U.N. Drone Inquisitor Says It's Time to End Robot War in Pakistan

After days of meeting with Pakistani officials, the United Nations official investigating Washington's global campaign of drone strikes attacked the legal and strategic basis for the robotic war in its biggest battlefield. And he raised doubts over whether Americans operating the drones can actually distinguish terrorists from average Pakistanis.

Ben Emmerson spent much of the week in Pakistan soliciting the views of senior government and elected officials about the drone strikes, part of his ongoing effort to investigate the relatively new method of targeted killing. He said in a statement on Friday that he also met with representatives of the tribal areas of western Pakistan that have borne the overwhelming brunt of the drone campaign. The officials underscored to Emmerson that Pakistan doesn't consent to the U.S. drone effort, and denied extending the tacit consent that its military ' with whom Emmerson did not consult ' has previously provided.

'As a matter of international law the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan is therefore being conducted without the consent of the elected representatives of the people, or the legitimate Government of the State,' Emmerson, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, said in the statement. 'It involves the use of force on the territory of another State without its consent and is therefore a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty.'

Emmerson's statement is carefully worded. He portrays himself as conveying Pakistan's concerns, rather than vouching for their particulars. But it's still the strongest statement yet by an international official calling for an end to a campaign of targeted killing that briefly flared back up earlier this year. And to call the strikes an unwarranted violation of Pakistan's sovereignty is tantamount to saying the U.S. is waging a war of aggression.

'The Pashtun tribes of the FATA area have suffered enormously under the drone campaign,' Emmerson's statement continues, referring to the tribal areas. 'It is time for the international community to heed the concerns of Pakistan, and give the next democratically elected government of Pakistan the space, support and assistance it needs to deliver a lasting peace on its own territory without forcible military interference by other States.'

If the drone strikes continue into the next Pakistani government, Emmerson warned, the U.S. drone effort could further destabilize the nuclear power, undermining a key U.S. strategic goal at the heart of the drone strikes. He urged patience with a Pakistani military effort to eradicate al-Qaida's allies in the tribal areas ' one that official Washington has long since written off as unserious.

Significantly and subtly, Emmerson raised doubts over repeated U.S. claims that the targeting efforts behind the drones kill terrorists and spare civilians. Last month, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a staunch drone advocate, claimed that the drones kill only 'single digits' worth of civilians annually. Many of the CIA's strikes, termed 'signature strikes,' kill people believed to fit a pattern of extremist behavior, rather than killing specific, known terrorists.

Emmerson's tribal contacts gave reason to doubt that westerners unfamiliar with the area would even be able to tell a terrorist from an average resident.

'In discussions with the delegation of tribal Maliks from North Waziristan the Special Rapporteur was informed that drone strikes routinely inflicted civilian casualties, and that groups of adult males carrying out ordinary daily tasks were frequently the victims of such strikes,' Emmerson continued. 'They emphasized that to an outsider unfamiliar with Pashtun tribal customs there was a very real risk of misidentification of targets since all Pashtun tribesmen tended to have similar appearance to members of the Pakistan Taliban, including similar (and often indistinguishable) tribal clothing, and since it had long been a tradition among the Pashtun tribes that all adult males would carry a gun at all times. They considered that civilian casualties were a commonplace occurrence and that the threat of such strikes instilled fear in the entire community.'

As much as Emmerson will rely on the Obama administration for access concerning the drones during his inquiry, he's given a major international platform to the victims and the critics of its robotic campaign. Emmerson told Danger Room last month that he endorsed John Brennan to run the CIA out of confidence that Brennan will rein in the drone effort. Now that Brennan's at Langley, Emmerson will soon have his theory tested, having delivered a major public challenge to Washington.

U.S. Military Neglects Huge Data Trove of Iraq War: The Iraqis Themselves

More than the U.S. military ever knew, the Sunni tribes in Iraq prevented America's long, searing occupation from descending into an even bigger fiasco than it was. That's just one lesson the U.S. is missing by not taking advantage of the biggest data trove of the war: the accounts of Iraqis who lived through it.

In the popular American conception of the Iraq war, the tribes didn't play a significant role in the war until around 2006, when they abruptly defected from the Sunni insurgency to stand with U.S. forces during the surge. The brutality of al-Qaida in Iraq ' who would punish the ostensible sin of cigarette smoking by chopping off the fingers of the Sunnis they claimed to protect ' compelled one of the most momentous strategic shifts of the war.

That is nowhere near the complete truth, according to Najim Abed al-Jabouri. Jabouri was a two-star general in Saddam Hussein's army who became one of America's most prominent and heralded partners against the extremist forces in Iraq that killed nearly 4,500 U.S. troops. Jabouri was the key Iraqi partner for U.S. Army then-Col. H.R. McMaster in Tall Afar, a city that became a proving ground for the counterinsurgency strategy that Gen. David Petraeus would later implement and make famous.

'For a long time after the invasion,' Jabouri recollects for Danger Room, 'the tribal leaders were telling people, 'Shut up, shut up, don't cause problems.' There was a big expectation of inclusion.' That expectation kept more of Sunni Iraq out of the insurgency than the U.S. understands, for years, as the Sunnis tribal leaders thought that it was inevitable that Americans 'would be like the Brits when they occupied Iraq. We thought they would reach out to the tribes, work with the established order.'

As a result, the Sunni insurgency ' one of the main hotbeds of resistance to the U.S. occupation ' was never as deadly as Jabouri believes it could have been. Tribal leaders that Jabouri knew from his army days 'had weapons caches in the desert. They were getting ready.'

Even with those caches remaining in reserve, the Iraq war was agony for the soldiers and marines tasked with pacifying unfamiliar Sunni areas in Baghdad, Ramadi and Baquba. In 2006, according to statistics kept by the Pentagon's bomb squad, insurgents manufactured and detonated 30,822 homemade bombs, often from ordnance harvested and repurposed from the weapons depots that ex-officers like Jabouri relied on during their service. Not only did the Iraqis frustrate American efforts at defeating the bombs, their homebrewed arsenal created a weapons template for insurgencies worldwide.

To Jabouri, the insurgency, al-Qaida included, was a lame, unimpressive fighting force. With merely equivocal backing from the tribal power structure, the inevitable resistance to the occupation 'was more emotional and random,' he says. 'There were a lot of different movements on the ground, and they weren't organized with each other.' Saddam Hussein's military, contrary to a strain of conventional American thinking, was not relying on a post-invasion insurgency as a Plan B.

Two months before the 2003 invasion, Jabouri says, the Iraqi defense minister, Sultan Hashem, assembled his top generals in Baghdad to discuss the impending American incursion. 'He told us we can't confront America and win,' Jabouri, then despondent over the invasion, recollects. But there was never a discussion, let alone an order, to melt away into the populace once the invasion occurred.

'There wasn't planning for resistance,' Jabouri remembers. 'The Iraqi leadership, if they were to announce that or plan for that, it would mean that we would be defeated! It's not a sign of strength.' Not only did that limit participation in the resistance from Saddam's Baathist forces ' contrary to years of statements from the Washington ' it set a tone to the officers that the remnants of Saddam's leadership structure was a spent force, and so 'we returned to our tribes.' Jabouri took his family to Mosul, in the north, recognizing a center of power and influence that Americans never fully understood.

They still might not, ten years after the invasion. The premiere repositories of institutional U.S. military knowledge have few studies of the Iraq war through Iraqi eyes. The Army's Center for Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Ks., one of the its main memory banks, 'does not, in fact, have any lessons learned materials from Iraq from the insurgents' perspective,' Bill Ackerly from the center's Army parent organization tells Danger Room. That's despite volumes of human-terrain studies and detainee interrogation reports; access to tens of thousands of ex-insurgents who ended up siding with the Americans; and a general, vague U.S. understanding that human networks are decisive in insurgencies. West Point's Combating Terrorism Center has a tremendously informative trove of documents captured from al-Qaida in Iraq, but it sheds most of its light on non-Iraqi terrorists.

The Marines do better. Marine Corps University compiled and published a multi-volume oral history of the Anbar Awakening, the major Sunni tribal uprising that began in 2006 against al-Qaida, complete with Iraqi perspectives. 'It's a very good place to start, but it's not a complete view,' says Sterling Jensen, a 35-year old researcher at National Defense University who seeks to fill the gap.

Jensen is writing his Ph. D on the Iraqi insurgency ' from the insurgents' perspective. Stretching back to interviews he first conducted as a contract translator in Ramadi in 2006, Jensen has spent years collecting Iraqi accounts of their varied experiences at resistance, insurgency and terrorism, centering on mostly-Sunni organizations like the 1920 Revolution Brigades, Ansar al-Islam, and even the Islamic State of Iraq, as al-Qaida's local chapter likes to call itself.

From Jensen's perspective, the tribes 'didn't really want to fight the Americans.' Some did, but it was mostly transactional, as they hewed to the belief that they could make money off the insurgency than they could working with the largely Shia government or the Americans. 'The tribes weren't working against the Americans from the start,' Jensen tells Danger Room.

And the story of the Anbar Awakening isn't the typical 'surge' narrative of the Americans suddenly revamping their tactics and protecting the population. It's a story of al-Qaida vastly overplaying its hand and attacking the tribes ' and the Americans finally being savvy enough to take yes for an answer from a Sunni power structure it had long antagonized. 'Had al-Qaida not overreached,' Jensen says, 'then the Sunni community would not have joined with the U.S. It doesn't matter what COIN [counterinsurgency] you use.'

It remains unclear how interested the U.S. is in hearing the Iraq war told from Iraqis, something sure to be an uncomfortable experience. Ackerly says he expects an impending revision of the Army's now-iconic counterinsurgency manual, expected by the end of the year, will have information on the organization, structure and tactics of the insurgency 'from the perspective of the insurgent' in Iraq. But that's not finalized, and it's also something of a circumscribed perspective.

'If we had a better understanding of what went on in Iraq, based on what the Iraqis were saying,' Jensen contends, 'we would learn how to better [military] engagements in the future. We won't be as timid because we'd have a little bit more confidence that we understand what's going on on the ground. We'd be more effective.'

Not of that helps Jabouri ' and it certainly doesn't help the tens of thousands of dead Iraqis. The 57-year old former officer has lived in the United States since late 2008, after becoming a target for al-Qaida and the Shiite government for working closely with the Americans. While he concedes that 'many people feel it was better under Saddam,' Jabouri says he's optimistic about Iraq's future and wants to return someday.

'Maybe after we have a democracy in Iraq,' he says.

Our Security Models Will Never Work ' No Matter What We Do

A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force ' for both attackers and defenders. One side creates ceramic handguns, laser-guided missiles, and new-identity theft techniques, while the other side creates anti-missile defense systems, fingerprint databases, and automatic facial recognition systems.

The problem is that it's not balanced: Attackers generally benefit from new security technologies before defenders do. They have a first-mover advantage. They're more nimble and adaptable than defensive institutions like police forces. They're not limited by bureaucracy, laws, or ethics. They can evolve faster. And entropy is on their side ' it's easier to destroy something than it is to prevent, defend against, or recover from that destruction.

For the most part, though, society still wins. The bad guys simply can't do enough damage to destroy the underlying social system. The question for us is: can society still maintain security as technology becomes more advanced?

I don't think it can.

Because the damage attackers can cause becomes greater as technology becomes more powerful. Guns become more harmful, explosions become bigger, malware becomes more pernicious ' and so on. A single attacker, or small group of attackers, can cause more destruction than ever before.

This is exactly why the whole post-9/11 weapons-of-mass-destruction debate was so overwrought: Terrorists are scary, terrorists flying airplanes into buildings are even scarier, and the thought of a terrorist with a nuclear bomb is absolutely terrifying.

As the destructive power of individual actors and fringe groups increases, so do the calls for ' and society's acceptance of ' increased security.

Rethinking Security

Traditional security largely works 'after the fact'. We tend not to ban or restrict the objects that can do harm; instead, we punish the people who do harm with objects. There are exceptions, of course, but they're exactly that: exceptions. This system works as long as society can tolerate the destructive effects of those objects (for example, allowing people to own baseball bats and arresting them after they use them in a riot is only viable if society can tolerate the potential for riots).

When that isn't enough, we resort to 'before-the-fact' security measures. These come in two basic varieties: general surveillance of people in an effort to stop them before they do damage, and specific interdictions in an effort to stop people from using those technologies to do damage.

But these measures work better at keeping dangerous technologies out of the hands of amateurs than at keeping them out of the hands of professionals.

And in the global interconnected world we live in, they're not anywhere close to foolproof. Still, a climate of fear causes governments to try. Lots of technologies are already restricted: entire classes of drugs, entire classes of munitions, explosive materials, biological agents. There are age restrictions on vehicles and training restrictions on complex systems like aircraft. We're already almost entirely living in a surveillance state, though we don't realize it or won't admit it to ourselves. This will only get worse as technology advances ' today's Ph.D. theses are tomorrow's high-school science-fair projects.

Increasingly, broad prohibitions on technologies, constant ubiquitous surveillance, and Minority Report-like preemptive security will become the norm. We can debate the effectiveness of various security measures in different circumstances. But the problem isn't that these security measures won't work ' even as they shred our freedoms and liberties ' it's that no security is perfect.

Because sooner or later, the technology will exist for a hobbyist to explode a nuclear weapon, print a lethal virus from a bio-printer, or turn our electronic infrastructure into a vehicle for large-scale murder. We'll have the technology eventually to annihilate ourselves in great numbers, and sometime after, that technology will become cheap enough to be easy.

As it gets easier for one member of a group to destroy the entire group, and the group size gets larger, the odds of someone in the group doing it approaches certainty. Our global interconnectedness means that our group size encompasses everyone on the planet, and since government hasn't kept up, we have to worry about the weakest-controlled member of the weakest-controlled country. Is this a fundamental limitation of technological advancement, one that could end civilization? First our fears grip us so strongly that, thinking about the short term, we willingly embrace a police state in a desperate attempt to keep us safe; then, someone goes off and destroys us anyway?

If security won't work in the end, what is the solution?

Resilience ' building systems able to survive unexpected and devastating attacks ' is the best answer we have right now. We need to recognize that large-scale attacks will happen, that society can survive more than we give it credit for, and that we can design systems to survive these sorts of attacks. Calling terrorism an existential threat is ridiculous in a country where more people die each month in car crashes than died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

If the U.S. can survive the destruction of an entire city ' witness New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or even New York after Sandy ' we need to start acting like it, and planning for it. Still, it's hard to see how resilience buys us anything but additional time. Technology will continue to advance, and right now we don't know how to adapt any defenses ' including resilience ' fast enough.

We need a more flexible and rationally reactive approach to these problems and new regimes of trust for our information-interconnected world. We're going to have to figure this out if we want to survive, and I'm not sure how many decades we have left.

Here's Why The Navy Doesn't Have Its Own Fleet of Killer Attack Dolphins

Whatever, Ukraine. Your claims of arming a fleet of dolphins with pistols and knives are dubious. This is why you can't transform man's favorite adorable aquatic buddy into sea mammals of death.

Dolphins are fantastic, intelligent creatures. They've got a sensing ability, echolocation, that's akin to 'natural biological sonar,' as Ed Budzyna of the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program puts it. Yes, as we've reported in the past, the Navy trains dolphins and sea lions for harbor and port security tasks that nature has endowed them well to perform.

Those tasks are not attack tasks. And yet, a story has resurfaced that the Ukranian Navy has strapped its military working dolphins with knives and pistols to their heads. It smelled funny to us the first time we encountered it in the fall. This time around, the allegedly-armed Ukranian dolphins have apparently gone rogue, swimming away from their Sevastopol handlers, apparently spurred to sea by a frenzy of lust. That account is already looking shady.

But fits of romance are not what stand in the way of your fleet of killer dolphins. It's easy enough to train dolphins and sea lions to hunt for mine-like objects on the sea floor or mark unidentified swimmers for security personnel to investigate. The Navy does it through typical repetitive positive reinforcement, like rewarding the marine friends with food for successful performance. What the Navy doesn't do is train them to distinguish people or objects in the water.

'You can't leave it up to a marine mammal to decide who's a friend and who's a foe. You can't train them for that,' Budzyna, a spokesman for the Navy program, tells Danger Room. 'How would they know which is which down there? You can't leave it up to them to make those judgment calls.'

And yet there are persistent rumors that dolphins ' American and Soviet ' have been equipped for battle. In the '70s, a Navy employee alleged that some of the U.S.' dolphins carried hypodermic syringes containing pressurized carbon dioxide that could potentially cause a diver to 'literally blow up,' as our David Hambling reported in 2007. More baroque stories involve the Russians dual-purposing their own harbor-security dolphin fleet with an weapon similar to the Farallon Shark Dart.

Budzyna insists the Navy doesn't take any such gamble with its sea lions and dolphins. In addition to the lack of 'operational sense' in arming a creature that can't figure out the right person to attack, he says, the danger to the animals' safety would be far too great.

What the Navy's dolphins and sea lions do without weaponry is sophisticated enough. Every day at San Diego, Navy sea-mammal handlers teach the dolphins to alert their human partners if there's a suspicious object at the bottom of the sea floor. If their echolocation picks up an undersea signature that could be a mine, the dolphin taps a disc-like pad on the side of its handlers' boat. The handler passes the dolphin a device to mark the suspicious object's location ' either a beacon or something that emits a sound or releases a balloon ' and then Navy explosive-ordnance disposal divers descend to take care of it.

Similarly, the Navy harnesses sea lions' ability to see in low levels of light to check out suspicious divers who might want to damage a pier. If the sea lion sees a nighttime diver, it would swim to the location and drop off another such marker for the authorities to investigate. 'They work with Navy divers so that no one gets hurt,' Budzyna says, either man or beast. Training such creatures typically takes two to four years.

But what the mammals don't do, perhaps the robots will, someday. The Navy's working on an undersea robot that basically fools a mine into detonating before a Navy ship is in range. There's no plans to arm it; and the Navy will have its hands full designing a robot that can outperform a dolphin's natural echolocation. But the Navy is more likely to weaponize a fleet of robotic dolphins than it is to form up a lethal armada of the real thing.

That's No Train! Air Force Eyes Subway for Nuclear Missiles

The Air Force wants to upgrade its aging nuclear missiles and the hundreds of underground silos that hold them. One idea it's exploring: the construction of a sprawling network of underground subway tunnels to shuttle the missiles around like a mobile doomsday train. As one does.

As first reported by Inside Defense, the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center will award several study contracts next month worth up to $3 million each to research the idea. A broad agency announcement from the Air Force describes the hair-raising concept, intended to keep the weapons secure through 2075, as a system of tunnels where nuclear missiles are shuttled around on rails or some undefined 'trackless' system.

The advantage of the world's deadliest subway: During an atomic holocaust, mobile missiles are harder for an adversary to target than a static silo. Missiles could be positioned at launch holes placed at 'regular intervals' along the length of the tunnels.

'The tunnel concept mode operates similar to a subway system but with only a single transporter/launcher and missile dedicated to a given tunnel,' stated the notice. 'The tunnel is long enough to improve survivability but leaving enough room to permit adequate 'rattle space' in the event of an enemy attack.'

The Air Force hasn't given specifics on where the tunnels could be built, or how long they'd need to be. But they'll probably have to be jumbo-sized to 'minimize impact from attack during all phases of missions/operations,' the notice stated. The Air Force requires that all research proposals address ways to 'minimize likelihood' that unauthorized persons could sneak in, while keeping the system working safely and not sacrificing the doomsday train's ability to 'conduct world-wide operations.'

The project would likely be gigantic, expensive and take decades to build ' all things that cut against cut against these relatively lean times at the Pentagon. But the U.S.' silo-launched nuclear arsenal of 420 Minuteman III ballistic missiles are some of the oldest weapons still in service with the military, and they're only getting older. (Not to mention the upkeep the military has to perform on the other two legs of the nuclear triad, submarine-launched Trident II missiles and the air-dropped B61 nuclear weapon.)

The Air Force has spent billions upgrading the Minuteman's guidance systems, rocket motors and power systems to keep them serviceable through 2030. In a March 5 posture statement (.pdf) to the House Armed Services Committee, U.S. Strategic Command chief General Robert Kehler said the Minuteman IIIs are 'sustainable through 2030 and potentially beyond with additional modernization investment.' But to sustain the missiles until 2075, the service has to come up with new ideas.

The subway of doom isn't the Air Force's only option for revamping its silos. Others include 'super-hardened' silos, or ground-based 'transporter erector launchers' ' really large trucks that can haul nuclear missiles around the country, including on public roads and even off-road. The trucks have their downsides: who knows how well they can cross bridges; people would freak out if they encountered nuclear missiles on their morning commute; and they're way more expensive than silos.

Last year, nuclear analyst and Danger Room pal Jeffrey Lewis estimated that building a fleet of 500 such mobile launchers would cost about $52 billion. 'Apparently, building a 200,000 pound truck with rad-hard electronics and capable of withstanding nuclear blast effects is expensive,' he blogged. Lewis also noted that the mobile nuclear launchers were too expensive during the Cold War when, y'know, full-scale nuclear war was a big threat.

Hans Kristensen, a nuclear analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, thinks the Air Force is stuck with plain old static silos. 'The nuclear subway ICBM is, I think, a pie in the sky and more included to have a review process entertain a range of options so it can land on the most sensible,' Kristensen tells Danger Room. 'The costs associated with developing and operating such a system would be enormous and completely out of sync with the fiscal realities of this nation. Even a mobile system is probably unrealistic. I think the most likely, and probably only realistic option short of scrapping the land-based leg of the deterrent, is to simply extend the life of the existing Minuteman III ICBM.'

Then again, maybe the Air Force defies logic and builds the death tunnels that it says it wants. Tomorrow's Armageddon could ride to work on rails.

China's Newest Stealth Fighter May Head to Sea, State Media Says

China's latest stealth fighter prototype could be deployed aboard the Chinese navy's first aircraft carrier, eventually allowing Beijing to deploy radar-evading warplanes all over the world ' although it'll have to overcome some serious constraints.

The twin-engine J-31, which made its public debut in blurry photographs snapped at the Shenyang Aircraft Company airfield in northeastern China in late October, 'may become China's next generation carrier-borne fighter jet,' according to the government-owned Global Times newspaper. 'News' from China's state media, including Global Times, essentially can be read as official announcements.

But Sun Cong, the J-31's chief designer, implied that the new stealth jet will need to be enhanced to become carrier-compatible, according to Global Times. In other words, the J-31 won't be headed to sea any time soon, however much Chinese state media signals the rising power's interest in taking its stealth jet out to the open water.

In any event, the prospect of a maritime future for the J-31 places China in rarefied company. Of the dozen or so countries that possess flattops, only a handful are developing carrier-based stealth warplanes; and none have deployed them yet. The U.S. Navy is working on the F-35C ship-compatible version of the Joint Strike Fighter; the U.K. and Italy are also acquiring F-35s for their carriers ' in their cases, the vertical-landing B-model of the next-generation jet that the U.S. Marines will use.

With a years-long head start, the Western countries are likely to field their carrier-launched stealth fighters well before the Chinese could. Beijing is only beginning to develop its naval aviation capability, a century after the U.S. formed its own seagoing air force.

There has long been speculation about the J-31's naval destiny. Observers noted during its debut that the first J-31 prototype has the extra-tough twin nose wheels that are typical of carrier-based planes, which tend to land hard on their comparatively small floating airstrips.

But judging from high-resolution photos of the J-31 prototype, the new plane apparently lacks other key features of naval fighters, including a tailhook (for snagging the arresting wire on the carrier deck) and folding wings (for compact storage below deck). It's these additions and others that Cong was likely referring to when he said the carrier-based J-31 would have to be an improved model.

There's little need for hastiness on Beijing's part. China's sole carrier, the ex-Soviet Liaoning, began sea trials in the summer of 2011 and landed her first planes in November. State media claims Liaoning will sail on her first long-range voyage sometime this year, with the goal of entering frontline service within two years. (China's ongoing construction of naval tanker ships, meant to refuel the carrier on long deployments, seems to corroborate this timeline.)

Beijing is also planning its first homebuilt carrier, with construction reportedly beginning this year.

Liaoning already possesses the components of a basic air wing, including non-stealthy J-15 fighters and several types of helicopter. There is some evidence Beijing is also developing a carrier-launched radar plane similar to the U.S. E-2. But Liaoning lacks the steam catapults that are standard on large American flattops ' and this limits the ship's ability to launch large, heavy planes in the class of the E-2.

The absence of catapults could also have some bearing on any future, maritime version of the J-31. Since they must launch off the ship's deck strictly under their own power, China's carrier planes are constrained in the amount of fuel and weapons they can carry. For all its potential stealthiness, a naval J-31 could sneak into a battle zone with only a handful of missiles and very little fuel for maneuvering ' though to be fair, the U.S. F-35 also has a fairly small weapons loadout while in stealth mode.

If the J-31 goes to sea, it could allow Beijing to deploy high-tech air power almost anywhere in the world within reasonable flying range of the coast. But not any time soon. And not without plenty of limitations.

Syrian Rebels Launched 401 Homemade Bomb Attacks Last Year

The signature weapon of the post-9/11 era is showing up in Syria in a major way. Syrian rebels detonated 401 homemade bombs in 2012.

That's according to the Pentagon's bomb trackers at the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. Statistics disclosed to Danger Room indicate that the opposition to dictator Bashar Assad killed 970 people in the second year of its uprising and wounded another 2,456.

The 401 Syrian bomb attacks is still nowhere near the 3,000-plus attacks that occurred last year in Iraq, the birthplace of the improvised explosive device, let alone the 16,000 in Afghanistan. But they do underscore how the cheap, easily adaptable weapon has become a fixture of contemporary irregular warfare. And the data also provides a glimpse into how a durable insurgency, one with a significant terrorist component, is using the bombs.

Overall, 49 percent of the Syrian bombs ' 197 of the 401 attacks ' caused any casualties. That's a higher success rate than in Afghanistan; although Assad's forces don't have the experience (or the gear) that U.S. troops have thwarting bomb manufacturers.

The overwhelming 'target types' tallied by JIEDDO are civilians, who were the victim of the attacks 47 percent of the time, a wide plurality. Syrian police were on the receiving end of 11 percent of the bombs; the Syrian loyalist military was hit 10 percent; and joint police and military installations received 6 percent of the bomb assaults. Generic 'infrastructure' represented 6 percent of targets.

JIEDDO didn't provide further breakdowns of data on the bombs, such as where they're most prevalent or the level of technical sophistication the Syrian insurgency's bombs employ. Syrian rebels have previously boasted of getting bomb recipes from the internet.

But the Syrian rebels are big on DIY weaponry, and frequently repurpose artillery looted from Assad's military into their own rockets, mortars and bombs. That's in addition to the weapons pipeline flowing in from the Gulf Arab states through Turkey.

Civilian casualties are part and parcel of attacks with homemade bombs, which don't necessarily detonate when rebels or insurgents might want them to detonate, particularly when they're activated by pressure from travelers. But the large proportions of civilians killed by the rebel bombs is significant, as the rebels are fighting against a dictator who's got the blood of at least 60,000 Syrians on his hands. Typically, the rebels portray their bomb attacks as a way to even the odds against Assad's mechanized forces and their heavy artillery. But clearly their bombs are killing more than just soldiers.

It shouldn't be surprising that homemade bombs have found a place in the Syrian rebel arsenal. The family of homebrewed weapon was born next door, in Iraq, and al-Qaida's Iraq branch is heavily invested in the Syrian Nusra Front, which the U.S. recently designated as a terrorist organization.