When U.S. President Joe Biden told an exhausted nation on Aug. 31 that the last C-17 cargo plane had left Taliban-controlled Kabul, ending two decades of American military misadventure in Afghanistan, he defended the frantic, bloodstained exit with a simple statement: "I was not going to extend this forever war." And yet the war grinds on. As Biden drew the curtain on Afghanistan, the CIA was quietly expanding a secret base deep in the Sahara, from which it runs drone flights to monitor al-Qaida and Islamic State group militants in Libya, as well as extremists in Niger, Chad and Mali. The military's Africa Command resumed drone strikes against the Shabab, an al-Qaida-linked group in Somalia. The Pentagon is weighing whether to send dozens of Special Forces trainers back to Somalia to help local troops fight militants.

Kabul – It was the last known missile fired by the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan, and the military called it a "righteous strike" -- a drone attack after hours of surveillance Aug. 29 against a vehicle that U.S. officials thought contained an Islamic State bomb and posed an imminent threat to troops at Kabul's airport. But a New York Times investigation of video evidence, along with interviews with more than a dozen of the driver's co-workers and family members in Kabul, raises doubts about the U.S. version of events, including whether explosives were present in the vehicle, whether the driver had a connection to the Islamic State group and whether there was a second explosion after the missile struck the car. Military officials said they did not know the identity of the car's driver when the drone fired but deemed him suspicious because of how they interpreted his activities that day, saying that he possibly visited an Islamic State group safe house and, at one point, loaded what they thought could be explosives into the car. Times reporting has identified the driver as Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group. The evidence, including extensive interviews with family members, co-workers and witnesses, suggests that his travels that day actually involved transporting colleagues to and from work.

Special Forces veteran reacts to Gitmo detainees now leading the Taliban on'Fox News Primetime' The United States' account of a drone strike launched against a suspected terrorist in Afghanistan toward the end of the military withdrawal from Kabul is being challenged by a report suggesting the victim was not a threat to the United States. According to a New York Times report, the drone attack that American officials said killed an ISIS terrorist carrying a bomb in a car toward U.S. troops may have killed a man with no ties to ISIS and who was carrying water to family members. American military officials announced late last month that the drone strike, carried out the day after a suicide bombing killed 13 U.S. service members, killed an alleged "ISIS-K planner" and an "associate." The New York Times says that after reviewing video evidence and interviewing more than a dozen of the driver's friends and family members in Kabul, it has doubts about the U.S. version of events. "Times reporting has identified the driver as Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group," the report states.

Swarms of drones have gotten a lot of time in the spotlight lately, mostly for their use in potential military operations. The U.S. military is testing out swarm operations in simulations, while the British Army is using live drones operating in swarms during actual training operations. Other militaries are also interested in deploying swarms. One of the biggest advantages a swarm of drones has when performing military operations is its resiliency. If a swarm enters combat and several individual drones get shot down or otherwise incapacitated, it really doesn't reduce the combat effectiveness of the swarm, nor the tactics that it uses.

BANGKOK/LONDON – A week after the Myanmar military seized power, a Twitter account that had lain dormant for nearly a decade flickered back into life. The Twitter user mocked anti-coup protesters, hundreds of whom have been killed in a crackdown by security forces since the Feb. 1 coup. After a police truck fired high-pressure water cannons on demonstrators in the capital city of Naypyidaw on Feb. 8, he made a trolling reference to the nation's traditional April new year celebration: "Water festival come earlier for them lol." A few weeks later, the user wrote "#fuckthereds," making a dismissive reference to the political party of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize-winning civilian leader who had been overthrown and arrested in the coup. A review of an archived version of the account, which has since been shut down, revealed the username was a pseudonym belonging to Ivan Htet, the 33-year-old son of a leading figure in the coup: the chief of the air force, Maung Maung Kyaw. But Ivan Htet hasn't just been an enthusiastic supporter on social media of the Tatmadaw, the name for the Myanmar military, which has dominated political life since independence in 1948 for Myanmar, then called Burma. He is also trying to cash in, helping equip the military, along with his wife Lin Lett Thiri, who co-founded a private firm to supply Myanmar's armed forces, Reuters has found.

What do you get when you combine 5G and AI with advanced drone development? One answer is from Qualcomm's recent launch of its Flight RB5 5G Platform, a reference drone containing computing at lower power with AI, 5G, and long-range Wi-Fi 6 connectivity. According to the company in a press release, the drone and reference design contains "enhanced autonomy and intelligence features" powered by the Qualcomm QRB5165 processor. Announced in June 2020, the QRB5165 processor is customized for robotics applications and is coupled with the Qualcomm AI Engine, which delivers 15 trillion operations per second (Tops) of AI performance. This allows it to run complex AI and deep learning workloads, and on-device machine learning and accurate edge inferencing while using lower power, according to a Qualcomm product description.

A new article published last week in the European Heart Journal discusses the use of drones for delivering life-saving automated external defibrillators (AED) to out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients. As the study describes, "Early treatment in line with the'chain-of-survival' concept such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and defibrillation by an automated external defibrillator (AED) prior to ambulance arrival is associated with increased survival. Use of AEDs in the early-cardiac-arrest electrical phase can increase survival rates to up to 50–70%. Although hundreds of thousands of AEDs are available in high-income countries, their accessibility and use are still low." Thus, the investigators of the study designed a system to deploy drones to real-life suspected OHCA patients in order to determine whether this was a viable solution to the accessibility problem.

Tiny flying drones, dubbed'slaughterbots', with facial recognition software and weapons capable of mass murder could be the future of warfare. A group of professors have warned the technology is already available to create flying mini killing machines. The Future of Life Institute (FLI), an artificial intelligence watchdog backed by the likes of physicist Stephen Hawking, has produced this chilling video demonstrating how these'slaughterbots' could kill thousands of people. The film is a vision of a dystopian future where tiny drones equipped with explosives, cameras, sensors and face scanners can programmed to carry out deathly instructions by either governments or terrorists. The UN Convention on Conventional Weapons summit in Geneva screened the film and also was heard stark warnings about the growing danger of drone warfare.

The location of the drone strike is in a heavily built-up part of Kabul called Khaje Bughra, near the airport. Relatives and neighbours in the area have disputed the justification for the strike, telling journalists that US intelligence was wrong, and that there was no Islamic State presence in the area.

Top aviation companies ANA Holdings Inc. and Japan Airlines Co. are planning to launch commercial drone services to deliver medical supplies and daily necessities to people living in remote areas. The two companies see the new services as playing a useful role in supporting local health care provision and disaster preparedness as well as expanding community infrastructure on remote islands and other far-flung areas. At the same time, the initiatives will help them promote management diversification and strengthen profitability as the coronavirus pandemic continues to take a toll on their overall business performances. ANA Holdings, the parent of All Nippon Airways Co., conducted a trial run jointly with a pharmaceutical company and other entities in March. Footage that it released shows a drone carrying a package of medical supplies from one island to another among Nagasaki Prefecture's Goto Islands at a speed of around 100 kph.