Crapaganda.com

The US military has used drones to attack suspected terrorists in Pakistan since at least 2004. Proponents of the small, unmanned planes say they are capable of “surgical strikes”that reduce civilian casualties and effectively combat terrorism.

Is that true? Well, not really, according to a new report from the New America Foundation, a non-profit research institute.

The percentage of civilians killed by drones in Pakistan is at about 32 percent, or one out of three, the report states, and the strikes themselves have little effect in deterring terrorist activities in either Pakistan or Afghanistan. Researchers do not believe any of the reported strikes targeted Osama bin Laden.

Our study shows that the 114 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, including 18 in 2010, from 2004 to the present have killed approximately between 834 and 1,216 individuals, of whom around 549 to 849 were described as militants in reliable press accounts, about two-thirds of the total on average. Thus, the true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 percent.

The group’s report is titled “The Year of the Drone,” referring to 2009. According to the figures obtained by the foundation, the Obama administration has increased the use of drone strikes considerably when compared to the previous years of the Bush administration.

There were 114 reported drone strikes from 2004 through 2009, but only 45 during the Bush years. The other 51 were during last year.

…[A]lthough the drone strikes have disrupted militant operations, their unpopularity with the Pakistani public and their value as a recruiting tool for extremist groups may have ultimately increased the appeal of the Taliban and al Qaeda, undermining the Pakistani state. This is more disturbing than almost anything that could happen in Afghanistan, given that Pakistan has dozens of nuclear weapons and about six times the population.

Although the US military executes the strikes with the approval of the Pakistani government, the people feel differently. Only 9 percent approve of drone strikes.

The group ReThink Afghanistan has already created a short documentary using some of the report’s findings.

“Clearly when you have a drone strike that kills a wedding party of ninety people when you’re really after one person and maybe you didn’t even get that person, this contributes to the problem,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) says in the film.

Watch it here:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military, just awarded a $32 million contract to build an all-terrain quadruped robot that carry equipment into battle for our troops.

The contract has been awarded to Boston Dynamics, which has just 30 months to turn the research prototype machines into a genuine load-toting, four-legged, semi-intelligent war robot–”first walk-out” of the newly-designated LS3 is scheduled in 2012.

LS3 stands for Legged Squad Support System, and that pretty much sums up what the device is all about: It’s a semi-autonomous assistant designed to follow soldiers and Marines across the battlefield, carrying up to 400 pounds of gear and enough fuel to keep it going for 24 hours over a march of 20 miles.

Here is a video of  BigDog kicking it on a beach in Thailand.

LS3 is a direct descendant of BigDog, and it’ll be battle-hardened and clever enough to use GPS and machine vision to either yomp along behind a pack of troops, or navigate its own way to a pre-programmed assembly point. Yup, that’s right, LS3 is smart enough to trot off over the horizon all on its lonesome. That opens up all sorts of amazing military possibilities, like resupply of materiel to troops who are deployed in difficult remote locations, as well as the standard “If LS3 can offload 50 pounds from the back of each soldier in a squad, it will reduce warfighter injuries and fatigue and increase the combat effectiveness of our troops” as described by BD’s president Marc Raibert.

And its clear that these, and other, potential benefits have been proven to DARPA enough that it’s prepared to fund what seems to be an extremely future-focused piece of military hardware. But LS3, of course, stands for much more than its simple “squad support” label would suggest. It’s placing artificially-intelligent robots right next to soldiers on the battle field, which is a natural extension of the way robots are currently used in combat–essentially as smart remote control units for situations too dangerous for a human to risk. And in that sense, LS3 is a significant piece of kit. Because it won’t be too long before someone considers the benefits of replacing its 400-pound load with a heavy gun, and LS32 becomes an AI-equipped armed battlefield robot. More terminator-dog than K9, you see.

Here is video of  BigDog auto-tracking a human.

Stay tuned for: Drone Wars