Are Robot Armies In Our Future?

Why is NATO is focused on AI Robots and Drone Technology?

Why NATO is focused on AI Robots and Drone Technology

NATO has supplied Ukraine with jammers to defend against Russian drone attacks, the alliance's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in Brussels. Russia's Lancet-3 drones have emerged as the most effective weapon to destroy NATO-supplied artillery in Ukraine. Both NATO and Russia are seeking Drones and Africans to fight their wars and here is why. Just under half of the military equipment in Africa is supplied by Russia. Not only does Russia have strong historical ties from when it armed Nations like Burkina Faso and Uganda it like other European nations is severely low in young men and looking at a catastrophic birth rate decline continuing far into the future

According to writer Stefan Soesanto of the NATO review Europe needs more European soldiers. In an article entitled “Europe needs less soldiers – but more European ones”, he states “A holistic approach to reform the Alliance would entail first and foremost the reconfiguration of NATO’s deployment strategy within Europe itself. In the same manner as the right to free movement and residence has strengthened European citizenry and the Union’s political integration, NATO needs to enhance national diversity among the armies of its member states and increase military dependencies to pivot away from a strategy based on defending its parts, towards a strategy of defending the whole.

The numbers speak for themselves. Some 25 percent of NATO members do not have an air force, 30 per cent have no naval force or maintain a navy with less than 600 sailors, and 50 per cent are fielding an active army of less than 20,000 soldiers. NATO is an Alliance of unequals, but it does not have to be if they bring in more people of the black yellow and brown persuasion. This is completely unacceptable for most European nations that have a strong fear they are losing their cultural identity due to immigration and the so-called browning of Europe so the other way would be to denationalize the military. Thus creating European soldiers, and in the long-run hopefully full-fledged European citizens, is the tactical way forward to build sustainable structures of cooperation, strengthen the foundations of the Alliance, and interweave European security interests across the entire continent.

Only when the European Allies are heavily invested in each other’s territorial defense, while maintaining national sovereignty and budget authority, will their parliaments and citizens be inclined to live up to NATO security commitments and the continuous pursuit of Alliance cohesion.

But European nations dislike this option as well so the only thing left is mechanizing the military!

One of America's most sophisticated weapons in the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the unmanned drone, was successfully penetrated by insurgents using software available on the internet for $26.

Drone tech is one of the most important tools for the military because a ground war is not feasible for those of European descent who are at below replacement level births and if their were a war which required boots on the ground for most European countries it would only speed up their demographic decline which has been reported as a global phenomena that was first noted in the 70’s! Insurgents in Iraq intercepted live video feeds from the drones being relayed back to a US controller and revealing potential targets. A US official said the flaw was identified and fixed in 12 months. The problem only came to light after the US found many hours' worth of videotaped recordings on militant laptops.

In 2022 Police departments in some areas of the country began using drones and robots that are armed for more than bomb retrieval and removal. drones have become one of the most important parts of the US armory. Their use has increased tenfold over the past 15 years. They are able to hover over suspect sites and launch missiles against alleged militants.

The use of the drones in Pakistan was particularly controversial, in part because some Pakistanis saw it as US infringement of the country's sovereignty, but also because civilians are often hit too.The backlash of that use was the mass immigration of Pakistanis to Europe due directly to the killing of civilians by drone attacks. The potential problem with the hacking tor the military was that insurgents, if they knew the locations being targeted, would be able to take evasive action. In fact many nations that cannot afford missiles and tanks can afford to train computer hackers as a defense strategy against drone incursions. The potential impacts of drone-based cyber attacks can range from data theft and disruption of services to physical damage or injury. Malicious actors may use drones to gain access to sensitive data or disrupt operations by interfering with communications or navigation systems.

A US source with knowledge of the program today confirmed the report that many third world nations are prepared for drone attacks, first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, but said that the quality of the pictures seen by the insurgents would have been of limited value. The pictures would have been fuzzy, making it nearly impossible to determine the location of a target in the deserts or mountains, the source said. There are several different ways a drone can be hacked. Once the drone has been located, a hacker can potentially take control of the drone, or downlink video or other images which the drone is broadcasting to its base station. Hacking a drone isn't technically very difficult, and many drone operators leave their drones wide open to attack.

GPS spoofing for example, feeds the drone false GPS coordinates. The drone thinks it is following its original flight pattern but in fact is being led to a different location. A hacker out for fun might simply want to crash a drone deliberately, but a drone could also be used to crash into a car, a person, or even another drone. It could also be instructed to land near the hacker so that it can be stolen, together with its payload - which might, for instance, include a drone-mounted camera and the images stored on its memory card.

Drones can be hacked from as much as a mile away. Hijacking the command and control signal between the operator and the drone can deliver full control of the drone and its systems to the hacker. The radio signal is often unencrypted, making it easy to decode with a packet analyzer (or 'sniffer'), so hacking a drone signal isn't technically demanding. The signal might also simply be jammed, leaving the drone with no way to navigate itself.

Security researcher Samy Kamkar's Skyjack experiment in drone hacking went further, using a hijacked drone with a Raspberry Pi payload to hijack multiple other drones, creating a swarm under the hacker's control. Hacking a drone with another drone vastly expands the potential of the threat - it could be compared to the way botnets operate to perform DDOS attacks — taking over vast numbers of individual computers and devices.

Downlink threats allow a hacker to intercept data being transmitted from the drone to a base station. If video, for instance, is being broadcast from the drone to the controller, as is the case with First Person View (FPV) systems, it's vulnerable. That's particularly the case if the data is unencrypted (which is often the case with consumer systems).

The US air force was responsible for drones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the CIA for those in Pakistan. The CIA video feeds are reported to have been encrypted, while some of the air forces ones were not. They have also developed strategies combining use of drones with electromagnetic pulse weaponry and sound as well as microwave weapons for crowd control. The Pentagon had been aware of the problem of potential hacking for many years, but had assumed the insurgents would not have the technical knowledge to intercept the feeds. Nowadays it is apparent every kid with a cell phone could potentially disable a drone. Air force Lieutenant General David Deptula, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, said: "Any time you have a system that broadcasts information using omnidirectional signals, those are subject to listening and exploitation. One of the ways we deal with that is encrypting signals."When asked about the problem, a Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wright, indicated that it had been addressed. He said: "The department of defense constantly evaluates and seeks to improve the performance and security of our various ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] systems. As we identify shortfalls, we correct them as part of a continuous process of seeking to improve capabilities and security."

One defense official, however, said that upgrading the encryption in the drones would be a long process because hundreds of the unmanned drones are in use, along with thousands of ground stations. The first the US apparently knew about the interception was a decade ago, when video feeds from a drone were found on the laptop of a Shia militant in Iraq who was allegedly backed by Iran. The US and Britain both accused Tehran for years of interfering in Iraq. More laptops were found in the summer that suggested that the insurgents shared the video feeds.

While the US hinted at the time that Iran was the culprit behind the problem, it could simply be that an Iraqi searching for a football game or other broadcast came across the signal. Traditionally, computer systems have been protected around the perimeter, both in terms of the computer network and physically. However, data has become more mobile as Wi-Fi and the Cloud make it possible to access data from anywhere. Plus, the Internet of Things, together with RFID, enable data flows between smaller devices, such as security cameras, pallet labels, and goods tags in retail stores.

Technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and RFID generally work only within a limited area, so physical access restrictions can often prevent hacking. But drones give hackers more mobility.

For instance, a small computer, such as a Raspberry Pi or ASUS Tinker Board, could be loaded onto a drone and dropped on the roof of an office building. It could then be used to carry out cyberattacks exploiting Wi-Fi, RFID or Bluetooth vulnerabilities. It could mimic a Wi-Fi network in order to steal data from tablets and smartphones, or hijack Bluetooth peripherals, such as mice and keyboards. Keylogging would enable a drone-mounted computer to steal passwords from users.