Noted: The Rise of the Drones or Bruce Schneier Has Some Strange Readers!

Modern machine guns and their ammunition have the range accuracy, power and rate of fire.

Navel ships have had systems designed to automatically shoot down incoming ordinance for a number of years now so we know the physics of it works.

There have been similar prototypes shown for armored vehicles and systems are being looked into as a defense against GPS guided smart munitions such as bombs, mortar rounds or 150lb artillery shells in indirect fire.

The only question is if the likes of a supposedly unconventional combatant can or will do the same and for what reason against drones.

Given the knowns we can surmise that various non super power nations are certainly developing anti drone systems in response to changes in the way the US wages war.

Around 50 years ago the US discovered that the major limitation to it's military capabilities for "extending power" was not it's opponents military capabilities but it's civilian population reaction to the press etc.

Over time the US has been more and more hampered by the press and to sum it up crudely the two issues are,

1, Body Bags being repatriated.
2, Non combatant civilian deaths.

The solution to the first has been to try to minimize boots on the ground and bums in the air, and to the second the development of more precise weapons and targeting systems.

The initial way to do the first was to change the way the US fought other super powers in proxy wars. Instead of sending in large amounts of US troops they resorted to arming and training the native populations of the countries used for proxy wars.

So in Vietnam in the early 1970's there were very large casualties both in US troops and civilians. By the 1980's when the cold war was approaching it's point of maximum you had the US arming Afghan tribes men via irregulars from other nations with very modern weaponry.

That did not work out to well because it left Afghanistan as a waring tribal nation armed to the teeth with modern weaponry and the likes of Osama Bin Laden and others stirring up a backlash against the US...

The cold war collapsed for various reasons and what had been inconsequential build ups of tribal power in the likes of Afghanistan and Somalia and quite a few other places were not immediately recognized as problems.

The collapse of the US backed Iranian government and the fundamentalist take over had shifted the balance of power away from the US and this had given people like OBL ideas.

Further in response to the US change in policy other super powers have followed suit and changed tactics in their use of proxy wars. And other nations also had ideas about how to use these factions and fundamentalist organizations as proxies against the US and other nations.

In the mean time the US kept interfering in middle east politics to try to control oil in various ways and in the process made it's self a rallying flag for recruitment in fundamentalist groups.

Well various people did not like the US attempts to rig oil prices so various things happened amongst which large amounts of oil and drugs money started to be used to by weapons and influence.

Much of this became available to fundamentalist organizations and it was becoming clear that their political influence was such that they ended up running countries directly or indirectly.

The US tried to keep Iran under control by using the old policy of backing it's enemies and in the process Iraq and Saddam Hussein was armed and fought a long and protracted war against Iran which should have resulted in the fundamentalists being kicked out of Iran.

It did not, quite simply because as in the Eastern Front war between Germany and Russia during WWII, the Iranians like the Russians went into all out war with children not even ten years old going off to fight the Iraqi troops.

Eventually a stalemate was arrived at but by know resentment against the US had risen to a point where blowback was inevitable and started to happen in various ways.

Now it is not known what the US involvement was in Iraq invading Kuwait, but there certainly must have been a considerable degree. Because for all his failings Saddam knew where his wealth and power originated and where most of the weapons he had came from and who was to a certain extent keeping Israel of his back (there were and still are rumors that Israel were at one point actually backing Iran during the war).

Upsetting the US would not have been on his list of plans. Some have suggested that Kuwait that had been upsetting the US in various ways was "suggested" by friends of the Bush clique to Saddam as a way to recover the costs and losses of the war with Iran and as a further way to get at Iran with US blessing.

Well Kuwait might not have had the armed forces but it certainly new how to work the UN and world Press (remember the babies thrown from incubators story? given to the world by what we later found out was a woman related to the Kuwait ruling family who was not even in Kuwait at the time).

Well the result was the first gulf war where the US decided to try out it's new ideas about air supremacy smart weapons and keeping boots off of the ground

Well it did not quite work the way planned and the smart weapons turned out not to be quite as smart as they could be, and the US was shown to still be susceptible to significant manipulation via human shields and attacks on Israel but mainly by civilian deaths.

Whilst Bush senior was asleep with Iraq under full retreat along the Basra road a US pilot was interviewed and came up with the "Turkey Shoot" statement that along with graphic and horrific pictures turned the world opinion and that of the US civilian population on a sixpence.

All of a sudden instead of looking like a savior the US looked like the aggressor and Bush senior pulled the plug.

It was testament to the power of 24H news reporting in the worlds biggest TV nation and the message was not lost on the US or other eyes.

More or less from that point on the US started to lose political influence in the world because it was seen ass "to flaky to trust" and this started policy changes. Which also coincided with that fact it was becoming glaringly obvious that the US policy on intelligence gathering since the Garry Powers U2 incident was not working and the US did not have real on the ground intelligence.

And thus the drones resulted as they did not have pilots who could be used to manipulate the world media, they had less problems with cloud cover, no orbit time issues and perhaps best of all not being an intelligence community only political football. And importantly were considered tactical not strategic which meant that the usual secrecy rules on using the intelligence for battle field work were not a hindrance.

The Bush clique got back into power and the war hawks rejoiced as rumors circulated about "finishing daddies business" started with regards the Iraq
problem to US prestige and status.

The pressure against Saddam was cranked up and thus various events started one of which is rumored to be Saddam approaching the EU with an offer to sell Iraq oil in Euros only not US dollars [1]. All of a sudden Iraq was a major major issue and with it the rest of the middle east. Power was swinging back that way and the US was looking quite vulnerable.

What changed all of that and brought the US back to world domination was 9/11. Suddenly every nation was saddened by the event but nations realized just how vulnerable they were to a handful of unconventional and disaffected individuals that for a very small amount of money had inflicted a crippling disaster on what many still regarded as the worlds most powerful nation.

The US went on the warpath not just against the terrorists, but invented Saddam into a press credible threat and went back in to "Finish Daddies Business".

Since then Bush clique and those surrounding them have done very nicely, thank you, the money train is rolling and the lesson learned about how to deal with problems 1 & 2.

However the "enemy is adaptable" and have dragged US boots onto their home turf where they have the home advantage and have shown by quite clever tactics rules 1 & 2 still apply in spades and no amount of technology is going to be of any real advantage whilst fallible humans are still in the chain.

This has pushed the US even further down the drone route and if the signs and symptoms coming out of the US DoD are anything to go by then drones are the future of warfare for the foreseeable future (see Cyber Combat medal, etc.).

So we have the interesting state of warfare, high tech drones versus low tech anti drone techniques with nations of varying technical capability watching and learning and possibly even assisting, simply because they reason they are next on the US hit list.

So keep your eye on it because military budgets are not big enough. They want serious orders and those are not overseas orders but domestic law enforcement...

[1] There is significant evidence that these approaches were made as part of actions to get international sanctions lifted. What is not known is if it was in Saddam's mind just as a "sweetener" or as a real kick back weapon against the US [2].

[2] If Saddam had stopped trading oil in Dollars as the worlds second largest producer of oil the effect on the US economy would have been at the time an unimaginable disaster [3]. Bill Clinton and Alan Greenspan had been very carefully doing a lot of things in the background to keep the US and world economy from going into recession for many years preceding Bush Junior getting the oval office gig.

[3] If the Euro had superseded the Dollar as the world trading currency then at the very least the US would have seen a collapse and recession as bad as the housing and banking crises combined, but it's get out of jail card of being the de facto world trading currency would not have been there and the US would have had a dollar crisis the size of the current Euro crisis to contend with as well, and Europe would probably not have had the Euro crisis at all.