UAV African Market Research

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Africa: the world’s second largest and second most-populous continent.

  • Present Military UAV usage in Africa
  • Future Military UAV usage in Africa
  • African countries Military spending
  • African countries’ international relationships
  • Chinese UAV research and development progress
  • SWAT analysis of BUAA’s MALE and HALE UAV.
  • 非洲无人机使用的现状
  • 非洲军用无人机的现状
  • 非洲军用无人机的购买潜力
  • 中国出口空军武器装备型号在国际市场的竞争潜力分析。

Drones in Africa

From killing machines to agents of hope: the future of drones in Africa

In Rwanda, as in many other African countries, the rainy season makes already difficult roads between smaller towns and villages all but impassable. Battered trucks struggle through the mud, and in some cases even more agile motorbikes and foot traffic are unable get through.

非洲的基建要加油啊，中国有句俗话说得好啊，要致富先修路。你们看看南非利用上世纪90年代到本世纪初叶的基础设施，忽悠了多少国际投资，干成了多少大事情。一个是路，一个是电。这两个有了，招商引资才好做嘛。

“If it’s for niche uses, it may not be very scalable as a business. One of the obstacles has been security considerations – people are worried about how they might be used and that has put the brakes on it a bit.”

Others are confident of the long-term potential for drone technology. Mteto Nyati, chief executive of MTN South Africa – the country’s second largest telecoms firm and part of the largest mobile operator in sub-Saharan Africa, says drones represent “a huge growth opportunity for us”.

“All those devices will have a sim … but there will also be applications linked to that sim that come up with solutions beyond the drones themselves,” says Nyati. “In South Africa, there is already clarity around licensing. It will be very easy to do the same across a number of other countries.”

For these small devices, they will be able to have a SIM. For large ones, they can but will not have SIM installed. Because they have other means of communication.

“Drones may well bring the most exciting potential to marry the real and vast physical challenges of Africa with **the digital revolution.**”

The life-saving potential of drones in Africa

At first, the drone took some explaining. Anxious villagers buzzed with rumors of a new blood-sucking thing that would fly above their homes. Witchcraft, some said.

很多年前的清朝民间团体，义和团也是这么看洋鬼子的洋枪洋炮的。Boxer Rebellion，洋大人在维基百科上这么写道。造反有理！一切反动派都是纸老虎！中华民族靠着这种顽强不屈的斗争精神在残酷的20世纪活了下来。为什么要和平崛起，伟大复兴呢？因为我们配。

As drones quickly pick up momentum around the world in everything from military strikes to pizza delivery, Africa, the continent with some of the most entrenched humanitarian crises, hopes the technology will bring progress.

The average cost for UAV research and development, and the REAL-WORLD APPLICATION still remains to be seen. AKA, it’s becoming more practical. It takes time and patience.

This second-largest continent, with harsh landscapes of desert and rain forest and extremes of rainy seasons and drought, is burdened with what the World Bank has called “the worst infrastructure endowment of any developing region today.” Rural highways, often unpaved, disintegrate. In many countries, access to electricity has actually declined. Taking to the air to soar over such challenges, much as Africa embraced mobile phones to bypass often dismal landline service, is a tempting goal.

当然你们这些白皮猪也要想一想，自己搞的吃饭砸锅，颜色革命。非要在21世纪玩20世纪那一套搞乱了好赚钱的路数，真是江总骂你们骂得对，too young. Sometimes naive, naive!

Off Africa’s eastern coast in Madagascar, another U.S. company, Vayu, has completed drone flights to deliver blood and stool samples from rural villages with support from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Drones also face multiple challenges. Some models are limited in range or need frequent recharging. If they crash, retrieval in remote areas can be difficult. Some governments are wary of the technology as a possible invasion of their sovereignty, or they have no regulations in place.

实际上就是。成都飞云搞出来的黑飞就是，因为这个东西速度快，还可以远程遥控/设定自毁之类，所以在正反两个方面都是牢不萌的“空军制胜论”以及“无人机后无革命”的优良例证。你想想，你吃着火锅唱着歌，忽然就被不明武装力量的无人机给炸死了！

Cost is another issue. The United Nations’ test early this year in Malawi with the help of U.S. company Matternet found that using motorcycles was cheaper as they could carry other cargo, said Sherman, UNICEF’s HIV and AIDS chief there.

COST IS A BIG ISSUE (RELIABILITY IS THE BIGGEST IN MY VIEW) FOR DRONES, BIG OR SMALL, TO BE POPULAR AROUND THE WORLD.

Aid organizations are pushing for new breakthroughs. The Netherlands-based Wings for Aid is working on a drone prototype to carry more and go farther: Up to 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of cargo could be delivered to several points within 500 kilometers (310 miles), said Wesley Kreft, director of business development and innovation.

“The holy grail is to have a network of autonomous drones that do their work independently, with a human supervising numerous deliveries at once,” said Arthur Holland Michel, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York.

It could take a couple of years before such drones could be entrusted with critical deliveries in challenging rural areas like Africa, he said, but the technology is there.

指挥，控制。4CISR,怎么越听越像在打仗？打仗是不怎么考虑成本的，然鹅商业化无人机是肯定需要考虑的，要不然你就做好创业第一年GG的思想准备。

Drone use is on the rise in Africa - in film-making, conservation and construction.

But BBC Monitoring Africa security correspondent Tomi Oladipo says some governments on the continent are worried about security and have begun cracking down on pilots.

这TM不是废话嘛！现代战争，空军致胜是真理。所以在非洲大部分国家的防空设施、能力都不行的时候大搞特搞无人机，放开自己的空域，不被别有用心认识拍个底裤都拍出来，才奇怪累！虽然现在大多数四旋翼都不会自己往机场里面飞，耐不住网上有教程教你拆了GPS啊。我还是那句话，无人机后无革命。

Weaponized Drones in Africa

U.S. MILITARY IS BUILDING A $100 MILLION DRONE BASE IN AFRICA

WHY NIGER IS WEST AFRICA’S PEOPLE-SMUGGLING HUB

Libya’s status as the preferred departure point for African migrants and refugees seeking to reach Europe has been well-documented.

Next, the harsh conditions make the region difficult to police. The journey from Agadez to the Libyan border takes between three and six days of driving through sandstorms and searing temperatures that can reach between 40-50°C (104-122°F). While the Mediterranean migration crisis has arguably received far more coverage and funding—the EU allocated €11.82 million ($13.3m, £9.3m) in June 2015 for a 12-month mission to patrol the Mediterranean for possible instances of smuggling—Loprete says tackling the problem in the Sahara is complicated by such conditions. “Nobody is patrolling the desert…It’s not like the Mediterranean where you can set up a rescue operation,” he says. “Even the police do not patrol these areas.”

Nobody is patrolling the desert, but if you have a long endurance UAV, you will be able to see everything at a relatively low cost.

All of These Countries Now Have Armed Drones

Last week Nigeria joined a dubious international clique when it bombed a logistics base used by the militant group Boko Haram in the country’s northeast. Though the airstrike itself was unremarkable—the Nigerian Air Force has conducted hundreds of strikes against Boko Haram in recent months—it was the first Nigeria has delivered via an unmanned drone.

In the past 18 months the weaponized drone club has quietly grown to double-digit membership, largely thanks to Chinese technology that is both less expensive and easier to obtain than U.S. drone technology.

According to a report the New America Foundation released last year, the list of countries that possess armed drones includes the U.S., the U.K., China, Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, and South Africa. Two non-state organizations—Hamas and Hezbollah—also make the list, though this is where the distinctions between “weaponized drone” and “model-aircraft-with-a-grenade-strapped-to-it” begin to become important, and not just in terms of tallying membership in the weaponized drone club. An aircraft’s range and the size of the payload it can carry has important ramifications in the international weapons marketplace, triggering international arms control agreements in some cases and not in others (more on that below).

In November, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of weaponized MQ-9 Reaper technology to Italy, making it only the second country to receive the U.S. Air Force’s signature drone strike technology (following the U.K. in 2007). Around the same time, Spain also acknowledged that it would pursue weaponization of its own fleet of MQ-9s at some undetermined point in the future. The Canadian air force reportedly is shopping for an armed drone capability as well, though neither Spain nor Canada has received clearance from the U.S. to import the technology.

That clearance is key to a larger trend in the proliferation of weaponized drones, particularly the ones now emerging in combat roles in places like Nigeria, Iraq, and Pakistan. The U.S. is signatory to something called the Missile Technology Control Regime, or MTCR—a voluntary 1987 arms control agreement aimed largely at controlling the proliferation of cruise missile technologies as the Cold War came to a close.

While the U.S. is signatory to the MTCR, drone exporters like China and Israel are not. Not only has that hurt the U.S. drone industry (for both armed and unarmed models) in the global marketplace, but it’s made China a particularly attractive vendor. (While Israel exports its drone technologies, its security situation requires that it be a more discerning seller of weaponized drone technology.) Though pricing information is scarce, analysts estimate the price tag on a Chinese CH-4 drone is roughly a quarter that of the American MQ-9 Reaper it is designed to emulate. Buying weaponized drones from China also entails far fewer regulatory hurdles.

That’s one reason we’re now seeing armed drones entering combat in places like Nigeria, Pakistan, and Iraq, each of which operates Chinese CH-3 or CH-4 models. Two CH-4s reportedly crashed in Algeria last year during evaluation by the Algerian military (though it’s not clear if Algeria went through with its purchase after the botched demo). Both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have reportedly purchased Chinese drones as well, as arms control considerations have thus far barred them from purchasing the technology from their usual weapons vendors in the United States.

The proliferation of armed Chinese drones is stratifying the weaponized drone club somewhat, says Sarah Kreps, an associate professor in Cornell University’s department of government and an expert on weapons proliferation and international security. At the high end of that strata there’s the U.S. and a handful of its allies that have the resources to sustain satellites, global data links, and foreign bases that offer the kind of global reach the U.S. drone program is renowned for, she says. Then there’s a lower tier that includes those countries operating Chinese-made weaponized platforms capable of flying only a few hundred miles from their ground controller.

That limited range doesn’t make the lower tier any less deadly, she says. For many countries battling insurgencies within their own borders or targeting the neighbor next door, a shorter range and fewer technological bells and whistles isn’t all that limiting, as evidenced by deadly strikes inside the borders of Nigeria, Pakistan, and Iraq. The fact that the weaponized drones most popular on the global market are theoretically less effective than U.S.-made drone hardware has not blunted their effect in practice.