Witnesses say a surveillance drone has crashed into a refugee camp in the Somali capital.

Drones have been used by the U.S. to attack or observe al-Qaida-linked militants in the Horn of Africa nation.

Refugees and soldiers in Mogadishu’s Badbado camp say they watched the drone crash Friday into a hut made of sticks, corrugated cans and plastic bags.

Sacdiyo Sheikh Madar, a refugee at the camp, says African Union peacekeepers came to remove it.

Police officer Ali Hussein says the drone was shaped like a small plane. A similar drone crashed into a house in Mogadishu last year.

Are we threatened by those who live in huts of sticks, corrugated cans and trash bags?

Our national security leadership apparently thinks an awful lot of stupid or just-don’t-care people do.

There’s a deep immorality here. If you don’t see it why are you reading this blog?

Formal addition of a new category: Bombing Paupers.

Best song, ever. Share and post it to places where it will be sure to infuriate. Some people need to be kicked and informed there are many who don’t share their views on US military and technological supremacy.

Contained therein, all the assertions and scenarios delivered by authority, again demonstrating what I’ve come to believe is a profound defect in the American national security mind brought on by US paranoia and the growth of the fear-based economy.

From the Globe:

A few months back, I made the mistake of falling asleep with the television on, tuned to C-Span. While a torpid House hearing on finance lulled me to sleep, sometime during my REM rebound I found myself in the middle of a Day After-style nightmare. Turns out, I was emerging from my slumber during a forum dominated by EMPact America, a well-funded advocacy group spreading the word about the looming threats of an EMP attack.

These guys know how to scare the daylights out of you. The most prominent EMP hawk is Newt Gingrich, who peppered some of last year’s presidential debates with mini-lectures about the threat. “Without adequate preparation,” Gingrich said at one EMP conference, “we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds.” There is real science behind the EMP fears, though some energy and national security analysts contend the EMP lobby greatly exaggerates the threat. (Boldface mine. It took years to force this unattributed concession.)

Analyst Sue Tierney is far more concerned about cyber threats. No bomb needed – just serious hacking qualifications, and these days it seems everybody knows a gloomy 17-year-old who’s got those. In what is widely believed to have been an Israeli-American covert effort, the Stuxnet computer worm was unleashed on the Iranian nuclear program in 2010, ruining about a fifth of the centrifuges the country uses to enrich uranium. It would be naive to think our country won’t eventually find itself on the other side of a similar attack.

Several years ago, Tierney was part of a National Academies task force charged with identifying the grid’s vulnerability to terrorists. With the World Trade Center in mind, the task force largely concentrated on trying to anticipate another Al Qaeda-style conventional attack. If Tierney were serving on the task force right now, she says, she would push for even more focus on guarding against cyber threats.

But the chairman of the task force, Granger Morgan, says that what continues to worry him the most is the havoc that bad guys could cause with relatively little technological savvy. “If I’m a terrorist, I can shut down the power system in a lot simpler ways than using a valuable nuclear device,” says Morgan, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a noted authority on the grid. “All I need to do is destroy a bunch of major substations.” Despite all the talk about strengthening security after 9/11, he says, “big transformers continue to sit there on pads out in the open, with only chain-link fences around them.”

Any way you look at it, these are real threats that need to be treated seriously. Don’t take my word for it. After Morgan’s task force finalized its report, the US Department of Homeland Security swooped in and classified the document. Federal officials didn’t want to give the terrorists any ideas. Not that they need any.

“Don’t take my word for it.” Good advice many sensible people will probably heed.

One would assume the Department of Homeland Security has classified many things. This being the case classification is not necessarily any imprimatur of a dangerous reality waiting to unfold.

Anyway, here again: National security experts like grains of sand on the beach, each with their version of doomsday. Always reliant on argument from authority in a country where the government and business interests aligned with security spending have spent the past decade destroying the legitimacy of such argument.

In a side note it’s worth mentioning the national publicity accruing to Newt Gingrich has actually hurt the relatively insignificant Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy lobby. It’s easy to see he’s utterly despised by a majority in Washington. So are his ideas.

Even though they may appear on C-SPAN, anyone can really if they throw a luncheon/talk in DC, EMPAct America is so out of power in recent months they resorted to employing a spammer to post backlinks to themselves in the comments sections. My spam filter kept catching them. Eventually they gave up on it. (Oops, spoke to soon. Just spied another in the spam filter for the old blog which stopped updating over a year ago.)

Found in my my inbox yesterday: “It is not difficult, nor does it take a nation-state, to compromise the North American electric grid.”

Those now dispensing judgment from on high are not gods, though they must feel like it. The people striking mortals down with drones are doubtless as capable as anyone else of self-deception, denial and cognitive illusions. More so, perhaps, as the eminent fictions of the Bush years and the growing delusions of the current president suggest …

These power-damaged people have been granted the chance to fulfill one of humankind’s abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance …

[One] danger is acknowledged in a remarkably candid assessment published by the UK’s Ministry of Defence, which also deploys drones, and has also used them to kill civilians. It maintains that the undeclared air war in Pakistan and Yemen “is totally a function of the existence of an unmanned capability – it is unlikely a similar scale of force would be used if this capability were not available”.

The author also seems to argue that by not being put at risk, as Americans were when they had to dispense with the Japanese and the Germans in WWII, there is no deterrent to use.

However, deterrence can be thought of as deferred, put off to some future date as vengeance since the only way those attacked can retaliate is through terrorism, should the created enmities last long enough.

However, the use of terrorism on the US, or on clients, is always seen in this nation as a reason to turn loose more drones.

And I’m still waiting for someone, other than here, to dig into the issue of the haves bombing the have-nots. Strictly speaking, it’s a war of impunity against paupers. Drones will never be turned loose on those who have the money to immediately take action.

In this, Iran has a deterrent should they get the bomb. And Pakistan has the ability to make a similar threatening noise.

Through diplomatic channels it becomes plausible to suggest to American leadership that unless the war of impunity ceases, there are other far less pleasant methods of escalation than standard state-sponsored terrorism they’re prepared to let us come to grips with. Maybe such a thing would be a bluff. And maybe not.

In the old Star Trek episode — Mirror, Mirror — the evil Kirk had something called the Tantalus Field, a weapon to disappear enemies with impunity. The good Kirk chose not to use it to get himself out of a jam although in the hands of his alternative evil Federation girlfriend, it was.

In any case, the bully will continue to violate your sovereignty, so to speak, until forcefully discouraged from doing so.

The United States drone strategy is only pursued against people and countries who, largely, cannot effectively defend themselves. There is no way for them to give us a good one right in the nuts.

And so today we read from the New York Times, the continued use of drones in Iraq whether they like it or not. Further, the paper notes this was revealed in a call for bids to operate the drones, issued by the State Department. That is, bombing paupers is ripe for mercenary defense contracting.

Excerpted:

Mr. Asadi said that he opposed the drone program: “Our sky is our sky, not the U.S.A.’s sky.”

The Pentagon and C.I.A. have been stepping up their use of armed Predator and Reaper drones to conduct missile strikes against militants in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. More recently, the United States has expanded drone bases in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and a secret location in the Arabian Peninsula.

Over the weekend, Pine View Farm pointed out a story on a navy drone, one developed to be used without a remote pilot’s chair.

It is here.

Published at the Los Angeles Times, the story follows in the mainstream media tradition of never stating the obvious, mostly because it’s embarrassing or unpleasant.

A couple years ago Hollywood produced a summer blockbuster on an autonomous drone. It was a a bad sci-fi-ish adventure/buddy movie called Stealth.

The drone, named “EDI” (pronounced “Eddy”) talked, went rogue, stole all its music off the Internet, and saved the day at the end.

A Wikipedia entry on it drily notes it was a “colossal box office bomb.”

Crap movie. Unlike being stuck in the real, you could walk out of the theatre and tell your friends not to see it.

For the movie, the enemy actually had forces — fighter planes and anti-aircraft flak, not that it did much good.

However, in the real world the US employs drones exclusively in places and on people who can’t defend themselves. Iran included, the high altitude stealth drone being an exception to the rule that cost the country something when it malfunctioned. However, overflying Iran with Predators — which do the lion’s share of the drone work — would seem not to be done.

Increasing amounts of money on robotics technology is used on places and peoples with essentially nothing, either for themselves or in the quiver.

And none of the allegedly wise people who get talked to for these kinds of news stories bring up this matter. Instead they go on about side issues — like “what if a theoretically artificially intelligence-equipped drone makes a wrong killing decision?” Never mind there is already a long history of wrong decisions routinely made by the people directing them.

So as the robots become more sophisticated they are used on those left farther and farther behind in the global economy. This is all written off as pro-active work making Americans secure, guaranteeing there is always some further price to be paid for being in a desperate situation and hating America for all its freedoms (to bomb).

Whether the drones get some petty bad guys or not hardly matters. It just matters that there be an increasing market and budget for them.

Which makes this quote, published at the LA Times, specious:

”More aggressive robotry development could lead to deploying far fewer U.S. military personnel to other countries, achieving greater national security at a much lower cost and most importantly, greatly reduced casualties,” aerospace pioneer Simon Ramo, who helped develop the intercontinental ballistic missile, wrote in his new book, ‘Let Robots Do the Dying.’ ”

Well, the air force and navy — the new autonomous prototype drone is being tested off an aircraft carrier — aren’t doing any dying now.

The only dying, and it’s fairly obvious to all except perhaps the ballistic missile expert, is done by those where the drones are overhead.

There’s no dying to be soaked up by flying killer robots because the United States is not going against the Imperial Japanese Navy or the Luftwaffe over Germany in WWII. And it is not anything remotely like going “downtown,” or flying over Hanoi in the Sixties.

The pirates off Somalia can’t fight back against robotic or manned systems. They can’t fight back in Indonesia or Yemen or in Afghanistan. And the drones operate in Pakistan where there is largely no Pakistani army to say boo to them.

So it’s all rubbish.

There isn’t a conventional force the US is going to fight which could inflict any serious casualties because those with such armed forces aren’t won’t be pushed into a war with us and, further, we most probably won’t be fighting them. These wars are all by the wealthy country with the biggest world military against those who have nothing except their poverty and enmity. (If there is some manner of war with Iran, you watch how quickly it turns into bombing with impunity. And that thought may have something to do with why the mullahs want an atomic bomb.)

This is what made much of the Stealth movie silly. The scriptwriters, unlike our national security experts, had to at least try to sell something on the screen that seemed slightly real. There had to be an enemy to expose the heroes, even the robot one, to danger. They failed but, hey, they gave it a shot.

Our theoreticians don’t even make the pretense of trying. They’ll just take the money whether it’s eventually a colossal bomb or not.

Research funding for bombing paupers takes off.

Unless, maybe, you’re a fanboi of The Dangerous Room of Examining US Tech for Killing Other People, All Smaller and Poorer blog, you can smile at the accidental poetry software makes of a collection of DD-minted slurs and pejoratives used to more accurately describe the world of national security.

Moe is dead, of course. Persecuting Paupers, Maim People and National Security Business sound like good names for indie bands in some college town.

If you have gold and your ass don’t smell/We won’t bomb you straight to hell. — The National Anthem

No one will say it in formal circles: Use of drones outside the US is all about bombing paupers or — ahem — the impoverished places of the world, if something less blunt sounding is needed. That’s the US strategic plan coupled to the story on budget cuts. It’s a strategic triad with two of legs — drones and special forces — aimed at going after people who largely cannot defend themselves in any serious way, always poorer, weaker, and generally of different color and religion in desperate regions. And the third leg of the triad — the Navy — is aimed at people who definitely can shoot back, the Chinese. But whom we won’t get into a war with for the obvious reason that they make all our pipe and wires and telephones and computers and underwear and everything else except drones and most of the kit that the special forces use.

Here’s a thought question: Do you really think those places where drones now operate freely threaten the existence of the civilian populace of the US in any meaningful way?

Exclude incitements to commit violence against Americans from Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia.

Exclude kidnappings by pauper/pirates unless you actually believe such things may eventually threaten people in, say, Pasadena, CA. These are bad but people get shot near my neighborhood by gang members about once a year and you don’t see the governor going off and demanding pinpoint assassinations from the air in retaliation now, do you?

What are the ramifications, not internally but worldwide, of being seen as using remote-control technology to erase handfuls of paupers (and civilians who are in the wrong place at the wrong time) in places where people don’t have a chance of shooting them down? Because, like, they have no money to afford a modern military for national defense.

On a scale, with 1 being an image as a villain and 10 that of someone someone riding to the rescue, where do you think the current usage and future trending of drones falls?

Discuss where domestic drone operations are necessary but only where they aren’t already used.

Exclude use on the Mexican border which also falls under chasing paupers. However, do discuss how deep into Mexican airspace drones operate or should be allowed to go.

Do you think drones are necessary, for example, over southern California highways, to monitor traffic? If so, how would a drone alleviate bumper to bumper traffic during hours of peak congestion?

If there was a natural disaster, how are drones superior to a helicopter or manned plane, for example, if looking for people stranded by rising levels of water?

Are drones necessary to hunt down meth labs in abandoned shacks and barns in the hinterlands? Is this a new innovation/application or just using a more expensive technology to chase paupers?

On a scale, 1 being “it’s just chasing/persecuting paupers” and 10 being it’s “a new way to keep everyone safe”, rate what you think the increasing domestic use of drones means.

On a scale, 1 being “it’s just wealth preservation for arms manufacturers” and 10 being “it’s a cutting edge of innovation and technology and needs to be supported,” rate what you think the desire for more drones means.

Remember what I said about nobody in formal circles coming right out and saying the strategy is to bomb paupers? It’s true. Over ten years they’ve come up with another way to describe it.

Here’s an example from what you’ve come to know as the Empire’s Dog Feces beat, from the famous Internet magazine/blog, The Dangerous Room of Examining US Tech for Killing Other People, All Smaller and Poorer (no link):

When Adm. Eric Olson, the former leader of U.S. Special Operations Command, wanted to explain where his forces were going, he would show audiences a photo that NASA took, titled “The World at Night.” The lit areas showed the governed, stable, orderly parts of the planet. The areas without lights were the danger zones — the impoverished, the power vacuums, the places overrun with militants that prompted the attention of elite U.S. troops. And few places were darker, in Olson’s eyes, than East Africa.

Instead of “The World at Night,” it calls out for an acronym, something national security staffers, wonks and military men could grab onto.

First I thought of Defending Against Those Who Hate Us For Our Freedom (to Bomb Them). But it has too many consonants to acronym-ize. And it doesn’t quite cover all the people who don’t know we’re coming for them yet because they’re not having money and electricity are markers for America-threatening terrorism.

Instead, here’s an alternative: the GWOP, or Global War on Paupers. It had a neatness to it, superseding — as it does, the Global War on Terror.

Inspired by:

Domestic Use of Drones is Well Underway — at Secrecy blog.

In comments from the last post tagged to the Made In China tab Chuck pointed to comprehensive National Science Foundation/National Science Board analyses of trends and statistics in US research and development as compared to the rest of the developed world.

That link is here.

The above plot, just one from many, clearly shows the US national research and development commitment to homeland security and bombing paupers worldwide as a result of the war on terror. It is the only area of research funding not particularly affected by the worldwide economic downturn. Although a leveling is seen in the last two years, the overall level of commitment to finding new applications in bombing and hounding others less fortunate outside national borders remains quite high. (The larger original version, if you don’t know how to use the browser magnifier, is here.)

Non-military research funding from the federal government shows a clear spike associated with Barack Obama’s stimulus package. When the stimulus abated, in comparison to allocations for bombing paupers, spending plunged.

The military pamphlet on it is here. (H/T Cryptome.)

In the past the military’s non-lethal wish list was crapped up with really bad notions proffered by a variety of boffins from the national labs and small business America. These encompassed the idea you could use or develop exotic chemicals to spray on people and hardware.

This meant sticky foams, suds and various agents to allegedly corrode metal or disable people. Over more than a decade none of this panned out.

Or a very few sensible people figured out spraying toxic chemicals around, in effect — trying to imitate industrial accidents on a small scale as a way of destroying equipment and controlling crowds, was a genuinely nuts thing.

So that’s gone.

In the place of it, a doubling down on trivial engineering applications in dousing people with pepper spray or blinding them with green lasers.

Does the US military (and, by extension, the police forces of this nation and those who buy from us) really need a Claymore mine redesigned to blast protesters with little hard rubber balls?

One could easily make a decent case against it.

There is also a fetish for using loud noise broadcasting devices to control crowds and deter terror frogmen. (”What terror frogmen?” I hear you ask. Exactly.) In any case, earplugs render the dollar investment a total waste.

In the totally notional area, the US military still wants to use non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse rays. This bit of wishing has been going on for almost twenty years.

As always, it wants to put nullifying electric rays in drones, on small naval vessels, everywhere you can imagine for spraying at all the alleged cars, boats, planes and other whirring things of those on the other side of the barriers of Fortress America.

However, these projects are all dubbed “conceptual.”

In the real world that translates as: Can’t make them work. And this is for various reasons, all having to do with over-reliance on magical thinking and limitations imposed by the laws of physics and nature.

They’re kept alive mostly as high button corporate welfare for electrical and aerospace engineers. They would be as productive if paid to dig holes and fill them back up the next day.

Bad photoshopping, bad wishful thinking.

Note pleasure-seeker motorboat in background at 51 seconds. H-o-o-o-nk!

North Korean-style midget sub, around the size of the Civil War-era Hunley.

Add to this a couple old Kilo diesel subs, bought from the Russkis, about the country’s crown jewels, and that doesn’t say much — as this sort of supercilious note here implies.

A piece from the AP Reuters is worth linkage for a summary of the bog standard reasoning used when anything concerning force on force versus the largest military in the world comes up:

Keenly aware of conventional U.S. military dominance in the region, Iran has adopted what strategists describe as an “asymmetric” approach.

Missiles mounted on civilian trucks can be concealed around the coastline, tiny civilian dhows and fishing vessels can be used to lay mines, and midget submarines can be hidden in the shallows to launch more sophisticated “smart mines” and homing torpedoes.

Iran is also believed to have built up fleets of perhaps hundreds of small fast attack craft including tiny suicide speedboats, learning from the example of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels who used such methods in a war with the government.

Sri Lanka, the island country which a long time ago was known as Ceylon — most will instinctively know, doesn’t have a Fifth Fleet.

“Assymetric,” of course, is the sickeningly overused jargon-word used to make something sound intellectual and fancy for stupid people — in this case, the description of the natural state of affairs that exists when a really small or lousy (or small and lousy) military is compared to ours.

It’s assymetric! We spend 100,000 times as much or even more as Iran does on our military, forcing them into assymetry! A comparison chart of the US and Iranian navies appears to be greatly assymetrical! That is, it lacks symmetry!

This is only to say the best minds aren’t our military theorists and national security experts. A number of whom are consulted for the news piece linked above, furnishing stuff you could have come up with for much less. Which also informs us their purpose is not really to provide any great value. It never is, the real function being to add a pseudo-scholarly quality to the assessment of war.

After all, where are we if we do not have our natsec think tank experts and retired military men to tell us such things? Rhetorical, obviously.

“They [Iran] can cause a great deal of mischief… but it depends how much pain they are willing to accept,” one of these personnel, Nikolas Gvosdev, “professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island,” tells the news agency.

The US Naval War College, for those from abroad who don’t, is not quite the same thing as the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD.

The former’s website is here. Located in the capitol for old swank money in Rhode Island, Newport, its website announces the school recently awarded someone you don’t know the “Hattendorf Prize.”

The Hattendorf Prize!

“The Hattendorf Prize was established on 7 December 2010 and first awarded in 2011,” informs Wiki.

Anyway, the “Nicholas Gvosdev” also posts at SITREP, the GlobalSecurity.Org blog to which this place syndicates posts.

Where he writes things like:

The Atlantic Community has launched a new series of essays looking at the future of European security, specifically in resourcing and procurement …

Well, you’ve had enough of that to get the idea.

So now you know what you need to about potential war with the Iranian navy and our national security scholars for today. Iran loses 99 percent of its assets right quick in a shooting war over blocking Hormuz.