Pinpointing the exact firing location is a job for the drones

Friday, July 11th, 2025

Headlines early on in the invasion of Ukraine warned about the sheer power of Russian artillery, with advances following massive ‘fire curtain’ barrages, but, David Hamblin explains, Ukraine has been successful at countering Russian artillery:

Any gun firing can be spotted by counter-artillery radar, like the U.S. -made AN/TPQ-36 Firefinder, which tracks shells in flight and calculates their source. New Ukrainian-made acoustic detectors which recently went into mass production are likely to figure increasingly.

“The radar is typically the first step. It can detect the approximate area of a firing position, but it’s not precise,” says Michael. “Depending on distance and terrain, it may narrow the location down to a 200-by-200-meter area, which is too broad for a direct strike.”

Pinpointing the exact firing location is a job for the drones.

“Drones are essential for confirming the exact location of artillery,” says Michael. “We use fixed-wing drones, some with real-time video, others capturing high-resolution photos, for wide-area reconnaissance. These platforms allow us to assess whether the artillery is still in position and provide up-to-date imagery.”

[…]

“Artillery is easiest to spot when it’s firing — muzzle flashes, smoke, or movement of the crew make it visible,” says Michael. “Also, we can identify the artillery by its silhouette, even if it’s partially hidden somewhere in the trees or buildings. In covered areas, we look for signs like tracks, disturbed ground, or heat if thermal optics are available.”

[…]

“FPV drones, both quadcopters and fixed-wing types, have become more effective than traditional artillery in terms of precision engagement,” says Michael. “A high-quality FPV drone for now is the most effective way to destroy the artillery system.”

Several different types are used depending on the range, with fixed-wing FPVs typically having longer reach.

Surprisingly, drones are preferred because they are faster. It is highly counter-intuitive that 100 mph drone will reach a target quicker than a 700-mph artillery shell, but what counts is how long it takes to hit the target.

[…]

Dynamic conditions may mean a situation where a self-propelled gun fires off a few rounds and speeds away down a track. An artillery shell arriving after thirty seconds will miss by hundreds of meters. A drone which arrives later can spot the vehicle, follow it, and carry out a precision strike.

Towed guns are less likely to get away. But they are harder targets because they are not packed with fuel and ammunition like self-propelled guns.

[…]

Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi says Russia’s long-range striking power has been halved, but on the front line there are still plenty of shells coming down.

Running away from it with equipment and weapons is a virtually impossible task

Monday, June 30th, 2025

Russian mil-bloggers have laid out basic counter-FPV tactics:

When encountering an enemy FPV drone, it is important to clearly understand that running away from it with equipment and weapons is a virtually impossible task, because an FPV drone can reach speeds of over 100 km/h.

Counter-FPV Tactics

When spotting an enemy FPV drone, it is important to first open fire with single shots. If there are bushes nearby that can be reached with one dash, it is imperative to use them as cover. FPV drones cannot overcome such an obstacle, clinging to the branches of a bush and falling, which, in turn, does not always lead to the detonation of the FPV drone’s warhead.

In the absence of bushes, another slightly less priority cover can be a tree trunk (also located at a distance of one dash), which can be used as a support when firing [Image 2 above].

It is important to remember that if an enemy FPV drone is hit, you must quickly leave the “drone meeting place”, moving as far away as possible and then taking up reliable cover, since the enemy will definitely send several more drones to the place where the previous one was shot down. If your legs are injured, without being able to take the necessary position behind cover [Images 1 and 2 above], you must also fight off the attacking (approaching) FPV drone using the nearest bush or tree trunk (leaning [images 3 and 4] your back on the tree trunk). Attempts to freeze, lie down and pretend to be dead will not help, since drones can hit both the wounded and the bodies of the dead.

Tactical nuclear war, Wykeham-Barnes concluded, favored the aggressor

Monday, June 16th, 2025

In the early years of the Atomic Age, most people only dimly understood the consequences of tactical nuclear war:

It wasn’t until nearly a decade into the superpower contest that Europe’s nightmare gained a vivid, terrifying clarity.

That clarity came in 1955 from Carte Blanche, NATO’s first major exercise to simulate what a nuclear exchange with the Soviets on the continent would look like.

[…]

The exercise was mostly an air war, spread out over six days in the summer of 1955. Organizers distributed roughly 2,500 planes between the sides, giving the pretend Soviets slightly more aircraft.

Exercise referees moderated the pace of the conflict, telling air base inhabitants when they’d been hit by a nuclear bomb, the distance it had landed from them and the damage it had done.

British Air Commodore Peter Wykeham-Barnes, Chief of Staff of Allied Air Forces in Europe, briefed the press on the results of Carte Blanch. Tactical nuclear war, Wykeham-Barnes concluded, favored the aggressor—in this case, the mock-Soviets of Northland.

Nonetheless, “in an all-out atomic war, there would be no winners and no losers and little left to asses,” he said. Any similar conflict would be “short and horrible.”

Someone leaked details to West Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper. According to the leaked info, targets in West Germany had borne the theoretical brunt of the exercise, with 268 of the 335 mock nuclear weapons detonating inside the country.

Exercise officials calculated 1.7 million dead.

The public was understandably frightened … and outraged. Polls showed increases in domestic opposition to nuclear weapons.

I can understand the West German public being opposed to Soviet nuclear weapons, but it doesn’t sound like a lack of American nuclear weapons would protect them.

This is a solution for slow-firing but powerful ranged weapons

Monday, May 19th, 2025

Bret Devereaux explains why archers didn’t volley fire:

You know the scene: the general readies his archers, he orders them to ‘draw!’ and then holds up his hand with that ‘wait for it’ gesture and then shouts ‘loose!’ (or worse yet, ‘fire!’) and all of the archers release at once, producing a giant cloud of arrows. And then those arrows hit the enemy, with whole ranks collapsing and wounded soldiers falling over everywhere.

[…]

Archers didn’t engage in coordinated all-at-once shooting (called ‘volley fire’), they did not shoot in volleys because there wouldn’t be any point to do so. Indeed, part of the reason there was such confusion over what a general is supposed to shout instead of ‘fire!’ is that historical tactical manuals don’t generally have commands for coordinated bow shooting because armies didn’t do coordinated bow shooting. Instead, archers generated a ‘hail’ or ‘rain’ (those are the typical metaphors) of arrows as each archer shot in their own best time.

More to the point, they could not shoot in volleys. And even if they had shot in volleys, those volleys wouldn’t produce anything like the impact we regularly see in film or TV.

[…]

We want to start by understanding what volley fire is and what it is for. Put simply, ‘volley fire’ is the tactic of having a whole bunch of soldiers with ranged weapons (typically guns) fire in coordinated groups: sometimes with the entire unit all firing at once or with specific sub-components of the unit firing in coordinated fashion, as with the ‘counter-march.’ In both cases, the problem that volley fire is trying to overcome is slow weapon reload times: this is a solution for slow-firing but powerful ranged weapons.

[…]

Volley fire can cover for the slow reload rate of guns or crossbows in two ways. The first are volley fire drills designed to ensure a continuous curtain of fire; the most famous of these is the ‘counter-march,’ a drill where arquebuses or muskets are deployed several ranks deep (as many as six). The front rank fires a volley (that is, they all fire together) and then rush to the back of their file to begin reloading, allowing the next rank to fire, and so on. By the time the last rank has fired, the whole formation has moved backwards slightly (thus ‘counter’ march) and the first rank has finished reloading and is ready to fire. The problem this is solving is the danger of an enemy, especially cavalry, crossing the entire effective range of the weapon in the long gap between shots.

[…]

The other classic use is volley-and-charge. Because firearms are very lethal but slow to reload, it could be very effective to march in close order right up to an enemy, dump a single volley by the entire unit into them to cause mass casualties and confusion and then immediately charge with pikes or bayonets to try to capitalize on the enemy being demoralized and confused.

[…]

Crucially, note that volley-and-charge works because it compresses a lot of lethality into a very short time, which I suspect is why we don’t see it with bows or crossbows (but do see it with javelins, which may have shorter range and far fewer projectiles, but seem to have had higher lethality per projectile). As we’re going to see in a moment, the lethality of bows or crossbows against armored, shielded infantry – even in close order – was pretty low at any given moment and needed to add up over an extended period of shooting.

[…]

But as you’ve hopefully noted, these tactics are built around firearms with their long reload times: good soldiers might be able to reload a matchlock musket in 20-30 seconds or so. But traditional bows do not have this limitation: a good archer can put six or more arrows into the air in a minute (although doing so will exhaust the archer quite quickly), so there simply isn’t some large 30-second fire gap to cover over with these tactics. As a result volley fire doesn’t offer any advantages for traditional bow-users.

[…]

Of course the other reason we can be reasonably sure that ancient or medieval armies using traditional bows did not engage in volley fire is that they couldn’t. You will note in those movie scenes, that the commander invariably gives the order to ‘draw’ and then waits for the right moment before shouting ‘release!’ (or worse yet ‘fire!’). The thing is: how much energy does it take to hold that bow at ready? The key question here is the bow’s ‘draw’ or ‘pullback’ which is generally expressed in the pounds of force necessary to draw and hold the bow at full draw. Most prop bows have extremely low pulls to enable actors to manipulate them very easily; if you look closely, you can often see this because the bowstrings are under such little tension that they visibly sway and wobble as the bow is moved. This also helps a film production because it means that an arrow coming off of such a bow isn’t going to be moving all that fast and so is a lot less dangerous and easier to make ‘safe.’

[…]

Which neatly answers why no one had their archers hold their bows at draw to synchronize fire: you’d exhaust your archers very quickly. Instead, war bow firing techniques tend to emphasize getting the arrow off of the string as quickly as possible: the bow is leveled on the target as the string is drawn and released basically immediately.

[…]

Maybe two-third to three quarters of our arrows just miss entirely, hitting the ground, shot long over the whole formation and so on. Of the remainder, another three-quarters at least (probably an even higher proportion, to be honest) are striking shields. Of the remainder, we might suppose another three-quarters or so are striking helmets or other fairly solid armor like greaves: these hurt, but probably won’t kill or disable. Of the remainder, a portion – probably a small portion, because of those big shields – are being defeated by body armor that they could, under ideal circumstances, defeat. And of the remainder that actually penetrate a human on the other side, maybe another two-thirds are doing so in the arms, feet or lower legs, many of them with glancing hits: painful, but not immediately fatal and in some cases potentially not even disabling.

After all of those filters, we’re down to an estimated arrow lethality rate hovering 0.5-1%, meaning each arrow shot has something like a 1-in-100 or 1-in-200 chance to kill or disable an enemy.

I’ve discussed the physics of medieval archery before, by the way.

The three deadliest weapons in the world today

Sunday, May 18th, 2025

The deadliest weapon in American history, Kulak notes, is the handgun, because more Americans have been killed in ordinary criminal homicides than all the wars America has fought:

Applying the logic which we have already seen, that outside of the most war-ravaged countries ordinary homicide, gang wars, feuds, and clasdestine actions are VASTLY more likely to kill people than high intensity warfare, you quickly notice a trend.

The three deadliest weapons in the world today in terms of body-count (your likelihood to be killed by them) varies between

  • Handguns in the New World where guns are plentiful but open carry of rifles is not the norm
  • Auto and semiautomatic (and previously bolt-action) rifles in the third world of Africa and failed parts of the Middle-East where it is perfectly acceptable for gangs to walk about with AK-47s in their arms
  • Knives and bladed weapons in Gun restrictionist jurisdictions (Europe), Asia, Prisons, etc.

If you die a violent death, dear reader, whether in the killing fields of darkest Africa, darkest Detroit, the trenches of forever war or the smuggling tunnels of Mexico, to an enemy you’ve never spoken a word to or to a spouse you said just one word too many to, it will almost certainly be to one of these 3. Even in the age of FPV Drones, IEDs, cluster munitions, and thermobaric rocket artillery, a super-majority of the time the person who decides you need to die will be within 2-200 meters of you, see you with their bare eye or possibly a simple optic, and decide in sight of your face to end your life with the tool they have at hand: knife, handgun, or rifle.

And it’s very hard to tell which of the three actually leads the pack globally.

In the US where guns are widely available knife homicides are only about 10–15% of what firearm homicides are, In the UK this is reversed, and firearm related murders are 10% of knife murders.

The drone uses real-time views from a downward-facing optical camera, comparing them against stored satellite images, to determine its position

Sunday, May 11th, 2025

Now in its third generation, KrattWorks’ Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopter has come a long way since 2022:

Its original command-and-control-band radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren’t jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.

The drone’s dual-band satellite-navigation receiver can switch among the four main satellite positioning services: GPS, Galileo, China’s BeiDou, and Russia’s GLONASS. It’s been augmented with a spoof-proof algorithm that compares the satellite-navigation input with data from onboard sensors. The system provides protection against sophisticated spoofing attacks that attempt to trick drones into self-destruction by persuading them they’re flying at a much higher altitude than they actually are.

At the heart of the quadcopter’s matte grey body is a machine-vision-enabled computer running a 1-gigahertz Arm processor that provides the Ghost Dragon with its latest superpower: the ability to navigate autonomously, without access to any global navigation satellite system (GNSS). To do that, the computer runs a neural network that, like an old-fashioned traveler, compares views of landmarks with positions on a map to determine its position. More precisely, the drone uses real-time views from a downward-facing optical camera, comparing them against stored satellite images, to determine its position.

[…]

Russia took an unexpected step starting in early 2024, deploying hard-wired drones fitted with spools of optical fiber. Like a twisted variation on a child’s kite, the lethal UAVs can venture 20 or more kilometers away from the controller, the hair-thin fiber floating behind them, providing an unjammable connection.

“Right now, there is no protection against fiber-optic drones,” Vadym Burukin, cofounder of the Ukrainian drone startup Huless, tells IEEE Spectrum. “The Russians scaled this solution pretty fast, and now they are saturating the battle front with these drones. It’s a huge problem for Ukraine.”

[…]

This past July, kamikaze drones equipped with an autonomous navigation system from U.S. supplier Auterion destroyed a column of Russian tanks fitted with jamming devices.

[…]

But purchasing Western equipment is, in the long term, not affordable for Ukraine, a country with a per capita GDP of US $5,760—much lower than the European average of $38,270. Fortunately, Ukraine can tap its engineering workforce, which is among the largest in Europe. Before the war, Ukraine was a go-to place for Western companies looking to set up IT- and software-development centers. Many of these workers have since joined Ukraine’s DIY military-technician (“miltech”) development movement.

Almost any above ground facility is vulnerable to attack and destruction by precision guided weapons

Friday, May 9th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenIn the 1980s, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51) the military worked to develop the bunker buster, a nuclear weapon designed to fire deep into Earth’s surface, hit underground targets, and detonate belowground:

Weapons designer Sandia was brought on board. It was called the W61 Earth Penetrator, and testing took place at Area 52 in 1988. The idea was to launch the earth-penetrator weapon from forty thousand feet above but after many tests (minus the nuclear warhead), it became clear that a nuclear bomb would have little or no impact on granite, which is the rock of choice in which to build sensitive sites underground. After President Clinton ended all U.S. nuclear testing in 1993 (the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1996 and signed by five of the then seven or eight nuclear-capable countries), the idea of developing an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon lost its steam. But the building of underground facilities by foreign governments continued to plague war planners, so along came a nonnuclear space-based weapons project called Rods from God. That weapons project involved slender metal rods, twenty to thirty feet long and one foot in diameter, that could be launched from a satellite in space, enter the atmosphere travelling at 36,000 feet per second, and hit a precise target on Earth. T. D. Barnes says “that’s enough force to take out Iran’s nuclear facility, or anything like it, in one or two strikes.” The Federation of American Scientists reported that a number of similar “long-rod penetration” programs are believed to currently exist.

After the Gulf War, DARPA hired a secretive group called the JASON scholars (a favored target in conspiracy-theorist circles) and its parent company, MITRE Corporation, to report on the status of underground facilities, which in government nomenclature are referred to as UGFs.

[…]

What this means is that the F-117 stealth bomber showed foreign governments “that almost any above ground facility is vulnerable to attack and destruction by precision guided weapons.” For DARPA, this meant it was time to develop a new nuclear bunker buster—Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty or not.

[…]

In 2002, with America again at war, the administration of George W. Bush revived the development of the nuclear bunker-buster weapon, now calling it the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. In April of the same year, the Department of Defense entered into discussions with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to begin preliminary design work on the new nuclear weapon. By fiscal year 2003, the Stockpile Services Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator line item received $ 14.5 million; in 2004 another $ 7.5 million; and in 2005 yet another $ 27.5 million. In 2006, the Senate dropped the line item. Either the program was canceled or it got a new name and entered into the black world—perhaps at Area 51 and Area 52.

Drone mining puts mines exactly where they are needed

Tuesday, May 6th, 2025

Drones have transformed mine warfare in Ukraine:

Mines were buried underground for concealment, unless the minefield was laid in a hurry when they might be simply placed on the surface. This made them easier to avoid but kept thew deterrent effect.

The US developed scatterable mines during the Vietnam conflict in the 1960s. These are a fraction the size of traditional mines, with a magnetic sensor triggered by a vehicle passing over them. Scatterable mines were dropped by aircraft or helicopters, and later by special artillery rounds and rockets. This enabled commanders to create minefields behind enemy lines to block or channel movement or simply to cause casualties. The USSR soon fielded their own versions.

[…]

The TM-62 is powerful enough to destroy a tank track or blow off a wheel and immobilize it or destroy lighter vehicles.

Ukraine’s ‘Baba Yaga’ multicopter bombers started dropping modified TM-62s as bombs. Then the operators experimented with laying TM-62s as mines. They could be placed on the trails left by tracked vehicles, or on roads miles behind enemy lines, giving a very high chance of a hit.

Any vehicle immobilized by a mine will be spotted by the reconnaissance drones, and bombers and FPVs dispatched to finish it off before it can be recovered.

[…]

Last summer Ukraine’s elite Birds of Magyar drone unit started placing mines on roads behinds enemy lines at night. Russian military social media lit up with warnings and reports of casualties. A Russian map showed that every segment of the 72-kilometre road network around Krynky had been mined. Logistics vehicles taking supplies to the front were being destroyed at an unprecedented rate.

[…]

The miner’s preferred weapon was the ten-pound PTM-3, which is significantly bigger than the PTM-1S but has a far more effective design. Rather than simply relying on blast, this is a shaped charge weapon, Each of the four sides of the PTM-3 is a linear shaped charge which will, when detonated, cut through almost anything immediately above it, neatly severing a tank tread or severely damaging a soft vehicle.

The mines were placed at night, making them difficult to spot from vehicles driving at high speed without lights because of the threat of drone attacks.

[…]

To make demining more challenging, the Ukrainians also produce wooden replica PPTMs which look just like the real thing. These are likely much lighter so can be mixed in with real mines.

[…]

Scatter mining is inefficient because it distributes a few mines over a large area. Drone mining puts mines exactly where they are needed and can be used to block an opponent’s advance or retreat, or cut their supply lines. Drones may quickly ring any static opponent with mines, penning them in.

The pilot and the sensor operators rely on a team of fifty-five airmen for operational support

Friday, May 2nd, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenTo operate a Predator-style drone requires ownership in space, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):

All unmanned aerial vehicles require satellites to relay information to and from the pilots who operate the drones via remote control. As the Predator flies over the war theater in the Middle East, it is being operated by a pilot sitting in a chair thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. The pilot is seated in front of a computer screen that provides a visual representation of what the Predator is looking at on the ground in the battlefield halfway across the world. Two sensor operators sit beside the pilot, each working like a copilot might have in another age. The pilot and the sensor operators rely on a team of fifty-five airmen for operational support. The Predator Primary Satellite Link is the name of the system that allows communication between the drone and the team. The drone needs only to be in line of sight with its ground-control station when it lands. Everything else the drone can do, from capture images to fire missiles, it does thanks to its satellite link.

[…]

For the Department of Defense, the vulnerability of space satellites to sabotage has created a new and unprecedented threat. According to a 2008 study on “Wicked Problems” prepared by the Defense Science Board, in a chapter significantly entitled “Surprise in Space,” the board outlines the vulnerability of space satellites in today’s world.

[…]

By relying on satellites to fight the war on terror as well as many of the foreseeable conflicts in the immediate future, the single greatest wicked problem facing the Pentagon in the twenty-first century is the looming threat of the militarization of space. To weaponize space, historical thinking in the Pentagon goes, would be to safeguard space in a preemptive manner. A war in space over satellite control is not a war the United States necessarily wants to fight, but it is a war the United States is most assuredly unwilling to lose.

“Over eighty percent of the satellite communications used in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility is provided by commercial vendors,” reads the Pentagon’s “Surprise in Space” report. And when, in 2007, the Chinese—unannounced and unexpectedly—shot down one of their own satellites with one of their own weapons, the incident opened the Pentagon’s eyes to a whole host of potential wicked-problem scenarios in space.

[…]

Seven months later, in February of 2008, an SM-3 Raytheon missile was launched off the deck of the USS Lake Erie in the North Pacific. It traveled approximately 153 miles up into space where it hit a five-thousand-pound U.S. satellite described as being about the size of a school bus and belonging to the National Reconnaissance Office. The official Pentagon story was that the satellite had gone awry and the United States didn’t want the satellite’s hazardous fuel source, stated to be the toxin hydrazine, to crash on foreign soil. “Our objective was to intercept the satellite, reduce the mass that might survive re-entry [and] vector that mass into unpopulated areas ideally the ocean,” General James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the press. International leaders cried foul, saying the test was designed to show the world that the United States has the technology to take out other nations’ satellites. “China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries,” declared Liu Jianchao, China’s foreign ministry spokesman—certainly an example of the pot calling the kettle black.

In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union actually considered using space as a launching pad for war. President Eisenhower’s science adviser James Killian—a man with so much power that he was not required to tell the truth to Congress—fielded regular suggestions from the Pentagon to develop, in his own words, “satellite bombers, military bases on the moon, and so on.” Killian was the man who spearheaded the first nuclear weapon explosions in space, first in the upper atmosphere (Orange), then near the ozone layer (Teak), and finally in outer space (Argus). But Killian shied away from the idea of weaponizing space not because he saw putting weapons in space as an inherently reckless or existentially bad idea but because Killian believed nuclear weapons would not work well from space.

“A satellite cannot simply drop a bomb,” Killian declared in a public service announcement released from the White House on March 26, 1958, a report written for “nontechnical” people at the behest of the president. “An object released from a satellite doesn’t fall. So there is no special advantage in being over the target,” Killian declared. Here was James Killian, who, by his own admission, was not a scientist, explaining to Americans why dropping bombs from space wouldn’t work. “Indeed the only way to ‘drop’ a bomb directly down from a satellite is to carry out aboard the satellite a rocket launching of the magnitude required for an intercontinental missile.” In other words, Killian was saying that to get an ICBM up to a launchpad in space was simply too cumbersome a process. Killian believed that the better way to put a missile on a target was to launch it from the ground. That the extra effort to get missiles in space wasn’t worth the task. This may have been true in the 1950s, but decades later James Killian would be proven wrong.

Flash forward to 2011. Analysts with the United States Space Surveillance Network, which is located in an Area 51–like facility on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, spend all day, every day, 365 days a year, tracking more than eight thousand man-made objects orbiting the Earth. The USSS Network is responsible for detecting, tracking, cataloging, and identifying artificial objects orbiting Earth, including active and inactive satellites, spent rocket bodies, and space debris. After the Chinese shot down their own satellite in 2007, the network’s job got considerably more complicated. The Chinese satellite kill produced an estimated thirty-five thousand pieces of one-centimeter-wide debris and another fifteen hundred pieces that were ten centimeters or more. “A one-centimeter object is very hard to track but can do considerable damage if it collides with any spacecraft at a high rate of speed,” said Laura Grego, a scientist with the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The United States said the NRO satellite it shot down did not create space debris because, being close to Earth when it was shot down, its pieces burned up as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere.

But targeted assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal

Friday, April 25th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenIt was January of 2001, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), and the director of the CIA’s Counter­terrorism Center, Cofer Black, had a serious problem:

The CIA had been considering assass­inating Osama bin Laden with the Predator, but until that point, the unmanned aerial vehicle had been used for reconnaissance only, not targeted assassination. Because two technologies needed to be merged—the flying drone and the laser-guided precision missile—engineers and aerodynamicists had concerns. Specifically, they worried that the propulsion from the missile might send the drone astray or the missile off course. And the CIA needed a highly precise weapon with little possibility of collateral damage. The public would perceive killing a terrorist one way, but they would likely perceive killing that terrorist’s neighbors in an altogether different light. This new weaponized drone technology was tested at Area 51; the development program remains classified. After getting decent results, both the CIA and the Air Force were confident that the missiles unleashed from the drone could reach their targets.

[…]

But targeted assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal, per President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, and since the situation required serious examination, State Department lawyers got involved.

There was one avenue to consider in support of the targeted-killing operation, and that was the fact that the FBI had a bounty on the man’s head. By February of 2001, the State Department gave the go-ahead for the assassination.

[…]

Bin Laden’s compound was called Tarnak Farm, and a number of high-profile Middle Eastern royal family members were known to visit there.

To determine collateral damage, the CIA and the Air Force teamed up for an unusual building project on the outer reaches of Area 51. They engineered a full-scale mock-up of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan on which to test the results of a drone strike. But while engineers were at work, CIA director George Tenet decided that taking out Osama bin Laden with a Hellfire missile–equipped Predator drone would be a mistake. This was a decision the CIA would come to regret.

[…]

The CIA had sent drones on more than six hundred reconnaissance missions in the Bosnian conflict, beginning in 1995. CIA drones had provided intelligence for NATO forces in the 1999 Kosovo air campaign, collecting intelligence, searching for targets, and keeping an eye on Kosovar-Albanian refuge camps. The CIA Predator had helped war planners interpret the chaos of the battlefield there. Now, the Air Force needed the CIA’s help going into Afghanistan with drones.

The first reconnaissance drone mission in the war on terror was flown over Kabul, Afghanistan, just one week after 9/ 11, on September 18, 2001. Three weeks later, the first Hellfire-equipped Predator drone was flown over Kandahar. The rules of aerial warfare had changed overnight. America’s stealth bombers were never going to locate Osama bin Laden and his top commanders hiding out in mountain compounds. Now pilotless drones would be required to seek out and assassinate the most wanted men in the world.

Although drones had been developed and tested at Area 51, Area 52, and Indian Springs for nearly fifty years, the world at large would come to learn about them only in November of 2002, when a drone strike in Yemen made headlines around the world. Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi was a wanted man. A citizen of Yemen and a senior al-Qaeda operative, al-Harethi had also been behind the planning and bombing of the USS Cole two years before. On the morning of November 2, 2002, al-Harethi and five colleagues drove through the vast desert expanse of Yemen’s northwest province Marib oblivious to the fact that they were being watched by eyes in the skies in the form of a Predator drone flying several miles above them.

The Predator launched its missile at the target and landed a direct hit. The al-Qaeda operatives and the vehicle were instantly reduced to a black heap of burning metal. It was an assassination plot straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, except that it was so real and so dramatic—the first visual proof that al-Qaeda leaders could be targeted and killed—that Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz began bragging about the Hellfire strike to CNN. The drone attack in Yemen was “a very successful tactical operation,” Wolfowitz said. Except it was supposed to be a quiet, unconfirmed assassination. Wolfowitz’s bravado made Yemen upset. Brigadier General Yahya M. Al Mutawakel, the deputy secretary general for the People’s Congress Party in Yemen, gave an exclusive interview to the Christian Science Monitor explaining that the Pentagon had broken a secrecy agreement between the two nations. “This is why it is so difficult to make deals with the United States,” Al Mutawakel explained. “They don’t consider the internal circumstances in Yemen. In security matters, you don’t want to alert the enemy.”

Yemen pushed back against the United States by outing the secret inner workings of the operation. It was the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Edmund Hull, an employee of the State Department, who had masterminded the plot, officials in Yemen explained. Hull had spearheaded the intelligence-gathering efforts, a job more traditionally reserved for the CIA. Hull spoke Arabic. He had roots in the country and knew people who knew local tribesmen in the desert region of Marib. The State Department, Yemen claimed, was the agency that had bribed local tribesmen into handing over information on al-Harethi, which allowed the CIA to know exactly where the terrorist would be driving and when. Revealing Ambassador Hull to be the central organizing player in the drone strike exposed the Department of State as having a hand in not just the espionage game but targeted assassination as well. Surprisingly, little fuss was made about any of this, despite the fact that diplomats are supposed to avoid assassination plots.

In political circles, Ambassador Hull was greatly embarrassed. He refused to comment on his role in what signaled a sea change in U.S. military assets with wings. The 2002 drone strike in Yemen was the first of its kind in the war on terror, but little did the public know that hundreds more drone strikes would soon follow. The next one went down the very next week, when a Predator targeted and killed al-Qaeda’s number-three, Mohammed Atef, in Jalabad, Afghanistan. As the war on terror progressed, some drone strikes would be official while others would go unmentioned. But never again would the CIA or the State Department admit to having a hand in any of them. When Mohammed Atef was killed, initial reports said a traditional bomber aircraft had targeted and destroyed Atef’s home. Only later was the strike revealed as being the work of a Predator drone and a targeted assassination spearheaded by the CIA.

[…]

No longer used only for espionage, the Predator got a new designation. Previously it had been the RQ-1 Predator: R for reconnaissance and Q indicating unmanned. Immediately after the Yemen strike, the Predator became the MQ-1 Predator, with the M now indicating its multirole use.

[…]

A second Predator, originally called the Predator B, was also coming online. Described by Air Force officials as “the Predator’s younger, yet larger and stronger brother,” it too needed a new name. The Reaper fit perfectly: the personification of death. “One of the big differences between the Reaper and the Predator is the Predator can only carry about 200 pounds [of weapons]. The Reaper, however, can carry one and a half tons, and on top of carrying Hellfire missiles, can carry multiple GBU-12 laser-guided bombs,” said Captain Michael Lewis of the Forty-second Wing at Creech Air Force Base. The General Atomics drones were single-handedly changing the relationship between the CIA and the Air Force. The war on terror had the two services working together again, exactly as had happened with the advent of the U-2.

[…]

From 2003 to 2007 the number of drone strikes rose incrementally, little by little, each year. Only in 2008 did the drones really come online. During that year, which included the last three weeks of the Bush administration, there were thirty-six drone strikes in Pakistan, which the Air Force said killed 268 al-Qaeda and Taliban. By 2009 the number of drone strikes would rise to fifty-three.

Russia has been able to place Ukrainian troops in untenable positions

Sunday, April 20th, 2025

By combining ground troops, artillery (and drones), and glide bombs, into an “offensive triangle,” Russia has been able to place Ukrainian troops in untenable positions:

“First, the AFRF [Russian armed forces] continue to pin down Ukrainian ground forces on the line of contact with infantry and mechanized forces,” according to a study by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British think tank.

“Second, they prevent maneuver and inflict attrition with first-person view (FPV) drones, Lancet drones, and artillery firing both high-explosive shells and scatterable mines.”

“Third, the AFRF has increased its use of UMPK glide bombs against Ukrainian forces who are holding defensive positions,” RUSI said. This “creates a competing dilemma: should the AFU [Ukrainian armed forces] hold and invest in static defensive positions to reduce attrition from FPVs and drone-enabled artillery, or retain mobility to avoid destruction from glide bomb strikes, which have the explosive yield to demolish or bury even well-prepared fortifications?”

[…]

The solution to resurrecting Russian airpower proved simple and lethal: glide bombs. By affixing its own satellite guidance system and wings to its huge Cold War stockpile of unguided “dumb bombs,” Russia created a cheap smart bomb that can dropped from up to 60 miles behind the front line.

This keeps Russian aircraft safely out of range of Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles. While not as accurate as Western counterparts like America’s Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), the Russian munitions are huge — up to 6,000 pounds or close to 3 metric tonnes — so that even a near miss will devastate Ukrainian entrenchments.

While some Western observers dismissed these weapons as a sign that Russia lacked the capacity to manufacture sophisticated smart bombs, no one is laughing now.

[…]

Already, Ukraine claims to have had success in jamming them, leading to a sharp decrease in accuracy. “The golden era of the ‘divine’ UMPK turned out to be short-lived,” lamented a Russian pilot on social media. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Russian advance has slowed in recent months.

The six-foot-long pilotless aircraft was disguised to look like an eagle or buzzard in flight

Friday, April 18th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenDuring the 1970s, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), the CIA’s aviation efforts concentrated largely on pilotless aircraft, or drones:

Hank Meierdierck, the man who wrote the manual for the U-2 at Area 51, was in charge of one such CIA drone project, which began in late 1969. Code-named Aquiline, the six-foot-long pilotless aircraft was disguised to look like an eagle or buzzard in flight. It carried a small television camera in its nose and photo equipment and air-sampling sensors under its wings. Some insiders say it had been designed to test for radiation in the air as well as to gather electronic intelligence, or ELINT. But Gene Poteat, the first CIA officer ever assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, offers a different version of events. “Spy satellites flying over the Caspian Sea delivered us images of an oddly shaped, giant, multi-engined watercraft moving around down there on the surface. No one had any idea what this thing was for, but you can be sure the Agency wanted to find out. That is what the original purpose of Aquiline was for,” Poteat reveals. “To take close-up pictures of the vehicle so we could discern what it was and what the Soviets might be thinking of using it for. Since we had no idea what it was, we made up a name for it. We called it the Caspian Sea Monster,” Poteat explains. Project Aquiline remains a classified project, but in September of 2008, BBC News magazine produced a story about a Cold War Soviet hydrofoil named Ekranoplan, which is exactly what the CIA’s Aquiline drone was designed to spy on.

At Area 51, Hank Meierdierck selected his former hunting partner Jim Freedman to assist him on the Aquiline drone program. “It flew low and was meant to follow along communication lines in foreign countries and intercept messages,” Freedman says. “I believe the plan was to launch it from a submarine while it was waiting in port.” The Aquiline team consisted of three pilots trained to remotely control the bird, with Freedman offering operational support. “Hank got the thing to fly,” Freedman recalls. Progress was slow and “it crash-landed a lot.” The program ended when the defense contractor, McDonnell Douglas, gave a bid for the job that Meierdierck felt was ninety-nine million dollars over budget. McDonnell Douglas would not budge on their bid so Hank recommended that the CIA cancel Project Aquiline, which he said they did. After the program was over, Hank Meierdierck managed to take a mock-up of the Aquiline drone home with him from the area. “He had it sitting on his bar at his house down in Las Vegas,” Freedman recalls.

[…]

Project Ornithopter involved a birdlike drone designed to blend in with nature by flapping its wings. And a third, even smaller drone was designed to look like a crow and land on windowsills in order to photograph what was going on inside CIA-targeted rooms. The tiniest drone program, orchestrated in the early 1970s, was Project Insectothopter, an insect-size aerial vehicle that looked like a dragonfly in flight. Insectothopter had an emerald green minifuselage and, like Ornithopter, flapped its wings, which were powered by a miniature engine that ran on a tiny amount of gas. Through its Office of Research and Development, or ORD, the CIA had also tried turning live birds and cats into spies. In one such program, CIA-trained pigeons flew around Washington, DC, with bird-size cameras strapped to their necks. The project failed after the extra weight tired out the pigeons and they hobbled back to headquarters on foot instead of in flight. Another CIA endeavor, Acoustic Kitty, involved putting electronic listening devices in house cats. But that project also backfired after too many cats strayed from their missions in search of food. One acoustic kitty got run over by a car.

[…]

During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, which began in 1977, CIA discretionary budgets were at an all-time low, and the CIA didn’t get very far with its drones — until late 1979, when the Agency learned about a lethal anthrax accident at a “probable biological warfare research, production and storage installation” in Sverdlovsk, Russia — the same location where Gary Powers had been taking spy photographs when his U-2 was shot down nineteen years before. As a result of the Sverdlovsk bioweapons accident, the CIA determined that as many as a hundred people had died from inhaling anthrax spores.

[…]

For twenty-five years, from 1974 to 1999, the CIA and the Air Force rarely worked together on drone projects at Area 51. This lack of cooperation was evident, and succinctly summed up in an interview Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave Time magazine in April of 2008. Gates said that when he was running the CIA, in 1992, he discovered that “the Air Force would not co-fund with CIA a vehicle without a pilot.” That changed in the winter of 2000, when the two organizations came together to work on a new drone project at Area 51, one that would forever change the face of warfare and take both agencies toward General Henry “Hap” Arnold’s Victory Over Japan Day prediction that one day in the future, wars would be fought by aircraft without pilots sitting inside. In the year 2000, that future was now.

The project involved retrofitting a CIA reconnaissance drone, called Predator, with antitank missiles called Hellfire missiles, supplied by the army. The target would be a shadowy and obscure terrorist the CIA was considering for assassination. He lived in Afghanistan, and his name was Osama bin Laden.

It would be another four years before the public had any idea the F-117 Nighthawk existed

Friday, April 11th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen With 267 combat missions under his belt, 44 in Korea and 213 in Vietnam, Robert M. Bond was a highly decorated Air Force pilot and vice commander of Air Force Systems Command at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), which made him a VIP when he visited the F-117 program at Area 51 in March, 1984:

But in addition to being impressed by the F-117 Nighthawk, General Bond was equally fascinated by the MiG program, which was still going on at Area 51. In the fifteen years since the CIA had gotten its hands on Munir Redfa’s MiG-21, the Agency and the Air Force had acquired a fleet of Soviet-made aircraft including an MiG-15, an MiG-17, and, most recently, the supersonic MiG-23. Barnes says, “We called it the Flogger. It was a very fast plane, almost Mach 3. But it was squirrelly. Hard to fly. It could kill you if you weren’t well trained.”

On a visit to Area 51 the following month, General Bond requested to fly the MiG-23. “There was some debate about whether the general should be allowed to fly,” Barnes explains. “Every hour in a Soviet airplane was precious. We did not have spare parts. We could not afford unnecessary wear and tear. Usually a pilot would train for at least two weeks before flying a MiG. Instead, General Bond got a briefing while sitting inside the plane with an instructor pilot saying, ‘Do this, do that.’” In other words, instead of undergoing two weeks of training, General Bond pulled rank.

General Bond’s death opened the possible exposure of five secret programs and facilities, including the MiG program, the F-117 program, Area 51, Area 52, and the nuclear reactor explosions at Jackass Flats. Unlike the deaths of CIA pilots flying out of Area 51, which could be concealed as generic training accidents, the death of a general required detailed explanation. If the press asked too many questions, it could trigger a federal investigation. One program had to come out of the dark to keep the others hidden. The Pentagon made the decision to out the MiG. Quietly, Fred Hoffman, a military writer with the Associated Press, was “leaked” information that Bond had in fact died at the controls of a Soviet MiG-23. The emphasis was put on how the Pentagon was able to obtain Soviet-bloc aircraft and weaponry from allies in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “The government has always been reluctant to discuss such acquisitions for fear of embarrassing the friendly donors, but the spotlight was turned anew on the subject after a three-star Air Force general was killed April 26 in a Nevada plane crash that was quickly cloaked in secrecy,” Hoffman wrote, adding “sources who spoke on condition they remain anonymous have indicated the MiG-23, the most advanced Soviet warplane ever to fall permanently into U.S. hands, was supplied to this country by Egypt.”

[…]

It would be another four years before the public had any idea the F-117 Nighthawk existed. In November of 1988, a grainy image of the arrowhead-shaped, futuristic-looking craft was released to an awestruck public despite the fact that variations of the F-117 had been flying at Area 51 and Area 52 for eleven years.

“All-Ukrainian” FPV drones?

Tuesday, April 8th, 2025

Last month, Ukrainian makers Vyriy Drone performed an official handover of the first batch of 1,000 “all-Ukrainian” FPV drones:

It is important to note that some of the electronic chips in that make up devices may in fact come from China or other countries. But these are simple building blocks, commodity products which can be sourced from the U.S. and Japan. They are very different to specialist end products for drones like flight controllers.

[…]

“Initially, there was a generally accepted opinion that China could not be beaten on price,” Ukrainian analyst Serhii Flash wrote on his Telegram channel. “Never. But competition, time, volumes, optimization of business processes work wonders.”

Flash shares a graph showing how the prices of various locally made components including motors, frames and propellers have dropped an average of around 50% over the last two years.

Frames and propellers are relatively easy to make without a major investment in production machinery. Other components are more challenging. In 2024 we reported on how Ukrainian makers Wild Hornets were making their own flight controllers on a robotic assembly line, and later set up a similar process to make their own drone batteries.

Specialist companies have gone further. Thermal imagers are a particular challenge, and FPV makers have spent considerable time and effort finding Chinese suppliers who meet their requirements for cost and capability. In other countries, the defence sector makes it own high-end thermal imagers and price is not a factor. Drone makers are on a tighter budget. A $2,000 military imager is not a viable proposition for a $400 FPV,

In October 2024 Ukrainian start-up Odd Systems announced that they were producing locally-made thermal imagers. These are comparable to Chinese 256×192 pixel imagers, but about 20% cheaper at $250. Odd Systems say they when they can make their Kurbas-256 in volume the unit price will drop even further.

Importantly the Kurbas-256 is designed for FPVs rather than general industrial use. The developers talked to users about their combat experience with commercial Chinese thermal imaging cameras and modified their design accordingly. For example, some Chinese cameras suffer from condensation forming inside them, making them unusable, so Kurbas cameras come in a sealed unit sealed to prevent condensation.

“We studied the experience and considered the wishes of FPV operators. We have created a Ukrainian product with full control of hardware and low-level software,” the company told Militaryni.

For example, the operator can adjust the output of the Kurbas-256 in flight, changing contrast for a clearer image depending on conditions. Also, most thermal cameras have automatic calibration which sometimes freezes the image for several seconds. This is not an issue for most applications but disastrous on a drone, so Odd Systems’ cameras do not have this ‘feature’.

How many targets can we take out on a single sortie?

Friday, April 4th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenThe F-117 Nighthawk, the nation’s first stealth bomber, would radically change the way America fought wars, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):

As a Lockheed official explained at a banquet honoring the F-117 in April of 2008, “Before the advent of stealth, war planners had to determine how many sorties were necessary to take out a single target. After the invention of the F-117 stealth bomber, that changed. It became, How many targets can we take out on a single sortie?”

Lockheed physicist Edward Lovick worked on each rendition of the stealth bomber, which began in the early 1970s with Harvey, a prototype aircraft named after the Jimmy Stewart film about an invisible rabbit. Harvey’s stealth qualities were initially engineered using slide rules and calculators, the same way Lockheed had developed the A-12 Oxcart. Only with the emergence of the mainframe computer, in 1974, did those tools become obsolete. “Two Lockheed engineers, named Denys Overholser and Dick Scherrer, realized that it might be possible to design a stealth aircraft that would take advantage of some of the results of a computer’s calculations,” Lovick says. “In 1974 computers were relatively new and most of them were the size of a car. Our computer at Lockheed ran on punch cards and had less than 60 K worth of memory.” Still, the computer could do what humans could not do, and that was endless calculations.

[…]

“We designed flat, faceted panels and had them act like mirrors to scatter radar waves away from the plane,” Lovick says. “It was a radical idea and it worked.”

The next, on-paper incarnation of the F-117 Nighthawk began in 1974 and was called the Hopeless Diamond, so named because it resembled the Hope Diamond and because Lockheed engineers didn’t have much hope it would actually fly. After the Hopeless Diamond concept went through a series of redesigns it became a full-scale mock-up of an aircraft and was renamed Have Blue.

[…]

“It was a very weird, very crude-looking thing that actually looked a lot like the ship from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Our job was to look at it from every angle using radar to see how it showed up on radar.”

[…]

“Initially, it was as visible as a big old barn,” says Barnes. So the Have Blue mock-up was sent back to the Skunk Works for more fine-tuning. Several months later, a new version of the mock-up arrived at Area 51. “Lockheed had changed the shape of the aircraft and a lot of the angles of the panels. Once we put the new mock-up on the pole it appeared to us as something around the size of a crow.” There was a final round of redesigns, then the airplane came back to Area 51 again. “We put it up on the pole and all we saw was the pole.”

[…]

The director of science and engineering at Skunk Works, a man named Ed Martin, went to Lovick for some advice. “Ed Martin asked me how I thought the aircraft might appear on enemy radar. I explained that if the Oxcart showed up as being roughly equivalent to the size of a man, the Have Blue would appear to a radar like a seven-sixteenth-inch metal sphere — roughly the size of a ball bearing.” Ed Martin loved Lovick’s analogy. A ball bearing.

[…]

Before Martin left for Washington, DC, Lovick went to the Lockheed tool shop and borrowed a bag of ball bearings. He wanted Ed Martin to have a visual reference to share with the Air Force officials there. “Later, I learned the ball-bearing illustration was so effective that the customers began rolling the little silvery spheres across the conference table. The analogy has become legendary, often still used to make an important visual point about the stealthy F-117 Nighthawk with its high-frequency radar signature that is as tiny as a ball bearing.”