Silk Road forums
Discussion => Off topic => Topic started by: rise_against on August 17, 2012, 05:58 am
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U.S. Customs and Border Patrol is spending big - just under $100 million - to combat drug smugglers who use small aircraft worth only a few thousand dollars each to ferry narcotics into the U.S.
Last week the CBP awarded SRCTec, a New York-based research and development company, a $99,955,087.00 contract for a real-time detection system that is specifically designed to pick out ultralight aircrafts, slow-speed rudimentary manned planes that have a very small radar signature, on America's southern border.
The contract award ended a year-long search for a way to spot ultralights loaded with narcotics - a tactic lawmakers said is being employed more and more in recent years by drug smugglers hoping to buzz back and forth over border fences undetected. Ultralights are easy-to-use aircraft - often little more than an airframe and engine - that can be bought online or constructed at home from kits for a few thousand dollars. Ultralights do not require a pilot's license.
In May 2011, The Los Angeles Times reported that in the previous fiscal year, ultralights - sometimes with armed pilots - had entered U.S. borders illegally at least 228 times, double the number compared to the year before that.
One man died in 2008 when his ultralight crashed into a lettuce field in Arizona, according to the CBP. Nearly 150 lbs. of marijuana was found with the downed aircraft. A year later CBP managed to spot an ultralight using their current radar and followed it to its own crash elsewhere in Arizona. In that case, CBP said the pilot managed to escape but two others believed to be involved were arrested and another 275 lbs. of pot was confiscated - worth an estimated $220,000 on the street.
In 2010, the military reported two F-16s had been scrambled by NORAD to chase down an ultralight near the Arizona border. The fighter jets - capable of flying 1,500 miles per hour - reportedly shadowed the ultralight - which generally has a top speed around 60 miles per hour - for 30 minutes before the ultralight decided to head back into Mexican airspace.
The ultralight's use by smugglers has become so ubiquitous that Congress recently updated their definition of "aircraft" to include ultralights and, therefore, make those caught smuggling drugs with them subject to the same penalties as other aircraft under the Tariff Act of 1930. The legislation, known as the Ultralight Aircraft Smuggling Prevention Act of 2012, was the last bill sponsored by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona) before she resigned from Congress after surviving an apparent assassination attempt last January.
"The use of ultralight vehicles is yet another example of the extreme measures drug smugglers will use to get drugs into the United States," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), Chairman of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, said after the bill passed the Senate.
Ultralights were also feared to have been part of an alleged terror plot uncovered in Spain earlier this month. In that case, three men were arrested before the plot could get off the ground. Authorities said two of them had been practicing flying ultralights and small drones.
The CBP contract winner, SRC Tec, lists what it calls the VantagePoint system under its products. According to the company's website, VantagePoint can "detect and track people, vehicles, and low and slow aircraft, such as [unmanned aircraft systems] and ultralights."
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yeah before long cartels will just use UAV's to smuggle and then there's no risk of getting caught.
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yea, i can see it now, one gets out of control and crashes into someones house.... hey mom why did 100 kilos of coke just crash thru our ceiling?
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I fly ultralights as a hobby, they fucking rule !
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yea, i can see it now, one gets out of control and crashes into someones house.... hey mom why did 100 kilos of coke just crash thru our ceiling?
Please let it be my ceiling, PLEASE.
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Yet another example of swarming in action.
Soon there will be tiny robots carrying a couple of ounces, but by the thousand over long distances. No sci-fi, this is the direction of modern warfare, surveillance, transport and scientific research, look up quadrotors on youtube, you'll shit yourself if you haven't seen such things before. Very scary, very cool, very different to the common perception of future progress. As usual!
You going to develop a way of detecting something the size of your hand flying across the border? Swarming really is the future of conflict, and commerce too with the advent of 3D printers.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB311.html
Swarming takes power from any hierarchical centralized system, and I don't see most governments cottoning on to the implications of what that means, because they're still investing in aircraft carriers. 'Power Projection Force' is a meaningless concept when you're working against the Hive, it's like punching an empty bag.
If this is a concept that the new Asian states understand, and the mindset of the Japanese strongly suggests that it is, then the United States should be very afraid indeed. Traditional maneuver tactics or Blitzkrieg strategy won't work against a nation state that comprehends what swarming means.
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Pine,
The scary thing about swarming tech is that if it ever becomes a threat (real, imagined, or as propaganda) western governments will respond with Blitzkrieg tactics and the only way to really stop e-swarms are EMP or thermo.
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Pine,
The scary thing about swarming tech is that if it ever becomes a threat (real, imagined, or as propaganda) western governments will respond with Blitzkrieg tactics and the only way to really stop e-swarms are EMP or thermo.
Well, I don't think nation states will face each other head on, but rather through proxy wars via cyberspace or cats paw conflicts i.e. geographical spaces that serve as a jousting area, just as Vietnam did. So, a whole lot of 'artillery' which would be unthinkable to use in a densely populated area in your own states, would become possible when territories and their peoples become expendable without serious political blowback. I think of them as Guinea Pig States.
I don't think thermonuclear weapons make much sense vs swarming, it's like taking a sledge to a bunch of nails. Maybe miniaturized nuclear devices, but frankly swarms are predicated on being made out of cheap mass manufactured materials so they are disposable, so the accounting is against you there. You may have heard that uranium and plutonium aren't getting any cheaper on Tera Firma.
EMP protection is likely something swarms would have from the get-go, I don't know much about this science, but I don't think it takes anything better than metal shielding or even a couple of layers of alum foil to protect internal electronics. Maybe I'm wrong about very strong EMP pulses, but I guess we're going to find out in either case.
I think the only way to realistically counter swarms, is to use swarms i.e. interception bots. This ultimately takes warfare directly to a battle over comms, hi-tech geekry and the use of pervasive/ubiquitous networks not exactly miles removed from Tor. A combination of the human network using low-fi tech e.g. UV tagging somebody's door who's a suspect, and somebody else delivering a micro-explosive device the size of a dime in a simple envelope, or piloting a tiny insect sized bot with a poison needle through a catflap at night. Sci-fi? No, the technology already is here, we're just waiting on the application.
Imagine a war in which there is no distinguishing marks to tell a solider from a civilian because that would be intelligence for the enemy, where war becomes based more on ideologies other than nationalism, and you have dudes piloting different kinds of drones from their suburban homes, maybe fighting against their next door neighbors for all they know.
Sounds surreal, but when WMD cancels out the possibility of direct conflict maybe proxy warfare and swarming is the natural thing that follows. In one respect I think the videogame 'Command & Conquer' was on the money, and that is that future nation state wars may not be fought on the basis of geographical boundaries anymore. I mean, people simply don't identify with political parties any more, people who strongly do are almost seen as anachronistic by their peers in some places in the West. On the other hand, people still *feel* strong emotions about political *events*, so the potential for conflict certainly hasn't dissipated. This has a lot to do with the mass media providing bandwidth for such organization, I see a lot of similarity between modern flash mobs and the genocide in Rwanda for example, there are a lot of parallels. I don't think you could realistically say the governments were in control in any way of that situation that went down there.
What happens, when somebody can print off handguns on their 3D printer? It's not like they're particularly complex devices. It makes the concept of Assassination Markets much more accessible. What happens when people are opting to pay their taxes using untraceable cryptographic currencies to organizations that truly represent them as opposed to today's complacent tax gouging states? Then the state's power gets hollowed out with within, it could result in them abruptly collapsing. For centuries, the number of nation states has declined over time, maybe that trend is going to reverse.
The future, whichever way you look at it, in my opinion, is a vast dissolution of State power. This is the zenith of State power today. From here on out, those dinosaurs are going to be shown the door. China, for all its hard power, struggles to keep a lid on simple organic sentiment among its populace, even with its mass surveillance technology and cold war mindset. They can't even garner support from their own nationalists! The Western powers too, their use of soft power has been dramatically curtailed by the Internet. Witnesses wikileaks and look at the contrast between the blogosphere and the editorial lines of major news corporations. Looks to me like the Libertarians have the upper hand and the States are just reacting, reacting, reacting, ineffectively as ever.
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Pine,
I completely agree that proxy warfare and swarming approaches are certainly the future, however as WMD's, especially nuclear, are becoming more and more disseminated and very well could find their way into a proxy war.
In your slightly Gibson-esq (in a good way) take on the future, which I don't disagree with, I do agree that we will see dissolution of State power, yet my fear is that we get that before or at least not simultaneous, to the collapse of the multinational corps power structure. If there is collapse of the financial markets and with it the Wall Street/London finance markets both the multinationals and the State will experience dissolution. If, on the other hand, we have the dissolution of the State without the simultaneous occurrence of the same in regards to the multinationals then we risk repeating what happened during the collapse of the Roman empire. I fear that many financial/banking/Insurance/Security companies are setting themselves up to be feudal lords following the dissipation of the State.