Italian Defense Company Unveils Anti-Drone System.

Italian Defense Company Unveils Anti-Drone System. (Popsci).

The rise of drones will, inevitably, lead to their Icarus-like fall. Earlier this week, Selex ES, part of Italy’s large Finmeccanica defense giant, unveiled an anti-drone weapon at the Defence and Security Equipment International in London. Dubbed “Falcon Shield,” the system neither mimics nor uses actual birds to attack unmanned flying machines. Instead, “Falcon Shield” is a collection of sensors and software that are supposed to work together to find, track, and then either disable or take over hostile drones. Read the full story here.

Iran unveils its first fighter drone.....does it fly?

Hmmm....looks like a drone with a Manpad stuck to it :)

Iran unveils its first fighter drone.....does it fly?(Taz).

Iran has unveiled a new home-made drone equipped with air defense missiles.

It is the first home-made fighter drone which carries air to air missiles, Iran’s IRNA news agency reported Sept. 23.

Iran’s Deputy Defense Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami told reporters that the drone is capable of destroying all types of aircrafts including fighters, small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and helicopters.

Hatami noted that the drone was manufactured by the Islamic Republic’s defense ministry.

The Islamic Republic has so far unveiled various home-made drones including Ababil, Fotros, Hazem, Karrar (long range attack drone), Mohajer, Sarir, Shahed 129, Yasir and Zohal.

The country unveiled its first domestically-manufactured long-range UAV named Karrar in 2010.

Iran also inaugurated the production line of two domestically-built UAVs dubbed Raad and Nazir with bombing and reconnaissance capabilities at that year. The two hi-tech drones are capable of performing long-range reconnaissance, patrolling, assault and bombing missions with high precision.

Iran also successfully tested a home-made radar-evading UAV in June 2009.

The first Iranian medium-altitude long-endurance UAV, the Shahed-129 was unveiled in September 2012, which is capable of carrying out combat and reconnaissance eight missions for 24 hours and has a range of 1,700 km.

The country unveiled its largest yet home-made UAV, titled 'Fotros' in 2013. Fotros has a range of some 2,000 kilometers and is capable of launching air-to-surface missile strikes.

The drone can fly at an altitude of 25,000 feet, with a flight time of 16 to 30 hours.

Iran started mass production of the "Yasir" UAV in September 2013. Yasir can fly at an altitude of 15,000 ft., be in flight for eight hours, cover the distance of 200 km, and does not need a runway. The UAV is equipped with light powerful modern cameras, and can precisely control the target.

How 3D Printing Will provide On-Demand Swarms of Disposable Drones.

How 3D Printing Will provide On-Demand Swarms of Disposable Drones.(Gizmodo).

New advances in 3D printing are making it not only possible but also viable to manufacture cheap, print-on-demand, disposable drones designed simply to soar off over the horizon and never come back.

Some British engineers did just that, and this is only the beginning.

The team hails from the Advanced Manufacturing Research Center (AMRC) at the University of Sheffield, where they're exploring innovative ways to 3D-print complex designs.

They built their disposable drone, a five-foot-wide guy made of just nine parts that looks like a tiny stealth bomber, using a technique called fused deposition modeling.

This additive manufacturing technique has been around since the 1980s but has recently become faster and cheaper thanks to improved design processes.Read the full story here.

Video - "It's a plane, it's a bird....Hell NO it's the NSA."

Video - "It's a plane, it's a bird....Hell NO it's the NSA." Hmmmm......."He's looking at you Kid! Remember three years ago in March when i stated that the "HummingBird" was  native to the American continent  not Afghanistan?

"Survival of the Fittest" Drone-spotting: Survival guide informs on new breed of aerial predators.

"Survival of the Fittest" Drone-spotting: Survival guide informs on new breed of aerial predators.(RT).

In light of the growing number of drones, the Guide advises a number of techniques to evade and scramble drones. The document is available online and has been translated into 17 different languages.

“Our ancestors could spot natural predators from far by their silhouettes. Are we equally aware of the predators in the present-day?” writes the Guide.

It contains the silhouettes and measurements of all of the most widely-used drones, from the ‘Killer Bee’ to ‘The Sentinel’ as well as information on where they are currently operational. It goes on to detail ways you can hide from a drone.

“Most drones are equipped with night vision, and/or infrared vision cameras, so-called FLIR sensors. These can see human heat signatures from far away, day or night. However there are ways to hide from drones.”

Among the tactics it advices for eluding the aerial craft are: hiding “in thick forests,” wearing space blankets to confuse heat sensors, not using wireless communication, and the use of mannequins or human-sized dolls as decoys.

“Wait for bad weather. Drones cannot operate in high winds, smoke, rainstorms or heavy weather conditions.”


As well as avoidance strategies to escape from the craft, the document also gives advice on how to hack into a drone’s systems. The Guide gives the assurance that as long as a drone’s communications are not encrypted then they can be hacked. It describes how to intercept and interfere with the workings of a drone and also details a process called “spoofing”.

“Small, portable GPS transmitters can send fake GPS signals and disrupt the Drones navigation systems. This can be used, for example, to steer drones into self-destruction flight paths or even hijack them and land them on a runway.”Read the full story here.

drone platform SkyJack hijacks other drones for $400.

Flying zombie swarms to serve your will for $400.(RT).

Samy Kamkar was once convicted of creating the Samy computer worm that knocked out MySpace back in 2005. Now he is devoting his tech skills to legit cyber-security research. The drone-hacking drone is his latest creation, which may send a chill to those inspired by Amazon’s recent announcement that it will use small remote-controlled aircraft for deliveries in a few years’ time.

The drone platform called SkyJack that Kamkar created uses readily available components such as the Parrot AR.Drone quadcopter, a Raspberry Pi circuit board and open-source software he developed and published.

SkyJack uses WiFi to detect other Parrot drones in its range. It then injects WiFi packets into the victim drone’s connection, making it de-authenticate from its remote controller, usually a smartphone, and authenticate in its place, taking it under control.

The flying hacker is relatively cheap and quite simple to build.
“My instructions are pretty detailed. I’ve made the code entirely free and open source, and fortunately all the technology is so low-cost and easy to acquire (less than $400 for all of it, including your very own drone) that to put it all together from my instructions would take someone under an hour if they were familiar with Linux,” Kamkar told threatpost.com via email.

The SkyJack drone was made more as a proof-of-concept than a practical tool. Kamkar made it target only a small range of drones, although even that is quite large with at least 500,000 Parrot drones sold since the model was introduced in 2010.

But it is only a question of time before a similar technique is used to hack into a broader set of targets or do things more sinister than just intercepting them.

"Misuse of the camera can raise privacy concerns, because unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can traverse property boundaries easily and quickly," said Matthew Peacock and Michael Johnstone, of Edith Cowan University's (ECU) School of Computer and Security Science, who tested Kamkar’s system.
"The misuse of small UAV's such as the Parrot by criminal or terrorist elements is a potential threat to critical infrastructure," they added.So swarms of zombie drones may take over the skies.

Video - Vertical take Off Drones .

First up is the Aerovel Flexrotor, designed by the same folks who brought you the Insitu ScanEagle. The company has just completed what it believes are the first autonomous launches and recoveries of an unmanned aircraft from an unmanned boat. With a 9.8ft span, the 44lb Flexrotor is designed to fly for more than 40hr, or 2,000nm, at speeds up to 79kt, with an imaging turret in its non-rotating nose.

The Flexrotor is a taillsitter (more correctly a wingsitter if you watch the video) that takes off vertically like a helicopter then transitions from rotor-borne to wing-borne flight, which gives it long endurance, before transitioning back to thrust-borne flight for a vertical landing. The slow-turning proprotor provides both vertical and forward thrust. Proprotor cyclic pitch and small stowable roll thrusters at the wing tips provide control in vertical flight, while conventional aerodynamic surfaces on the wing and fold-out tail provide control in forward flight.

The video shows how the UAV, supported by a pair of extending arms, launches itself from the remotely controlled skiff, transitions from vertical to horizontal flight and back again, landing vertically back on to the support arms, which have "combs" to capture the wing. The UAV is then centered and pulled in to be autonomously refueled and restarted for a second launch and recovery cycle. Aerovel is aiming the Flexrotor at civil applications such as geological survey, weather reconnaissance, fishery surveillance and environmental monitoring.
From Aerie in Austria, we have a modern re-interpretation of the Triebfluegel (thrust-wing) - an unmanned aircraft in which the wing spins like a rotor for vertical flight then stops for forward flight. Aerie says its designs can reach 24hr endurance, three times that of a conventional VTOL design. The video shows the company's progress over the last three years of tests - both rotary-wing and fixed-wing flights and transitions between the two.

The aircraft is a "nosesitter" - it takes off and climbs vertically, tail-first, in rotor-borne mode, then dives to convert to forward-flying wing-borne flight. To land the UAV climbs, flips over, and descends nose-first in rotor-borne flight. The big "tails" on which the UAV sits (which become forward-swept canards in forward flight) use downwash from the rotor/wing to counter any torque on the fuselage.



Aerie is working on a range of UAV sizes from 2-200kg (roughly 4.5-450lb). In the 25kg S-25 Swift and 150kg D-150 Dipterion designs, the rotor/wing is driven by two small propellers on the leading edges. The 2kg I-2 ILE has the drive props mounted on separate stub wings at 90deg to the rotor/wing. while the 200kg K-200 Kestrel has a jet-drive system. Aerie is now taking options on the I-2 and S-25.Read and see the full story here.

Iran Army unveils latest drone, Yasir

Iran Army unveils latest drone, Yasir. (Fars).

The drone was unveiled in a ceremony attended by Commander of the Iranian Army Ground Force Brigadier General Ahmad Reza Pourdastan.

Elaborating on the capabilities and specifications of Yasir drone, Pourdastan said, "One of the capabilities of Yasir is detection and targeting of remote targets."

He said that the drone is equipped with the most advanced reconnaissance systems.

The drone can fly at an altitude of 15000 feet, has a flight endurance of eight hours and effective operational radius of 200 kilometers.

Yasir, a portable drone, is equipped with state-of-art and light cameras for reconnaissance.Iran has recently made giant advancements in aerospace industries, specially in designing and manufacturing pilotless drones.

In September 2012, Iran announced that it has started using UAVs for its air defense units as part of its broader plans for strengthening the country's air defense capability.

Speaking to reporters on the occasion of the National Day of Air Defense here in Tehran on September 3, 2012, Commander of Khatam ol-Anbia Air Defense Base Brigadier General Farzad Esmayeeli said Iran has equipped its air defense units with Haazem drones.

Haazem is a drone designed and manufactured by Iranian air defense experts in three short, mid and long range models and for air defense missions.

The drone can be used as a target for air defense systems and also for reconnaissance missions.

The UAV can also be equipped with missiles and used for aerial bombardments as well.

The Iranian Armed Forces have recently test-fired different types of newly-developed missiles and torpedoes and tested a large number of home-made weapons, tools and equipment, including submarines, military ships, artillery, choppers, aircrafts, UAVs and air defense and electronic systems, during massive military drills.

Defense analysts and military observers say that Iran's wargames and its advancements in weapons production have proved as a deterrent factor.

Iran equipped army units with a new type of advanced suicide drone.

Iran equipped army units with a new type of advanced suicide drone.(Taz).

A senior Iranian Army commander announced that the country has equipped army units with a new type of advanced suicide drone which is capable of destroying both air and ground targets, Tasnim news agency reported.

"These drones have the capability to conduct suicide attacks and can hit specified targets, either air or ground targets, such as tanks and installations. It acts like a mobile bomb and hits targets," Commander of the Iranian Army Ground Force Brigadier General Ahmad Reza Pourdastan said.

The Iranian commander also noted that the drones are capable of taking online pictures and videos and conducting other missions, including aerial reconnaissance.

Pourdastan then added that Army Ground Force will test and use the new drones during upcoming military wargames.

On Sunday, Pourdastan had announced that Iranian Army Ground Force will stage massive wargames, dubbed as "Qamar-e bani-Hashem", in the coming months in which different units of the force, especially its airborne division will take part.

He had also stated that the forthcoming military exercises will demonstrate the potentials and capabilities of the armored units of the ground force and it can also "tell us how such units must be deployed in an asymmetrical situation.""Qamar-e bani-Hashem wargames will be staged in a very vast and extensive region in 3 operational zones," Pourdastan said at the time.

Over the past few years, Iran has held several military drills to enhance the defense capabilities of its armed forces and to test modern military tactics and equipment.

'Vorsprung durch technik' - Iran unveils latest home-made UAV.

Vorsprung durch technik - Iran unveils latest home-made UAV.(TI).Iranˈs latest indigenized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) dubbed as Hemase (Epic) was unveiled at the presence of Defense Minister Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi on Thursday night, IRNA reported.

The unveiling ceremony was held concurrent with the closing ceremony of the congress titled ˈthree martyred ministers, war engineering commander and 1,000 martyrs of Iranˈs defense ministry.

The Iranian UAV has been made by Aviation Industries Organization of the Defense Ministry.

The home-made UAV is reconnaissance-offensive and its important feature is its flight duration.Hmmmm.......'Epic' .....indeed.....hahahaha.Read the full story here.

Drone Be Gone! Oregon Company to Sell Drone Defense Technology to Public.

Drone Be Gone! Oregon Company to Sell Drone Defense Technology to Public.(USN).Do you want to keep drones out of your backyard?

An Oregon company says that it has developed and will soon start selling technology that disables unmanned aircraft.

The company, called Domestic Drone Countermeasures, was founded in late February because some of its engineers see unmanned aerial vehicles—which are already being flown by law enforcement in some areas and could see wider commercial integration into American airspace by 2015—as unwanted eyes in the sky.

“I was personally concerned and I think there’s a lot of other people worried about this,” says Timothy Faucett, a lead engineer on the project. “We’ve already had many inquiries, a lot of people saying ‘Hey, I don’t want these drones looking at me.’”

Domestic Drones Countermeasures was formed as a spin-off company from Aplus Mobile, which sells rugged computer processors to defense contractors—though the company won’t discuss its specific technology because it is still applying for several patents. Faucett says that work has helped inform its anti-drone technology.

The company will sell land-based boxes that are “non-offensive, non-combative and not destructive.” According to the company, “drones will not fall from the sky, but they will be unable to complete their missions.”

Though Faucett wouldn’t discuss specifics, he says the boxes do not interfere with a drone’s navigation system and that it doesn’t involve “jamming of any kind.” He says their technology is “an adaptation of something that could be used for military application” with the “combat element replaced with a nondestructive element.”

For now, Faucett admits the technology is "expensive," but the company is already ready to design custom anti-drone boxes for customers.

"We envision it could be cheap enough for residential use very soon," he says. "It's quite possible to deploy it if you were shooting a movie and wanted to protect your set, or if you had a house in Malibu and wanted to protect that, we could deploy it there. If a huge company like Google wanted to protect its server farms, it can be scaled up for a larger, fixed installation." Hmmmm.....Should i call Wall Mart now?Read the full story here.

House orders Pentagon to disclose domestic drone use.

House orders Pentagon to disclose domestic drone use.(CNet).The U.S. House of Representatives voted yesterday to require the Defense Department to disclose whether military drones are being operated domestically to conduct surveillance on American citizens.
  A requirement buried in a lengthy appropriations bill calls on newly confirmed Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to disclose to Congress what "policies and procedures" are in place "governing the use" of military drones or other unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) domestically. The report is due no later than 90 days after the bill is signed into law.
The vote on the bill, which was overwhelmingly supported by Republicans and opposed by Democrats, comes as concerns about domestic use of drones have spiked. Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, launched the first filibuster in three years yesterday to call attention to the Obama administration's drone policy, and CNET reported last weekend that Homeland Security required that its UAVs be capable of "signals interception" and "direction finding" of cell phones in use on the ground.
"I think the drone issue has crystalized many of the public anxieties and frustrations surrounding the decade-old war on terror, including many concerns that have nothing to do with drones," says Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.
"The executive branch has been stingy with information, and that has created a vacuum that is now being filled with reactions of all kinds."
The House's language stops short of requiring Hagel to disclose whether he or his predecessor have taken the step of approving the targeting of any U.S. citizens for surveillance.
Last year, the U.S. Air Force adopted a drone policy (PDF) that says its unmanned aircraft "will not conduct nonconsensual surveillance on specifically identified U.S. persons, unless expressly approved by the Secretary of Defense."
It also says, however, that "collected imagery may incidentally include U.S. persons or private property without consent."
Concern about domestic use of drones is growing, with federal legislation introduced last month that would restrict arming drones, in parallel with similar efforts from state and local lawmakers.
The Federal Aviation Administration recently said that it will "address privacy-related data collection" by drones, and Rep. Austin Scott, a Georgia Republican, on Tuesday introduced a bill, H.R. 972, that would require police to obtain warrants before sending drones on domestic surveillance missions. Sen Rand Paul received his response today, when Attorney General Eric Holder responded in a terse letter (PDF) saying that the president does not have the authority to "use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil."Read the full story here.

New Yorker Magazine: ‘Can The President Use Drones On Journalists?’

New Yorker Magazine: ‘Can The President Use Drones On Journalists?’

HT: NewYorker. In thinking about drones strikes and targeted killings, it can be instructive to picture them hitting people you know, either deliberately or as collateral damage. Doing so may not even be much of a stretch, nor should it be. (It’s already the case for people living in parts of Pakistan and Yemen.) Last week, I moderated a live chat on the ethics of drone warfare with Michael Walzer, the author of “Just and Unjust Wars”; Jeff McMahan, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers, who has also written about just-war theory; and The New Yorker’sJane Mayer, who is a master of the subject. The discussion took some interesting turns, touching on the idea of a secret committee that the President would be asked to check with before killing an American and the question of whether China would ever assert the right to call in a drone strike on a dissident living in San Francisco. After Walzer and McMahan suggested some criteria for strikes—criminality, risk of American lives—I asked them this:

Doesn’t a journalist working abroad who is about to release classified information about a war crime—thus committing a crime—that will provoke retribution or a break with allies—endangering Americans—fit this definition of a target?

Walzer didn’t initially think that it did. The danger to Americans, he said, had “to come directly not indirectly from the target before he can be a target.” McMahan had a different view:

If the release of classified information really would seriously endanger the lives of innocent people and the only way to prevent the release of the information was to kill the journalist, then the journalist would be liable to attack. But the evidential standards in such a case would be very high and would be unlikely to be satisfiable in practice.

“So Michael wouldn’t kill the journalist but Jeff just might…” I posted, and the chat moved on. But the question of the journalist is worth dwelling on, because it gets at some of the fundamental problems with the targeted-killing program. Who is “dangerous”? And who decides? A Justice Department white paper laying out the circumstances in which the President can kill Americans talks not only about Al Qaeda but also about “associated forces,” not clearly defined. Michael Crowley, of Time, pointed out that Jeh Johnson, the former Pentagon general counsel, has said that “Our enemy does not include anyone solely in the category of activist, journalist, or propagandist,” and I don’t mean to say that the current Administration has adopted the logic that it does, though that “solely” can do a lot of work. The vagueness could easily increase with the passage of time, as targeted killings shift from a policy to a precedent. The logical chain, as illustrated in our chat, can move very quickly.Read the full story here.

DOJ white paper explaining Obama's targeted killing program - Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force.

DOJ white paper explaining Obama's targeted killing program - Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force.HT: BarracudaBrigade.

Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Q... by Mike Riggs

Homeland Security Quietly Runs “Loan-a-Drone” Program for Local Law Enforcement.

Homeland Security Quietly Runs “Loan-a-Drone” Program for Local Law Enforcement.(AllGov).By Noel Brinkerhoff .Government watchdog groups are concerned that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been loaning out sophisticated, expensive drones to local law enforcement, and in the process turning the military’s hottest new weapon on Americans.
In one of the first known instances of domestic drone use, in 2011 DHS loaned one of its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to police in North Dakota in order to spy on a farmer, Thomas Brossart, who had refused to give back some cows that had wandered onto his property. The Brossart case was the first known drone-aided arrest.
The Washington Guardian reports that since then, DHS and Customs and Border Protection (CPB) have deployed drones several other times to help local law enforcement and other federal agencies.
The problem with the loan-a-drone program, according to critics, is that it is being operated on an ad-hoc basis with no established regulations for how and when to use them, or how to protect Americans’ privacy, or how to make sure taxpayers are reimbursed for the loaners.
After all, CPB’s drones can cost between $15 million and $34 million each to purchase, not to mention their hourly operational costs.
Between loan-a-drone and DHS giving out $4 million in grants to help police buy their own drones, good government groups are concerned that homeland security is subsidizing the militarization of local police forces.
“Drones are a powerful surveillance tool that can be used to gather extensive data about you and your activities,” Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which studies privacy issues, told the Washington Guardian. “The public needs to know more about how and why these Predator drones are being used to watch U.S. citizens.”Read the full story here.

Related: White House wins fight to keep drone killings of Americans secret

Iran builds "world’s first" VTOL unmanned aerial vehicle.

Iran builds "world’s first" VTOL unmanned aerial vehicle.(TI).This Iranian drone enjoys ultra-advanced technology and has been manufactured for the first time in the world, an Iranian expert in the research team in charge of building the drone, Abbas Jam, told Mehr news agency on Saturday. He added that the drone would be tested on Saturday and would be unveiled during the 10-Day Dawn celebrations, which will begin on January 31, marking the 34th anniversary of the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. He noted that the hushed drone does not require runways at all and can take off and land vertically. Jam added that NASA has confirmed the manufacturing of this unmanned aerial vehicle and its information.
Iranian researchers have recently designed and built a new radar-evading drone, named Liko, with the capacity of carrying 100 kg of cargo for 100 kilometers. It is also capable of non-stop flights for three hours. The 53-kg UAV can fly at an altitude of 16,000 feet and requires the shortest landing runway length. Karrar, Iran's first indigenous long-range drone unveiled in August 2010, is capable of carrying a military payload of rockets to carry out bombing missions against ground targets, flying long distances at a very high speed, and gathering information. The country's indigenous unmanned aerial vehicle, Shahed 129, unveiled in September 2012, can carry out combat and reconnaissance missions with its 24-hour nonstop flight capability. Read the full story here.

Iran - Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Announces Production of Drone with Missile Capability

Iran - Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Announces Production of Drone with Missile Capability.(Fars). Speaking at a press conference here in Tehran on Sunday, Jafari pointed to Iran's latest achievements in area of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) production, and stated, "Shahed 129 drone presents the IRGC's latest advancement in this field. With its 24-hour-long non-stop flight capability, the drone can accomplish good missions in reconnaissance and combat fields."
The commander added that Shahed 129 can hit and destroy targets from a far distance with its Sadid (Iron-Strong) missiles. Earlier this month, a senior Iranian defense official announced that Iran plans to equip its military drones with missile capabilities. "We observed the operation of Iran's combat Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAVs) in the recent wargames conducted by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and we plan to mount missile systems onto these drones," Deputy Defense Minister for Industrial and Research Mohammad Eslami told FNA at the time. Early in July, the IRGC Aerospace Force conducted three days of massive missile drills, codenamed Payambar-e Azam 7 (The Great Prophet 7). In March 2012, Iranian experts managed to produce a new type of drone which is capable of carrying out military and border patrol missions. The new remote-controlled aircraft, called Shaparak (Butterfly), has a maximum operational radius of 50 kilometers (31 miles), and a maximum flight ceiling of 15,000 feet (4,572 meters), Reza Danandeh Hakamabad, the aeronautics engineer in charge of the project, said at the time. The aircraft is capable of three and half hours of non-stop flying, and can carry an 8-kilogram (17-pound) payload. Iran successfully tested a home-made radar-evading UAV with bombing capabilities in June 2009. In February 2011, Iran inaugurated the production line of two home-made UAVs with bombing and reconnaissance capabilities. The two hi-tech drones named 'Ra'd' (Thunder) and 'Nazir' (Harbinger) are capable of conducting long-range reconnaissance, patrolling, assault and bombing missions with high precision. Ra'd which is a UAV of choice for assault and bombing missions has the capability to destroy the specified targets with high pinpoint precision. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in August 2010 unveiled the country's first home-made combat Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The combat drone, named Karrar, was unveiled in a special ceremony in Tehran marking the national 'Day of Defense Industry'. The Karrar UAV is capable of carrying a military payload to carry out bombing missions against ground targets. It is also capable of flying long distances at a very high speed. Read the full story here.