Yemen Says It Killed al Qaeda Leader

Yemeni security forces killed a man suspected of leading a cell of Al Qaeda and captured four other militants on Wednesday morning, hours after two soldiers were killed by Qaeda members in a neighboring district, Yemeni officials said.

The clashes were the latest episode in the Yemeni government’s heightened campaign against Al Qaeda’s Arabian branch, a terrorist organization once based in Saudi Arabia and run by a Saudi, and now based in Yemen and run by a Yemeni.

Raids have grown more frequent and have drawn on increased help from the United States, which declared the regional Qaeda affiliate a global threat after it claimed credit for the failed effort on Dec. 25 to blow up an airliner approaching Detroit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/world/middleeast/14yemen.html

the yemen invasion is gaining pace..

somalia next..maybe nigeria to

Interesting reading material. America better changes her way of doing business. Is this our future ??

It's America, 2016, and angry and desperate veterans of the "war on terror" have merged with the "tea bag" movement and other alienated groups to launch a military coup reminiscent of events in post-World War I Germany. In that era, as now in the United States, the German public saw its wealth and status threatened by a great recession and war, and a militarized solution for "the fatherland" soon became the most credible last resort. - William J Astore (Jan 20, '10)
DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Going rogue in combat boots
By William J Astore
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LA21Df03.html
The wars in distant lands were always going to come home, but not this way.

It's September 2016, year 15 of America's "Long War" against terror. As weary troops return to the homeland, a bitter reality assails them: despite their sacrifices, America is losing.

Iraq is increasingly hostile to remaining occupation forces. Afghanistan is a riddle that remains unsolved: its army and police forces are untrustworthy, its government corrupt, and its tribal leaders unsympathetic to the vagaries of US intervention. Since the Obama surge of 2010, a trillion more dollars have been devoted to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and other countries in the vast shatter zone that is Central Asia, without measurable returns; nothing, that is, except the prolongation of America's Great Recession, now entering its tenth year without a sustained recovery in sight.

Disillusioned veterans are unable to find decent jobs in a crumbling economy. Scarred by the physical and psychological violence of war, fed up with the happy talk of duplicitous politicians who only speak of shared sacrifices, they begin to organize. Their motto: take America back.

Meanwhile, a lame duck presidency, choking on foreign policy failures, finds itself attacked even for its putative successes. Healthcare reform is now seen to have combined the inefficiency and inconsistency of government with the naked greed and exploitative talents of corporations. Medical rationing is a fact of life confronting anyone on the high side of 50. Presidential rhetoric that offered hope and change has lost all resonance. Mainstream media outlets are discredited and disintegrating, resulting in new levels of information anarchy.

Protest, whether electronic or in the streets, has become more common - and the protesters in those streets increasingly carry guns, though as yet armed violence is minimal. A panicked administration responds with overlapping executive orders and legislation that is widely perceived as an attack on basic freedoms.

Tapping the frustration of protesters - including a renascent and mainstreamed "tea bag" movement - the former captains and sergeants, the ex-Central Intelligence Agency operatives and out-of-work private mercenaries of the "war on terror" take action. Conflict and confrontation they seek; laws and orders they increasingly ignore. As riot police are deployed in the streets, they face a grim choice: where to point their guns? Not at veterans, they decide, not at America's erstwhile heroes.

A dwindling middle-class, still waving the flag and determined to keep its sliver-sized portion of the American dream, throws its support to the agitators. Wages shrinking, savings exhausted, bills rising, the sober middle can no longer hold. It vents its fear and rage by calling for a decisive leader and the overthrow of a can't-do congress.

Savvy members of traditional Washington elites are only too happy to oblige. They, too, crave order and can-do decisiveness - on their terms. Where better to find that than in the ranks of America's most respected institution: the military?

A retired senior officer who led America's heroes in Central Asia is anointed. His creed: end public disorder, fight the war on terror to a victorious finish, put America back on top. The United States, he says, is the land of winners, and winners accept no substitute for victory. Nominated on September 11, 2016, Patriot Day, he marches to an overwhelming victory that November, embraced in the streets by an American version of the post-World War I German Freikorps and the police who refuse to suppress them. A concerned minority is left to wonder (and tremble) at the de facto military coup that occurred so quickly, and yet so silently, in their midst.

It can happen here, unless we act
Yes, it can happen here. In some ways, it's already happening. But the key question is: at this late date, how can it be stopped? Here are some vectors for a change in course, and in mindset as well, if we are to avoid our own stealth coup:

1. Somehow, we need to begin to reverse the ongoing militarization of this country, especially our ever-rising "defense" budgets. The most recent of these, we've just learned, is a staggering US$708 billion for fiscal year 2011 - and that doesn't even include the $33 billion President Obama has requested for his latest surge in Afghanistan. We also need to get rid of the idea that anyone who suggests even minor cuts in defense spending is either hopelessly naive or a terrorist sympathizer. It's time as well to call a halt to the privatization of military activity and so halt the rise of security contractors like Xe (formerly Blackwater), thereby weakening the corporate profit motive that supports and underpins the American version of perpetual war. It's time to begin feeling chastened, not proud, that we're by far the number one country in the world in arms manufacturing and the global arms trade.

2. Let's downsize our global mission rather than endlessly expanding our military footprint. It's time to have a military capable of defending this country, not fighting endless wars in distant lands while garrisoning the globe.

3. Let's stop paying attention to major TV and cable networks that rely on retired senior military officers, most of whom have ties both to the Pentagon and military contractors, for "unbiased" commentary on our wars. If we insist on fighting our perpetual "frontier" wars, let's start insisting as well that they be covered in all their bitter reality: the death, the mayhem, the waste, the prisons, and the torture. Why is our war coverage invariably sanitized to "PG [parental guidance]" or even "G," when we can go to the movies anytime and see "R [restricted]" rated pornographic or violent films? And by the way, it's time to be more critical of the government's and the media's use of language and propaganda. Mindlessly parroting the Patriot Act doesn't make you patriotic.

4. It's time to elect a president who doesn't surround himself with senior "civilian" advisors and ambassadors who are actually retired military generals and admirals, one who won't accept a Nobel Peace Prize by defending war in theory and escalating it in practice.

5. Let's toughen up. Let's stop deferring to authority figures who promise to "protect" us while abridging our rights. Let's stop bowing down before men and women in uniform, before they start thinking that it's their right to be worshipped and act accordingly.

6. Let's act now to relieve the sort of desperation bred by joblessness and hopelessness that could lead many - notably male workers suffering from the "He-Cession" - to see a militarized solution in "the homeland" as a credible last resort. It's the economy, stupid, but with Main Street's health, not Wall Street's, in our focus.

7. Let's take Sarah Palin and her followers seriously. They're tapping into anger that's real and spreading. Don't let them become the voices of the angry working (and increasingly unemployed) classes.

8. Recognize that we face real enemies in our world, the most powerful of which aren't in distant Afghanistan or Yemen but here at home. The essence of our struggle to sustain our faltering democracy should not be against "terrorists," with their shoe and crotch bombs, but against various powerful, perfectly legal groups here whose interests lie in a Pentagon that only grows ever stronger.

9. Stop thinking the US is uniquely privileged. Don't take it on faith that God is on our side. Forget about God blessing America. If you believe in God, get out there and start trying to earn His blessing through deeds.

10. And, most important of all, remember that fear is the mind-killer that makes militarism possible. Ramping up "terror" is an amazingly effective way of shredding our constitution. Putting our "safety" above all else is asking for trouble. The only way we'll be completely safe from the big bad terrorists, after all, is when we're all living in a maximum security state. Think of walking down the street while always being subject to a "full-body scan".

That's my top 10 things we need to do. It's a daunting list and I'm sure you have a few ideas of your own. But have faith. Ultimately, it all boils down to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's words to a nation suffering through the Great Depression: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. These words came to mind recently as I read the following missive from a friend and World War II veteran who's seen tough times:
It's very hard for me to accept how soft the American people have become. In 1941, with the Western world under assault by powerful and deadly forces, and a large armada of ships and planes attacking us directly, I never heard a word of fear as we faced three powerful nations as enemies. Sixteen million of us went into the military with the very real possibility of death and I never once heard of fear, except from those exposed to danger. Now, our people let [their leaders] terrify them into accepting the destruction of our economy, our image in the world, and our democracy ... All this over a small group of religious fanatics [mostly] from Saudi Arabia whom we kowtow to so we can drive eight-cylinder SUVs. Pathetic!

How many times have I stood in 'security lines' at airports and when I complained of the indignity of taking off shoes and not having water and the manhandling of passengers, have well educated people smugly said to me, 'Well, they're just keeping us safe.' I look at the airport bullshit as a training ground to turn Americans into docile sheep in a totalitarian state.
A public conditioned to act like sheep, to "support our troops" no matter what, to cower before the idea of terrorism, is a public ready to be herded. A military that's being used to fight unwinnable wars is a military prone to return home disaffected and with scores to settle.

Angry and desperate veterans and mercenaries already conditioned to violence, merging with "tea baggers" and other alienated groups, could one day form our own Freikorps units, rioting for violent solutions to national decline. Recall that the Nazi movement ultimately succeeded in the early 1930s because so many middle-class Germans were scared as they saw their wealth, standard of living, and status all threatened by the Great Depression.

If our great recession continues, if decent jobs remain scarce, if the mainstream media continue to foster fear and hatred, if returning troops are disaffected and their leaders blame politicians for "not being tough enough," if one or two more terrorist attacks succeed on US soil, wouldn't this country be well primed for a coup by any other name?

Don't expect a "Seven Days in May" scenario. No American Caesar will return to Washington with his legions to decapitate governmental authority. Why not? Because he won't have to.

As long as we continue to live in perpetual fear in an increasingly militarized state, we establish the preconditions under which Americans will be nailed to, and crucified on, a cross of iron.

William J Astore teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology (wastore@pct.edu). A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), he has also taught at the US Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism.

War skeptics at work. These guys are right. The number does not add up.....Someone is making money off the taxpayers. Trillions spent and no results. Osama Bin Laden is a diabetic. The medical supply which he uses for his diabetes is readily traceable....

In 2001, George W Bush declared the United States was at war against al-Qaeda. President Barack Obama also claims the country's main enemy is al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda's shock troops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa, based on the best intelligence estimates available, add up to about 2,100 fighters; the US has approximately 1.4 million active duty men and women under arms. - Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt (Jan 15, '10)
A fight against the odds
By Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LA16Df02.html
In his book on World War II in the Pacific, War Without Mercy, John Dower tells an extraordinary tale about the changing American image of the Japanese fighting man. In the period before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, it was well accepted in military and political circles that the Japanese were inferior fighters on the land, in the air and at sea - "little men", in the phrase of the moment. It was a commonplace of "expert" opinion, for instance, that the Japanese had supposedly congenital nearsightedness and certain inner-ear defects, while lacking individualism, making it hard to show initiative. In battle, the result was poor pilots in Japanese-made (and so inferior) planes, who could not fly effectively at night or launch successful attacks.

In the wake of their precision assault on Pearl Harbor, their wiping out of US air power in the Philippines in the first moments of the war, and a sweeping set of other victories, the Japanese suddenly went from "little men" to supermen in the American imagination (without ever passing through a human phase). They became "invincible" - natural-born jungle- and night-fighters, as well as "utterly ruthless, utterly cruel and utterly blind to any of the values which make up our civilization".

Sound familiar? It should. Following September 11, 2001, news headlines screamed "A NEW DAY OF INFAMY" and the attacks were instantly labeled "the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century". Soon enough, al-Qaeda, like the Japanese in 1941, went from a distant threat - the George W Bush administration, on coming into office, paid next to no attention to al-Qaeda's possible plans - to a team of arch-villains with little short of superpowers. After all, they had already destroyed some of the mightiest buildings on the planet, were known to be on the verge of seizing weapons of mass destruction, and, if nothing was done, might soon enough turn the Muslim world into their "caliphate".

Al-Qaeda was suddenly an organization against which you wouldn't launch anything less than the full strength of the armed forces of the world's "sole superpower". To a surprising extent, they are still dealt with this way. You can feel it, for instance, in the recent 24/7 panic over the thoroughly inept underwear bomber and the sudden threat of a few hundred self-proclaimed al-Qaeda members in Yemen. You can feel it in the ramping up of the Af-Pak war.

You can hear it in the "debate" over moving al-Qaeda detainees from Guantanamo to US maximum security prisons. The way some politicians talk, you might think those detainees were all Lex Luthors and Magnetos, super-villains incapable of being held by any prison, just like the almost magically impossible-to-find Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in the wild borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Because most Americans have never dealt with or thought of al-Qaeda as a group made up of actual human beings or accepted that, for every televisually striking success, they have an operation (or several) that go bust, the US can't begin to imagine what it's actually up against. The current president, like the previous one, claims that the US is "at war". If so, it's a war of one, since al-Qaeda and the US military are essentially not in the same war-fighting universe, which helps explain why repeatedly knocking off significant portions of al-Qaeda's leadership (even if never finding bin Laden and Zawahiri) doesn't seem to end the threat.

But let's stop here and try, for a moment, to imagine these two enemies side-by-side in the same universe of war. What, in that case, would the lineup of forces look like?

Assessing al-Qaeda's 'troops'
According to US intelligence estimates, there are currently about 100 al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, as well as "several hundred" in Pakistan and, so the latest reports tell us, a similar number in Yemen. Members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Algeria, Mali and Mauritania) and those based in Somalia undoubtedly fall into the same category at several hundred each. According to authorities from the Iraq Study Group to the US State Department, even at the height of the insurgency and civil war in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia never had more than 1,300-4,000 active fighters. Today, it is believed to consist only of "small, roving cells".

Combined, these groups - think of them as al-Qaeda's shock troops, add up to perhaps 2,100 fighters, about one-fifth the number of US troops now based in Italy. As the 9/11 attacks, the intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the failure to disrupt the underwear bomber's plot indicate, US intelligence has long been flying blind, but even if al-Qaeda turned out to have sleeper cells with 300 additional committed members in every nation on Earth, its clandestine operatives would only moderately exceed the number of US forces now based in Germany.

Al-Qaeda does have some "training camps" in the backlands of countries like Yemen, and it has civilian supporters, financiers and other scattered allies. Over the years, and sometimes with good reason, Washington has lumped Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan with al-Qaeda and counted various militant groups, including Somalia's al-Shabab Islamic rebels, as al-Qaeda affiliates. Add such fighters in and you would swell these numbers by many thousands.

Additionally, al-Qaeda has an arsenal of weaponry. Members have access to rocket-propelled grenades, small arms of various sorts, the materials for making deadly roadside bombs, car bombs, and of course underwear bombs.

Assessing America's troops
United States efforts to crush al-Qaeda have certainly not failed for lack of resources. The US military has spent about US$1 trillion on its post-9/11 wars so far. It has an army, a navy, an air force and a marine corps which, like the navy, has its very own air force. It possesses trillions of dollars in weapons, materiel and other assets. It can mobilize spy satellites, advanced fighter planes and bombers, high-tech drones and helicopters, fleets of trucks, tanks and other armored vehicles. It has advanced missiles and smart bombs, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and state-of-the-art ships in all shapes and sizes.

It also has incredibly well-trained special operations forces - almost 56,000 elite troops, including the US Army Rangers and Special Forces, Navy SEALs and Special Boat Teams, Air Force Special Tactics Teams and Marine Corps Special Operations Battalions, armed with incredibly advanced weaponry. It has military academies that churn out highly-educated officers and specialized training camps, schools and universities. It has more than half-a-million buildings and structures on more than 800 bases sitting on millions of hectares of prime real estate scattered around the world, including in or near lands where various branches of al-Qaeda operate.

In addition, the US military has manpower - lots of it. All told, the United States has approximately 1.4 million active duty men and women under arms and another 1.3 million reserve personnel. It employs more than 700,000 civilians in support roles - from stocking shelves and serving food at stateside bases to assisting in intelligence analysis in war zones - and utilizes untold tens of thousands of private security hired-guns and various other kinds of private contractors all around the globe.

These numbers would be further swelled by intelligence agents who aid military efforts, including 100,000 members of the civilian intelligence community. And then there are the allies the US can draw on, ranging, in Afghanistan alone, from the Afghan army and police to tens of thousands of North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other foreign allied troops from more than 40 countries.

Comparing the sides
Even excluding from the US side of the equation all those US reserves, Defense Department civilians, intelligence operatives and analysts, private contractors and allies of various sorts, if you compare the two enemies in the current "war", you still end up with either the Mark of the Beast or a marker for futility.

The active duty US military alone enjoys a 666:1 advantage over the estimated number of al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Algeria, Mauritania, Mali and Somalia. Adding in the reserves, the ratio jumps to an embarrassingly-high 1,286:1. Even if you were to factor in those hordes of non-existent al-Qaeda sleeper agents, 300 each for 195 countries from Australia to the Vatican City, the US military would still enjoy a 23:1 advantage (or 45:1 if you included the reserves, now regularly sent into war zones on multiple tours of duty).

In sum, after the better part of a decade of conflict, the US has spent trillions of taxpayer dollars on bullets and bombs, soldiers and drones. It has waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have yet to end, launched strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, dispatched special ops troops to those nations and others, like the Philippines, and built or expanded hundreds of new bases all over the world. Yet Osama bin Laden remains at large and al-Qaeda continues to target and kill Americans.

Open-source al-Qaeda
Founded in 1988, bin Laden's al-Qaeda formally issued a "declaration of war" on the United States in 1996, primarily over the US military presence in the Middle East. While Washington has been hunting bin Laden and al-Qaeda since the mid-1990s, a post-9/11 congressional resolution authorized the president to use force against that group and the Taliban. Ever since, the Pentagon has been waging one of the most ineffective campaigns of modern times in an effort to destroy it.

During these years, Bush declared himself a "war president" heading a country "at war" and living in "war time". In a milder way, President Barack Obama has repeatedly declared the US to be "at war" and, as in his surge speech at the West Point military academy in December, has identified the main enemy in that war as al-Qaeda. In the process, the US military has unleashed tremendous destructive power on parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia, causing the deaths of al-Qaeda fighters, non-al-Qaeda militants and innocent civilians. Thousands of its own troops have died and tens of thousands have been wounded in the process, not to mention the losses to allied forces.

In these years, new al-Qaeda "affiliates" like al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia have nonetheless sprung to life regularly and, as in Yemen, have even been officially crushed, only to be reborn. These groups have often made up their own "al-Qaeda" membership requirements, and focused on their own chosen targets. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda wannabes and look-alikes have proliferated and the organization (or those sympathetic to it or praising it) has reportedly spurred further attacks in the US and encouraged men from New York to California, Nigeria to Jordan, to join the movement, and then work, fight, kill and die for it, sometimes in attacks on Americans.

Al-Qaeda has no tanks, Humvees, nuclear submarines, or aircraft carriers, no fleets of attack helicopters or fighter jets. Al-Qaeda has never launched a spy satellite and isn't developing advanced drone technology (although it may be hacking into US video feeds). Al-Qaeda specializes in low-budget operations ranging from the incredibly deadly to the incredibly ineffectual - from murderous car bombs and airplanes-used-as-missiles to faulty shoe- and underwear-explosives.

Comparisons of the strengths of the US military and al-Qaeda "at war" would be absurd, if it weren't for the fact that the United States actually went to war against such a group. It was a decision about as effective as firing a machine gun at a swarm of gnats. Some may die, but the process is visibly self-defeating.

In the present "war on terror", called by whatever name (or, as at present, by no name at all), the two "sides" might as well be in different worlds. After all, al-Qaeda today isn't even an organization in the normal sense of the term, no less a fighting bureaucracy. It is a loose collection of ideas and a looser collection of individuals waging open-source warfare.

You don't sign up for al-Qaeda the way you would for the US Army. If you and two friends are sitting around a table in some country and you're angry, alienated and dissatisfied with the state of the world, you can simply claim to adhere to the basic ideas of Osama bin Laden and declare yourself al-Qaeda in [fill in the blank]. Who then gets into your organization and how you link up, if at all, with other "al-Qaedas" is up to you.

That's why groups like al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia are always referred to in the press as "homegrown". What you have, then, in this post-war-on-terror war is a massive global military force aided and abetted by allied troops, "native" forces, and all sorts of corporate contractors facing off against something fluid and "homegrown", fierce but strangely undefined, constantly morphing and shape-shifting. Every one of its "members" could be destroyed without the "enemy" being destroyed, because the enemy is a set of ideas, however extreme or strange to most Americans.

The Pentagon, with its giant bureaucracy and its miles of offices and corridors, is the headquarters of the US war effort, but there is no central al-Qaeda headquarters, not in Afghanistan or Pakistan - not anywhere. There is probably no longer even an "al-Qaeda central". Osama bin Laden has vanished or, for all we know, may be dead. Think of it, at best, as an open-source organization that is remarkably capable of replicating by a process of self-franchising.

Isn't it time, then, to stop imagining al-Qaeda as a complex organization of terrorist supermen capable of committing super-deeds, or as an organization that bears any resemblance to a traditional enemy military force? With al-Qaeda, the path of war has undoubtedly been the road to perdition - as we should have discovered by now, more than one trillion dollars later.

When this "war" began, Bush and his followers, like bin Laden and his followers, were eager to proclaim future "victory" and to say with bravado to the other side: "Bring 'em on!" The word "victory" has long since fled Washington's lips, along with boasts that the US is a new Rome.

So far, no matter how many of its operatives may be dead, "victory" remains on the lips of those calling themselves al-Qaeda-in-anywhere. After all, they did get Washington to "bring 'em on" and the results have been disastrous and draining for the United States. The US military has killed many al-Qaeda operatives, but it cannot annihilate its appeal by "surging" in Afghanistan and making war, with all the civilian destruction involved, in Muslim lands.

It's time to put al-Qaeda back in perspective - a human perspective, which would include its stunning successes, its dismal failures and its monumental goof-ups, as well as its unrealizable dreams. (No, Virginia, there will never be an al-Qaeda caliphate in or across the Greater Middle East.) The fact is: al-Qaeda is not an apocalyptic threat. Its partisans can cause damage, but only Americans can bring down this country.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His website is NickTurse.com.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

In the end, War against terror is just another religious war ??
Row over 'biblical' weapons in Afghanistan
By Brendan Nicholson From: The Australian, AFP January 22, 2010 7:32AM
http://www.news.com.au/national/row-over-biblical-weapons-in-afghanistan/story-e6frfkw0-1225822373759

Australian soldiers are using gunsights with biblical references etched on to them as they fight in Afghanistan. Picture: Gary Ramage Source: The Daily Telegraph

Aussie soldiers using controversial gunsights
Fears revelations will anger religious groups
Moves underway to remove references

AUSTRALIAN special forces soldiers are using gunsights with biblical references etched on to them as they fight the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

The Australian Defence Force has several hundred of the sights, which are prized by elite troops for their accuracy over long range, The Australian reports.

Their use by US, British and New Zealand troops has raised alarm among military leaders that it could reinforce views among extremists that the West is waging a crusade against Islam.

The ADF is investigating how to remove biblical references etched on to gunsights, without damaging the weapons.

The ADF and military authorities in the US, Britain and elsewhere thought the letters and numbers on the sights were simply stock or model numbers until a US soldier in Afghanistan complained to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation that the initials referred to passage from the Bible.

One example was JN8:12 which turned out to be a reference to chapter eight, verse 12 in the Book of John: "When Jesus spoke again to the people he said 'I am the light of the world' ".

" 'Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life'."

While coalition soldiers were unaware of the significance of the initials, military officials quickly became alarmed that religious extremists could take some propaganda advantage from them being proof the West was waging a crusader war against Islam.

The ADF confirmed yesterday it had been unaware of the meaning of the inscription when the sights were issued to troops.

"The Department of Defence was unaware of the significance of the manufacturer's serial number," the spokesman said.

"The sights were procured because they provide mature technology which is highly reliable, in wide use by our allies and best meet Defence requirements. Soldiers are confident in the utility of the sight and the positive and proven effect which it is having on operations.

Meanwhile, the US firm responsible for the gunsights, Trijicon, has announced it was providing the military with kits to remove the biblical references.

The company said it would supply the military with 100 kits "to enable the removal of the references that are already on products that are currently deployed."

"Trijicon has proudly served the US military for more than two decades, and our decision to offer to voluntarily remove these references is both prudent and appropriate," Trijicon president and CEO Stephen Bindon said in a statement.

The sequel to terminator ??
The Pentagon plans a 40-year surge to create fleets of ultra-advanced, heavily-armed, increasingly autonomous, all-seeing, hypersonic unmanned aerial systems. These badder, faster drones will be armed to the teeth and have the capability to loiter overhead for days waiting for human targets. For United States air chiefs, it's the stuff of dreams, for others, the stuff of waking nightmares. - Nick Turse (Jan 25, '10)
Page 1 of 2
Drone surge: Today, tomorrow and 2047
By Nick Turse
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LA26Df01.html

One moment there was the hum of a motor in the sky above. The next, on a recent morning in Afghanistan's Helmand province, a missile blasted a home, killing 13 people. Days later, the same increasingly familiar mechanical whine preceded a two-missile salvo that slammed into a compound in Degan village in the North Waziristan tribal area of Pakistan, killing three.

What were once unacknowledged, relatively infrequent targeted killings of suspected militants or terrorists in the George W Bush years have become commonplace under the Barack Obama administration. And since a devastating December 30 suicide attack by a Jordanian double agent on a Central Intelligence Agency forward operating base in Afghanistan, unmanned aerial drones have been hunting humans in the AfPak war zone at a record pace.

In Pakistan, an "unprecedented number" of strikes - which have killed armed guerrillas and civilians alike - have led to more fear, anger and outrage in the tribal areas, as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with help from the United States Air Force, wages the most public "secret" war of modern times.

In neighboring Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft, for years in short supply and tasked primarily with surveillance missions, have increasingly been used to assassinate suspected militants as part of an aerial surge that has significantly outpaced the highly publicized "surge" of ground forces now underway. And yet, unprecedented as it may be in size and scope, the present ramping up of the drone war is only the opening salvo in a planned 40-year Pentagon surge to create fleets of ultra-advanced, heavily-armed, increasingly autonomous, all-seeing, hypersonic unmanned aerial systems (UAS).

Today's surge
Drones are the hot weapons of the moment and the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review - a soon-to-be-released four-year outline of Department of Defense strategies, capabilities and priorities to fight current wars and counter future threats - is already known to reflect this focus. As the Washington Post recently reported, "The pilotless drones used for surveillance and attack missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with the goals of speeding up the purchase of new Reaper drones and expanding Predator and Reaper drone flights through 2013."

The MQ-1 Predator - first used in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s - and its newer, larger and more deadly cousin, the MQ-9 Reaper, are now firing missiles and dropping bombs at an unprecedented pace. In 2008, there were reportedly between 27 and 36 US drone attacks as part of the CIA's covert war in Pakistan. In 2009, there were 45 to 53 such strikes. In the first 18 days of January 2010, there had already been 11 of them.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the US Air Force has instituted a much-publicized decrease in piloted air strikes to cut down on civilian casualties as part of Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal's counter-insurgency strategy. At the same time, however, air UAS attacks have increased to record levels.

The air force has created an interconnected global command-and-control system to carry out its robot war in Afghanistan (and as Noah Shachtman of Wired's Danger Room blog has reported, to assist the CIA in its drone strikes in Pakistan as well). Evidence of this can be found at high-tech US bases around the world where drone pilots and other personnel control the planes themselves and the data streaming back from them.

These sites include a converted medical warehouse at al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar where the air force secretly oversees its ongoing drone wars; Kandahar and Jalalabad air fields in Afghanistan, where the drones are physically based; the global operations center at Nevada's Creech air base, where the air force's "pilots" fly drones by remote control from thousands of kilometers away; and - perhaps most importantly - at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a 12-square-mile (32 square kilometers) facility in Dayton, Ohio, named after the two local brothers who invented powered flight in 1903. This is where the bills for the current drone surge - as well as limited numbers of strikes in Yemen and Somalia - come due and are, quite literally, paid.

In the waning days of December 2009, in fact, the Pentagon cut two sizeable checks to ensure that unmanned operations involving the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper would continue full speed ahead in 2010. The 703rd Aeronautical Systems Squadron based at Wright-Patterson signed a $38 million contract with defense giant Raytheon for logistics support for the targeting systems of both drones. At the same time, the squadron inked a deal worth $266 million with mega-defense contractor General Atomics, which makes the Predator and Reaper drones, to provide management services, logistics support, repairs, software maintenance and other functions for both drone programs. Both deals essentially ensure that, in the years ahead, the stunning increase in drone operations will continue.

These contracts, however, are only initial down payments on an enduring drone surge designed to carry US unmanned aerial operations forward, ultimately for decades.

Drone surge: The longer view
In 2004, the air force could put a total of only five drone combat air patrols (CAPs) - each consisting of four air vehicles - in the skies over American war zones at any one time. By 2009, that number was 38, a 660% increase according to the air force. Similarly, between 2001 and 2008, hours of surveillance coverage for US Central Command, encompassing both the Iraqi and Afghan war zones, as well as Pakistan and Yemen, showed a massive spike of 1,431%.

In the meantime, flight hours have gone through the roof. In 2004, for example, Reapers, just beginning to soar, flew 71 hours in total, according to air force documents. In 2006, that number had risen to 3,123 hours; and last year, 25,391 hours. This year, the air force projects that the combined flight hours of all its drones - Predators, Reapers and unarmed RQ-4 Global Hawks - will exceed 250,000 hours, about the total number of hours flown by all air force drones from 1995-2007. In 2011, the 300,000 hour-a-year barrier is expected to be crossed for the first time, and after that the sky's the limit.

More flight time will, undoubtedly, mean more killing. According to Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the Washington-based think-tank the New America Foundation, in the George W Bush years, from 2006 into 2009, there were 41 drone strikes in Pakistan which killed 454 militants and civilians. Last year, under the Barack Obama administration, there were 42 strikes that left 453 people dead. A recent report by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, an Islamabad-based independent research organization that tracks security issues, claimed an even larger number, 667 people - most of them civilians - were killed by US drone strikes last year.

While assisting the CIA's drone operations in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the air force has been increasing its own unmanned aerial hunter-killer missions. In 2007 and 2008, for example, air force Predators and Reapers fired missiles during 244 missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, while all the US armed services have pursued unmanned aerial warfare, the air force has outpaced each of them.

From 2001, when armed drone operations began, until the spring of 2009, the air force had fired 703 Hellfire missiles and dropped 132 GBU-12s (250-kilogram laser-guided bombs) in combat operations. The army, by comparison, launched just two Hellfire missiles and two smaller GBU-44 Viper Strike munitions in the same time period. The disparity should only grow, since the army's drones remain predominantly small surveillance aircraft, while in 2009 the air force shifted all outstanding orders for the medium-sized Predator to the even more formidable Reaper, which is not only twice as fast but has 600% more payload capacity, meaning more space for bombs and missiles.

In addition, the more heavily-armed Reapers, which can now loiter over an area for 10 to 14 hours without refueling, will be able to spot and track ever more targets via an increasingly sophisticated video monitoring system. According to air force Lieutenant General David Deptula, deputy chief of staff for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, the first three "Gorgon Stare pods" - new wide-area sensors that provide surveillance capabilities over large swathes of territory - will be installed on Reapers operating in Afghanistan this spring.

A technology not available for the older Predator, Gorgon Stare will allow 10 operators to view 10 video feeds from a single drone at the same time. Back at a distant base, a "pilot" will stare at a tiled screen with a composite picture of the streaming battlefield video, even as field commanders analyze a portion of the digital picture, panning, zooming and tilting the image to meet their needs.

A more advanced set of "pods", scheduled to be deployed for the first time this autumn, will allow 30 operators to view 30 video images simultaneously. In other words, via video feeds from a single Reaper drone, operators could theoretically track 30 different people heading in 30 directions from a single Afghan compound. The generation of sensors expected to come online in late 2011 promises 65 such feeds, according to air force documents, a more than 6,000% increase in effectiveness over the Predator's video system. The air force is, however, already overwhelmed just by drone video currently being sent back from the war zones and, in the years ahead, risks "drowning in data", according to Deptula.

The 40-year plan
When it comes to the drone surge, the years 2011-2013 are just the near horizon. While, like the army, the navy is working on its own future drone warfare capacity - in the air as well as on and even under the water - the air force is involved in striking levels of futuristic planning for robotic war. It envisions a future previously imagined only in science-fiction movies like the Terminator series.

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Drone surge: Today, tomorrow and 2047
By Nick Turse

As a start, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, the Pentagon's blue skies research outfit, is already looking into radically improving on Gorgon Stare with an "Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Infrared (ARGUS-IR) System". In the obtuse language of military research and development, it will, according to DARPA, provide a "real-time, high-resolution, wide-area video persistent surveillance capability that allows joint forces to keep critical areas of interest under constant surveillance with a high degree of target location accuracy" via as many as 130 'Predator-like' steerable video streams to enable real-time tracking and monitoring and enhanced situational awareness during evening hours".

In translation, that means the air force will quite literally be flooded with video information from future battlefields; and every "advance" of this sort means bulking up the global network of facilities, systems and personnel capable of receiving, monitoring and interpreting the data streaming in from distant digital eyes. All of it is specifically geared toward "target location", that is, pin-pointing people on one side of the world so that Americans on the other side can watch, track and, in many cases, kill them.

In addition to enhanced sensors and systems like ARGUS-IR, the air force has a long-term vision for drone warfare that is barely beginning to be realized. Predators and Reapers have already been joined in Afghanistan by a newer, formerly secret drone, a "low observable unmanned aircraft system" first spotted in 2007 and dubbed the "Beast of Kandahar" before observers were sure what it actually was. It is now known to be a Lockheed Martin-manufactured unmanned aerial vehicle, the RQ-170 - a drone which the air force blandly notes was designed to "directly support combatant commander needs for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to locate targets". According to military sources, the sleek, stealthy surveillance craft has been designated to replace the antique Lockheed U-2 spy plane, which has been in use since the 1950s.

In the coming years, the RQ-170 is slated to be joined in the skies of America's "next wars" by a fleet of drones with ever newer, more sophisticated capabilities and destructive powers. Looking into the post-2011 future, Deptula sees the most essential need, according to an Aviation Week report, as "long-range [reconnaissance and] precision strike" - that is, more eyes in far off skies and more lethality. He added, "We cannot move into a future without a platform that allows [us] to project power long distances and to meet advanced threats in a fashion that gives us an advantage that no other nation has."

This means bigger, badder, faster drones - armed to the teeth - with sensor systems to monitor wide swathes of territory and the ability to loiter overhead for days on end waiting for human targets to appear and, in due course, be vaporized by high-powered munitions. It's a future built on advanced technologies designed to make targeted killings - remote-controlled assassinations - ever more effortless.

Over the horizon and deep into what was, until recently, only a silver-screen fantasy, the air force envisions a wide array of unmanned aircraft, from tiny insect-like robots to enormous "tanker size" pilotless planes. Each will be slated to take over specific war-making functions (or so air force dreamers imagine). Those nano-sized drones, for instance, are set to specialize in indoor reconnaissance - they're small enough to fly through windows or down ventilation shafts - and carry out lethal attacks, undertake computer-disabling cyber-attacks, and swarm, as would a group of angry bees, of their own volition. Slightly larger micro-sized Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems (STUAS) are supposed to act as "transformers" - altering their form to allow for flying, crawling and non-visual sensing capabilities. They might fill sentry, counter-drone, surveillance and lethal attack roles.

Additionally, the air force envisions small and medium "fighter-sized" drones with lethal combat capabilities that would put the current UAS air fleet to shame. Today's medium-sized Reapers are set to be replaced by next generation MQ-Ma drones that will be "networked, capable of partial autonomy, all-weather and modular with capabilities supporting electronic warfare [EW], CAS [close air support], strike and multi-INT [multiple intelligence] ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] missions' platforms".

The language may not be elegant, much less comprehensible, but if these future fighter aircraft actually come online they will not only send today's remaining Top Gun pilots to the showers, but may even sideline tomorrow's drone human operators, who, if all goes as planned, will have ever fewer duties. Unlike today's drones, which must take off and land with human guidance, the MQ-Mas will be automated and drone operators will simply be there to monitor the aircraft.

Next up will be the MQ-Mb, theoretically capable of taking over even more roles once assigned to traditional fighter-bombers and spy planes, including the suppression of enemy air defenses, bombing and strafing of ground targets and surveillance missions. These will also be designed to fly more autonomously and be better linked in to other drone "platforms" for cooperative missions involving many aircraft under the command of a single "pilot". Imagine, for instance, one operator overseeing a single command drone that holds sway over a small squadron of autonomous drones carrying out a coordinated air attack on clusters of people in some far off land, incinerating them in small groups across a village, town or city.

Finally, perhaps 30 to 40 years from now, the MQ-Mc drone would incorporate all of the advances of the MQ-M line, while being capable of everything from dog-fighting to missile defense. With such new technology will come new policies and new doctrines. In the years ahead, the air force intends to make drone-related policy decisions on everything from treaty obligations to automatic target engagement - robotic killing without a human in the loop. The latter extremely controversial development is already envisioned as a possible post-2025 reality.

2047: What's old is new again
The year 2047 is the target date for the air force's Holy Grail, the capstone for its long-term plan to turn the skies over to war-fighting drones. In 2047, the air force intends to rule the skies with MQ-Mc drones and "special" super-fast, hypersonic drones for which neither viable technology nor any enemies with any comparable programs or capabilities yet exist. Despite this, the air force is intent on making these super-fast hunter-killer systems a reality by 2047. "Propulsion technology and materials that can withstand the extreme heat will likely take 20 years to develop. This technology will be the next generation air game-changer. Therefore the prioritization of the funding for the specific technology development should not wait until the emergence of a critical COCOM [combatant command] need," says the air force's 2009-2047 UAS "Flight Plan".

If anything close to the air force's dreams comes to fruition, the "game" will indeed be radically changed. By 2047, there's no telling how many drones will be circling over how many heads in how many places across the planet. There's no telling how many millions or billions of flight hours will have been flown, or how many people, in how many countries, will have been killed by remote-controlled, bomb-dropping, missile-firing, judge-jury-and-executioner drone systems.

There's only one given. If the US still exists in its present form, is still solvent and still has a functioning Pentagon of the present sort, a new plan will already be well underway to create the war-making technologies of 2087. By then, in ever more places, people will be living with the sort of drone war that now worries only those in places like Degan village. Ever more people will know that unmanned aerial systems packed with missiles and bombs are loitering in their skies. By then, there undoubtedly won't even be that lawnmower-engine sound indicating that a missile may soon plow into your neighbor's home.

For the air force, such a prospect is the stuff of dreams, a bright future for unmanned, hypersonic lethality; for the rest of the planet, it's a potential nightmare from which there may be no waking.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His website is NickTurse.com.