Global Guerrillas

Israel, Iran and the Poor Man's Cruise Missile

It's hard not to spend time thinking about Iran and Israel given all of the current build up on this.  Here's another installment:

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One of the Stratfor research "findings" (culled from the Wikileaks stockpile) is that Israel claimed its upcoming strike on Iran would be "catastrophic enough" to cause a regime change.  This claim was made both to dissuade Iran from going forward with its program, physically eliminating their ability to move forward with the program, and persuade the US to act instead of Israel.

Running through all of the potential scenarios, only one emerges that makes sense.  

A strike on Iranian oil facilities.  A strike so devastating that it disrupts all of its oil production, currently at 4 million barrels a day.

The logic of this is pretty clear:  any strike on facilities wouldn't have a high likelihood of failure.  At most, it would only delay the program by months.   Further, politically, there may not be a possibility for the second, third and fourth strikes necessary to keep kicking the ball down the road.

The strike that can do it one go is one that causes a massive economic failure that both a) creates the chance of regime change, or b) at a minimum starves the program of the copious amounts of funding it needs to keep going (it's very expensive to move forward) for many years into the future.

The only way to do that, given Israel's capabilities, is a strike on Iranian oil facilities.  To knock them out of production for a year or more.  The loss of its 4 m barrels of production.  

How to do that?  Drones. 

My thinking:  lots and lots of ship and air launched drones.  Drones that you can make in secret, easy to transport/launch, are inexpensive enough build in bulk, and extremely accurate.  Likely, stripped down Harops.  

Why are drones siginficant here?  Israeli aircraft can't reach Iran w/o dangerous overflights, tankers, and light payloads.  Once there, they wouldn't be able to do much.  Cyberwarfare? Perhaps a little.  That's overhyped.  

The reality is that the Iranian oil operation is big.  It's target rich.  To hit everything you would need to hit, from offshore to onshore, would require hundreds and hundreds of strikes.  The only way to do that is to use drones as a poor man's cruise missile fired from offshore transports (from just outside Persian Gulf). 

If this actually occurs, we are going to see drone development go into afterburner.

The Fall of Stratfor

There's a research company called Stratfor.  It markets itself as a private intelligence company and sells its research to corporate and financial clients worldwide.  The firm hires lots of very junior analysts (it's not able to recruit people with gov't experience at the pay levels and status they offer) and trains them internally.

Recently, Anonymous hacked Stratfor's e-mail database.  It is now in the process of publishing those e-mails through Wikileaks (which is proving to many, yet again, to be the future of global journalism).  Those e-mails are doing massive damage to:

• its reputation (from it can't protect itself to the details of its research/sausage making process)
• its sources (many of whom are being outed and the corruption used to recruit them), and
• its customers (many of whom are being exposed). 

I suspect that it's very possible the firm will lose a huge percentage of its business, some sources will be killed/fired/prosecuted, and some of the senior folks at Stratfor may even do a perp walk.  Why did it fail so hard?

Vanity.

This vanity evidenced itself in three ways:

• It saw itself as a CIA or NSA without the money, legal protections, or talent required to operate at that level.  This also meant the firm adopted practices of corrupting sources with bribes, sex/booze, and blackmail.  
• Promoted the CEO as the company's only visionary.  The rest of its analysts are kept  in the shadows of his heroic presence (this doesn't allow the firm to keep, attract and grow great talent).  This also likely led to the diminishment of information technology talent in the firm (it was likely underfunded and understaffed), hence the scale of the leak.  It also meant that there weren't any people senior enough to push back against the CEO's hubris.  
• It sought out shady sources of revenue.  It started an investment fund with Goldman Sachs alum to exploit some of its insider info.  

That a Stratfor, as a private CIA, could grow unmolested for so long is yet another sign that nation-state as we know it is in decline.  It's also a good and public warning to the firms that see themselves in this role that they should keep a much lower profile and base themselves in a permissive environment.  

Oil Disruption is Zooming and Global Panic Awaits

Oil is up to $110 and it is on a roll.

The last time oil went in this direction, it caused a slowing in the global economy that led to a global financial panic.   

What's causing it?  Peak oil, Chinese growth and lots of potential oil disruption.  Pretty much the same factors that caused it last time.

The pipeline disruption is a little different this time.

Israel

The headline player is Iran due to its nuclear program.  But Iran isn't actually disrupting the production system, they are merely making threats.  

If you unwind this a bit, it's pretty clear that the countries actually sending shockwaves of fear through the markets are Israel and the US.  However, of the partners in this relationship, Israel is in the drivers seat.  They are calling the shots on the timing of an attack on Iran and they will take the world along for a ride.  

The funny thing, to set this entire disruption event in motion, the Israeli attack on Iran doesn't have to be that big.  It just needs to be public and able blow something up.

NOTE:  IF you start seeing people with strong connections to the Israeli government buying up oil futures contracts for the "Widows and Orphans fund", start buying like crazy.

Nigeria

Nigeria's MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) is back for the first time since the 2009 amnesty-payoff.  The government recently decided to stop the big (although small $$ compared to the amount top gov't and corporate players in the country are paying themselves) payments to MEND guerrillas and they have resumed operations.  

They are making attacks again on foreign oil company pipelines.  Last time they were able to hit nearly 1 m barrels a day of disruption.  We'll see if they can hit that level again.  

Another factor is oil theft.  Bunkering on the pipelines of Shell and other foreign oil firms operating in the Delta is reaching a new level of dynamism.   The number of bunkering valves inserted into company pipelines is up to 4 a kilometer!  Lots of money is being made at the grass roots level.

Global Heart Attack

This is shaping up to be an amazingly violent global heart attack.  Another in a long line, with more yet to come.  Worse, everytime it happens, we get weaker and the global elites get stronger.   We still have the 16% unemployment due to the last one while the fortunes of the global 0.001% zoomed.

You should be looking for a long term solution.  Something that will allow you to get out of a global system in a flat spin.  

What is that solution?  A Resilient Community. If you don't know what that means, read something I wrote today called, "What is a Resilient Community?" These communities have the potential to provide you a much better quality of life in a decade than you have today, across nearly every measure.  

So don't wait. Start small.  Get smart.  Join our online community on ResilientCommunities.com by signing up for the free newsletter.   You might even be able to find other people there you would be interested in starting a community with.

You can also join us on Facebook. 

We're on the journey to make this happen before depression sets in.    Let's roll.

Drone Hype vs. Drone Reality

Drone + Fireworks + Hydrogen Balloon. Looks like fun.  But it's pure hype.

You can expect to see lots of DIY efforts to combine drones with other weapons.  Many of those efforst will be showing up on YouTube soon.

Here's something more interesing that's in line with the tech curve on drones:

A helicopter drone was recently used in an attempt to smuggle heroin into a Russian prison.  Four Roma suspects, 700 g of heroin, and the drone were siezed by police.

It was planned that the container with the drug will be suspended from the helicopter on a rope and equipped with a flashlight to make it easier to track. The device was supposed to hang over the territory of prison so that the container was next to the window chamber, which was the organizer of the delivery.

LINKS: February 20, 2012 Drones. DIY bio. China. Surveillance.

Some random items of interest:  

• Doing Biotech from my Bedroom.   Lots of very smart entrepreneurs are trying to start the next bio company from their bedroom biolab (as in: start-up + garage).  
• How company's learn your secrets.    Modern government's use this technique too (but with much less precision).   They use commercial data to find the "signatures"  of anti-gov't activists and security threats.   Automated Stasi.    
• GG friend Zenpundit asks some great questions about drones and privacy.  
• The Chinese are converting patrol boats (that were built to be manned) into drones for mine sweeping duties.
• Here's a simple cell phone hack that lets hackers track your exact location on GSM systems.  
• Judge:  Americans must decrypt files upon gov't request (5th Ammendment doesn't apply).  

Print Your Own Drone: Free Designs and Tools

Here's an interesting twist on building your own drone:  A drone you can print it using tools that you own (or your neighbor owns).

Here's an example of a guy that built his own drone by printing many of the parts.  It's a great example of maker tech, drones, tinkering networks, leveraging the network, etc. in one neat package.  

Introducing the Vampire (from Peter in Sweden):

Peter designed the Vampire using Google Sketchup.  

If you haven't heard of that program before, it's 3D modeling software.  If you have an engineering bone in your body, get it.  

Peter than posted his designs to Thingverse for anybody to download.  

He then printed out the parts using his Ultimaker 3D printer.  

Peter provides more detail in this instructional video:

  

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PS, here are some recent articles on resilient community.com you might enjoy:

• Avoid Social Breakdowns.  
• A 40% cut in Social Security...

Make sure you sign up for the e-mail alert. I'm going to put stuff in the newsletter I've never talked about before.

Printing Drones by the Sheet (or how we get to tens of billions of drones by 2020)

Pratheev Sreetharan on the old way of making micro-drones:  "You'd take a very fine tungsten wire and dip it in a little bit of superglue.  Then, with that tiny ball of glue, you'd go in under a microscope like an arthroscopic surgeon and try to stick it in the right place."

The FAA currently estimates that there will be 30,000 drones licensed to operate in US skies by 2020.  It's a misleading estimate.  

Why?  

It only counts large, professional drones (and even that estimate is low).  It doesn't count all of the small/micro drones operating below ~400ft and at slower airspeeds.   How many micro-drones will there be by 2020?

Tens of millions (tens of billions if there is warfare or repression driving it  -- and given the problems we are facing, there will be) and they will look something like this (depicted:  The Mobee):

How do we get to that number?

Simple.  You print them by the sheet.

Here's the latest step in that development.  The microrobotics team at Harvard discovered a new manufacturing process that allowed them to go from

• assembling drones by hand a month ago with an 85% error rate to 
• manufacturing them by the sheet with nearly zero defects/failures in assembly.

Think about that for a second.

Modern tools for rapid prototyping are so precise (< 5 microns of error across the entire sheet), cheap (that a small drone lab can access them), and fast (design it on the computer lead straight to manufacturing) that nearly everyone can do this (or will be soon).  

Some more detail

One of the manufacturing breakthroughs was the use of  folding techniques (ala origami and children's pop up books) and hinges to cleanly assemble a 3D shape from a 2D sheet.  Very slick.  

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>>> Hey, I'm going to be putting up some info on drone defense soon. Make sure you subscribe to the Resilient Communities newsletter (basic is free) to get it.

LINKS: February 15, 2012 Drones and Oil

After a long hiatus, links are back.  Decided to add a bit more commentary to them.  

Here are your random items of interest:

• Ehrhardt, South Carolina.  The first drone casualty in the US.  An activist group (from Shark -- SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness) brought a drone to the Broxton Bridge Plantation to document a live pigeon shoot.  Given the potential of adverse publicity (both to the plantation and the participants), the pigeon shoot was cancelled.  The activists decided to launch the drone anyway.  When it gained altitude, it was shot down by some people hidden in the tree line (likely hunters disgruntled by the cancellation).  $200-300 damage was done to the drone.  Police were called.  
  
  
• Disruption + Peak oil = extreme leverage.  The Economist has an interesting bit of analysis on how oil/gas prices have impacted the US economy over the last 5 years.  They found that summer spikes in gasoline prices have tanked the US economy in every year since 2008-2011.   See inset.  
  
  Three things worth noting here.  
  a) This looks like a peak oil dynamic.  Oil production is now steady state.  The prices increases until if forces a decrease in economic activity, which drive prices down again (but not as far as it was).  
  b) Systems Disruption works.  In a constrained market, even a little bit of oil disruption can have a big impact.  MENDs attacks on Shell's facilities in 2008 led to a loss of 1 m barrels of production and drove prices to new highs, which forced an economic retreat that ignited the credit crisis.
  c) The Economist's analyst concluded that prices over $3 will be less likely to tank the economy in the future.  That's not a question.   Here's an improvement on that analysis:  Consider $3 as the new normal and that prices over $4 at the pump will drive the economy into reteat.
• A simple first step towards resilience:  Think Lasagna.  (BTW, make sure you sign up for the e-mail delivery option, I don't want you to miss the report I'm cooking up).
• Alternet.  10 Rules for Radicals.  Look at it as a sign that open source insurgency are going mainstream.  I'm currently working on refining my Robb's Rules for Open Movements.  Still cooking it, but it's pretty close.  Gave a presentation on it in DC last week and the audience really loved it.  Will put it out as an inexpensive e-book (to keep me writing/researching rather than building companies).  
• BBC takes a tour of Genspace.  One of the first community bio-hacking spaces.  They have amazing digs in Brooklyn.  

Transcript of Congressional Testimony for the National Drone Association

Jordan, a GG reader, sent me this.  It's certainly not going to happen this way, but I thought it was funny enough to share w/some edits. 

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Transcript of Written Testimony by Peter Piper

Executive Director of NDA's ILA, before the House Judiciary Committee

April 25, 2024, submitted for Congressional record:

Mr. Chairman. My name is Peter Piper.  I am Executive Director of the National Drone Association's Institute for Legislative Action.

We directly represent the views of over 3.3- million voters, and indirectly represent the views of perhaps 20 times that many Americans who peaceably own and use armed drones. The citizens who share our passion reside in every state in the Union. We are doctors, lawyers, teachers, farmers, construction workers, nurses, mechanics, housewives... we are men and women from across every professional, social, and political spectrum.

Above all, we are peaceable people. There is one thing we are not. We are not criminals. Our wish to pursue our individual right to own and bear small arms has nothing to do with criminal violence. Our wish to fight any further encroachment on our rights has nothing to do with crime and criminals. With what this Congress is proposing -- a prohibition on armed drone ownership -- we are angry.

Build yourself a Drone NOW (before they become illegal)

Follow me on Twitter.

Francis Fukuyama isn't your standard tech guy.  He's a policy guy at Stanford that writes hefty books on very philosophical topics.  That's why his detailed blog post on his efforts to build a surveillance drone are so cool.  Here's a little video of the test of his drone outside of his office at Stanford.  

Francis makes two simple observations that are worth repeating.  Here's the first one:

"I don’t have to spell out the implications of this.  I want to have my drone before the government makes them illegal."

 

The Inevitable Ban on Drone Tech

I agree with Francis, it's pretty clear that drones will become illegal sooner than later.  Let me run through a scenario for you.  I'm going to have some fun with it:

The ban will likely start by closing down the drone flight amateur loophole -- under 400ft, line of site, away from built up areas (which Francis obviously violated with his test flight).  You will need a license to fly even small drones.  Commercial licenses will be very restrictive (right now it's illegal to take pictures from a drone for commercial purposes).

However, that's not going to last.  There will be too many violations as people build and use drones without regard to the legal restrictions.  It will then be made illegal to own a drone w/o a very restrictive license.  

Of course, that won't last long either.  People will continue to build and use them using generic parts.  This technology will prove way to useful and too easy to access.  At that point, like we have seen recently with efforts to put limits on general purpose computing (ACTA, SOPA, etc.), we are going to see the following:

1. Bans on general purpose robotic technology from hardware to software.
2. Controls on general purpose fabrication technology (since parts can be made with these technologies).  There will be lots of support from commercial patent and copyright holders for government bans on 3D fabrication.
3. Controls on people that know how to build drones.  Dangerous people must be tracked and monitored (I had a physics teacher once who designed nuclear bombs, he couldn't travel more than 50 miles w/o government authorization -- it would be much easier to do that for many more people now using modern tech).

Now, all of these steps will accelerate to the end point if a single terrorist incident is based on drone tech.

So, what should you do?

Build yourself a drone.  Before they are made illegal.  

Why?  

One big reason is that drones/bots make the emergence of police states (as my tech thriller post on this topic shows) more likely since they allow a very small number of people to automate their control over a great many people.  So, in order to ensure the future doesn't careen in that direction, we should democratize the technology as a counter-weight.  

The second observation Francis makes?  

"One somewhat worrying thing is that virtually all of this [drone] equipment comes from China or Taiwan."

I actually think this is a good thing.  It will slow down efforts to ban them.

So, follow the trail blazed by Francis and build yourself a drone.  If only to understand more about them. Before the government makes them illegal.

Why The Global System is Killing Trust

Trust is an essential building block of any economic and social system.  Systems that attempt to operate without it inevitably fail.  A loss of trust typically preceeds a collapse in legitimacy.  

That's our future.  Here's why:

Let's start with a philosopher "king" of crypt0-security, Bruce Schneier.  He has a new book out called "Liars and Outliers."  The book is all about the mechanisms for building trust.  There are four mechanisms:

• moral controls,
• reputational pressure (shame),
• institutional pressure (legal system), and
• security controls (encryption, locks, etc.).  

He contends (rightly) that in the modern world, we don't typically make/have the personal relationships required to build moral and reputational trust.  We typically make impersonal relationships when we interact with a global economic system (you buy stuff made by people you don't know).  As a result, we rely up on institutional (legal compliance) and security (to guard against bad behavior) to provide the level of trust necessary to make the global economy work.

There are two massive problems with that.  

Legal compliance is increasingly a farce.  Take the mortgage settlement the US government and the financial industry reached over rampant fraud in mortgage lending.  I wrote a bit more about it on the Resilient Community blog if you want more detail.   What does this mean?  That even at the national level in a "developed country" it is impossible to use legal means to enforce trustworthiness (let's not even talk about compliance at the global level).  It's doesn't work anymore.  It's just too easy for anybody with financial means, to buy off country's legal system for pennies on the dollar (to the damage caused).  The compliance system is broken.

So, that leaves us with security as the only way to prevent bad actors from running away with the global system.  This leads me to a great presentation I heard yesterday by Dan Geer.   He's another philosopher "king" of crypto-security (but for the CIA).  Very smart guy.   He made a convincing case that security is scaling slower than data, bandwidth, node, and user growth.  It is falling behind and will continue to fall behind as the global system grows.  

Upshot:  it's already nearly impossible to secure big organizations. Every Fortune 500 company has and will continue to compromised. The government's systems are already a sieve.  There's almost nothing that can be done about it and it will get increasingly worse. Forget about securing a single person trying to connect to the global system.  They are just sheep ready for slaughter.

So, what happens now?

The global system will continue to grow.  Trust will continue to leak as attempts at compliance and security fail to work effectively.  The economic depression we have already started gets worse and worse and worse.  Disorder erupts.  It grows....

Is there a solution?  An alternative form of social order that can provide a scalable global solution?

Yes.  Resilient communities.  Resilient communities rescale your life down to a rational level.  They make personal relationships with the people that economically interact with you possible (again).   

Hey, let the rest of the world sink into the squalor of a trust free world.   It will make that system easier to trounce in head to head competition for people.

Robb's 27 Rules for Global Guerrillas

Just finished preparing my presentation on the 27 rules for Global Guerrillas that I'm giving tomorrow morning (hopefully first slot) at the Suits and Spooks Anti-Conference.  

It's going to be a very simple presentation.  How to think like a Global Guerrilla (GG) and win conflicts, whether violent or non-violent, in the 21st Century.  

Hopefully, the takeaway is that seed of an intuitive feel for how to think like a GG.  Because, while the specifics may change, the intuition or feel for what's right or wrong will remain.  

Regardless, I'm hoping to get some great feedback from some smart people that will allow me to refine the list of rules.

 

BigTwitter is Here

Simple equation:

 

A national security system that is mostly bloat and mission creep instead of real, honest to goodness, security.

+

Badly design social media monitoring tools that are sifting through billions of messages a day?

=

FAILURE

 

Here's a simple example.  A young British guy makes a tweet to his friends:

Easy to discern the tweet is about hard drinking/partying.

He flies to Los Angeles with a friend.  He is promptly arrested.  Held in cuffs/cell for 12 hours and deported.  

Why?  The Department of Homeland Security flagged his tweet  as a possible threat to the US.

Huh?  

Automated security at its finest. 

Add lethal drones that kill people due to "terrorist" signature behaviors and we have a problem Houston.

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New post at Resilient Communities.com: Your Very Own Cake Boss

Mr. Drone and the $199 CombatPilot

IF there is anyone on this earth that has a claim to the title of Mr. Drone, it's Chris Anderson (the only other contender is one of my favorite writers/biologists: E.O. Wilson).  

This is one of those increasingly common cases where a person's hobby (expert amateur) becomes much more important than the work they get paid for (which in most cases is typically dull and fits within the category of: we do what we must so we can do what we want...).  

In contrast, his love for drone technology in combination with his prodigious skills as a media front man, has radically accelerated the emergence and the democratization of autonomous drone technology.

For example: The ArduPlane.  A conversion kit that, in the language of the promotion, can:

Convert any RC airplane into a fully-autonomous UAV!

Or the ArduCopter, ArduRover...

For all of that, one of the coolest projects he's helping along is the ArduPilotMega.  

What is it?  It's a fully functional Universal DronePilot.  It has a triple core autopilot.  A complete motion sensor package that includes precision pressure, GPS, magnetometer, etc.  2 way telemetry.  Mission planning system.  Flash data storage.  And best of all for you scriptkiddies out there: it will soon include Python for acrobatic/maneuver programming.    

vs.

Will we see something like BattleSwarms soon?

Here's a bit of a break from the whack you in the face gloom of the last couple of posts.  

The idea behind this post?  One of the best ways to avoid some of the bad futures drones could enable would be to democratize the knowledge for building them.

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About a decade ago, there was an interesting game show on Comedy Central called Battlebots. It featured fights between robots (with Bill Nye as the technical expert).  It was an early form of a now successful genre:  NerdTV. 

Background

First, some background.  Here's more detail on the rules/classes:

• Lightweight – 60 pounds (27 kilograms)
• Middleweight – 120 pounds (54 kilograms) 
• Heavyweight – 220 pounds (100 kilograms) 
• Superheavyweight – 340 pounds (154 kilograms) 

'Walking' robots ('StompBots') propelled by means other than wheels were initially given a 50% weight bonus. The rules changed following the victory of a heavyweight StompBot (Son of Whyachi) at BattleBots 3.0. For BattleBots 4.0 and beyond only a 20% weight bonus was given to walkers and the technical rules specified that walking mechanisms not use cam operated walking mechanisms as they were functionally too similar to wheel operation. Since the rules change, walking robots have entered the competition, but none have achieved any success beyond preliminary rounds.

Here's a clip (there are lots of these fights archived on YouTube) of two contenders:

The fights on BattleBots (and the UK's Robot Wars) had the feel of the types of competitions you find in college engineering schools (with a little wrestling schtick thrown in).  An engineering task is set.  Two teams of engineering students build a contraption to accomplish the task.  The proving ground is chosen.  The teams battle for the best grade.  In the case of this show, the victor was the only bot still operation at the end of the time period (if both are, the victory is awarded on points).

BattleDrones

What if there was an updated version of BattleBots called "BattleSwarms."  It wouldn't be a simple head to a head competition, but something that combined serious engineering prowess and combat.

• Competition.   Leveraging the success of engineering competitions like the X-Prize (which led to a private space industry) and the DARPA Grand Challenge which led to autonomous, self-navigating vehicles (and armored supply carriers for warfare).
• Controlled combat.   Prototypes locked into a life or death struggle.  Perfect for NerdTV.
• Open source innovation.  All of the designs and prototypes details are shared after each major competition.  This in turn leads to thousands of new applications and much faster rates of innovation.

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Of course.  You can always find me on Twitter for more commentary.

Added some good info on my Resilient Communities site.  Here's one on an Investment more precious than Gold.

 

I'll be speaking at the Suits and Spooks Conference on 8 February

Jeff Carr's excellent Suits and Spooks conference is on the 8th of February 2012 in Rosslyn, VA.  

Definitely worth attending.

I've been booked to speak there for months.  Should  be the first speaker for the day.  

This should be my LAST speaking (and in person consulting) gig for a long, long while.  Focusing more of my time on original research and writing.   Now that I've got my health back, I'm going to make the most of the uptime available.

What's the topic of the presentation?  I'm going to present on the 27 rules of open source warfare (the structure of my new book).  It suspect this book is going to be essential reading for anybody concerned about where things are headed re: globalization, drones, etc.

Drone Swarms are Here: 1 Minute to Midnight?

The algorithms that enable drone swarms is advancing EXTREMELY quickly.  In the next couple of years, the number of advances in technology, deployments, use cases, and awareness of drones will be intense.  In 5 years, they will be part of every day life.  You will see them everywhere.

Not just one or two drones.  SWARMS of drones.   Tens.  Hundreds.  Thousands.  Millions (potentially if the cost per unit is small enough)?  

How soon will we see that.  It's already here.

Here's a video depicting experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics.  It was posted today:

If you want to learn more about how swarming works as a method of attack, here's an article I wrote about it seven years ago.  Benefits of swarming attacks include: 

• It cuts the enemy target off from supply and communications.
• It adversely impacts the morale of the target.
• It makes a coordinated defense extremely difficult (resource allocation is intensely difficult).
• It radically increases the potential of surprise

Here's your homework.  Think about the swarming tech you see above in the context of the following:

• Drones and US Internal Security (as in: conventional weapons really don't matter).
• Drones in the US of A. Recent example of drones were used in a manhunt (just to prove it could be done).
• How a small group of global plutocrats can use software to control the world (Bots and Drones). 

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Follow me on Twitter for more commentary on current news/trends.

Also, check out my Resilient Communities site.  It's a site dedicated to figuring out how to not only survive the coming decades but how to thrive regardless of how bad it gets.

 

Journal: Smart Bullets

Sandia labs has announced it has built a smart bullet.  It's a particularly nice addition to a micro drone system that can ID targets (with drones, ammo payload matters quite a bit).

This bullet can make small corrections using fins + a computer control system (it makes 30 corrections per second).    The caliber will get smaller and the intelligence/correction capacity will increase.  Saw variants of this tech as far back as a decade ago.  Check for patents and more detail on this tech.  If you find them, post it.

You are going to see lots of old weapons tech get a new life as smarts are added.  It might be breakable, but the lethality of someone with smart personal weapons could should eventually be 100x someone without it.  

The world is changing.  Quickly.