EU mulls joint defence spending

Commission keen to develop EU’s own surveillance UAVs (Photo: EADS)

 

The EU budget should be used for military research and the bloc could become a defence alliance akin to Nato, the European Commission is poised to say.

The Commission is to outline its ideas in a legislative proposal on spending and in an ideas paper on defence due out on Wednesday (7 June).

“The development of a new generation of many major defence systems is today beyond the reach of a single EU member state … ‘More Europe’ in defence and security is clearly needed”, the draft proposals, seen by Bloomberg, a US news agency, said.

Mexican cartels using new countersurveillance tech against U.S.

The U.S. has for years been flying surveillance drones along the Mexican border. Now Mexico’s drug cartels are as well. / Vocativ

 

Senior drug enforcement officials in Washington and along the U.S. southwest border have spotted new technologies used by Mexican drug cartels to track their trackers in U.S. law.

China Set To Grab UAV Market While US Restricts Sales

PARIS: Psst. Hey mister. Wanna buy a UAV? China’s got drones for shooting, drones for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and drones for target practice. Cheap prices and no arms export restrictions.

And China may grab a significant share of the international market for just those reasons, according to a new report by the U.S-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Breaking Defense obtained a copy of the report: China’s Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Industry [sic]

The irony would be, of course, that the United States has largely created that demand by demonstrating the utility of drones (UAVs, Remotely Piloted Aircraft — RPAs — pick your term) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq and other locales over the last decade.