Page 1 of 2 A sky filled with assassins
By Tom Engelhardt
In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a cyborg
assassin, a "terminator”, back to our time. His job was to liquidate the woman
who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of the underground human
resistance of Skynet's time. You with me so far? That, of course, was the plot
of the first Terminator movie and for the multi-millions of people who saw it;
the images of future machine war - of hunter-killer drones flying above a
wasted landscape - are unforgettable.
Since then, as Hollywood's special effects took off, there were two sequels
during which the original terminator somehow morphed into a friendlier figure
onscreen, and even more miraculously, off-screen, into the humanoid governor of
California. Now, the fourth
film in the series, Terminator Salvation, is about to descend on us. It
will hit our multiplexes this May.
Oh, sorry, I don't mean hit hit. I mean, arrive in.
Meanwhile, hunter-killer drones haven't waited for Hollywood. As you sit in
that movie theater in May, actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless
surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, will be
patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings. And in
the Pentagon and the labs of defense contractors, UAV supporters are already
talking about and working on next-generation machines. Post-2020, according to
these dreamers, drones will be able to fly and fight, discern enemies and
incinerate them without human decision-making. They're even wondering about
just how to program human ethics, maybe even American ethics, into them.
Okay, it may never happen, but it should still make you blink that out there in
America are people eager to bring the fifth iteration of Terminator not to
local multiplexes but to the skies of our perfectly real world - and that the
Pentagon is already funding them to do so.
An arms race of one
Now, keep our present drones, those MQ-1 Predators and more advanced MQ-9
Reapers, in mind for a moment. Remember that, as you read, they're cruising
Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani skies looking for potential "targets", and in
Pakistan's tribal borderlands are employing what Centcom commander General
David Petraeus calls "the right of last resort" to take out "threats" (as well
as tribespeople who just happen to be in the vicinity). And bear with me while
I offer you a little potted history of the modern arms race.
Think of it as starting in the early years of the 20th century when Imperial
Britain, industrial juggernaut and colonial upstart Germany and Imperial Japan
all began to plan and build new generations of massive battleships or
dreadnoughts (followed by "super-dreadnoughts") and so joined in a fierce naval
arms race. That race took a leap onto land and into the skies in World War I
when scientists and war planners began churning out techno-marvels of death and
destruction meant to break the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western
front.
Each year, starting in 1915, new or improved weaponry - poison gas, upgrades of
the airplane, the tank and then the improved tank - appeared on or above the
battlefield. Even as those marvels arrived, the next generation of weapons was
already on the drawing boards. (In a sense, American auto makers took up the
same battle plan in peacetime, unveiling new, ramped up car models each year.)
As a result, when World War I ended in 1918, the war machinery of 1919 and 1920
was already being mapped out and developed. The next war, that is, and the
weapons that would go with it were already in the mind's eye of war planners.
From the first years of the 20th century on, an obvious prerequisite for what
would prove a never-ending arms race was two to four great powers in potential
collision, each of which had the ability to mobilize scientists, engineers,
universities and manufacturing power on a massive scale. World War II was, in
these terms, a bonanza for invention as well as destruction. It ended, of
course, with the Manhattan Project, that ne plus ultra of industrial-sized
invention for destruction, which produced the first atomic bomb, and so the
Cold War nuclear arms race that followed.
In that 45-year brush with extinction, the United States and the Soviet Union
each mobilized a military-industrial complex to build ever newer generations of
ever more devastating nuclear weaponry and delivery systems for a MAD (mutually
assured destruction) world. At the peak of that two-superpower arms race, the
resulting arsenals had the mad capacity to destroy eight or ten planets our
size.
In 1991, after 73 years, the Soviet Union, that Evil Empire, simply evaporated,
leaving but a single superpower without rivals astride planet Earth. And then
came the unexpected thing: the arms race, which had been almost a century in
the making, did not end. Instead, the unimaginable occurred and it simply
morphed into a "race" of one with a finish line so distant - the bomber of
2018, Earth-spanning weapons systems, a vast anti-ballistic missile system and
weaponry for the heavens of perhaps 2050 - as to imply eternity.
The Pentagon and the military-industrial complex surrounding it - including
mega-arms manufacturers, advanced weapons labs, university science centers, and
the official or semi-official think tanks that churned out strategies for
future military domination - went right on. After a brief, post-Cold War blip
of time in which "peace dividends" were discussed but not implemented, the
"race" actually began to amp up again, and after September 11, 2001, went into
overdrive against "Islamo-fascism" (aka the "war on terror", or the Long War).
In those years, our Evil Empire of the moment, except in the minds of a clutch
of influential neo-cons, was a ragtag terrorist outfit made up of perhaps a few
thousand adherents and scattered global wannabes, capable of mounting
spectacular-looking but infrequent and surprisingly low-tech attacks on
symbolic American (and other) targets. Against this enemy, the Pentagon budget
became, for a while, an excuse for anything.
This brings us to our present unbalanced world of military might in which the
US accounts for nearly half of all global military spending and the total
Pentagon budget is almost six times that of the next contender, China.
Recently, the Chinese announced relatively modest plans to build up their
military and create a genuinely offshore navy. Similarly, the Russians have
moved to downsize and refinance their tattered armed forces and the industrial
complex that goes with them, while upgrading their weapons systems. This could
potentially make the country more competitive when it comes to global arms
dealing, a market more than half of which has been cornered by the US. They are
also threatening to upgrade their "strategic nuclear forces", even as
Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama have agreed to push forward a new
round of negotiations for nuclear reductions.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has just announced cutbacks in
some of the more outre and futuristic military R&D programs inherited from
the Cold War era. The navy's staggering 11 aircraft-carrier battle groups will
over time also be reduced by one. Minor as that may seem, it does signal an
imperial downsizing, given that the navy refers to each of those carriers,
essentially floating military bases, as "four and a half acres of sovereign US
territory". Nonetheless, the Pentagon budget will grow modestly and the US will
remain in a futuristic arms race of one, a significant part of which involves
reserving the skies as well as the heavens for American power.
Assassination by air
Speaking of controlling those skies, let's get back to UAVs. As futuristic
weapons planning went, they started out pretty low-tech in the 1990s. Even
today, the most commonplace of the two American armed drones, the Predator,
costs only US$4.5 million a pop, while the most advanced model of the Reaper -
both are produced by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems of San Diego - comes
in at $15 million. (Compare that to $350 million for a single F-22 Raptor,
which has proved essentially useless in America's most recent counterinsurgency
wars.) It's lucky that UAVs are cheap, since they are also prone to crashing.
Think of them as snowmobiles with wings that have received ever more
sophisticated optics and powerful weaponry.
They came to life as surveillance tools during the wars over the former
Yugoslavia, were armed by February 2001, hastily pressed into operation in
Afghanistan after 9/11 and, like many weapons systems, began to evolve
generationally. As they did, they developed from surveillance eyes in the sky
into something far more sinister and previously restricted to terra firma:
assassins. One of the earliest armed acts of a CIA-piloted Predator, back in
November 2002, was an assassination mission over Yemen in which a jeep,
reputedly transporting six suspected al-Qaeda operatives, was incinerated.
Today, the most 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 7,000 meters for up to 22 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.
No need to worry about a pilot dozing off during those 22 hours. The human
crews "piloting" the drones, often from thousands of kilometers 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 on - 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 - now operate over Iraq and the Af-Pak (as in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan) theater of operations. Part of the more-than-century-long
development of war in the air, drones have become favorites of American
military planners. Gates in particular has demanded increases in their
production (and in the training of their "pilots") and urged that they be
rushed in quantity into America's battle zones even before being fully
perfected.
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 now wants publicity for the drone-war
program, reporters from the US and elsewhere were recently given a "rare
behind-the-scenes" look at how they work. 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 US 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,
thousands of kilometers away. (Other US bases may be involved as well.)
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