OMNI
MILITARY DRONES IN
ARKANSAS, ANTHOLOGY #1
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, Ecology, and Democracy
February 17, 2026
What’s at
Stake: War-making drones have been
developing and becoming more horrifically lethal for a decade, but so also has
opposition. Join tomorrow’s protest.
“Protest
to Stop Killer Robots Factory in Fayetteville. This Wednesday.”
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Dear
Friends,
The
Military Industrial Complex is officially* coming to Fayetteville this week.
War Profiteering Military Officials and Silicon Valley Big Tech bros (see the web site following) are opening their
factory for dystopian autonomous AI Drone Swarms, aka killer robots. They
are having their big Ribbon Cutting Opening Ceremony this
Wednesday morning tomorrow at 10 AM (see Fay Chamber of Commerce Flyer
below), so we are organizing a protest outside starting at 9:30 AM. The address
is 3660 S. School Avenue, Fayetteville, just north of Drake Field, and you can
park right next door at the Arkansas National Guard parking lot.
Swarm Aero Website, and Military
Industrial Complex Board
We
are expressing opposition to handing over decision-making for killing people to
AI robots, specifically. The extreme dangers of this technology are more fully
explained in the TED Talks by experts at the links below. We are also
expressing opposition to wasting trillions of taxpayer dollars on endless war
profiteering while USA is $38 trillion in debt and while so many American human
needs go unmet.
We
will be joining a well established international Campaign to Stop Killer Robots
that has been trying to get this kind of technology banned at the international
level.
https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/
Why
We Must Ban Killer Robots TED Talk from software engineer Laura Nolan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4FocUsT8VQ
Stop
Killer Robots TED Talk from Jody Williams from the Nobel Prize winning
organization that passed international treaty to ban land mines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbsXjkmvB5I
*In
addition to Fayetteville's UA Nuclear Weapons Program that works on nuclear
weapons components.
Abel Tomlinson AbelTomlinson.com World Citizen Wire Arkansas Antiwar Alliance
ARKANSAS
DRONES, Fort Smith Ebbing AFB, 2008-2024
See Arkansas
Military Industrial Complex (AR MIC) Anthologies, 2008-2024, which include
Drones.
Anthology #1, October 8, 2008.
Anthology #2, October 10, 2012.
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2018/11/omni-militarism-in-arkansas-2-oct-10.html
Anthology #3, November 28, 2021.
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2021/11/militarismmilitary-industrial.html
Anthology #4, July
10, 2025.
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2025/07/omni-militarism-in-arkansas-anthology-4.html
Anthology #5 in
preparation.
(More recent
anthologies are in preparation.)
Michael Klare.
“Swarms of AI “killer robots” are the future of war: If
that sounds scary, it should” (Feb. 24, 2024).
Swarms of self-guided automated weapons
systems will fight future wars. What will they decide to do?
This article originally
appeared at TomDispatch. Yes, it’s already time to
be worried — very worried. As the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have
shown, the earliest drone equivalents of “killer robots” have made it onto the
battlefield and proved to be devastating
weapons. But at least they remain largely under human control. Imagine, for a
moment, a world of war in which those aerial drones (or their ground and sea
equivalents) controlled us, rather than vice versa. Then we would be on a
destructively different planet in a fashion that might seem almost unimaginable
today. Sadly, though, it’s anything but unimaginable, given the work on
artificial intelligence and robot weaponry that the major powers have already
begun. Now, let me take you into that arcane world and try to envision what the
future of warfare might mean for the rest of us.
By combining AI with advanced robotics, the
U.S. military and those of other advanced powers are already hard at work
creating an array of self-guided “autonomous” weapons systems — combat drones
that can employ lethal force independently of any human officers meant to
command them. Called “killer robots” by critics, such devices include a variety
of uncrewed or “unmanned” planes, tanks, ships and submarines capable of
autonomous operation. The U.S. Air Force, for example, is developing its “collaborative combat aircraft,”
an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, intended to join piloted aircraft on
high-risk missions. The Army is similarly testing a variety of autonomous
unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, while the Navy is experimenting with both
unmanned surface vessels, or USVs and unmanned undersea vessels or drone
submarines). China, Russia,
Australia and Israel are also working on such weaponry for the battlefields of
the future.
The imminent appearance of those killing
machines has generated concern and controversy globally, with some countries
already seeking a total ban on them and others, including the U.S., planning to
authorize their use only under human-supervised conditions. In Geneva, a group
of states has even sought to prohibit the deployment and use of fully
autonomous weapons, citing a 1980 U.N. treaty, the Convention on Certain
Conventional Weapons, that aims to curb or outlaw non-nuclear
munitions believed to be especially harmful to civilians. Meanwhile, in New
York, the U.N. General Assembly held its first discussion of autonomous weapons
last October and is planning a
full-scale review of the topic this coming fall.
For the most part, debate over the battlefield
use of such devices hinges on whether they will be empowered to take human
lives without human oversight. . . .
[Veterans for Peace, VFP-all] DRONE ORGANIZERS BULLETIN - JUNE 19, 2021. Tarak Kauff via uark.onmicrosoft.com
to vfp-all@googlegroups.com, vfpaction@googlegroups.com, VFP-standing-rock@googlegroups.com. 
From: Nick Mottern <nickmottern@gmail.com>
Date: June 19, 2021 at 10:01:52 PM EDT
To: <takauff@gmail.com>
View a
comprehensive list of things people can do to stop drone warfare and
surveillance. [No longer available.]
BAN KILLER DRONES campaign webinar:
DRONE USE BY U.S. POLICE and the HUMAN IMPACT OF U.S. DRONE
ATTACKS IN YEMEN.
Tuesday, June 22, 2021, 11
a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time (US)
Please register here. . . .
PANELISTS
ARE:
THE REV.
DR. EMMA JORDAN-SIMPSON, is the Executive
Director of Fellowship of Reconciliation USA, the US branch of the oldest
international interfaith peace and justice organization employing the
transformative power of nonviolence to resolve human conflict. She is the
executive pastor of the Concord Baptist Church of Christ, Brooklyn, NY and
President of American Baptist Churches of Metropolitan New York. She will
address the police use of drone surveillance at protests.
MOHAMMED
AL-AHMADI is an investigative journalist,
member of the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate, member of the International
Federation of Journalists and a legal researcher for Alkarama for Human
Rights. He is Secretary-General of the Yemeni Media Club
in Instanbul, Turkey, which was recently established with a license from
the Turkish authorities, and he is a press editor for Balqis TV, which
broadcasts from Turkey. He has a media presence and participates in many
satellite channels to comment on events in Yemen, especially human rights
issues. Several years ago, he carried out several field visits to Yemeni
areas that had experienced drone attacks, met with survivors, and the families
of victims, and contributed to preparing several human rights reports for
Alkarama, and he also contributed to writing investigative articles about drone
attacks. He will report on the physical and emotional impact of U.S. drone
attacks on the Yemeni people and Yemeni politics.
Webinar moderator KATHY
KELLY helps coordinate the Ban Killer Drones campaign.
In articles and interviews, she regularly raises concerns about drone warfare,
particularly in Afghanistan and Yemen, and the impact of drone surveillance on
U.S. communities.
Registration Now Open for Drone Summit in AR 2020
The fourth annual Arkansas
Drone/Unmanned Aircraft Systems Summit will take place Thursday and Friday,
March 12-13, 2020, with events in Fayetteville and Little Rock. . . .
NEWS OF DRONE BASE AT FT SMITH, ARKANSAS
“GOV. HUTCHINSON’S Building on Guard site starts.”
Project
to house 3 188th wing missions
By Dave
Hughes. Posted: February 14, 2018 .
http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2018/feb/14/building-on-guard-site-starts-20180214/?news-arkansas-nwa
FORT SMITH
-- The Arkansas Air National Guard broke ground Tuesday on construction of a
40,000-square-foot building that will put all three of the 188th Wing's
major missions under one roof.
In a
ceremony at Ebbing Air National Guard Base, the 188th's commander, Col.
Robert Kinney, said the $14.2 million
building that will house the wing's remotely piloted
aircraft, distributed ground station and intelligence surveillance
reconnaissance missions in one structure is expected to be completed in
2020.
"Upon
completion, this Razorback Operation
Center, as this facility will be known, will be the only facility in the world which will house all three mission sets,"
Kinney told the crowd of about 100 military officials, congressional
representatives, community leaders and airmen.
Among those
present Tuesday were Arkansas Adjutant General Maj. Gen. Mark Berry, Arkansas
Air Guard Chief of Staff Brig. Gen. Joe Wilson, Col. [Ret.] Steve Eggensperger
representing Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and
Fort Smith Mayor Sandy Sanders. Berry said he believed the 188th's missions
were important in maintaining the nation's national security, an asset
that will employ many airmen and guarantee the long-term survival of the
Arkansas National Guard.
Combining
the three missions under one roof, Kinney said, will lead to innovations,
efficiencies and synergies that will help operators and analysts collaborate to
solve problems in carrying out their missions around the world. "This just didn't happen," Sanders
said. "It took a lot of support from the governor's office, the congressional delegation, and it
demonstrates the confidence in the leadership of the 188th."
The 188th's
missions are more important today given the complicated world for the military
to navigate. Kinney said the newly released National Defense Strategy, among
other things, refocuses attention on strategic competitors Russia, China,
North Korea, Iran and transnational groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida.
They will
challenge the United States, short of armed conflict, he said, and blur the
lines between civil and military force.
"We
here at the 188th are primarily focused day to day on the counter-insurgency
fight," he said. "In parallel, we will continue to prepare for
the strategic fight as the National Defense Strategy provides."
The 188th
took on the new missions after losing its long-held flying mission in 2014 when
the wing's A-10 Thunderbolt IIs, nicknamed the Warthogs, were reassigned.
Kinney said
the wing was put on a tight schedule to transition to the new missions,
completing six years of hiring in six months and training more than 500
personnel in two years.
The remotely piloted aircraft mission moved into a
5,000-square-foot classified facility where combat missions took place around
the clock. The distributed ground station targeting mission is in a
3,500-square-foot classified space. A renovated 20,000-square-foot operations
space houses the intelligence surveillance reconnaissance group headquarters.
Putting
those missions into action was accomplished in three years, Kinney said.
"We do support combat and command requirements 24/7/365
around the world," Kinney said. "I can't talk about where those
are, but we certainly have that capability."
NW News on 02/14/2018
OPPOSITION
TO KILLER DRONES 2020
(I sent the following
message to folks on my anti-war list inviting them to a video event v. drones. –D)
What's at stake is
extrajudicial killing, a euphemism for murder, under cover of "national
security," which has rationalized millions of killings.
Fortunately, several organizations in the
US oppose drone murders, including the Interfaith Network on Drone
Warfare. Take a
look at their 4 brief videos and tell your
religious friends about . . . .
Thanks, Dick
Reserve
for May 27 Workshop on Art & Activism: Resisting Drone Warfare!
5-23-20. |
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A Project of the Peace Action Education Fund
REGISTER TODAY for the workshop.
. . . What: Art &
Activism: A Workshop on Resisting Drone Warfare . . . .
Who: Essam Attia. Essam served for three years as a geospatial
analyst in the US Army, he then earned a BFA in photography from the School
of Visual Arts and went on to create his most notable artworks, Drone
Zones, and The Drone Campaign. These seminal works garnered
international press and have been featured in The New Yorker, The
Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News. For a taste of what Essam will
offer in the virtual workshop, click on any or all of the four video links
following: [No longer available. Please
join me in denouncing the ephemerality of online communication v. print. --D P.S. If you would like to
resume having a monthly conference call to network with others doing
faith based organizing on drone warfare from 12-1 PM on
our usual first Tuesday of the month, June 2, please reply to this email! [No longer available.] Peace Action Education Fund, 40 Witherspoon St., Princeton, NJ
08542, (609)924-5022 |
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Urgent: Contribute
Toward Continuing Work of Interfaith Network on Drone Warfare! Interfaith Network on
Drone Warfare cfpa@peacecoalition.org via bounce.myngp.com
12-30-19
A Project of the Peace Action Education Fund (PAEF)
Dear Supporter, The
photo above is of a highly successful Interfaith Organizing Conference on
Drone Warfare, in which we
brought 80 faith leaders from 24 states to Princeton Seminary from
September 27-29. Evaluations of the conference were universally positive
and enthusiastic. Since
then, I have started facilitating monthly conference calls of
conference attendees to help us follow-through and be better informed and
mutually supportive on our faith based concerns about drone warfare and
autonomous weapons. One specific task
we've taken on is doing further education in our congregations and faith
organzations, especially utilizing five half hour educational videos which have so far been screened in over
150 congregations across the country. [These
videos are no longer available.] . . . .
Sincerely, The
Rev. Robert Moore Executive Director
Peace Action Education Fund
Peace Action Education
Fund 40 Witherspoon St. Princeton, NJ 08542 609-924-5022
www.peacecoalition.o
END ARKANSAS DRONES ANTHOLOGY #1
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