US Reaper Drone Shot Down Over Afghanistan

In a rare, successful attack on one of the most advanced US offensive weapons, a US drone has reportedly been shot down over Afghanistan. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Voice of Jihad) reports that Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) said to be operated by the United States. The rea

The UAV above is believed to be a MQ-9 Reaper with a price tag of $10.5 million. The aircraft can stay airborne up to 36 hours with 1.7 tons of missiles and bombs. The wreckage of the plane is said to have been seized by the Mujahideen. So far, there has been no comment from from the US military.

The location of the downed drone is in Kunduz, a city in northern Afghanistan.

The attack may have been in retaliation for a US drone strike which yesterday killed 14 ISIS militants in the Kunar province, a northern boarder region in Afghanistan. According to The Guardian, “Abdul Ghani Musamim, a spokesman for the provincial governor, told the Associated Press that the drone had targeted a meeting of Isis commanders who were planning a terrorist attack."

Apropos, on Thursday, we reported U.S. bombs dropped in Afghanistan surged to a 7-year high in the month of September, as it became clear that Trump’s Afghanistan war policy was simply to add to the local death toll by dropping more bombs.

As discussed before, we suspect that President Trump, gradually settling in into his role as the next "Warmonger-in-Chief" has reignited a trend that the military industrial complex is simply delighted about.

Spotted In Davos: Anti-Drone Guns

By now we are used to images of snipers on hotel rooftops protecting the world"s great-est-and-good-est from the evils of average-joe-ness.

But this year it appears there is a new foe - the drone - and a new weapon to tackle it: the anti-drone gun.

h/t @alaashahine

While the shoulder-mounted anti-drone gun pictured above in Davos does not appear to be one we have seen before, as Engadget detailed previously, there are numerous systems built to take down wayward or dangerous drones, but they tend to have one big catch: you need to be relatively close to the drone, which could be scary if the robotic aircraft is packing explosives. DroneShield thinks it can help. It"s introducing the DroneGun, a jammer that disables drone signals (including GPS and GLONASS positioning) from as far as 1.2 miles away. Like most rivals, it doesn"t destroy the target drone -- it just forces the vehicle to land or return to its starting point. Anti-drone teams can not only disable threats from a safe distance, but potentially locate their pilots.

It"s not the lightest machine at about 13 pounds, but it"s portable enough to be usable by one person. You don"t need technical training, either, so it"s easy for security staff to use.

Whether or not you see the DroneGun in action is another matter. It"s not FCC-certified as we write this, so you can"t legally operate one in the US unless you"re with the government. Provided it"s approved, though, it could help take down drones at airports, protect soldiers against drone bombs and otherwise help in situations where it"s simply not possible to get close.