February 20 2024
Rise of the drone
1 Drones have transformed warfare
2 The West responds with AI drone swarms
3 Money for domestic semiconductor manufacturing is flowing
4 China has booby-trapped US critical infrastructure: FBI
5 OPINION Ukraine’s prospects are grim
2/20/1962 John Glenn becomes first American to orbit Earth
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1 Drones have transformed warfare
6/3/2021
Smaller militaries around the world are deploying inexpensive missile-equipped drones against armored enemies, a new battlefield tactic that proved successful last year in regional conflicts, shifting the strategic balance around Turkey and Russia. Drones built in Turkey with affordable digital technology wrecked tanks and other armored vehicles, as well as air-defense systems, of Russian protégés in battles waged in Syria, Libya and Azerbaijan. These drones point to future warfare being shaped as much by cheap but effective fighting vehicles as expensive ones with the most advanced technology. China, too, has become a leading war drone exporter to the Middle East and Africa. Iran-linked groups in Iraq and Yemen used drones to attack Saudi Arabia. At least 10 countries, from Nigeria to the United Arab Emirates, have used drones purchased from China to kill adversaries, defense analysts say.
Flying alone or in a group, these drones can surprise troops and disable poorly concealed or lightly defended armored vehicles, a job often assigned to expensive warplanes. The drones can stay quietly aloft for 24 hours, finding gaps in air-defense systems and helping target strikes by warplanes and artillery, as well as firing their own missiles.
WSJ
Iran’s drone export industry is booming
Iran’s arms industry is growing rapidly, turning the country into a large-scale exporter of low-cost, high-tech weapons whose clients are vexing the U.S. and its partners in the Middle East, Ukraine and beyond. The transformation of the industry, accelerated by Russia’s 2022 purchase of thousands of drones that altered the battlefield in Ukraine, has helped Tehran scale up its support of militia allies in Middle East conflicts that have intensified alongside Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza. One of Iran’s top arms exports, a Shahed suicide drone, designed to carry explosives and crash into its target, was used to kill three American servicemembers in Jordan in an attack by an Iraqi militia group on Jan. 28, U.S. officials said.
Iran sold about $1 billion in weapons from March 2022 to March 2023, three times as much as the previous year, Deputy Defense Minister Mahdi Farahi said in November. In a tally that omits smuggled weapons, Iran became the world’s 16th-biggest arms seller in 2022 with $123 million in exports, a jump from $20 million in 2017, when Iran was the 33rd-biggest exporter, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The U.S. is the world’s top weapons supplier: U.S. exports under the Foreign Military Sales system climbed to a record $80.9 billion in the 2023 fiscal year.
Production scaled up after Iran sold over 2,000 Shahed drones to Russia in 2022, according to security consultants to a European government. At around $20,000 each, the deliveries generated at least $40 million for Tehran, they said.
In a sign of the evolution of Iran’s drone expertise, Moscow enlisted Tehran last year to help build a Russian factory that could produce at least 6,000 drones a year, part of a $1 billion deal between the two countries, the Journal reported. The plant was expected to be operational early this year, the U.S. said in June, releasing a satellite image that it said showed the construction site. It couldn’t be determined how far those plans have progressed. The Kremlin didn’t respond to a request for comment.
WSJ
https://www.wsj.com/world/irans-rise-as-global-arms-supplier-vexes-u-s-and-its-allies-6f205083
2 The West responds with AI drone swarms
The UK is working with nations including the US to provide Ukraine with thousands of new AI-enabled drones that could swarm Russian targets simultaneously, according to people familiar with the matter. Western military planners developing the technology believe it could allow Ukraine to overwhelm certain Russian positions with the unmanned vehicles, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters. The drones could be sent to Ukraine within months, they said, while warning the timeline could slip.
Bloomberg
3 Money for domestic semiconductor manufacturing is flowing
The U.S. government is giving chip maker GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion in grants to build and expand facilities in New York and Vermont, the first major award in a program that aims to reinvigorate domestic chip production. The award from the Commerce Department kicks off what is expected to be a series of cash injections into semiconductor manufacturing projects in Arizona, Texas, New York and Ohio in the coming weeks. Chip makers Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology have all submitted applications for the government to cover a portion of the billions of dollars it costs to build cutting-edge factories.
In addition to the grant funding, the U.S. is making $1.6 billion of loans available to the company. The total potential investment in the projects would be about $12.5 billion, with the government grant and loan covering a portion of the cost. The projects are expected to create 9,000 construction jobs and 1,500 manufacturing jobs. GlobalFoundries is also agreeing to support workforce-development initiatives and extend an existing $1,000 annual child-care subsidy to construction workers.
WSJ
4 China has booby-trapped US critical infrastructure: FBI
As intelligence chiefs and policymakers gathered for this city’s annual security conference focused on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation urged them not to lose sight of another threat: China. Christopher Wray on Sunday said Beijing’s efforts to covertly plant offensive malware inside U.S. critical infrastructure networks is now at “a scale greater than we’d seen before,” an issue he has deemed a defining national security threat. Citing Volt Typhoon, the name given to the Chinese hacking network that was revealed last year to be lying dormant inside U.S. critical infrastructure, Wray said Beijing-backed actors were pre-positioning malware that could be triggered at any moment to disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure.
WSJ
5 OPINION Ukraine’s prospects are grim
As the second anniversary of the Ukraine war looms, we are staring at one of the West's greatest policy disasters. We see parallels to Germany in 1914, where everybody believed that victory would be sweet and easy, only to find that they were neither militarily, politically, economically and mentally prepared for war. After Ukraine's formidable successes at the start of the war, the west kept on overestimating itself, and underestimating the Russians. The town of Avdiivka fell over the weekend. Ukraine's army is doing extremely well given the circumstances. The average age of Ukrainian troops is 45 years. But they are lacking ammunition and supplies, and that situation won't change in the short-run. The west also overestimated the impact of economic sanctions. We suspect that one of the reasons behind this misjudgment is the ridiculous idea that the Russian economy is small: the size of Spain. In times of war, you don't want to look at the dollar value of GDP, but in terms of bang for the buck - literally. In purchasing power parity terms, Russia is larger than Germany, and China is larger than the US. We think it is time for the west and Ukraine to drop the idea of victory, and to start thinking about realistic war goals. We have some sympathy with Ivan Krastev's idea that the future of Ukraine is West German. The future of Ukraine lies on this side of a heavily-guarded border. When Angela Merkel vetoed Ukraine's accession to Nato in 2008, she argued that the country was politically too divided. The only version of Ukraine that could ever become a member of Nato would be Western Ukraine.
Eurointelligence
https://www.eurointelligence.com
2/20/1962 John Glenn becomes first American to orbit Earth
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