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'Easier access': US export change for the UAE to boost Emirati drones, AI tech
breakingdefense.com

... The status change should "shorten procurement timelines, make sustainment less cumbersome and facilitate closer cooperation between American defense companies and UAE institutions," one analyst told Breaking Defense.

Washington's recent decision to significantly ease export controls for the UAE should give a boost to the Emirates' domestic production of high-tech drones and other military hardware, thanks to more available dual-use tech like computer chips, analysts told Breaking Defense.

The US Commerce Department announced on July 10 that the Emiratis will be upgraded to the A:5 export country group, making the UAE the first Arab state -- and the second Middle Eastern state after Israel -- to be granted the coveted status.

"They'll have much cleaner and easier access to dual-use technology and other technologies with defense implications," Michael Horowitz, a former senior Pentagon official who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, told Breaking Defense.

"While munitions are governed by the US munitions list, controlled by the State Department, the decision by the Commerce Department will make UAE access to American technology substantially easier." ...




The cover of the June 27, 1969 issue of the widely-circulated LIFE Magazine directed readers to a photo feature: "The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week's Toll." Inside, on a series of pages laid out much like a high school yearbook, readers found the names and faces of the 242 US service personnel killed during a one-week period. (See 1960sdaysofrage.wordpress.com)

Those photos really shook-up a lot of readers up about the Vietnam fiasco.

Because the photographs moved beyond lists of names or, worse, columns of numbers by showing faces we instantly knew were something both different and more than numerals or letters. These were clearly the visages of formerly living human beings so recently sacrificed on the altar of what and why. Those photos personified the war in ways that eclipse the power of numbers and names alone.

The regime wants you to put the recent dead and wounded and those yet to come into the blender of historical forgetfulness and flick the switch to "11."


On the right, former CPA Justin McAuliffe resting himself comfortably in a congressional meeting room after a long day of trying to overturn the government on 6 Jan 2021.

"Phew! Insurrection can be tough on a guy's feet!"

"The Iran war has brought a few things into focus"among them, that the United States needs to rethink its approach to warfare in the region and beyond. For all of the time that the U.S. Central Command undoubtedly spent planning and rehearsing for a confrontation with Iran, the conduct of this war betrays a certain failure of imagination that has cost the U.S. military a great deal. The United States appears to have assumed that its abundance of precision weaponry would give it a huge advantage over the Iranians - which it did, for at least a few weeks. But precision weaponry was not decisive."

Relatively low-cost Iranian missiles and drones have wrought havoc upon U.S. bases and other targets in the Middle East. American planners should have anticipated as much: Ukrainian drones have been inflicting devastating damage on Russian military assets for several years now, demonstrating just how quickly the nature of warfare has changed. Yet American troops are getting killed in their barracks by cheap Iranian missiles and drones, and their leaders haven't thought through adequate countermeasures.

This failure belongs not only to the Trump administration but also to the military services and their leaders. The Iran war is almost certainly the easiest drone war that America will ever fight. Countering this cheap and widely accessible technology will only get harder. The United States has to dramatically rethink its posture in the Middle East and around the globe until it figures out how to contend with that.


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