The exotic new weapons the Pentagon wants to deter Russia and China
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President Obama nominates Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr. (C) as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and US Air Force Gen. Paul J. Selva (R) to be vice chairman, during an event in the White House Rose Garden on May 5. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Little noticed amid the daily news bulletins about the Islamic State and Syria, the Pentagon has begun a push for exotic new weapons that can deter Russia and China.
Pentagon officials have started talking openly about using the latest tools of artificial intelligence and machine learning to create robot weapons, “human-machine teams” and enhanced, super-powered soldiers. It may sound like science fiction, but Pentagon officials say they have concluded that such high-tech systems are the best way to combat rapid improvements by the Russian and Chinese militaries.
David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.
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These potentially revolutionary U.S. weapons systems were explained in an interview last week byRobert Work, the deputy secretary of defense, and Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Their comments were the latest in a series of unusual recent disclosures about what, until a few months ago, was some of the military’s most secret research.
“This is how we will make our battle networks more powerful, hopefully, and inject enough uncertainty in the minds of the Russians and the Chinese that, you know, if they ever did come to blows with us, would be able to prevail in a conventional [non-nuclear] way. That, for me, is the definition of conventional deterrence,” Work explained.
Within the Pentagon, this high-tech approach is known by the dull phrase “third offset strategy,” emulating two earlier “offsets” that checked Russian military advances during the Cold War. The first offset was tactical nuclear weapons; the second was precision-guided conventional weapons. The latest version assumes that smart, robot weapons can help restore deterrence that has been eroded by Russian and Chinese progress.
The Office of Naval Research used this autonomous Swarm demonstration to showcase technology that allows unmanned Navy vessels to overwhelm an adversary. The demonstration took place on the James River in Virginia in August, 2014. (U.S. Navy Research)
Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, voiced an early warning during his confirmation hearing in July when he said that Russia posed the greatest “existential” threat to the United States. Work said in a recent speech that because the United States has focused on the Middle East since 2001, “our program has been slow to adapt as these high-end threats have started to re-emerge.”
The Pentagon’s 2017 budget includes some money to prime the high-tech pump: $3 billion for advanced weapons to counter, say, a Chinese long-range attack on U.S. naval forces; $3 billion to upgrade undersea systems; $3 billion for human-machine teaming and “swarming” operations by unmanned drones; $1.7 billion for cyber and electronic systems that use artificial intelligence; and $500 million for war-gaming and other testing of the new concepts.
The Obama administration, sometimes chided for being slow to respond to Russian and Chinese threats, seems to have concluded that America’s best strategy is to leverage its biggest advantage, which is technology. The concepts are reminiscent of President Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative, but 30 years on.
The high-tech resurgence got a boost last year from the blue-ribbon Defense Science Board, which conducted a “summer study” of autonomous, robot weapons. “Imagine if we are unprepared to counter such capabilities in the hands of our adversaries,” the board warned.
The game partly is about messaging the Russians and Chinese. Work has described Russia as “a resurgent great power” and China as “a rising power with impressive latent technological capabilities [that] probably embodies a more enduring strategic challenge.” In a Feb. 2 budget announcement, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter spoke of Russian “aggression” in Europe and said: “We haven’t had to worry about this for 25 years, and while I wish it were otherwise, now we do.”
Carter raised some eyebrows in that budget message when he described the Pentagon’s “Strategic Capabilities Office,” a highly classified initiative that he began in 2012 when he was undersecretary. He noted that the office was working on advanced navigation for smart weapons using micro-cameras and sensors; missile-defense systems using hypervelocity projectiles; and swarming drones that are “really fast, really resistant.”
Work illustrated the new willingness to discuss exotic weaponry. During the interview, he showed off a small “Perdix” micro-drone, less than a foot long, which flew with 25 of its mates in a tight grid last summer after being launched from a large plane. These organized drones are part of the Pentagon’s vision of future combat.
The Ukraine and Syria battlefields have offered sobering demonstrations of Russian capabilities. In the interview and other public comments, Work catalogued Russian military advances that include automated battle networks, advanced sensors, drones, anti-personnel weapons and jamming devices.
“Our adversaries, quite frankly, are pursuing enhanced human operations,” Work warned a gathering at the Center for a New American Security in December. “And it scares the crap out of us, really.”
Read more from David Ignatius’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
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· · · · · · · ·
“ARE you sure they’re there?” the decision maker asks. “They” are Qaeda operatives who have been planning attacks against the United States.
“Yes, sir,” the intelligence analyst replies, ticking off the human and electronic sources of information. “We’ve got good Humint. We’ve been tracking with streaming video. Sigint’s checking in now and confirming it’s them. They’re there.”
The decision maker asks if there are civilians nearby.
“The family is in the main building. The guys we want are in the big guesthouse here.”
“They’re not very far apart.”
“Far enough.”
“Anyone in that little building now?”
“Don’t know. Probably not. We haven’t seen anyone since the Pred got capture of the target. But A.Q. uses it when they pass through here, and they pass through here a lot.”
He asks the probability of killing the targets if they use a GBU-12, a powerful 500-pound, laser-guided bomb.
“These guys are sure dead,” comes the reply. “We think the family’s O.K.”
“You think they’re O.K.?”
“They should be.” But the analyst confesses it is impossible to be sure.
“What’s it look like with a couple of Hellfires?” the decision maker asks, referring to smaller weapons carrying 20-pound warheads.
“If we hit the right room in the guesthouse, we’ll get the all bad guys.” But the walls of the house could be thick. The family’s safe, but bad guys might survive.
“Use the Hellfires the way you said,” the decision maker says.
Then a pause.
“Tell me again about these guys.”
“Sir, big A.Q. operators. We’ve been trying to track them forever. They’re really careful. They’ve been hard to find. They’re the first team.”
Another pause. A long one.
“Use the GBU. And that small building they sometimes use as a dorm …”
“Yes, sir.”
“After the GBU hits, if military-age males come out …”
“Yes, sir?”
“Kill them.”
Less than an hour later he is briefed again. The two targets are dead. The civilians have fled the compound. All are alive.
TARGETED killing using drones has become part of the American way of war. To do it legally and effectively requires detailed and accurate intelligence. It also requires some excruciatingly difficult decisions. The dialogue above, representative of many such missions, shows how hard the commanders and analysts work to get it right.
The longer they have gone on, however, the more controversial drone strikes have become. Critics assert that a high percentage of the people killed in drone strikes are civilians — a claim totally at odds with the intelligence I have reviewed — and that the strikes have turned the Muslim world against the United States, fueling terrorist recruitment. Political elites have joined in, complaining that intelligence agencies have gone too far — until they have felt in danger, when they have complained that the agencies did not go far enough.
The program is not perfect. No military program is. But here is the bottom line: It works. I think it fair to say that the targeted killing program has been the most precise and effective application of firepower in the history of armed conflict. It disrupted terrorist plots and reduced the original Qaeda organization along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to a shell of its former self. And that was well before Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011.
Not many years before, the targeted killings were fairly limited. But by 2008, we knew that the terrorist threat had increased to intolerable levels, both to American forces in South Asia and to the United States itself. From our surveillance platforms, we could observe training camps where men leapt off motorbikes and fired on simulated targets. Early that year, the C.I.A. and I began recommending more aggressive action.
We were confident that the intelligence was good enough to sustain a campaign of very precise attacks. To be sure, it was not, is not, always error-free. In late 2006, for instance, a strike killed a one-legged man we believed was a chieftain in the Haqqani network, a violent and highly effective group allied with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It turned out that the man was indeed affiliated with the Haqqanis, but he wasn’t the leader we wanted. With all the land mines in the region, there were many one-legged terrorists in South Asia.
I demanded a full explanation for the misidentification. There were no excuses. People were thoroughly, maybe even excessively, contrite.
But even if I was convinced that we could routinely provide high-quality intelligence to enable precision targeting, we still had to convince policy makers in the government that they should take advantage of it.
We had one thing going for us. I got to talk to President George W. Bush directly every week without filters. I briefed him every Thursday morning and began to use the sessions to underscore Al Qaeda’s growing footprint and brazenness in the tribal region of Pakistan. My chief analyst on this, a lanky Notre Dame graduate, met with me almost daily and stressed that as bad as this might be for Afghanistan and our forces there, the threat could also come to our shores.
If we had boiled our briefings down, the essence would have been: “Knowing what we know, there will be no explaining our inaction after the next attack.”
So the United States began to test some limits. In early 2008, a charismatic Qaeda operations chief was killed along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The strike was clean and the target so important that even regional reaction was muted. Local people knew who he was and did not mourn his passing.
Later in the year another senior Qaeda operative, active in planning attacks in the West, was killed along with several lieutenants in a similar strike that resulted in a similar reaction.
By midsummer, when Hellfire missiles killed a senior Qaeda operator who was active in its weapons of mass destruction program, it was clear that the United States had launched a campaign of targeted killings in South Asia.
Publicly available sources document nearly three dozen attacks in the last seven months of the Bush administration, almost three times the total of the previous four years. According to those sources, 18 senior and midlevel Taliban and Qaeda leaders were killed.
The intelligence used for these strikes was based on human reports, surveillance technology and the near unblinking stare of the Predator itself. The strikes were particularly damaging to Al Qaeda’s operational leaders, who couldn’t afford to hunker down like Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, whose main contribution to the movement was pretty much just staying alive. Those front-line operators had to move and communicate — and that made them vulnerable.
Other attacks were intended to disrupt known Qaeda locations and activities even when the identities of the people present were not known. Critics said these so-called signature strikes were indiscriminate. They were not. Intelligence for signature strikes always had multiple threads and deep history. The data was near encyclopedic.
Many such strikes killed high-value targets whose presence was suspected but not certain. And we made no excuses about killing lower-ranking terrorists. The United States viewed these attacks as legitimate acts of war against an armed enemy — and in warfare it is regrettably necessary to kill foot soldiers, too.
The signature strikes drastically shrank the enemy’s bench and made the leadership worry that they had no safe havens. Almost inadvertently, these strikes also helped protect intelligence sources and methods since the strikes seemed more random than they actually were.
It wasn’t long before intelligence reporting began to confirm our success. We learned there was a widespread sense of helplessness among the Qaeda leadership. Years later, documents proved just how anguished they were.
In 2015, an American court case against a Qaeda member prompted the government to release eight documents from the trove of Bin Laden letters captured when he was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. Bin Laden’s correspondence with his chief lieutenants, in 2010, is remarkable in its candor.
The letters show the stress within the organization. “I convey my condolences regarding our great brother Sheikh Sa’id” who died “as a martyr during a spy plane attack,” read one from June 2010.
“The strikes by the spy planes are still going on,” it continued. A member named al-Sa’di Ihsanullah was the “latest to become a martyr: He was killed about a week ago, also by air raids.” It noted, “The midlevel commands and staff members are hurt by the killings.”
Signature strikes were also taking a toll. In November, the same Bin Laden lieutenant complained, after 20 fighters were killed in one place on Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim feast celebrating the end of Ramadan, that the men had “gathered for the holidays, despite our orders.”
Al Qaeda gained a healthy respect for American intelligence. “Based on our analysis, they are constantly monitoring several potential or possibly confirmed targets,” the June letter said.
The frightened underlings in the field beseeched Bin Laden to help. “We would like your guidance,” the June letter said. “Especially on this idea: reduce the work, meaning stopping many of the operations so we can move around less, and be less exposed to strikes.”
“There is an idea preferred by some brothers to avoid attrition,” it continued. “The idea is that some brothers will travel to some ‘safe’ areas with their families, just for protection. They would only stay for a time, until the crisis is over, maybe one or two years.”
Two months later another Bin Laden deputy agreed to their taking refuge and “calming down and minimizing movement.”
All this correspondence was from 2010, but it is consistent with the intelligence picture we were gathering in 2008. Al Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was spending more time worrying about its own survival than planning how to threaten ours.
The correspondence also confirmed our intelligence showing that attacking Americans on American soil was central to their plotting.
The letters are filled with references to recruits from a host of countries, including the United States. One correspondence emphasized that “operations inside America are some of the most important work of the Organization, as long as they are possible, because they affect the security and economy of the American people as a whole.”
Throughout the campaign, civilian casualties were a constant concern. In one strike, the grandson of the target was sleeping near him on a cot outside, trying to keep cool in the summer heat. The Hellfire missiles were directed so that their energy and fragments splayed away from him and toward his grandfather. They did, but not enough.
The target was hard to locate and people were risking their lives to find him. The United States took the shot. A child died, and we deeply regret that he did. But his grandfather had a garage full of dangerous chemicals, and he intended to use them, perhaps on Americans.
We tried to get better. Carefully reviewing video of one successful strike, we could discern — as a GBU was already hurtling toward an arms cache — a frightened woman responding to another weapon that had just detonated. She was running with young children square into the path of the incoming bomb, and they were killed. We realized, once our after-action review was done, that we needed to put even more eyes on targets as they were being struck to try to avoid any future civilian casualties.
For my part, the United States needs not only to maintain this capacity, but also to be willing to use it. Radical Islamism thrives in many corners of the world — Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Mali, the list goes on — where governments cannot or will not act. In some of these instances, the United States must.
And unmanned aerial vehicles carrying precision weapons and guided by powerful intelligence offer a proportional and discriminating response when response is necessary. Civilians have died, but in my firm opinion, the death toll from terrorist attacks would have been much higher if we had not taken action.
What we need here is a dial, not a switch.
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· · · · · · · · ·
WASHINGTON — Should an autopsy have been performed on the body of Justice Antonin Scalia?
When a Texas justice of the peace certified that the 79-year-old Supreme Court justice had died from natural causes, questions immediately erupted. No autopsy had been performed, and the certification had been made without even an examination of the body. The unexpected death of a divisive public figure during an acerbic presidential campaign set off conspiracy theories and demands from political commentators that a pathologist perform an autopsy before Justice Scalia’s burial on Saturday to prove no foul play was involved.
Texas officials said they had obeyed the wishes of the Scalia family in not authorizing an autopsy after the justice was found Feb. 13 in his bed at a West Texas ranch, cold, pulseless, his hands almost folded on top of the sheets as if he were taking a nap. His doctor said he had chronic cardiovascular disease, and witnesses described a scene typical for death from heart disease.
An estimated 326,000 people of all ages experience cardiac arrest out of a hospital in the United States each year, and 90 percent of them die, according to the American Heart Association.
In many cases, autopsies are not performed on their bodies, because of family wishes, religious objections and other factors, including the expense of the procedure (often not covered by insurance) or the lack of available forensic pathologists to perform them. But some people argue that in the case of a prominent government official, the public has a right to know.
Three forensic pathologists interviewed separately were divided in their opinions about the handling of the death of Justice Scalia. Two — Dr. Michael M. Baden, a former chief medical examiner in New York City, and Dr. Vincent J. M. Di Maio, a former chief medical examiner in San Antonio — said officials had done what is usual for many individuals who die if their doctors have attested they had potentially fatal ailments.
“What you have is an elderly man found dead in bed, and if he was not on the Supreme Court everyone would say, O.K., and nothing more would happen,” Dr. Di Maio said. “It is only who he was that makes it a big deal. You can make an argument that they should have done an autopsy, but the only reason you would do it is he is a Supreme Court judge.”
“If you are over 60 and are found dead in bed, most medical examiners’ offices don’t do an autopsy unless there is some obvious trauma,” Dr. Di Maio said.
A third, Dr. George D. Lundberg, a former editor of the American Medical Association publication JAMA, said the handling was “almost unbelievable.” An autopsy should be mandatory “when a politically prominent person dies unexpectedly, and especially if unobserved,” said Dr. Lundberg, who now works for CollabRx, a Rennova Health company.
In most unexplained deaths, if a personal physician attests that the deceased had an ailment that can be lethal, a justice of the peace or medical examiner usually will release the body without sending it to a medical examiner, unless officials suspect foul play or an accident. But if a police officer or funeral director sees a bullet or knife wound or sign of injury, they will call it to the medical examiner’s attention, which “happens, but rarely,” Dr. Baden said.
“A family in the United States has an absolute right not to have an autopsy under these circumstances unless there is enough suspicious reason for a medical examiner to intervene, but that did not happen in the jurisdiction where Justice Scalia died,” said Dr. Baden, who is also a former chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police and now has a private forensic pathology practice.
More than 90 percent of deaths in the United States are from natural causes and do not become medical examiner cases, Dr. Baden said.
Most sudden deaths result from a fatal heart rhythm that develops in ventricles (the heart’s lower chambers) damaged by atherosclerosis. In recent years, doctors have become increasingly convinced that many sudden deaths are not so sudden but come after warning signs or symptoms that may be overlooked in the days just before death.
Justice Scalia, a tennis player, went to his doctor on the Wednesday and Thursday before his death for a shoulder injury, according to The Associated Press. Pain in a shoulder can be heart-related. The A.P. reported that Justice Scalia had an M.R.I. of his shoulder and was told that the problem was from rotator cuff damage. Because Justice Scalia was too weak to endure surgery, his doctor advised rehabilitation.
A relatively small number of autopsies are performed in Texas because of a lack of forensic pathologists. “We do not have enough to do the cases we should do,” Dr. Di Maio said, explaining that about 500 forensic pathologists are practicing in the United States and that an estimated 1,500 are needed in the country. He said that in areas where there were no medical examiners, particularly in rural areas, certifying a death was a secondary job for a justice of the peace.
Without an autopsy, there is no way to know the specific cause of Justice Scalia’s death. Among the possibilities are a heart attack and a stroke or pulmonary embolus. Justice Scalia recently returned from travel to Asia. One problem that sometimes occurs after long airplane flights is pulmonary embolus, a formation of a blood clot in a leg from which a piece breaks off and travels in the blood to the lungs to cause sudden death.
In the absence of a full autopsy, Dr. Baden said, officials could obtain critical information even from an embalmed body by inserting a needle into the heart or a tube into the bladder to perform toxicology tests on blood and urine for evidence of toxins. Sophisticated testing could distinguish drugs and chemicals from those in embalming fluid. It is not known if officials performed such tests in Justice Scalia’s case.
Although Justice Scalia’s body could have appeared relaxed and asleep without showing any external signs if he had been poisoned, a natural cause is the most plausible explanation for his death, Dr. Baden said.
Officials in Washington have said little about the circumstances of Justice Scalia’s death. To tamp down rumors and speculation, officials at the United States Marshals Service on Friday provided the first timeline of their role in Texas. Federal marshals provide protection for justices on some of their out-of-town trips, but Justice Scalia declined it for the Texas hunting resort. Wade Drew, a spokesman for the Marshals Service, said a deputy marshal from western Texas arrived at the ranch about 2:30 p.m. on Feb. 13, after the body had been found. At least three Marshals Service employees guarded the body as it was taken to a funeral home in Texas and then returned to Washington.
“Our folks never indicated that anything seemed amiss or unusual, but that wasn’t our role,” he said. “We weren’t there to make any determination like that, so I’m not going to be drawn into that.”
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· · · ·
As police and soldiers, the Kadyrovtsy have proven themselves effective against the Islamist insurgency that the Chechen separatist movement mutated into, effectively wiping out the rebellion and pushing its remnants into neighbouring republics.
But human rights groups have accused security forces controlled by Mr Kadyrov of resorting to disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial executions, and the collective punishment of suspects’ extended families in their fight with Islamist insurgents.
And Mr Kadyrov’s security forces have also been directly or indirectly linked to a string of murders of political rivals, human rights activists, or troublesome journalists.
“Frankly, it’s hard to find cases of clear cut evidence of Mr Kadyrov’s personal involvement, but it does seem like various people who appear to be inconvenient to Mr Kadyrov have a tendency to die a violent death,” said Tanya Lokshina, a Chechnya expert at Human Rights Watch in Moscow.
Such inconvenient characters include Anna Politkovsksya, a campaigning journalist who bitterly criticised both Mr Kadyrov and Mr Putin, and who was murdered in Moscow in 2006, and Natalia Estemirova, a member of the board of the Memorial human rights organisation, was murdered after being abducted from her home in Grozny in July 2009.
Colleagues believe Mrs Estemirova was probably targeted by security forces controlled by Mr Kadyrov because of several investigations she was working on, including one involving the extra-judicial execution of a suspected insurgent sympathiser.
Other cases include a former bodyguard gunned down in Vienna after accusing Mr Kadyrov of torture, and Ruslan and Sulim Yamadayev, rivals of Mr Kadyrov who were murdered in Moscow and Dubai respectively.
No hard evidence links Mr Kadyrov personally to any of these murders, and he has strongly denied complicity in any such crimes.
Mr Aliev, the advisor, dismissed the suggestion that circumstantial evidence leads to his boss. “When such allegations are made it is by people who are trying to draw attention to themselves,” he said.
За двое суток прекращены в боевые действия в н.п. ДЖАВАЛИК (провинция ХОМС) и н.п. ГНАЙМИЯ, ЛАУЛЯТ и БОРДЖ ИСЛАМ (провинция ЛАТАКИЯ).
Russian and Syrian warplanes and artillery pounded Islamic State positions near Aleppo on Wednesday, a group monitoring the conflict said, trying to regain access to a strategic road whose fall to the militant group set back their allied military effort days before a truce is to take effect.
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