Page 2 of 2 A sky filled with assassins
By Tom Engelhardt
According to Christopher Drew of the New York Times, who visited Davis-Monthan
where Air National Guard members handle the controls, the pilots sit
unglamorously "at 1990s-style computer banks filled with screens, inside dimly
lit trailers". Depending on the needs of the moment, they can find themselves
"over" either Afghanistan or Iraq, or even both on the same work shift. All of
this is remarkably mundane as pilot complaints generally run to problems
"transitioning" back to wife and children after a day at the joystick over
battle zones - and at the same time, right out of Ali Baba's One Thousand and
One Nights.
In those dimly lit trailers, the UAV teams have taken on an almost godlike
power. Their job is to survey a place thousands of
kilometers distant (and completely alien to their lives and experiences),
assess what they see, and spot "targets" to eliminate - even if on their
somewhat antiquated computer systems it "takes up to 17 steps - including
entering data into pull-down windows - to fire a missile" and incinerate those
below. They only face danger, other than carpal tunnel syndrome, when they
leave the job.
A sign at Creech warns a pilot to "drive carefully"; "this, it says, is 'the
most dangerous part of your day'." Those involved claim that the fear and
thrill of battle do not completely escape them, but the descriptions we now
have of their world sound discomfortingly like a cross between the far
frontiers of sci-fi and a call center in India.
The most intense of our various drone wars, the one on the other side of the
Afghan border in Pakistan, is also the most mysterious. We know that some or
all of the drones engaged in it take off from Pakistani airfields; that this
"covert war" (which regularly makes front-page news) is run by the CIA out of
its headquarters in Langley, Virginia; that its pilots are also located
somewhere in the US; and that at least some of them are hired private
contractors.
William Saletan of Slate has described our drones as engaged in "a bloodless,
all-seeing airborne hunting party". Of course, what was once an elite activity
performed in person has been transformed into a 24/7 industrial activity fit
for human drones.
Our drone wars also represent a new chapter in the history of assassination.
Once upon a time, to be an assassin for a government was a furtive, shameful
thing. In those days, of course, an assassin, if successful, took down a single
person, not the targeted individual and anyone in the vicinity (or simply, if
targeting intelligence proves wrong, anyone in the vicinity). No more
poison-dart-tipped umbrellas, as in past KGB operations, or toxic cigars as in
CIA ones - not now that assassination has taken to the skies as an every day,
all-year-round activity.
Today, we increasingly display our assassination wares with pride. To us, at
least, it seems perfectly normal for assassination aerial operations to be a
part of an open discussion in Washington and in the media. Consider this a new
definition of "progress" in our world.
Proliferation and sovereignty
This brings us back to arms races. They may be things of the past, but don't
for a minute imagine that those hunter-killer skies won't someday fill with the
drones of other nations. After all, one of the truths of our time is that no
weapons system, no matter where first created, can be kept for long as private
property. Today, we talk not of arms races, but of "proliferation”, which is
what you have once a global arms race of one takes hold.
In drone-world, the Chinese, the Russians, the Israelis, the Pakistanis, the
Georgians and the Iranians, among others, already have drones. In the Lebanon
War of 2006, Hezbollah flew drones over Israel. In fact, if you have the
skills, you can create your own drone, more or less in your living room (as
your basic DIY drone website indicates). Undoubtedly, the future holds
unnerving possibilities for small groups intent on assassination from the air.
Already the skies are growing more crowded. Three weeks ago, President Obama
issued what Reuters termed "an unprecedented videotaped appeal to Iran ...
offering a 'new beginning' of diplomatic engagement to turn the page on decades
of US policy toward America's longtime foe." It was in the form of a Persian
New Year's greeting. As the New York Times also reported, the US military beat
the president to the punch. They sent their own "greetings" to the Iranians a
couple of days earlier.
After considering what Times reporters Rod Nordland and Alissa J Rubin term
"the delicacy of the incident at a time when the United States is seeking a
thaw in its relations with Iran”, the US military sent out Colonel James Hutton
to meet the press and "confirm" that "allied aircraft" had shot down an
"Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle" over Iraq on February 25th, more than three
weeks earlier. Between that day and mid-March, the relevant Iraqi military and
civilian officials were, the Times tells us, not informed. The reason? That
drone was intruding on our (borrowed) airspace, not theirs. You probably didn't
know it, but according to an Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman, "protection of
Iraqi airspace remains an American responsibility for the next three years”.
And naturally enough, we don't want other countries' drones in "our" airspace,
though that's hardly likely to stop them. The Iranians, for instance, have
already announced the development of "a new generation of 'spy drones' that
provide real-time surveillance over enemy terrain".
Of course, when you openly control squads of assassination drones patrolling
airspace over other countries, you've already made a mockery of whatever
national sovereignty might once have meant. It's a precedent that may someday
even make us distinctly uncomfortable. But not right now.
If you doubt this, check out the stream of self-congratulatory comments being
leaked by Washington officials about our drone assassins. These often lead off
news pieces about America's "covert war" over Pakistan ("An intense, six-month
campaign of Predator strikes in Pakistan has taken such a toll on al-Qaeda that
militants have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and
distrust, US intelligence and counter-terrorism officials say ..."); but be
sure to read to the end of such pieces. Somewhere in them, after the successes
have been touted and toted up, you get the bad news, "In fact, the stepped-up
strikes have coincided with a deterioration in the security situation in
Pakistan."
In Pakistan, a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror (and
terrorism), as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means
fundamentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of the country.
To those who know their air power history, that shouldn't be so surprising. Air
power has had a remarkably stellar record when it comes to causing death and
destruction, but a remarkably poor one when it comes to breaking the will of
nations, peoples, or even modest-sized organizations. Our drone wars are
destructive, but they are unlikely to achieve Washington's goals.
The future awaits us
If you want to read the single most chilling line yet uttered about drone
warfare American-style, it comes at the end of Christopher Drew's piece. He
quotes Brookings Institution analyst Peter Singer saying of our Predators and
Reapers: "[T]hese systems today are very much Model T Fords. These things will
only get more advanced."
In other words, our drone wars are being fought with the airborne equivalent of
cars with cranks, but the "race" to the horizon is already underway. By next
year, some Reapers will have a far more sophisticated sensor system with 12
cameras capable of filming a two-and-a-half mile round area from 12 different
angles. That program has been dubbed "Gorgon Stare", but it doesn't compare to
the future 92-camera Argus program whose initial development is being funded by
the Pentagon's blue-skies outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency.
Soon enough, a single pilot may be capable of handling not one but perhaps
three drones, and drone armaments will undoubtedly grow progressively more
powerful and "precise”. In the meantime, BAE Systems already has a drone four
years into development, the Taranis, which should someday be "completely
autonomous"; that is, it theoretically will operate without human pilots.
Initial trials of a prototype are scheduled for 2010.
By 2020, so claim UAV enthusiasts, drones could be engaging in aerial battle
and choosing their victims themselves. As Robert S Boyd of McClatchy reported
recently, "The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or
self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own.
On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to
fire their weapons."
It's a particular sadness of our world that, in Washington, only the military
can dream about the future in this way, and then fund the "arms race" of 2018
or 2035. Rest assured that no one with a governmental red cent is researching
the healthcare system of 2018 or 2035, or the public education system of those
years.
In the meantime, the skies of our world are filling with round-the-clock
assassins. They will only evolve and proliferate. Of course, when we check
ourselves out in the movies, we like to identify with John Connor, the human
resister, the good guy of this planet, against the evil machines. Elsewhere,
however, as we fight our drone wars ever more openly, as we field mechanical
techno-terminators with all-seeing eyes and fire our missiles from thousands of
miles away ("Hasta la Vista, Baby!"), we undoubtedly look like something other
than a nation of John Connors to those living under the Predators. It may not
matter if the joysticks and consoles on those advanced machines are somewhat
antiquated; to others, we are now the terminators of the planet, implacable
machine assassins.
True, we can't send our drones into the past to wipe out the young Ayman
al-Zawahiri in Cairo or the teenage Osama bin Laden speeding down some Saudi
road in his gray Mercedes sedan. True, the UAV enthusiasts, who are already
imagining all-drone wars run by "ethical" machines, may never see anything like
their fantasies come to pass. Still, the fact that without the help of a single
advanced cyborg we are already in the process of creating a Terminator planet
should give us pause for thought ... or not.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of
The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as
well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited
The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire(Verso,
2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. To catch an audio
interview in which he discusses our airborne assassins, click
here.
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