David Golumbia on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 19:03:26 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> beneath the radar


i am will risk taking my and your important time away from studying how
perfect and revolutionary are facebook and twitter to draw attention to yet
another science-fiction fairly tale about what might happen someday if
computers get in the wrong hands, courtesy of yet another of my wacky,
paranoid, near-apocalyptic sources of worry. if you choose even to
read/consider that some part of it might be true, go ahead, take a deep
breath, and go back and open up WoW again. someone else will take care of
it. someone open source.

>From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way
America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized
workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far
less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly
expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.

The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a
decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in
manned aircraft but expects its number of ???multirole??? aerial drones like the
Reaper ??? the ones that spy as well as strike ??? to nearly quadruple, to 536.
Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone,
than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

???It???s a growth market,??? said Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagon???s chief weapons
buyer.

The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year,
and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: ???spy flies???
equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies, nuclear weapons or
victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution
and the author of ???Wired for War,??? a book about military robotics, calls
them ???bugs with bugs.???

Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker, War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as
Bugs <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/20drones.html>, *The New York
Times* (June 19, 2011)
[image: microdrones]

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times. A microdrone during a demo flight at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Filed under:
surveillance <http://www.uncomputing.org/?cat=62>,
war<http://www.uncomputing.org/?cat=64>,
what are computers for <http://www.uncomputing.org/?cat=10> by dgloumbia

http://www.uncomputing.org/?p=91



-- 
David Golumbia
dgolumbia@gmail.com


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