American Way of War (14 page)

Today, the advanced UAV, the Reaper, housing up to four Hellfire missiles and two 500-pound bombs, packs the sort of punch once reserved for a jet fighter. Dispatched to the skies over the farthest reaches of the American empire, powered by a 1,000-horsepower turbo prop engine
at its rear, the Reaper can fly at up to 21,000 feet for up to twenty-two hours (until fuel runs short), streaming back live footage from three cameras (or sending it to troops on the ground)—16,000 hours of video a month. There is no need to worry about a pilot dozing off during those twenty-two hours. The human crews “piloting” the drones, often from thousands of miles away, just change shifts when tired. So the planes are left to endlessly cruise Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani skies relentlessly seeking out, like so many terminators, specific enemies whose identities can, under certain circumstances (or so the claims go) be determined even through the walls of houses. When a “target” is found and agreed upon—in Pakistan, the permission of Pakistani officials to fire is no longer considered necessary—and a missile or bomb is unleashed, the cameras are so powerful that “pilots” can watch the facial expressions of those being liquidated on their computer monitors “as the bomb hits.”

Approximately 5,500 UAVs, mostly unarmed—less than 250 of them are Predators and Reapers—operated in 2009 over Iraq and the so-called Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) theater of operations. Part of the more than century-long development of war in the air, drones have become favorites of U.S. military planners.

And yet, keep in mind that the UAV still remains in its (frightening) infancy. Such machines are not, of course, advanced cyborgs. They are in some ways not even all that advanced. Because someone wants publicity for the drone-war program, reporters from the United States and elsewhere have been given “rare behind-the-scenes” looks at how it works. As a result, and also because the “covert war” in the skies over Pakistan makes Washington’s secret warriors proud enough to regularly leak news of its “successes,” we know something more about how our drone wars work.

We know, for instance, that at least part of the air force’s Afghan UAV program runs out of Kandahar Air Base in southern Afghanistan. It turns out that, pilotless as the planes may be, a pilot does have to be nearby to guide them into the air and handle landings. As soon as the drone is up, a two-man team, a pilot and a “sensor monitor,” backed by intelligence experts and meteorologists, takes over the controls either at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, or at Creech Air Force Base
northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, some 7,000-odd miles away. (Other U.S. bases may be involved, as well, including Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar from which the air force evidently oversees its drone wars.)

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—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 miles 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 when they leave the job: a sign at Creech warns a pilot to “drive carefully” because this 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 United States; 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, in the twenty-first century 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. Assassination has taken to the skies as an everyday, year-round activity. Today, we increasingly display our assassination wares with pride. To us, at least, it seems perfectly normal for aerial assassination 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.

One of the truths of our time is that no weapons system, no matter where first created, can be kept as private property for long. Today, we talk not of arms races, but of “proliferation,” which is what you have once a global arms race of one takes hold. But don’t for a minute imagine that those hunter-killer skies dominated by Predators and Reapers won’t someday fill with the drones of other nations. The Chinese, the Russians, the Israelis, the Pakistanis, the Georgians, and the Iranians, among others, already have drones. In 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 do-it-yourself drone websites make clear).

Undoubtedly, the future holds unnerving possibilities not just for states, but for small groups intent on assassination from the air. Already the skies are growing more crowded. In March 2009, not long after coming into office, President Barack 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 U.S. policy toward America’s longtime foe.” It was in the form of a Persian New Year’s greeting. But, as the
New York Times
also reported, the U.S. military beat the president to the punch. They sent their own “greetings” to the Iranians a couple of days earlier. The U.S. 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 25, 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 spokesperson, “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 might 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, U.S. 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 real 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.

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, “these 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 under way. Soon, some Reapers will have a far more sophisticated sensor system with twelve cameras capable of filming a two-and-a-half mile round area from twelve 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, that should someday be “completely autonomous,” meaning it theoretically will operate without human pilots. Initial trials of a prototype were 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, “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 health care 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 loose 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.

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.

Consider this description: