DTN News - IRAN DEFENSE NEWS: Iran Military Says Copying U.S. Drone

DTN News - IRAN DEFENSE NEWS: Iran Military Says Copying U.S. Drone

(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - April 23, 2012: Iran's military has started to build a copy of a U.S. surveillance drone captured last year after breaking the software encryption, Iranian media reported on Sunday.

General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace division, said engineers were in the final stages of decoding data from the Sentinel aircraft, which came down in December near the Afghan border, Mehr news agency reported.

Iran said the unmanned aircraft was shot down, but Washington disputes that and says the security systems mean Iran is unlikely to get valuable information from the Lockheed Martin Corp drone.

"The Americans should be aware to what extent we have infiltrated the plane," Fars news agency quoted Hajizadeh as saying. "Our experts have full understanding of its components and program."

Iran's military regular announces defense and engineering developments, but some analysts are skeptical as to how reliable those reports are.

U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, a member of the Armed Services Committee, voiced his own doubts.

"There's a history here of Iranian bluster, particularly now when they're on the defensive because of our economic sanctions against them," Lieberman said in a television interview.

The RQ-170 Sentinel has been widely used since 2010 in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It played a role in the raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed last year, analysts say.

An Iranian defense official said recently that Tehran has received numerous requests for information on the craft and that China and Russia have shown most interest.

The loss of the plane sparked some concerns that sophisticated technology could fall into the hands of countries developing their own unmanned planes. The main worry centers on the special coatings on the craft's surface.

http://defense-technologynews.blogspot.ca/2012/04/dtn-news-iran-defense-news-iran.html

DTN News - CHINA DEFENSE NEWS: Chinese Navy Goes Unmanned For The First Time

DTN News - CHINA DEFENSE NEWS: Chinese Navy Goes Unmanned For The First Time

(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - April 10, 2012: The Chinese military has added sea-based unmanned aircraft to its rapidly growing arsenal, with the first of those aircraft already deployed. 

The People's Liberation Navy (PLN) has begun fielding unmanned surveillance aircraft aboard its fleet of warships, according to recent news reports. 

Foreign intelligence agencies have already confirmed the existence of one Chinese-built maritime aerial drone aboard PLN ships, United Press International reported Monday. 

Other state media reports coming from Beijing claim other versions of unmanned intelligence aircraft are already under construction. 

Chinese military leaders allegedly requested information from Iran on the highly-secretive RQ-170 Sentinal drone Tehran captured from U.S. forces last December. 

Military or intelligence agencies in Beijing have also been attempting to breach Defense Department networks, in an attempt to gain more information on U.S. unmanned aircraft operations. 

That information from Iran and the Pentagon may have informed China's work on this latest- sea-worthy drone. 

Iran is also attempting to build its own fleet of aerial drones, based on what it learned from the so-called "Beast of Kandahar" aircraft, into a new surveillance aircraft of their own. 

But it's unlikely that Iranian or Chinese engineers can incorporate any of the technology from the stealthy American drone. It will likely take months, or even years, before Iran can take anything its learned from the Sentinel drone and work it into a functioning weapons system.

The new Chinese drones will likely be used to track American and foreign warships and submarines traveling in the Pacific. 

News of their existence comes as the United States prepares to shift its focus from the Middle East to Asia. 

This strategic shift, announced by President Obama in February, was driven mainly by a need to check Chinese and North Korean aggression in the region. 

Interest in unmanned technology has increased dramatically among foreign countries in recent years. Autonomous drones, operated by the Pentagon and CIA, have played a key role in ongoing U.S.-led counterterrorism operations around the world. 

Currently, U.S. defense firms lead the world in development of unmanned intelligence aircraft. But Beijing claims its new sea-worthy drone is the first step in breaking into that market.

http://defense-technologynews.blogspot.ca/2012/04/dtn-news-china-defense-news-chinese.html

DTN News - DEFENSE & INTELLIGENCE NEWS: China's Cyber Thievery Is National Policy—And Must Be Challenged

DTN News - DEFENSE & INTELLIGENCE NEWS: China's Cyber Thievery Is National Policy—And Must Be Challenged

 (NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - February 5, 2012:Only three months ago, we would have violated U.S. secrecy laws by sharing what we write here—even though, as a former director of national intelligence, secretary of homeland security, and deputy secretary of defense, we have long known it to be true. The Chinese government has a national policy of economic espionage in cyberspace. In fact, the Chinese are the world's most active and persistent practitioners of cyber espionage today.

Evidence of China's economically devastating theft of proprietary technologies and other intellectual property from U.S. companies is growing. Only in October 2011 were details declassified in a report to Congress by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive. Each of us has been speaking publicly for years about the ability of cyber terrorists to cripple our critical infrastructure, including financial networks and the power grid. Now this report finally reveals what we couldn't say before: The threat of economic cyber espionage looms even more ominously.

The report is a summation of the catastrophic impact cyber espionage could have on the U.S. economy and global competitiveness over the next decade. Evidence indicates that China intends to help build its economy by intellectual-property theft rather than by innovation and investment in research and development (two strong suits of the U.S. economy). The nature of the Chinese economy offers a powerful motive to do so.

According to 2009 estimates by the United Nations, China has a population of 1.3 billion, with 468 million (about 36% of the population) living on less than $2 a day. While Chinese poverty has declined dramatically in the last 30 years, income inequality has increased, with much greater benefits going to the relatively small portion of educated people in urban areas, where about 25% of the population lives.

The bottom line is this: China has a massive, inexpensive work force ravenous for economic growth. It is much more efficient for the Chinese to steal innovations and intellectual property—the source code of advanced economies—than to incur the cost and time of creating their own. They turn those stolen ideas directly into production, creating products faster and cheaper than the U.S. and others.

Cyberspace is an ideal medium for stealing intellectual capital. Hackers can easily penetrate systems that transfer large amounts of data, while corporations and governments have a very hard time identifying specific perpetrators.

Unfortunately, it is also difficult to estimate the economic cost of these thefts to the U.S. economy. The report to Congress calls the cost "large" and notes that this includes corporate revenues, jobs, innovation and impacts to national security. Although a rigorous assessment has not been done, we think it is safe to say that "large" easily means billions of dollars and millions of jobs.

http://defense-technologynews.blogspot.com/2012/02/dtn-news-defense-intelligence-news.html

DTN News - US DEFENCE BUDGET CUTS: More Drones But 80,000 Fewer Troops

DTN News - US DEFENCE BUDGET CUTS: More Drones But 80,000 Fewer Troops


(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - January 27, 2012: The United States is to increase its fleet of unmanned drones by nearly a third and rely more on small, specially trained ground units as part of a slimmed down military.


As part of massive cuts to its budget, the army plans to shed 80,000 soldiers over the next few years, defence secretary Leon Panetta announced yesterday.


But he added the enforced belt-tightening would be an opportunity to modernise the military, with a focus on technology and the use of agile, rapid-deployment combat teams.


The US would also be refocusing it attention towards China and the Pacific, while seeking strategic partnerships in areas in which it will be cutting its presence, such as Europe.


The rethink was prompted by the need to find $487 billion (£310bn) in spending cuts over the next decade. Mr Panetta conceded it meant slashing the number of soldiers in the army from about 570,000 to 490,000 over the next decade.


Speaking from the Pentagon, he said: “The military will be smaller and leaner. But it will be agile, flexible, rapidly deployable and technologically advanced. It will be a cutting-edge force”.


He said he refused to allow the “hollowing out” of the US’s military might, and that the new strategy would “emphasise special operation forces”.


The effectiveness of these small, dedicated units was seen in the assassination of terror chief Osama bin Laden last year and the rescue of a US aid worker and her Danish colleague from Somali pirates this week.


The envisaged refocusing on smaller rotational bases will be at the expense of larger military sites, with closures expected to take place as part of the budget cuts.


There will be more money available for technologically advanced weapons and measures to counter cyber-terrorism.


Mr Panetta did not say how many more drones would be developed under the plan, but an increase of about 30 per cent has previously been reported.


Any rise in the use of umanned aircraft is likely to be met with suspicion by those who believe that their use endangers innocent life.


Figures from the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism show CIA drones stuck Pakistan 75 times in 2011, causing up to 655 fatalities. The majority of those killed were alleged militants, but as many as 126 civilians may also have lost their lives, the figures suggest.


The shrinking of the US army was signalled earlier this month in comments made by president Barack Obama.


Outlining plans to trim the armed forces, he said the US was ”turning a page on a decade of war”, with the end of hostilities in Iraq and the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan.


http://defense-technologynews.blogspot.com/2012/01/dtn-news-us-defence-budget-cuts-more.html