Author Topic: Drones/UAV/UAS/Bots and Balloons  (Read 123858 times)


DougMacG

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Re: Chinese drones spying on US Navy ships
« Reply #301 on: October 15, 2022, 10:38:14 AM »
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11317689/China-bombards-warships-drones-One-LANDED-deck-destroyer-near-Hong-Kong.html

New war fighting technology was cool when we were the only ones that could do it.

Good that we're doing everything we can to attract the best and the brightest to our military, and doing everything we can to protect our country and defenses. [sarc.]

G M

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Crafty_Dog

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Re: Drones/UAV/UAS/Bots
« Reply #303 on: October 19, 2022, 06:41:07 PM »
We noted the capture of our drone by Iran and Baraq's failure to snatch it back here.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Drones/UAV/UAS/Bots
« Reply #304 on: October 20, 2022, 03:34:42 AM »
Here are two of our posts from 2011:

From 2011
=======================================

Exclusive: Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer
In an exclusive interview, an engineer working to unlock the secrets of the captured RQ-170 Sentinel says they exploited a known vulnerability and tricked the US drone into landing in Iran.
By Scott Peterson, Payam Faramarzi* | Christian Science Monitor – 11 hrs agoEmail

Iran guided the CIA's "lost" stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone's systems inside Iran.

Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.

Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone's GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.


"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran's "electronic ambush" of the highly classified US drone. "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain."

The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.

The revelations about Iran's apparent electronic prowess come as the US, Israel, and some European nations appear to be engaged in an ever-widening covert war with Iran, which has seen assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, explosions at Iran's missile and industrial facilities, and the Stuxnet computer virus that set back Iran’s nuclear program.

Now this engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.

Western military experts and a number of published papers on GPS spoofing indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is plausible.

"Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible” to manipulation, says former US Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore, adding that it is “certainly possible” to recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it flies on a different course. “I wouldn't say it's easy, but the technology is there.”

In 2009, Iran-backed Shiite militants in Iraq were found to have downloaded live, unencrypted video streams from American Predator drones with inexpensive, off-the-shelf software. But Iran’s apparent ability now to actually take control of a drone is far more significant.

Iran asserted its ability to do this in September, as pressure mounted over its nuclear program.

Gen. Moharam Gholizadeh, the deputy for electronic warfare at the air defense headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), described to Fars News how Iran could alter the path of a GPS-guided missile – a tactic more easily applied to a slower-moving drone.

“We have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning ‘deception’ of the aggressive systems,” said Gholizadeh, such that “we can define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile would change to our desired destination.”

Gholizadeh said that “all the movements of these [enemy drones]” were being watched, and “obstructing” their work was “always on our agenda.”

That interview has since been pulled from Fars’ Persian-language website. And last month, the relatively young Gholizadeh died of a heart attack, which some Iranian news sites called suspicious – suggesting the electronic warfare expert may have been a casualty in the covert war against Iran.

Iran's growing electronic capabilities
Iranian lawmakers say the drone capture is a "great epic" and claim to be "in the final steps of breaking into the aircraft's secret code."

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Fox News on Dec. 13 that the US will "absolutely" continue the drone campaign over Iran, looking for evidence of any nuclear weapons work. But the stakes are higher for such surveillance, now that Iran can apparently disrupt the work of US drones.

US officials skeptical of Iran’s capabilities blame a malfunction, but so far can't explain how Iran acquired the drone intact. One American analyst ridiculed Iran’s capability, telling Defense News that the loss was “like dropping a Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture.”

Yet Iran’s claims to the contrary resonate more in light of new details about how it brought down the drone – and other markers that signal growing electronic expertise.

A former senior Iranian official who asked not to be named said: "There are a lot of human resources in Iran.... Iran is not like Pakistan."

“Technologically, our distance from the Americans, the Zionists, and other advanced countries is not so far to make the downing of this plane seem like a dream for us … but it could be amazing for others,” deputy IRGC commander Gen. Hossein Salami said this week.

According to a European intelligence source, Iran shocked Western intelligence agencies in a previously unreported incident that took place sometime in the past two years, when it managed to “blind” a CIA spy satellite by “aiming a laser burst quite accurately.”

More recently, Iran was able to hack Google security certificates, says the engineer. In September, the Google accounts of 300,000 Iranians were made accessible by hackers. The targeted company said "circumstantial evidence" pointed to a "state-driven attack" coming from Iran, meant to snoop on users.

Cracking the protected GPS coordinates on the Sentinel drone was no more difficult, asserts the engineer.

US knew of GPS systems' vulnerability
Use of drones has become more risky as adversaries like Iran hone countermeasures. The US military has reportedly been aware of vulnerabilities with pirating unencrypted drone data streams since the Bosnia campaign in the mid-1990s.

Top US officials said in 2009 that they were working to encrypt all drone data streams in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – after finding militant laptops loaded with days' worth of data in Iraq – and acknowledged that they were "subject to listening and exploitation."

Perhaps as easily exploited are the GPS navigational systems upon which so much of the modern military depends.

"GPS signals are weak and can be easily outpunched [overridden] by poorly controlled signals from television towers, devices such as laptops and MP3 players, or even mobile satellite services," Andrew Dempster, a professor from the University of New South Wales School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems, told a March conference on GPS vulnerability in Australia.

"This is not only a significant hazard for military, industrial, and civilian transport and communication systems, but criminals have worked out how they can jam GPS," he says.

The US military has sought for years to fortify or find alternatives to the GPS system of satellites, which are used for both military and civilian purposes. In 2003, a “Vulnerability Assessment Team” at Los Alamos National Laboratory published research explaining how weak GPS signals were easily overwhelmed with a stronger local signal.

“A more pernicious attack involves feeding the GPS receiver fake GPS signals so that it believes it is located somewhere in space and time that it is not,” reads the Los Alamos report. “In a sophisticated spoofing attack, the adversary would send a false signal reporting the moving target’s true position and then gradually walk the target to a false position.”

The vulnerability remains unresolved, and a paper presented at a Chicago communications security conference in October laid out parameters for successful spoofing of both civilian and military GPS units to allow a "seamless takeover" of drones or other targets.

To “better cope with hostile electronic attacks,” the US Air Force in late September awarded two $47 million contracts to develop a "navigation warfare" system to replace GPS on aircraft and missiles, according to the Defense Update website.

Official US data on GPS describes "the ongoing GPS modernization program" for the Air Force, which "will enhance the jam resistance of the military GPS service, making it more robust."

Why the drone's underbelly was damaged
Iran's drone-watching project began in 2007, says the Iranian engineer, and then was stepped up and became public in 2009 – the same year that the RQ-170 was first deployed in Afghanistan with what were then state-of-the-art surveillance systems.

In January, Iran said it had shot down two conventional (nonstealth) drones, and in July, Iran showed Russian experts several US drones – including one that had been watching over the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordo, near the holy city of Qom.

In capturing the stealth drone this month at Kashmar, 140 miles inside northeast Iran, the Islamic Republic appears to have learned from two years of close observation.

Iran displayed the drone on state-run TV last week, with a dent in the left wing and the undercarriage and landing gear hidden by anti-American banners.

The Iranian engineer explains why: "If you look at the location where we made it land and the bird's home base, they both have [almost] the same altitude," says the Iranian engineer. "There was a problem [of a few meters] with the exact altitude so the bird's underbelly was damaged in landing; that's why it was covered in the broadcast footage."

Prior to the disappearance of the stealth drone earlier this month, Iran’s electronic warfare capabilities were largely unknown – and often dismissed.

"We all feel drunk [with happiness] now," says the Iranian engineer. "Have you ever had a new laptop? Imagine that excitement multiplied many-fold." When the Revolutionary Guard first recovered the drone, they were aware it might be rigged to self-destruct, but they "were so excited they could not stay away."

* Scott Peterson, the Monitor's Middle East correspondent, wrote this story with an Iranian journalist who publishes under the pen name Payam Faramarzi and cannot be further identified for security reasons.

===========================================
===========================================


Iran claims its experts almost done recovering data from captured US drone
Nasser Karimi, The Associated Press Dec 12, 2011 13:45:00 PM
0

TEHRAN, Iran - Iranian experts are in the final stages of recovering data from the U.S. surveillance drone captured by the country's armed forces, state TV reported Monday.

Tehran has flaunted the capture of the RQ-170 Sentinel, a top-secret aircraft with stealth technology, as a victory for Iran and a defeat for the United States in a complicated intelligence and technological battle.

President Barack Obama said Monday that the U.S. was pressing Iran to return the aircraft, which U.S. officials say malfunctioned and was not brought down by Iran. But a senior commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard said on Sunday that the country would not send it back, adding that "no one returns the symbol of aggression."

Iranian lawmaker Parviz Sorouri, a member of the parliament's national security and foreign policy committee, said Monday the extracted information will be used to file a lawsuit against the United States for what he called the "invasion" by the unmanned aircraft.
Sorouri also claimed that Iran has the capability to reproduce the drone through reverse engineering, but he did not elaborate.

State TV broadcast images Thursday of Iranian military officials inspecting what it identified as the drone. Iranian state media have said the unmanned spy aircraft was detected and brought down over the country's east, near the border with Afghanistan.

Officers in the Revolutionary Guard, Iran's most powerful military force, have claimed the country's armed forces brought down the surveillance aircraft with an electronic ambush, causing minimum damage to the drone.

American officials have said that U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that Iran neither shot the drone down, nor used electronic or cybertechnology to force it from the sky. They contend the drone malfunctioned. The officials spoke anonymously in order to discuss the classified program.

U.S. officials are concerned others may be able to reverse engineer the chemical composition of the drone's radar-deflecting paint or the aircraft's sophisticated optics technology that allows operators to positively identify terror suspects from tens of thousands of feet in the air.

They are also worried adversaries may be able to hack into the drone's database, although it is not clear whether any data could be recovered. Some surveillance technologies allow video to stream through to operators on the ground but do not store much collected data. If they do, it is encrypted.

Separately, in comments to the semi-official ISNA news agency, Sorouri said Iran would soon hold a navy drill to practice the closure of the strategic Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, which is the passageway for about 40 per cent of the world's oil tanker traffic.

Despite Sorouri's comments and past threats that Iran could seal off the waterway if the U.S. or Israel moved against Iranian nuclear facilities, no such exercise has been officially announced.

"Iran will make the world unsafe" if the world attacks Iran, Sorouri said.

Both the U.S. and Israel have not rule out military option against Iran's controversial nuclear program, which the West suspects is aimed at making atomic weapons. Iran denies the charge, saying its nuclear activities are geared toward peaceful purposes like power generation.

In another sign of the increasing tensions between Iran and the U.S., Tehran said Monday it has asked Interpol to help seek the arrest of two former U.S. officials it accuses of supporting the assassinations of Iranian officials.

Iran's state prosecutor, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejehei, told reporters that Iran has filed charges against retired U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane and former CIA agent Reuel Marc Gerecht.

Ejehei said Iran sent a request to Interpol in Paris to help pursue the two Americans through its office in Washington.

Iran says the two men urged the Obama administration to use covert action against Iran and kill some of its top officials, including Brig. Gen. Ghassem Soleimani commander of the Quds Force, the special foreign operations unit of the Revolutionary Guard.

Crafty_Dog

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D1
« Reply #305 on: November 01, 2022, 04:52:13 PM »
November 1, 2022   
         
Ukraine is preparing for a "war of drones," including drones that can kill other drones in the sky. "This is the next stage in the development of ideas," the head of Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Development, 31-year-old Mikhail Fedorov, said in a lengthy interview published Monday by Forbes—and flagged on Twitter by Russia-watcher and drone enthusiast Sam Bendett of CNA. 

Kyiv is racing to stand up its own "army of drones." According to Fedorov, "Now there are contracts for 1,033 drones," he told Forbes. "About 70% of them have already been received. The rest will be delivered by the end of the year." Ukraine already uses "about 20 FlyEye [UAV systems] that are quite important for our artillery," he said. And indeed, that was one of the primary uses for the systems early on—as we noted near the top of our most recent Defense One Radio podcast, which features an interview with Bendett and drone researcher Faine Greenwood.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine back in late February, "There has been a real professionalization of the use of commercial drones in both Ukrainian and Russian military forces," Bendett said, and noted a meeting between Russian officials in early September on this very topic. One former Russian general even said publicly, "The quadcopter is now the symbol of modern warfare," as Bendett explained. And so Russia's defense industry is "starting to kind of turn around," he said, "and churn out hundreds, perhaps 1000s of small UAVs, especially quadcopters" in the months ahead. Read more about that deliberate drone campaign from Moscow, here.


"The future of war is a battle between drones—not soldiers," said Ivan Tolchinsky, the Ukrainian-born CEO of a Latvian drone firm called Atlas Dynamics. The Kyiv Independent spoke to Tolchinsky in an interview published Monday. According to the 36-year-old CEO, "Atlas Dynamics has delivered over 200 small reconnaissance drones to Ukraine," and they're mostly being used for surveillance and artillery scouting. One of the bigger challenges for Atlas, however, is improving distance and flying time for their drones. But defeating Russian jamming has already been addressed by the company, according to Tolchinsky.

"We know exactly which electronic warfare systems Russia uses to intercept drone signals, so we made our vehicles more robust to their influence," he told the Kyiv Independent. They're also encrypted "so that no one can seize control of the drone or access its data if the drone crashes in enemy territory," he said. Read on, here.
« Last Edit: November 01, 2022, 04:54:26 PM by Crafty_Dog »

Crafty_Dog

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narco drones in American skies
« Reply #306 on: November 20, 2022, 02:25:25 PM »

ccp

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Drones made in CCP land fly over DC
« Reply #307 on: November 23, 2022, 07:58:11 AM »

Crafty_Dog

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FA: The Dawn of Drone Diplomacy
« Reply #308 on: December 20, 2022, 08:05:17 AM »
The Dawn of Drone Diplomacy
Unmanned Vehicles Are Upending the Arms Trade—and the Balance of Power
By Erik Lin-Greenberg
December 20, 2022
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/dawn-drone-diplomacy

Iranian-built drones now routinely puncture the skies over Kyiv. Elsewhere in Ukraine, Turkish- and American-manufactured drones help Ukrainian forces target Russian troops. These operations demonstrate the growing role of remote-controlled weapons in battle. The conflict also showcases how drone exports have increasingly become an instrument of diplomacy.

With drone use on the rise, states have capitalized on drone exports to increase their global clout. To be sure, this is part of an established trend: governments have long leveraged arms exports as a diplomatic tool. Beyond filling state coffers and defraying research and development costs, arms sales help states advance their foreign policy agendas. Selling or donating weapons to like-minded partners can be used to extract concessions, exert influence, counter rivals, and strengthen military ties. A new era of arms trade is emerging, in which new exporters such as Iran and Turkey are displacing traditional weapons suppliers and are using drone exports to extend influence beyond their borders. These exports threaten Washington’s influence and the security of its partners. To keep ahead, U.S. policymakers should help allies build drone programs while developing approaches to counter the threat of rival drones.

GAME OF DRONES
Drone diplomacy is on the rise because it meets a growing demand. International leaders are increasingly convinced that their defense and foreign policy ambitions hinge on possessing remote-controlled weapons. Drones have changed the character of modern conflict by allowing states to project power while minimizing risk to friendly personnel. By keeping crews far from the frontlines, drones allow governments to undertake risky attack or intelligence-gathering missions that they might not otherwise launch. Russia, for instance, frequently uses drones instead of manned attack aircraft to strike well-defended Ukrainian targets. At the same time, drones offer air support and a bird’s-eye view to ground forces, which often tips the scale during battles. Moreover, drones are commonly cheaper and easier to operate and maintain than the missiles or inhabited aircraft they supplant, making it simpler for states to integrate drones into military operations.

Drone use in recent conflicts has proved effective advertising. Footage from Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh—a disputed territory fought over by Armenia and Azerbaijan—has showcased drones striking targets cheaply, prodding other militaries to add remotely piloted aircraft to their arsenals. Some countries have built domestic drone programs, but others have turned to international suppliers.

Traditional arms exporters such as the United States initially dominated drone production with systems including the MQ-9 Reaper. But export restrictions such as the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), a multilateral agreement the United States is party to, severely limited the sale of U.S.-built drones, even to Washington’s closest allies. Firms from countries that are not MTCR signatories, such as China and Israel, eagerly stepped in to fill the void and could engage in largely unregulated trade. 

At the same time, other states that traditionally were not aircraft exporters ramped up drone production programs. Iran sold drones to other countries and made them available to its Hezbollah and Houthi proxies. Similarly, Turkey’s drone program—developed in part to reduce dependence on foreign arms suppliers—quickly made a name for itself with the Bayraktar TB2. Turkey first deployed the TB2 against Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria. Soon, it was on the shopping lists of nearly two dozen countries across Africa, Central Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. 

SELLERS’ MARKET
Selling drones in a time of high demand increases a supplier state’s diplomatic power in three important, and often complementary, ways. First, exporting drones deepens ties with client governments. Selling a drone entails more than transferring a piece of machinery. Exports typically come with long-term training, logistics assistance, and maintenance agreements that have lasting effects. An importing state becomes reliant on its supplier state for upgrades and replacement parts. Exporters train drone crews in importing states, building relationships that endure as personnel climb the ranks. These connections produce new pathways through which a supplier state can sway policymaking. Indeed, one Iranian news outlet affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps proclaimed that Iran’s drone exports are “deepening its strategic influence” internationally.

Supplier states are increasingly cementing these relationships by opening overseas drone factories. Iran established drone production lines in Tajikistan and Venezuela, and Turkey plans to build a TB2 factory in Ukraine. Iran’s top general described the opening of the plant in Tajikistan as a turning point in relations between the two countries. Indeed, drones may serve as a gateway export that sets the stage for broader arms transfers by demonstrating the effectiveness of a supplier’s hardware and establishing processes for future weapons transfers. Russia, for instance, is now considering buying ballistic missiles from Iran.

Second, drone exports help supplier states compete with rivals. In some cases, exporting drones allows supplier states to challenge regional foes. For example, Turkish drone transfers to Azerbaijan contributed to Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, humiliating Turkey’s longtime rival and forcing it to cede territory. Similarly, Tehran armed its proxies with drones to attack targets in Gulf Arab states, Israel, and Yemen.


Selling a drone entails more than transferring a piece of machinery.
In other cases, drone transfers enable states to engage in proxy wars farther afield. When Iran sells drones to Russia, for example, it supports attacks on Ukraine, which is backed by the United States. At the same time, it shows off capabilities that Iran could use against the United States in a future conflict. To be sure, this involves political and military risks. Tehran’s drone exports triggered new sanctions and Iranian drone use in Ukraine is helping the United States and its allies develop countermeasures. But for Tehran, cementing ties with Russia seems to outweigh these risks. 

As drone suppliers diversify production through overseas factories, their drone diplomacy will become more resilient and less susceptible to disruption from rivals. Israel, for example, has bombed drone production facilities in Iran but may find it too risky to attack Iranian factories in countries with friendlier diplomatic ties, such as Tajikistan.

Finally, supplier states use drone transfers to extract concessions from clients. According to Al-Monitor, a news website, Turkey’s sale of 20 drones to the United Arab Emirates provided Ankara enough leverage to sway Emirati officials to restrict the social media access of a prominent Turkish mafia boss turned whistleblower living in Dubai. And in December 2022, U.S. government officials announced that Russia is now providing Iran an “unprecedented level” of advanced military equipment—potentially including fifth-generation Su-35 fighter jets—in part because of Iranian drone transfers.

By deepening ties with client states, countering rivals, and extracting quid pro quo concessions, drone diplomacy threatens regional stability and challenges the influence of established arms exporters such as the United States. Indeed, drone suppliers such as Iran routinely arm states such as Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela that were otherwise unable to acquire drones because of sanctions and other political roadblocks. Newly acquired drones allow these states to reignite frozen conflicts, violate human rights, and undercut internationally led conflict-resolution efforts. In recent years, activists and lawmakers criticized Turkey’s sale of TB2 drones to Ethiopia for enabling strikes that reportedly killed dozens of civilians.

MORE THAN A WEAPON
As states increasingly use drones as a currency for interstate competition, policymakers will wrestle with how to respond. In some cases, supplier states will compete over the same customers. Whoever ultimately wins the contract may also secure a position as a preferred security partner, making it difficult for other states to exert influence.

In other cases, states may need to help allies and partners defend themselves against a rival’s drones. In the ongoing war in Ukraine, NATO members stepped up deliveries of air defense equipment to Kyiv after Moscow acquired Iranian drones. Many of these systems, however, involve launching costly missiles to take down drones that are far cheaper. Keeping ahead of rivals in drone diplomacy will likely require an action-reaction process involving the provision of low-cost antidrone systems to states under threat of rival drones.

The war in Ukraine has highlighted the growing significance of drones to international security. To maintain an advantage, the United States and its allies should limit rogue states such as Iran from exporting drones through sanctions and export controls. At the same time, the United States should export more drones and antidrone systems to allies to help them build their own drone programs, limiting the likelihood that these states will turn to other suppliers. Drones are no longer just a battlefield weapon but also a diplomatic tool.

Crafty_Dog

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Crafty_Dog

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Uke Anti Drones action
« Reply #310 on: February 05, 2023, 08:18:06 PM »
Lots of photos in the original

Band of Barbers, Judges and Security Guards Uses Soviet-Era Guns to Repel Russian Drones
Ukrainian units are scrambling to intercept drones and missiles with aging weapons
An antiaircraft missile regiment in the Kyiv region of Ukraine in January.
An antiaircraft missile regiment in the Kyiv region of Ukraine in January.
By Matthew LuxmooreFollow
 | Photographs by Sasha Maslov for The Wall Street Journal
Feb. 4, 2023 9:00 am ET

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KYIV, Ukraine—A unit of Ukrainian volunteers took aim as the drone passed through the fog at the end of last year, emitting its trademark growl. One member pulled the trigger of his modified Soviet-era heavy machine gun.

The drone—a Shahed-136 produced by Iran but launched by Russia—plummeted to the ground, the gun operator later recalled.

It was another success for a group playing a key role in a battle taking place far from the war’s front lines: protecting Ukraine from Russian drones and missiles targeting civilian infrastructure that keeps the country running.

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Ukraine’s government says civilian and military units now intercept about 80% of Russian missiles and drones, denting Moscow’s campaign aimed at demoralizing the civilian population.

Having failed to gain air superiority in Ukraine early in the war, Russia has turned to missiles of various speeds and sizes to deprive entire cities of power. Ukraine’s own arsenal of Soviet-era arms and the air-defense systems it has received from the West, such as Stinger portable missiles, proved a match for Russia’s air force in the war’s early stages.

The U.S. has since provided midrange Nasams and Germany has sent the medium-range Iris-T as well as Gepard mobile antiaircraft guns.

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The antiaircraft missile regiment plays a key role in a battle taking place far from the war’s front lines: protecting Ukraine's skies from Russian drones.
But Russia’s use of cheap drones acquired from Iran is undermining those defenses. Deploying Iris-T surface-to-air missiles worth up to $500,000 against cheap Shahed-136 drones would quickly deplete Ukraine’s defenses against Russian warplanes and cruise missiles.

In recent weeks, the U.S. and Germany have pledged two Patriot surface-to-air systems capable of downing ballistic missiles, but the cost of using them—$4 million for a projectile—means the country can’t rely solely on them for protection.

Jet fighters also struggle against the drones, partly because the slowest speeds at which they can stably fly are more than double the speed of the drones, said Viktor Kevlyuk of the Center for Defense Strategies, a Ukrainian security think tank.

Ukrainian pilot Vadym Voroshilov won fame in October after intercepting five drones in one sortie over the city of Vinnytsia, but his plane caught fire after debris from one of the drones smashed into it forcing him to eject from the cockpit and parachute to land.

That is where the volunteer unit with its MacGyvered Soviet-era machine guns come in. They soldered pieces of metal to create gun turrets for the weapons and built separate sections to hold ammunition.


Serhiy Sas, a retired constitutional judge who commands the volunteer antiaircraft unit.
“We could shoot those drones down with the Patriot or with S-300s,” said Serhiy Sas, a retired constitutional judge who commands the volunteer unit. “But from a financial point of view, using small arms to destroy them is justified 100%.”

The foundation of Ukraine’s air defenses is built on Soviet-era weapons like the Buk, Tor M, and S-300 systems. But Western support is coming slowly, leaving Ukraine vulnerable to drones, cruise missiles and ballistic rockets.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
What’s your outlook for the war in Ukraine? Join the conversation below.

Ukraine can shoot down certain projectiles, such as Kalibr cruise missiles. But ballistic rockets such as Kinzhal or Iskander have a speed and trajectory that currently outmatch the arms at its disposal. When they arrive, the Patriots will fill that gap.

Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian air force, said Russia was firing simultaneously from multiple locations from the air, land and sea, seeking to scramble Ukrainian air defenses. Russian ground forces fire MLRS and S-300 rockets, while Tu-22 jet fighters and warships fire cruise missiles from the air and sea.

Since Russia began launching its barrages last autumn, videos have proliferated showing Ukrainian soldiers celebrating after intercepting cruise missiles and drones. During an October attack on Kyiv, a clip of three policemen firing at a Shahed drone with Kalashnikov rifles went viral.

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A mobile unit of an antiaircraft missile regiment patrols in the Kyiv region of Ukraine.


Soviet-era weapons are the foundation of Ukraine’s air defenses.


Ukraine can shoot down certain projectiles, such as Kalibr cruise missiles. But ballistic rockets have a speed and trajectory that currently outmatch the arms at its disposal.


Volunteers scan for drones from the roofs of Kyiv's high-rises.


Ukrainian mobile air-defense units constantly change position to track the likely path of Russian missiles, as Russia makes its own adjustments in response.

Air-defense teams like Mr. Sas’s have become heroes. His volunteer unit includes barbers, small-business owners and security guards, who keep their day jobs alongside their military duties. Once an air-raid siren sounds, they climb to the roofs of high-rise buildings or drive into fields to monitor the skies and try to shoot down drones.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces are engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the Russians. Ukrainian mobile air-defense units constantly change position to track the likely path of Russian missiles, as Russia makes its own adjustments in response.

“First we need to detect them and then we need to destroy them,” said Mr. Ihnat. “Meaning that we need to be in the right place at the right time, always aware.”

Major Artem Moskalenko, the commander of a battalion operating several air-defense batteries and mobile teams equipped with Stingers and British-made Stormer HVM antiaircraft systems, dispatches his troops to locations with a 360-degree view overhead when he receives reports that Russia has launched an attack.

“Every day we change our positions,” said Maj. Moskalenko. After each attack, they analyze where Russia sent its drones and rockets and adapt their positions in the future.

Ruslan Feschuk, a 32-year-old serving under Maj. Moskalenko, spent New Year’s Eve in a pickup truck with a DShKM Soviet heavy machine gun in the back, scanning the sky for Russian drones. “Our team celebrated by downing a Shahed just hours into the new year,” he said.

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The teams have come a long way since Russia began deploying waves of cheap Iranian drones in October. At least six drones struck a military base near Kyiv that month, and less than two weeks later another batch killed four people in the capital.

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What Attacks on Russian Air Bases Tell Us About Moscow’s Vulnerabilities
What Attacks on Russian Air Bases Tell Us About Moscow’s Vulnerabilities
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The Engels air base, a key aviation hub, was one of the targets of strikes inside Russian territory. WSJ explains what images and videos of the incidents can tell us about Kyiv’s tactics to destabilize Moscow far from the front lines. Photo composite: Eve Hartley via Planet Labs/Maxar
The drones are designed to explode upon impact, and shooting them down doesn’t completely neutralize them, although it prevents them from striking their intended target. After Mr. Sas’s unit shot down the drone over Kyiv in late December, emergency services rushed to the scene of the explosion, but no one was injured in the blast.

As a reward for the successful hit, the Ukrainian armed forces gave Mr. Sas’s unit a Soviet NSV machine gun that is a more modern version of the Maksim gun they fielded. But even when advanced Western air defenses arrive in Ukraine, the 65-year-old says older weapons may remain the best available solution to Russia’s drones.

The cost in ammunition used by the volunteer unit to down the Shahed drone in December was dwarfed by the cost of the drone itself, Mr. Sas said.

And “when it’s shot by a fighter who doesn’t get paid for his work, then for the state budget it’s an even better bargain,” he added.

Yevhenia Sivorka and Isabel Coles contributed to this article.

Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

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Re: Drones/UAV/UAS/Bots and Balloons
« Reply #312 on: February 10, 2023, 01:56:47 PM »
Why Spy Balloons Are the Pentagon’s New Secret Weapon
Air-tracking laser beams, swarms of support drones, and total dominion at 70,000 feet.
 By David HamblingPublished: Feb 6, 2023

Editor’s note: China’s use of spy balloons over the U.S. has recently made global headlines, but few realize that the U.S. is developing stealthy surveillance and intelligence-gathering balloons of its own. Below, we review the history of spy balloons, from their first use in WWII to their current technological capabilities and development in the U.S. This article was originally published on November 11, 2021.

New long-range U.S. weapons will be able to hit tactical targets like missile bases and air-defense radar from a thousand miles away or more, but only if they have aerial scouts to pinpoint their targets. The U.S. military has used stealth drones as spies to this point, but now, experimental stratospheric balloons are becoming viable, capable alternatives that can go undetected by enemy air defenses. Balloons combine remote capabilities with stealth to perform missions impossible for other aircraft, and they’re graduating from tests and demonstrations to live military operations.

Near-space craft like stratospheric balloons lurk anywhere between 60,000 and 80,000 feet, far above normal aircraft flight paths. The balloons come in the tradition of those used for artillery spotting in the Civil War, but they’re so high-tech today that they are sometimes mistaken for UFOs. The Pentagon is advancing its spy balloon program to put better eyes on a post-Afghanistan world marked by near-peer threats in Russia and China, and locally, it’s possible balloons will surveil the drug trade and smuggling networks via their unique integrated sensors and communications.
Better Than Satellites
Reconnaissance aircraft like drones and balloons are limited by how long they can survey an area of interest—an attribute Justin Bronk, analyst for the U.K. defense think-tank RUSI, calls persistence. “Even with something like the Global Hawk [the U.S. main strategic reconnaissance drone] you only get about twenty hours over the area of interest, and less than that if they have to travel a significant distance to get there,” he says. The ability to keep eyes on an area for days at a time with a low-cost platform would mean a huge increase in the military’s intelligence-gathering capability.
a world view stratollite balloon seen through a telescope at the mt lemmon sky center in arizona
A World View Stratollite balloon seen through a telescope at the Mt. Lemmon Sky Center in Arizona.
University of Arizona

Satellites fill some of the persistence gap, but low Earth orbit satellites 100 to 1,200 miles from the Earth’s surface only catch infrequent glimpses of a specific area, while satellites in geostationary orbit—meaning they travel with the Earth as it spins, staying above one location on the ground—are only useful for strategic applications like spotting ballistic missile launches.

Balloons’ durability and carrying strength could help them cover the bases neglected by those craft. World View Enterprises, a private company which develops near-space technology for the Pentagon and NASA, calls their balloons Stratollites. These giant pumpkin-shaped aircraft measure up to 800,000 cubic feet in volume. Their gondolas can house daylight and thermal cameras, radar, radio frequency sensors, and solar panels.

With a newly developed sensor that can measure wind patterns, and a design that can execute flight changes efficiently based on those readings, a Stratollite can change altitude, catch winds, and maintain position within 12 miles of a specified target for four days. “We think this has the potential to be a game-changer for us: a great, long-duration, long-dwell surveillance platform,” said Admiral Tidd, Commander of U.S. Southern Command over Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.
The Ascent to the Stratosphere

Japanese scientists were first to harness intercontinental balloons for military purposes in 1944. Their ‘Fu-go’ balloons carried incendiary bombs at 30,000 feet in an unsuccessful attempt to ignite forest fires across the Pacific Northwest.

A range of high-altitude balloon projects between 50,000-100,000 feet followed during the Cold War. The USAF’s Project Genetrix released spy balloons disguised as weather balloons over the Soviet Union in 1956, their downward-pointing cameras intending to photograph top-secret installations. This was the only way to see inside the country before satellites, but as the unpowered balloons could only drift at random with the wind, they gathered little useful information.
japanese fu go balloon
A Japanese Fu-Go Balloon, January 1945. The U.S. Army shot this balloon down over California and then reinflated it.
Courtesy U.S. Army
a project genetrix launch in 1956
A Project Genetrix launch in 1956.
Courtesy U.S. Air Force

A solution to the navigation challenge appeared by way of accessing the stratosphere, a convection-less portion of the atmosphere in which higher altitudes coincide with warmer temperatures. Without convection, wind patterns stay consistent at a given altitude, so with enough weather information, a balloon can go in any desired direction by adjusting to the right altitude and riding the wind. Project Loon, run by Google parent company Alphabet, developed stratospheric balloons with this capability in 2017. Several of these balloons rode countervailing winds at different heights to stay over Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017, providing internet access for 100,000 people.

Microwaves With Lasers

Both World View and Loon refined wind-prediction algorithms for their balloon projects, feeding weather reports and flight data into machine-learning processes to help their balloons find the right altitude at which to fly. But the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), developed a laser-based sensor to measure winds directly, rather than use a predictive model. Known as Strat-OAWL (Stratospheric Optical Autocovariance Wind Lidar), the sensor is derived from a NASA instrument used to observe the atmosphere from space. The original tech was the size of a kitchen table, says Alexander Walan, program manager for the now-complete Adaptable Lighter Than Air (ALTA) project at DARPA, but Strat-OAWL is the size of a microwave oven.

Strat-OAWL uses a Doppler sensor to track air movement. It bounces a laser beam off particles in the air and gathers the return with a telescope in order to measure the changes in the laser’s wavelength and “read” the wind. It was a high-risk project for DARPA, with little precedent for the technology, but in a 2019 capstone experiment, the ALTA project equipped outside balloon programs with Strat-OAWL sensors to fly their crafts across America with reliable, precise navigation. “We showed we could maneuver a stratospheric lighter-than-air craft across the continent,” says Walan. “We travelled to specific points of interest that we chose ahead of time, and showed we could loiter in any area we chose.” A purpose-built turbo compressor helped the balloons change heights with speed and efficiency.

a nasa super pressure balloon launches in new zealand
A NASA Super Pressure Balloon launches in New Zealand, March 2015.
NASA

ALTA also gave valuable operational experience for stratospheric balloon flights. The developers learned they needed rugged electronics that could withstand the space-like conditions at altitude. The equipment had to withstand a low-pressure environment that often saw extreme temperatures. According to Walan, the balloons themselves might last up to a month at these altitudes, though weeks-long missions are a safer bet.

Later balloon generations might have more endurance, able to watch over a point of interest for months. Today, that persistence requires relays of drones, with ground crew members managing landings and takeoffs.

ALTA transferred its technology to the U.S. military for operational use, and though Walan cannot provide further detail, budget documents hint the tech could reach near-space platforms operating at the level of the experimental balloons.

COLD STAR’s UFO Problem

The Pentagon’s efforts to operationalize the stratosphere begin with the classified program COLD STAR (COvert Long Dwell STratospheric ARchitecture), a spy balloon that can lurk undetected in enemy airspace. COLD STAR’s balloon has autonomous navigation, high fidelity sensors, and on-board AI. Budget documents note it participated in joint exercises this year, so it might be the unnamed balloon seen in photos of exercise Northern Edge in Alaska, an “experimental balloon operation” with the USAF.

COLD STAR’s plastic balloon is transparent to radar, and its gondola can be made stealthy by eliminating the straight lines and sharp corners that produce strong radar reflections in aircraft design. “It still has to stay within certain bounds dictated by the payload and the need for solar cells,” Bronk says. “But it does open the doors to different ways of shaping to minimize the radar cross section compared to other aircraft.” The ideal shape might look more like an egg than a typical balloon basket.

Bronk notes that many older radars automatically filter out slow-moving objects more likely to be birds or insects, so even a non-stealthy balloon would be invisible to dated tech. Further, there are no hot jet engine exhausts or wing edges heated by air friction on a balloon—both shine like beacons when viewed in the infra-red.
No balloon is going to be completely invisible, however. Even at 80,000 feet an object the size of a Stratollite is visible as a bright blob if caught by sunlight at the right angle. Multiple balloon programs, including ALTA, have inspired reports of extraterrestrial aircraft. “We were placing bets on how long it would take us to start getting UFO reports,” says Walan.

When Balloons Attack

COLD STAR will “refine hypersonic and long-range fires kill chains to counter time-sensitive targets,” per the Department of Defense’s budget documents for the fiscal year 2022. This suggests balloons will spot targets like mobile missile launchers for weapons like the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, which is intended to hit targets from 1,725 miles away.

“Relaying back data from these assets in real time, especially in high-resolution, is a real challenge at present,” Bronk says.

Only a handful of specialized support aircraft, called Battlefield Airborne Communications Nodes, or BACNs, do this job now. Stratollites offer a solution as long-endurance communication relays, and COLD STAR is equipped with electronics for processing and disseminating information.

1st battalion, 6th field artillery regiment, 41st field artillery brigade fires a guided multiple launch rocket system gmlrs from a multiple launch rocket system during the thunder cloud live fire exercise in andoya, norway on sept 15, 2021 the gmlrs is a surface to surface system used to attack, neutralize, suppress and destroy targets using indirect precision fires up to 70 plus kilometers us army photo by spc joshua thorne
The U.S. Army fires a Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System from a multiple launch rocket system during the Thunder Cloud live-fire exercise in Andoya, Norway, September 15, 2021. Thunder Cloud was designed to test out the targeting capability of high altitude balloons using long-range precision fires.
U.S. Army
brendan branick, electronics lead at raven aerostar, prepares a high altitude balloon for launch in support of the thunder cloud live fire exercise in andoya, norway, sept 15, 2021 thunder cloud was a sensor to shooter live fire exercise that utilizes high altitude balloons to gather and send targeting coordinates to firing assets within multiple domains for accurate and precise fires us army photo by spc joshua thorne
Brendan Branick, electronics lead at Raven Aerostar, prepares a high altitude balloon for launch in support of the Thunder Cloud live-fire exercise.
Courtesy U.S. Army
an engineering and electronics team from raven aerostar prepares to launch a high altitude balloon into the stratosphere as a part of the thunder cloud live fire exercise in andoya, norway, sept 15, 2021 high altitude balloons are filled with helium, tethered to solar panels, and released into the stratosphere where they collect targeting coordinates and information to relay to fire capabilities within other domains to deliver lethality us army photo by spc joshua thorne
An engineering and electronics team from Raven Aerostar prepares to launch a high altitude balloon into the stratosphere as a part of the Thunder Cloud exercise.
Courtesy U.S. Army

The military has also tapped stratospheric balloons for seeding areas behind enemy lines with thousands of tiny radio-frequency sensors meant for cyberspace situational understanding—mapping enemy positions through electronic signals like radio waves and wi-fi. Precision strikes can use these maps to take out otherwise invisible targets, with the sensors also able to confirm those strikes’ effectiveness.

The seeding project is likely to build on CICADA—‘Close-in Covert Autonomous Disposable Aircraft’—circuit boards folded into aerodynamic shapes like a paper plane. Each CICADA can glide from a balloon to a specific point on the ground. The balloon then acts as a communication node, passing data from the CICADA sensors back to headquarters, and distributing more sensors on areas of interest.

Other Army presentations indicate plans to release swarms of small drones from stratospheric balloons, either for detailed up-close reconnaissance and intelligence gathering, or for strikes on critical targets such as radar and communications.

The Future of Balloon Warfare

Another program, TRIPPWIRE—the Tactical Responsive Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Platforms and Payloads Watching Isolated Remote Environments—will include a Counter-Stratospheric Operations experiment in the next year. This apparently means balloon vs. balloon warfare.

Knocking out a balloon will probably require a hit on the gondola, which is more difficult than targeting a jet or drone because the gondola doesn’t have a pressurized cockpit, fuel tanks, munitions, or high-speed turbines. It’s hard to blow one up. “It’s a different target set,” Bronk says. “You would not create an explosive event as a hit on an aircraft might, but there’s still a good chance of taking it out of commission.”

It might be cheap to replace balloons relative to other aircraft—World View claims a month-long Stratollite mission will be “orders of magnitude” cheaper than, say, a drone mission of the same duration—so the Pentagon might rely on a combination of stealth and redundancy when approaching these aircraft for combat. If one is shot down, another could be nearby to take over.

President Biden indicated that after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the U.S. will rely more on ‘over the horizon’ operations, in which there are no boots on the ground. This will place more reliance on remote sensors such as drones, meaning balloons might start to supplement and replace traditional varieties of drone. Theaters like the South China Sea, which call for persistent observation, might be a good fit for balloons. Closer to home, Southern Command has suggested using balloon technology to counter drug smuggling through surveillance.

Balloon technology is fast moving into practical use, be it in stealth use cases or combat. Expect more projects in the U.S. and among its competitors—and prepare for more UFO sightings.

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Re: Chinese Balloon test to launch hypersonic missiles
« Reply #315 on: February 12, 2023, 12:31:01 PM »
https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-state-tv-showed-balloon-carrying-hypersonic-missiles-in-2018_5037040.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-02-12&src_cmp=uschina-2023-02-12&utm_medium=email&est=pr1cz2SS%2BrZN35nG%2FxfW78DnAaTrEcvP4BHMvWt0%2BUQqU6SymGsr0ZaCdp1DqQ44gKOZ
“While China has tested hypersonic missiles launched from balloons in the past, that isn’t a likely use for these airships,” Crespo told The Epoch Times in an email. “The biggest threat is sending one or more of these high altitude balloons over the U.S. with a small nuclear EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) device.

Epoch Times Photo
Illustration of the payload containing three hypersonic glide vehicles tested by China in 2018. (Epoch Times)
“Detonated at extremely high altitude, they could knock out power and communications across the US, wreaking widespread havoc for a year or more without firing a shot on the ground.”

That means at least 90% of the US population dies in that year.

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Chinese Balloons
« Reply #316 on: February 20, 2023, 05:23:18 PM »
‘Silent Killer’: Inside China’s Military Balloon Program
Chinese home-made airship AS700 takes off for a test flight at Jingmen Zhanghe Airport in Jingmen, Hubei Province of China, on Sept. 16, 2022. (Shen Ling/VCG via Getty Images)
Chinese home-made airship AS700 takes off for a test flight at Jingmen Zhanghe Airport in Jingmen, Hubei Province of China, on Sept. 16, 2022. (Shen Ling/VCG via Getty Images)
Eva Fu
By Eva Fu
February 17, 2023Updated: February 20, 2023
biggersmaller Print

0:00
16:03



1

Years before a gigantic white spy balloon from China captured America’s attention, a top Chinese aerospace scientist was keenly tracking the path of an unmanned airship making its way across the globe.

On a real-time map, the white blimp appeared as a blinking red dot, although in real life its size was formidable, weighing several tons and measuring 328 feet (100 meters) in length—about 80 feet longer than a Boeing 747-8, one of the largest passenger aircraft in the world.

“Look, here’s America,” the vessel’s chief architect, Wu Zhe, told the state-run newspaper Nanfang Daily. He excitedly pointed to a red line marking the airship’s journey at about 65,000 feet in the air, noting that in 2019, that flight was setting a world record.

Named “Cloud Chaser,” the airship had been flying for just shy of a month over three oceans and three continents, including what appears to be Florida. At the time of Wu’s interview in August, the airship was hovering above the Pacific Ocean, days away from completing its mission.

Cloud chaser image
An illustration of Cloud Chaser. (Nanfang Daily)
Wu, a veteran aerospace researcher, has played a key role in advancing the Chinese regime in what it describes as the “near space” race, referring to the layer of the atmosphere sitting between 12 and 62 miles above the earth. This region, which is too high for jets but too low for satellites, had been deemed ripe for exploitation in the regime’s bid to achieve military dominance.

Despite having existed for decades, the regime’s military balloon program came into the spotlight recently when the United States shot down a high-altitude surveillance balloon that drifted across the country for a week and hovered above multiple sensitive U.S. military sites. That balloon, the size of three buses, was smaller than Cloud Chaser.

The U.S. and Canadian militaries have since taken down three flying objects over North American airspace, although President Joe Biden on Feb. 16 said those are likely linked to private companies.

Epoch Times Photo
The suspected Chinese spy balloon drifts to the ocean after being shot down off the coast in Surfside Beach, S.C., on Feb. 4, 2023. (Randall Hill/Reuters)
Wu is turning 66 this month. He has ties to at least four of the six Chinese entities Washington recently sanctioned for supporting Beijing’s sprawling military balloon program, which the U.S. administration said has reached over 40 countries on five continents.

As a specialist in aircraft design, Wu has helped develop the Chinese regime’s homegrown fighter jets and stealth technology during his more than three decades in the aerospace field, taking home at least one award for his contribution to the military.

He was the vice president at Beihang University in Beijing, a prestigious state-run aeronautics school, until he voluntarily gave up the title for teaching and research in 2004, and he once served on the scientific advisory committee for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Armaments Department, a now-dissolved agency in charge of equipping the Chinese military.

Public records show that Wu is well-connected in the aerospace field, with stakes in many aviation firms. He is the chairman of Beijing-based Eagles Men Aviation Science, one of the six firms that, along with its branch in Shanxi, Washington has named as culprits in the balloon sanctions.

Both Beihang and the Harbin Institute of Technology, Wu’s alma mater and dubbed “China’s MIT,” are on a U.S. trade blacklist, the former for aiding China’s military rocket and unmanned air vehicle systems, and the latter for using U.S. technology to support Chinese missile programs.

_the digital screen of balloon journey
A map that shows the journey of the Chinese airship, Cloud Chaser, in August 2019. (Nanfang Daily)
‘Silent Killer’
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long vied for dominance in near space, which Chinese scientists see as a region for a variety of applications, from high-altitude balloons to hypersonic missiles.

From high above, there’s a wealth of information that an aerostat, equipped with an electronic surveillance system, can intercept and turn into an intelligence asset.

“If you’re flying a balloon that is 100,000 feet up in the air, you’ve got … visibility on the ground of hundreds and hundreds of miles over several states, because it’s up so high,” said Art Thompson, co-founder of California aerospace company Sage Cheshire Aerospace. During his three decades in the aerospace industry, Thomspon has worked on the B-2 stealth bomber and was technical director for the Red Bull Stratos project that broke the record for the highest balloon flight and the largest manned balloon.

EpochImages-2006334279
Art Thompson, CEO of Sage Cheshire and president of A2ZFX, sits inside a model capsule he built for Red Bull Stratos in Lancaster, Calif., on Aug. 13, 2022. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
“Whether it’s phone data, radio data, transmissions from aircraft, as to what the airplanes are, who owns it, all that data is available,” Thompson said.

As early as the 1970s, efforts were underway at the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences to explore high-altitude balloons, according to a state media report. Lacking the aid of computers, Chinese researchers drew inspiration from German and Japanese aerospace books and cut up newspapers to piece together prototypes.

The result was a helium balloon with an aluminum basket, altogether about the size of a typical hot air balloon. The team triumphantly named it HAPI and flew it into the stratosphere in 1983 to observe signals from a neutron star.

For the Chinese military, there’s high strategic value in aerostats, a technology that was in use as early as the late 1700s by the French as lookouts. Compared to airplanes or satellites, balloons are cheaper and easier to maneuver, can carry heavier payloads and cover a wider area, and are harder to detect, two regular columnists wrote in a 2021 article for PLA Daily, the Chinese military’s official newspaper. They consume less energy, allowing them to loiter in a target area for an extended period. And critically, they are often not caught by radars, so they can easily evade an enemy’s air defense system or be classified as UFOs.

A jet flies by a suspected Chinese spy balloon as it floats off the coast in Surfside Beach
A jet flies by a suspected Chinese spy balloon as it floats off the coast in Surfside Beach, South Carolina, on Feb. 4, 2023. (Randall Hill/Reuters)
Indeed, that appears to have occurred. Biden administration officials said they were able to retroactively detect three Chinese spy balloons that traveled over the United States during the Trump administration, and another after Biden took office.

Both Taiwan and Japan have since identified several suspected Chinese balloon incursions in recent years and are now threatening to shoot down any suspected objects in their airspace.

Chinese military researchers have also touted the utility of these balloons during combat. Newspaper articles and research papers have pored over balloons’ potential to screen for missiles, planes, and warships in lower space, serve as a medium for wartime communications, drop weapons to attack enemies, conduct electromagnetic interference, and deliver food or military supplies over a long distance.

U.S. Navy participates in recovery of balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina
U.S. Navy sailors assigned to Assault Craft Unit 4 prepare material recovered in the Atlantic Ocean from a high-altitude Chinese balloon shot down by the U.S. Air Force off the coast of South Carolina after docking in Virginia Beach, Virginia for transport to federal agents at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek on Feb. 13, 2023. (Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Ryan Seelbach/U.S. Navy/Handout via Reuters)
“In the future, balloon platforms may become like submarines in the deep sea: a silent killer that invokes terror,” the Chinese military columnists wrote in the PLA Daily article.

Such statements are not hyperbolic, according to Thompson. Paradoxically, the slow pace of a balloon, when used well, is in fact its strength.

“It’s virtually invisible on radar,” said Thompson. While people may be concerned about an intercontinental missile flying over, which would take several minutes, a balloon could transport one discreetly without being detected.

“Now when you decide to release that missile, it doesn’t take several minutes—it takes only a matter of seconds,” he added. “We can’t respond fast enough … It would hit us before we’d know what happened.”

“It’s a scary scenario. It’s funny that one of the oldest technologies is potentially also very dangerous.”

A Thriving Industry
traveler 3 turtle xinjiang
A turtle is shown after returning from the stratosphere in October 2017. (China Internet Information Center)
Chinese scientists have made great strides in near-space technology since HAPI’s launch. In 2017, they sent a yellow-spotted river turtle 68,900 feet over the northwestern Xinjiang region, marking the first time an aerostat was able to bring a live animal into the stratosphere.

The following year, a high-altitude balloon dropped three hypersonic missiles in the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia. Last year, a balloon brought a rocket more than 82,000 feet above the earth, making China the first country experimenting with such techniques, according to state media reports.

While the Chinese regime claimed the spy balloon was a civilian airship used for meteorological purposes, meteorological officials in China have a history of collaboration with the military.

hypersonic missile
China tested hypersonic glide vehicles dropped from a balloon in 2018, according to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV. (Screenshot via CCTV)
Meteorological officials under the PLA in 2013 coordinated with local meteorological bureaus to host a three-city military drill, according to state media outlet Xinhua. Such cooperation appeared to have deepened in the following years after CCP leader Xi Jinping ordered a major overhaul of the military. In 2017, the director of the China Meteorological Administration, the country’s national weather service, met with officials in the military and vowed to make a priority of “military-civil fusion,” a term for the regime’s aggressive national strategy to harness private sector innovations for military use.

The manufacturing of balloons has also flourished in the meantime.

Zhuzhou Rubber Research & Design Institute in China’s south-central Hunan Province, a subsidiary of state agrochemical giant ChemChina—which is on a U.S. blacklist over its ties to the military—is a dedicated supplier for the national weather bureau, producing three-quarters of the balloons it uses in nationwide weather stations, according to state media reports.

The company, sometimes described as a “made-in-China hidden champion,” was millions in debt in the early 2000s until it entered the balloon manufacturing game. It went on to become a leader in the industry, playing a chief role in formulating China’s national standard for weather balloons, and has around 30 patents under its name, a local government website shows.

In September 2017, Zhuzhou Rubber invested 30 million yuan ($4.38 million) in a key provincial-level lab for near-space sounding balloon research that it said aims to provide “security for national defenses on the near space front.”

It won a proclamation from the PLA’s General Armaments Department for designing a balloon for the return of Chang’e 5, the spacecraft used for China’s fifth lunar exploration mission, which was undertaken in 2020.

China Launches Chang'e-5 Spacecraft
A Long March-5 rocket carrying Chang’e-5 spacecraft blasts off from Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China, on Nov. 24, 2020. (VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
In March 2022, the China Ordnance Industry Experiment and Testing Institute—whose parent company, state-owned Norinco, is a major weapons producer for the Chinese military—inquired into prices for obtaining hundreds of sounding balloons from the firm, according to a tender bid on a Hunan provincial government site. It is unclear whether the institute made a bid after the tender.

The company’s website has become inaccessible since the recent spy balloon incident.

For the Chinese, these balloons are inexpensive tools for testing components for military equipment, Thompson said.

“They may be looking at as a particular piece of electronics that they want to put in a missile: is it going to hold up to the temperatures and altitude, or is it going to transmit,” he said. “So they might take that component that later is going to go on a piece of weaponry, and fly it to the altitude under a balloon to see how it handles it.”

‘China Speed’
Zhuzhou Rubber is but one player in the field. Dongguan Lingkong Remote Sensing Technology has claimed dozens of patents related to stratosphere aircraft, including a maneuverable stratospheric balloon and lightweight high-strength aerostat material. Wu is the statutory auditor of Dongguan Lingkong and the director of Beihang University’s Dongguan city research institute, which owns the company.

China Electronics Technology Group Corp. (CETC), a massive state-owned enterprise whose 48th research institute was hit with U.S. sanctions in the aftermath of the balloon incident, once credited itself for helping China bridge the technological gap in aerostats.

In 2010, the company showcased a large white blimp. Through its high-definition surveillance gear that scans the ground nonstop, it could spot details of objects as small as a book over an area of more than a hundred square miles, according to a Chinese state media report republished on the State Administration of Science website.

Their latest, the JY-400 balloon that CETC’s 38th research institute unveiled in 2021, can meet both civilian and military needs, with the capacity to carry payloads for detecting missiles and eavesdropping on and interfering with communications, Chinese media reports said. The reports cited Russian media expressing surprise at seeing their country outcompeted by China at a breathtaking pace, dubbing it “China speed.”

Thompson was struck by the JY-400 balloon’s visual resemblance to a U.S. military design, called the “Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System.”

That system was an Army program designed in 1998 by Raytheon that provides 360-degree surveillance to track low-flying cruise missiles, unmanned aircraft, and other threats. The dirigible had a synthetic aperture radar attached to its bottom. The U.S. Army began investing in it in the 2010s but ultimately discontinued funding in 2017, two years after one of the program’s two blimps broke loose and caused massive power outages in Pennsylvania.

Previews At The China International Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition
A China Electronics Technology Group Corp. (CETC) aerial blimp hangs in display at the China International Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai, China, on Oct. 31, 2016. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Military Blimp Loose Over Pennsylvania
Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) personnel oversee the inflation of an aerostat at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., on Dec. 15, 2014. (U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. Ronald Sellinger /Released)
Putting the two side by side, “you’d think they’re made by the same company,” Thompson said, noting that the only difference is one has the Chinese writing on it.

Thompson said it’s possible that the Chinese copied the designs of U.S. airships and adjusted certain parts, like the materials and size, to suit its needs.

Raytheon and CETC didn’t immediately respond to queries from The Epoch Times.

Wu’s Cloud Chaser airship was launched near Hainan, the island province that lies in the southern tip of China that U.S. officials have identified as a base for the Chinese surveillance balloon operations.

Considering China’s vast espionage program, those sanctioned by the United States represent only the “tip of the iceberg,” said Su Tze-yun, director of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taiwan.

But challenges abound for Western nations seeking to blunt the covert operation. The regime, as Su noted, could easily use front companies as a cover to steal or import Western technologies while attracting little notice. Under the civil-military fusion strategy, every private company could be indirectly supporting the regime’s military development, making it harder to draw the line and impose punishment. But that at least heightens the need to block Chinese entities from acquiring U.S. firms, he said.

While Western countries are also developing balloon technology, what differentiates the actions is China’s authoritarianism, according to Su.

“Democratic countries are bound by law from infringing other nations’ airspace,” he told The Epoch Times. “This is why the same technology, once it’s in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, would become a threat.”

Luo Ya and Dorothy Li contributed to this report.

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WSJ: Drones in Ukraine
« Reply #317 on: February 26, 2023, 07:12:43 AM »
Discussion about the war in Ukraine has focused recently on whether the West will supply Kyiv with tanks and jets. But consider the humble drone. Even as Russia has used Iranian-made drones to attack Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Ukraine has repurposed cheap commercial drones for use on the battlefield.

Jury-rigged commercial drones typically carry small payloads over short distances, but they’re cheap and can take out heavy enemy equipment. Ukrainian fighters call it “delivering pizza.” In September in the northern region of Kharkiv, Stanislav Zorin, a 36-year-old drone operator for Ukraine’s 80th Airborne Assault Brigade, used a Chinese-made DJI Mavic 3 drone that costs a little more than $2,000 to destroy a Russian tank worth millions. Mr. Zorin describes it as “my ideal sortie.”

Ukraine also has used drones to improve the accuracy of low-precision artillery. “When the first shot goes in, you say, ‘Well, it’s 10 meters left, it’s 10 meters right,’ until you make it in. It makes a huge difference,” says Timur Khromaev, 47, company commander of the Territorial Defense’s 112 Brigade, who spent the summer flying drones over Russian positions in the southern region of Kherson. Russia has had vastly more artillery and missile systems than Ukraine. “Every shot counts,” Mr. Khromaev says.

“Drones are fundamentally a platform that lets you do one of two things,” says Fred Kagan, director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project. “It lets you look at stuff, and it lets you shoot stuff.”


The West has helped Ukraine with intelligence, but Kyiv has also relied on drones to peer into Russian-occupied territory. Drones “let poor countries do stuff that otherwise only rich countries used to be able to do,” Mr. Kagan says. “The Ukrainians have used drones to offset their own gaps in capability at a much lower price tag than they would have had to pay if they were going to do it in the more conventional military way.”


Drones can also be used in psychological warfare. Samuel Bendett, a member of the Russia Studies Program at the nonprofit Center for Naval Analyses, says a pro-Kremlin account on Telegram recently featured a post by a Russian soldier who described how Ukrainians had used commercial drones to surveil his unit and attack its men when they tried to move between shelters.

“Movement is life,” the post said. “Especially in war. As soon as you are deprived of movement, you experience the difficulties with transportation and the evacuation of the wounded. . . . The fighter then gets the idea that he was driven into a trap and the brain offers options on how to escape. Morale then drops by an order of magnitude—this leads to soldiers abandoning their positions.”

This is dangerous work for the Ukrainians. The short flying range of commercial drones means operators “have to be on the edge of the frontline to do our work,” and “we can be reached by any means of artillery,” says Ihor Lutsenko, 44, a former member of Ukraine’s Parliament who has been flying modified commercial drones in eastern Ukraine. “This is the most dangerous job after being in the infantry, but compared to the infantry you’re a priority goal for the enemy.”

Fatalities and injuries are common. Russians often begin firing at operators within minutes after a drone takes flight. Sometimes “you can hear when it’s out, then you can expect something [is] going to fall on you, you can hide,” Mr. Zorin says. But sometimes “it just comes in, and you’re just standing there. . . . It’s like an immediate explosion.”

There’s a high burn rate for Ukraine’s drones, which are at particular risk of jammers that can commandeer or down them. Civil society is helping replenish the supply. “Drones have been probably the No. 1 target for volunteer fundraising activities throughout this war,” says Yuriy Sak, an adviser to Ukraine’s defense minister. These efforts are nimble because they’re decentralized and don’t rely on military bureaucracy. Volunteer groups communicate with soldiers about their needs, then crowdfund the purchase and figure out a way to deliver it fast to the front.

Chinese-made DJI drones are prevalent, with the Mavic 3 model considered the workhorse of the Ukrainian front. DJI didn’t respond to my queries, but in a statement in November the company said “we stand alone as the only drone company to clearly denounce and actively discourage use of our products in combat, including suspending all business operations in Russia and Ukraine to try to keep our drones out of the conflict.”


The Ukrainian Association of Drone Owners has about 18,000 members, including developers, hobbyists, photographers and farmers who use unmanned aerial vehicles for agricultural work like crop-dusting. The association’s chairman, Taras Troiak, says many members have donated drones to the war effort.

Soon after the war began, Ukraine learned that Russians were using AeroScope, a DJI drone-detection platform, to find Ukrainian drone operators and attack them. The U.S. considers DJI a “Chinese military company” and in 2021 warned that its systems “pose potential threats to national security.” Mr. Troiak says he asked DJI to help shield drones from AeroScope detection, but the company declined. So his team designed Olga—a device that “you can connect to the drone before takeoff” that ensures “AeroScopes can’t see you.”

“It helped Ukraine a lot,” Mr. Troiak says, “because we got many reports that the situation became stable, no such reports like before, when every day there were huge artillery strikes against the military or civilians who use DJI drones.” But “after a month or two, DJI discovered that we had hacked their hardware this way,” Mr. Troiak says. “Now the system Olga doesn’t work.”

The Ukrainians are less forthcoming about their current efforts to shield drone operators from Russian detection. But Mr. Troiak says Ukrainian volunteers are trying to develop their own drone technology, and he’s aware of some 100 volunteer teams “working like elves at night preparing for Santa” to build and modify drones for the battlefield and protect them from Russian electronic warfare.

Ukraine also gets help from Western drone developers. Seattle-based Brinc Drones has donated 30 drone systems and says the Netherlands purchased an additional 30 for Ukraine. Its drones are fortified against AeroScope and can be used for close targeting reconnaissance and search and rescue. Brinc trained Ukrainian operators and got the drones to Ukraine without the help of the U.S. government.

The company is using the battlefield experience to improve its product. “We can go to the open fields and deserts in America and fly our stuff around, but when you’ve got an aggressive enemy who’s trying to interdict or thwart you, you learn a lot,” says chief of staff Andrew Coté. “We are beyond fortunate for real-time end-user feedback as Ukrainian operators engage Russian armed forces.”

The Ukrainian government has called on its Western supporters to send more military drones, which fly farther, carry heavier payloads, and are better protected against countermeasures. “If you look at the military aid of the United States to Ukraine, you will see that the amount of drones is very limited,” says Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s internal-affairs minister. “We really need more drones.”

Ms. Melchior is a London-based member of the Journal editorial board.

« Last Edit: March 12, 2023, 05:51:26 PM by Crafty_Dog »

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RUS is learning lots about DroneWar
« Reply #318 on: March 12, 2023, 02:34:24 PM »

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Re: Drones/UAV/UAS/Bots and Balloons
« Reply #319 on: March 12, 2023, 05:57:42 PM »
Just shared that with someone with professional interest in these things.


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« Last Edit: March 12, 2023, 06:24:16 PM by Crafty_Dog »

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NC: Police use drone to catch 5 teens throwing rocks onto highway
« Reply #322 on: March 12, 2023, 06:28:26 PM »
Fourth

https://whnt.com/news/national/drone-tracks-down-5-teens-caught-throwing-large-rocks-onto-highway-sheriff/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=socialflow&fbclid=IwAR1FIxjqXlSgVwtfzz3zu4L0FPGV1MA4AKABbyjcBcP7ewXTuUmgLKfKnhw

Drone tracks down 5 teens caught throwing ‘large’ rocks onto highway: sheriff
by: Rodney Overton

Posted: Feb 26, 2023 / 09:22 AM CST

MONROE, N.C. (WNCN) — Deputies in North Carolina used a drone Friday night to track down suspects they say were throwing rocks from an overpass onto the toll highway below it.

There were several reports of at least two people throwing “large rocks off a bridge” onto the expressway, U.S. 74, below, according to the Union County Sheriff’s Office.

“Deputies arrived and located a semi-truck and trailer that had been struck by one of the rocks causing significant damage to the roof of the truck and the front side of the trailer,” deputies said in a news release.

Deputies then launched a drone with infrared technology to search the area.

During the drone’s flight, deputies “located several distinct heat signatures hiding near the on-ramp to the expressway,” the news release said.

Two suspects were initially caught before a perimeter was set up and three more were captured.


The five suspects range from 13 to 15 years old, deputies said.

Mexican president posts photo of what he claims is an elf
All five suspects will now face criminal charges for their actions via petitions issued by the North Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice.

“Throwing large rocks off of a bridge at commercial motor vehicles traveling on the Monroe Expressway could have seriously injured or killed one of the drivers who were just trying to work hard and provide for their families,” Union County Sheriff Eddie Cathey said in the release.
« Last Edit: March 12, 2023, 06:31:25 PM by Crafty_Dog »

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From our forum in 2011
=======================================

Exclusive: Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer
In an exclusive interview, an engineer working to unlock the secrets of the captured RQ-170 Sentinel says they exploited a known vulnerability and tricked the US drone into landing in Iran.
By Scott Peterson, Payam Faramarzi* | Christian Science Monitor – 11 hrs agoEmail

Iran guided the CIA's "lost" stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone's systems inside Iran.

Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.

Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone's GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.


"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran's "electronic ambush" of the highly classified US drone. "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain."

The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.

The revelations about Iran's apparent electronic prowess come as the US, Israel, and some European nations appear to be engaged in an ever-widening covert war with Iran, which has seen assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, explosions at Iran's missile and industrial facilities, and the Stuxnet computer virus that set back Iran’s nuclear program.

Now this engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.

Western military experts and a number of published papers on GPS spoofing indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is plausible.

"Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible” to manipulation, says former US Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore, adding that it is “certainly possible” to recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it flies on a different course. “I wouldn't say it's easy, but the technology is there.”

In 2009, Iran-backed Shiite militants in Iraq were found to have downloaded live, unencrypted video streams from American Predator drones with inexpensive, off-the-shelf software. But Iran’s apparent ability now to actually take control of a drone is far more significant.

Iran asserted its ability to do this in September, as pressure mounted over its nuclear program.

Gen. Moharam Gholizadeh, the deputy for electronic warfare at the air defense headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), described to Fars News how Iran could alter the path of a GPS-guided missile – a tactic more easily applied to a slower-moving drone.

“We have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning ‘deception’ of the aggressive systems,” said Gholizadeh, such that “we can define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile would change to our desired destination.”

Gholizadeh said that “all the movements of these [enemy drones]” were being watched, and “obstructing” their work was “always on our agenda.”

That interview has since been pulled from Fars’ Persian-language website. And last month, the relatively young Gholizadeh died of a heart attack, which some Iranian news sites called suspicious – suggesting the electronic warfare expert may have been a casualty in the covert war against Iran.

Iran's growing electronic capabilities
Iranian lawmakers say the drone capture is a "great epic" and claim to be "in the final steps of breaking into the aircraft's secret code."

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Fox News on Dec. 13 that the US will "absolutely" continue the drone campaign over Iran, looking for evidence of any nuclear weapons work. But the stakes are higher for such surveillance, now that Iran can apparently disrupt the work of US drones.

US officials skeptical of Iran’s capabilities blame a malfunction, but so far can't explain how Iran acquired the drone intact. One American analyst ridiculed Iran’s capability, telling Defense News that the loss was “like dropping a Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture.”

Yet Iran’s claims to the contrary resonate more in light of new details about how it brought down the drone – and other markers that signal growing electronic expertise.

A former senior Iranian official who asked not to be named said: "There are a lot of human resources in Iran.... Iran is not like Pakistan."

“Technologically, our distance from the Americans, the Zionists, and other advanced countries is not so far to make the downing of this plane seem like a dream for us … but it could be amazing for others,” deputy IRGC commander Gen. Hossein Salami said this week.

According to a European intelligence source, Iran shocked Western intelligence agencies in a previously unreported incident that took place sometime in the past two years, when it managed to “blind” a CIA spy satellite by “aiming a laser burst quite accurately.”

More recently, Iran was able to hack Google security certificates, says the engineer. In September, the Google accounts of 300,000 Iranians were made accessible by hackers. The targeted company said "circumstantial evidence" pointed to a "state-driven attack" coming from Iran, meant to snoop on users.

Cracking the protected GPS coordinates on the Sentinel drone was no more difficult, asserts the engineer.

US knew of GPS systems' vulnerability
Use of drones has become more risky as adversaries like Iran hone countermeasures. The US military has reportedly been aware of vulnerabilities with pirating unencrypted drone data streams since the Bosnia campaign in the mid-1990s.

Top US officials said in 2009 that they were working to encrypt all drone data streams in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – after finding militant laptops loaded with days' worth of data in Iraq – and acknowledged that they were "subject to listening and exploitation."

Perhaps as easily exploited are the GPS navigational systems upon which so much of the modern military depends.

"GPS signals are weak and can be easily outpunched [overridden] by poorly controlled signals from television towers, devices such as laptops and MP3 players, or even mobile satellite services," Andrew Dempster, a professor from the University of New South Wales School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems, told a March conference on GPS vulnerability in Australia.

"This is not only a significant hazard for military, industrial, and civilian transport and communication systems, but criminals have worked out how they can jam GPS," he says.

The US military has sought for years to fortify or find alternatives to the GPS system of satellites, which are used for both military and civilian purposes. In 2003, a “Vulnerability Assessment Team” at Los Alamos National Laboratory published research explaining how weak GPS signals were easily overwhelmed with a stronger local signal.

“A more pernicious attack involves feeding the GPS receiver fake GPS signals so that it believes it is located somewhere in space and time that it is not,” reads the Los Alamos report. “In a sophisticated spoofing attack, the adversary would send a false signal reporting the moving target’s true position and then gradually walk the target to a false position.”

The vulnerability remains unresolved, and a paper presented at a Chicago communications security conference in October laid out parameters for successful spoofing of both civilian and military GPS units to allow a "seamless takeover" of drones or other targets.

To “better cope with hostile electronic attacks,” the US Air Force in late September awarded two $47 million contracts to develop a "navigation warfare" system to replace GPS on aircraft and missiles, according to the Defense Update website.

Official US data on GPS describes "the ongoing GPS modernization program" for the Air Force, which "will enhance the jam resistance of the military GPS service, making it more robust."

Why the drone's underbelly was damaged
Iran's drone-watching project began in 2007, says the Iranian engineer, and then was stepped up and became public in 2009 – the same year that the RQ-170 was first deployed in Afghanistan with what were then state-of-the-art surveillance systems.

In January, Iran said it had shot down two conventional (nonstealth) drones, and in July, Iran showed Russian experts several US drones – including one that had been watching over the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordo, near the holy city of Qom.

In capturing the stealth drone this month at Kashmar, 140 miles inside northeast Iran, the Islamic Republic appears to have learned from two years of close observation.

Iran displayed the drone on state-run TV last week, with a dent in the left wing and the undercarriage and landing gear hidden by anti-American banners.

The Iranian engineer explains why: "If you look at the location where we made it land and the bird's home base, they both have [almost] the same altitude," says the Iranian engineer. "There was a problem [of a few meters] with the exact altitude so the bird's underbelly was damaged in landing; that's why it was covered in the broadcast footage."

Prior to the disappearance of the stealth drone earlier this month, Iran’s electronic warfare capabilities were largely unknown – and often dismissed.

"We all feel drunk [with happiness] now," says the Iranian engineer. "Have you ever had a new laptop? Imagine that excitement multiplied many-fold." When the Revolutionary Guard first recovered the drone, they were aware it might be rigged to self-destruct, but they "were so excited they could not stay away."

* Scott Peterson, the Monitor's Middle East correspondent, wrote this story with an Iranian journalist who publishes under the pen name Payam Faramarzi and cannot be further identified for security reasons.

===========================================
===========================================


Iran claims its experts almost done recovering data from captured US drone
Nasser Karimi, The Associated Press Dec 12, 2011 13:45:00 PM
0

TEHRAN, Iran - Iranian experts are in the final stages of recovering data from the U.S. surveillance drone captured by the country's armed forces, state TV reported Monday.

Tehran has flaunted the capture of the RQ-170 Sentinel, a top-secret aircraft with stealth technology, as a victory for Iran and a defeat for the United States in a complicated intelligence and technological battle.

President Barack Obama said Monday that the U.S. was pressing Iran to return the aircraft, which U.S. officials say malfunctioned and was not brought down by Iran. But a senior commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard said on Sunday that the country would not send it back, adding that "no one returns the symbol of aggression."

Iranian lawmaker Parviz Sorouri, a member of the parliament's national security and foreign policy committee, said Monday the extracted information will be used to file a lawsuit against the United States for what he called the "invasion" by the unmanned aircraft.
Sorouri also claimed that Iran has the capability to reproduce the drone through reverse engineering, but he did not elaborate.

State TV broadcast images Thursday of Iranian military officials inspecting what it identified as the drone. Iranian state media have said the unmanned spy aircraft was detected and brought down over the country's east, near the border with Afghanistan.

Officers in the Revolutionary Guard, Iran's most powerful military force, have claimed the country's armed forces brought down the surveillance aircraft with an electronic ambush, causing minimum damage to the drone.

American officials have said that U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that Iran neither shot the drone down, nor used electronic or cybertechnology to force it from the sky. They contend the drone malfunctioned. The officials spoke anonymously in order to discuss the classified program.

U.S. officials are concerned others may be able to reverse engineer the chemical composition of the drone's radar-deflecting paint or the aircraft's sophisticated optics technology that allows operators to positively identify terror suspects from tens of thousands of feet in the air.

They are also worried adversaries may be able to hack into the drone's database, although it is not clear whether any data could be recovered. Some surveillance technologies allow video to stream through to operators on the ground but do not store much collected data. If they do, it is encrypted.

Separately, in comments to the semi-official ISNA news agency, Sorouri said Iran would soon hold a navy drill to practice the closure of the strategic Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, which is the passageway for about 40 per cent of the world's oil tanker traffic.

Despite Sorouri's comments and past threats that Iran could seal off the waterway if the U.S. or Israel moved against Iranian nuclear facilities, no such exercise has been officially announced.

"Iran will make the world unsafe" if the world attacks Iran, Sorouri said.

Both the U.S. and Israel have not rule out military option against Iran's controversial nuclear program, which the West suspects is aimed at making atomic weapons. Iran denies the charge, saying its nuclear activities are geared toward peaceful purposes like power generation.

In another sign of the increasing tensions between Iran and the U.S., Tehran said Monday it has asked Interpol to help seek the arrest of two former U.S. officials it accuses of supporting the assassinations of Iranian officials.

Iran's state prosecutor, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejehei, told reporters that Iran has filed charges against retired U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane and former CIA agent Reuel Marc Gerecht.

Ejehei said Iran sent a request to Interpol in Paris to help pursue the two Americans through its office in Washington.

Iran says the two men urged the Obama administration to use covert action against Iran and kill some of its top officials, including Brig. Gen. Ghassem Soleimani commander of the Quds Force, the special foreign operations unit of the Revolutionary Guard.

Crafty_Dog

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Pretty amazing!
« Reply #324 on: March 20, 2023, 05:57:37 AM »

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Mon-50 drones
« Reply #325 on: March 21, 2023, 10:41:00 AM »

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Re: Drones/UAV/UAS/Bots and Balloons
« Reply #327 on: April 07, 2023, 08:57:50 AM »
Though the article is hostile to DeSantis, I heartily approve of his actions here.  No reason for the Chinese to have access to this sort of data!!!!!!!!!!!

Let the market solve the problem!!!

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Re: Drones/UAV/UAS/Bots and Balloons
« Reply #328 on: April 07, 2023, 09:03:20 AM »
agreed

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Re: Drones/UAV/UAS/Bots and Balloons
« Reply #329 on: April 07, 2023, 09:26:05 AM »
Though the article is hostile to DeSantis, I heartily approve of his actions here.  No reason for the Chinese to have access to this sort of data!!!!!!!!!!!

Let the market solve the problem!!!

Exactly

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Re: Drones/UAV/UAS/Bots and Balloons
« Reply #332 on: May 25, 2023, 02:36:19 PM »
well I hope this has potential for hypersonics

you likely had seen this :

https://eurasiantimes.com/new-chinese-pla-sink-uss-gerald-r-ford-aircraft/

the rumors we lose in war games
and that hypersonics can sink carriers

is not just some silly rumor
according to this..............

we need Star Trek shields .....




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LARPing killer drones
« Reply #334 on: June 12, 2023, 07:03:42 AM »


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New type of drone
« Reply #336 on: July 19, 2023, 03:09:33 PM »


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Tactical anti-drone gun
« Reply #341 on: August 31, 2023, 01:00:38 PM »
https://www.droneshield.com/products/dronegun-tactical

I am informed that it is ineffective.

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The dual modality Triton drone
« Reply #344 on: November 11, 2023, 03:22:58 AM »
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jF9ljFACXM

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Drones in Gaza
« Reply #347 on: December 29, 2023, 04:00:25 AM »
Small Drones Are Helping Israel Navigate the Urban Battlefield in Gaza
Cheap, agile devices can explore tunnels, break through windows and carry explosives
By
Dov Lieber
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Updated Dec. 29, 2023 12:05 am ET


The Israeli military has tried a variety of methods to explore Hamas’s tunnels in Gaza: robots, robot dogs and real dogs. But what it has quickly learned is that the cheapest and most effective option for exploring the underground labyrinths—which are a potential death trap for soldiers—is a small quadcopter drone.

It isn’t just tunnels. In the dense urban battlefield of Gaza, the Israeli military has been flying these quadcopters—essentially small helicopters with four rotors—into buildings before sending in soldiers. The devices are also providing smaller units with aerial reconnaissance and being used as guided munitions.

The small drones are just one new piece of Israel’s unmanned aerial arsenal, which military officials say has played an essential role in minimizing their casualties as they rapidly advance through a densely populated, well-fortified and extensively booby-trapped battlefield.

Israel also operates a large fleet of fixed-wing unmanned aircraft, some as large as F-16s and others small enough to be carried on a soldier’s back, that carry out a mix of surveillance, reconnaissance and airstrikes—an ability it admitted it had for the first time last year. The largest aircraft can fly up to altitudes of 45,000 feet and stay airborne for nearly a day and a half, while the smallest flies at 5,000 feet and can stay aloft for a few hours.

Israeli military officials say those drones are still a critical backbone of support for the military. But it turns out that small, cheap quadcopter drones are in many ways more useful on some parts of the battlefield—like in tunnels.


About a decade ago, Israel’s National Security Council had deliberated whether quadcopter drones would have an impact on the battlefield and concluded they wouldn’t, said Jacob Nagel, a former Israeli national security adviser.

Now he said, “The air in Gaza is full of them.”

The increasing adoption of small, commercial drones is evident in conflicts around the world. Both Russia and Ukraine have relied heavily on quadcopters for surveillance and attacks, while Hamas used small drones as part of its Oct. 7 assault. Since then, thousands of commercial drones have made their way into the hands of Israeli soldiers on the battlefield and civilians looking to defend themselves.

The quadcopter has become a lifeline for Israel’s smaller, less-equipped units, such as those made up of reservists called into battle after the Hamas attacks.

The drones, however, weren’t expected to be used to explore tunnels. Israel originally used heavy robots connected to the surface through a cable to search the hundreds of miles of passages that Hamas has dug beneath Gaza. But the tunnel floors are often filled with trash, tripping up the robots, while some passageways proved to be too narrow for them to be operated.

Israel also tried using robotic dogs, but they are expensive and heavy.


The small drones can create 3-D maps of the tunnels, are completely untethered and can fit through small spaces. They can also create their own communications networks underground, with each small drone flying as far as it can before becoming a new relay node that will allow the next drone to fly further.

It wasn’t just Israel that failed to originally foresee how important quadcopters would become in war zones. The U.S. military had for years focused on building larger, more expensive drones before realizing only too late that it had ceded the small drone market to China.


Today, China’s SZ DJI Technology is the world’s largest maker of consumer drones, and its inexpensive quadcopters have become popular on the battlefield.

At the outset of the war in Gaza, when there was a rush to get small drones into the hands of Israelis, many of those sent were Chinese-made DJI drones, said employees at private drone companies working with the Israeli military.

In one video released by the Israeli military, soldiers could be seen lowering a DJI Mavic 3 drone into a tunnel below a hospital compound in Gaza City.

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Israel soon cracked down on the use of DJI’s drones inside Gaza, said the employees at the private drone companies. The operators of the Chinese-made drones, which aren’t designed for the battlefield, can be located using off-the-shelf hardware that Hamas could likely acquire.


China’s SZ DJI Technology is the world’s largest maker of consumer drones, and its inexpensive quadcopters are also on the battlefield.  PHOTO: CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS/REUTERS
A senior Israeli military official said an effort had been made to standardize what kind of drones soldiers could use on the battlefield.

“One of the [Israel Defense Force’s] top acquisition priorities right now is indoor drones for use in hostage rescue operations in the Hamas tunnels and subterranean environments,” said Blake Resnick, CEO of the U.S. drone company BRINC.

Resnick said he was in Israel earlier in December and the Israeli military purchased some of the company’s LEMUR 2 drones, which are designed for search and rescue operations. The drones are being used primarily for hostage-rescue operations in the Hamas tunnels and subterranean environments, according to Resnick.

The Israeli military declined to comment on what type of drones it is using inside Gaza.

Aviv Shapira, the Israeli co-founder and CEO of drone company XTEND, first began working with Israel’s military several years ago to use quadcopters to take down incendiary balloons that Gazans, some at the behest of Hamas or other militant groups, were sending into nearby Israeli farms to start large fires.

Now, he said, the Israeli military is using the company’s drones for a variety of purposes inside Gaza. Some go into the tunnels. Some can break through windows and explore inside buildings. Others are equipped with robotic arms carrying a small payload, such as a small adhesive explosive that can blow a door open, fly in and drop grenades.

He said the military’s Yahalom, or diamond in Hebrew, which specializes in finding and destroying Hamas’s tunnels, uses the drones to drop things onto mines or booby traps usually found around the tunnel exits.

XTEND’s small Xtender drones, which can carry about 5 ounces, are equipped with cameras that can create real-time 3-D mapping, helping them fly indoors and underground in tunnels. The drones can work underground by operating as radio relays, helping the operator reach the furthest drone.

These functions, initially designed for indoor use, have now become essential for outdoor use in Gaza, said Shapira, because both Hamas and Israel are jamming Global Positioning Systems for navigation and radio signals for communications.

Multiple drones—sometimes called a swarm—can also be directed by one operator. Using a virtual-reality headset with picture-in-picture feeds, the operator can use one drone to break into a building through a window or a door, and land a second one at the entrance for additional surveillance. Meanwhile, a third can search the building for the target.

“We found that three is the magic number,” said Shapira.

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