflective of the total cost to gather the needed intelligence.

To give an example, the unmanned air system (UAS) would have to fly 54% more flight hours to collect intelligence on areas in North Korea, the Middle East and Iran.

Nor is CPFH reflective of mission success rates between the two platforms. Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance collection is in high demand, and aircraft downtime is extremely worrisome for combatant commanders. In the Pacific, 55% of Global Hawk's missions were canceled in fiscal 2013; 96% of the U-2's missions were achieved. The U-2 was also scheduled for nearly three times as many missions. Global Hawk lacks anti-icing equipment and is not able to operate in severe weather. An upgrade to remedy the shortcoming is being developed by the Navy for its Triton Global Hawk variant, but it would cost money and time to field.

The program source argues that CPFH is not an accurate metric on which to make a decision. He notes that Global Hawks based in Guam have to transit for hours just to reach North Korea, whereas the U-2, based at Osan air base, South Korea, has a shorter commute.

Additionally, the service originally opted to terminate the aircraft because of the lackluster performance by its Raytheon Enhanced Integrated Sensor Suite—the camera used to collect visual, infrared, and radar images. Global Hawk also flies at a lower altitude—typically close to 50,000 ft.—making it more susceptible to some weather and offering less-than-optimal ranges for peering into an enemy's territory. The U-2, by contrast, operates above 60,000 ft., and has nearly twice as much onboard power at the ready for collecting radar images. Forthcoming fielding of the secret, stealthy RQ-180 UAS (also developed by Northrop Grumman) probably contributed to the Air Force's view that the Global Hawk is excessive (AW&ST Dec, 9, 2013, p. 20).

The only reason to do this is to throw some bones to Northrop-Grumman, the manufacturer of the RQ-4, so that some general can score a lucrative executive or consultant gig after they retire.

Our military-industrial complex is  corrupting and destroying our ability to defend ourselves.

Heck of a Job, Barry………

What a surprise we do another drone strike, a "success", and transformed the person that we assassinated from public enemy number one to a martyr and hero:

In life, Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was Public Enemy No. 1: a ruthless figure who devoted his career to bloodshed and mayhem, whom Pakistani pundits occasionally accused of being a pawn of Indian, or even American, intelligence.

But after his death, it seems, Pakistani hearts have grown fonder.

Since missiles fired by American drones killed Mr. Mehsud in his vehicle on Friday, Pakistan’s political leaders have reacted with unusual vehemence. The interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, denounced the strike as sabotage of incipient government peace talks with the Taliban. Media commentators fulminated about American treachery. And the former cricket star Imran Khan, now a politician, renewed his threats to block NATO military supply lines through Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa — a province his Tehreek-e-Insaf party controls — with a parliamentary vote scheduled for Monday.

Virtually nobody openly welcomed the demise of Mr. Mehsud, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Pakistani civilians. To some American security analysts, the furious reaction was another sign of the perversity and ingratitude that they say have scarred Pakistan’s relationship with the United States.

“It’s another stab in the back,” said Bill Roggio, whose website, the Long War Journal, monitors drone strikes. “Even those of us who watch Pakistan closely don’t know where they stand anymore. It’s such a double game.”

To many Pakistanis, though, it is the United States that is double-dealing, and sentiments like Mr. Roggio’s exemplify typical American arrogance. Shireen Mazari, a senior official in Mr. Khan’s party, has urged the Pakistani military to shoot down drones.

Does anyone really really think that this makes us any safer?

It might temporarily increase the safety of our imperial contingent in Afghanistan, but our incessant drone strikes, and the resultant terror that this engenders in the population creates people who want to kill us.

It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.