Page 1 of 2 Drones: A slam-dunk weapons system
By Tom Engelhardt
For drone freaks (and these days Washington seems full of them), here's the
good news. Drones are hot! Not long ago - 2006 to be exact - the US Air Force
could barely get a few armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air at
once; now, the number is 38; by 2011, it will reputedly be 50, and beyond that,
in every sense, the sky's the limit.
Better yet, for the latest generation of armed surveillance drones - the ones
with the chill-you-to-your-bones sci-fi names of Predators and Reapers (as in
Grim) - whole new surveillance capabilities will soon be available. Their
newest video system, due to be deployed next year, has been dubbed Gorgon
Stare, after
the creature in Greek mythology whose gaze turned its victims to stone.
According to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, Gorgon Stare will offer a
"pilot" back in good ol' Langley, VA, headquarters of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), the ability to "stare" via 12 video feeds (where only one now
exists) at a 1.5 mile square area (259 hectares), and then, with Hellfire
missiles and bombs, assumedly turn any part of it into rubble. Within the year,
that viewing capacity is expected to double.
What we're talking about here is the gaze of the gods, updated in corporate
labs for the modern American war-fighter - a gaze that can be focused on
whatever runs, walks, crawls or creeps just about anywhere on the planet 24/7,
with an instant ability to blow it away. And what's true of video capacity will
be no less true of the next generation of drone sensors - and, of course, of
drone weaponry, like that "five-pound [2.2 kilogram] missile the size of a loaf
of French bread" meant in some near-robotic future to replace the present
100-pound Hellfire missile, possibly on the Avenger or Predator C, the next
generation drone under development at General Atomics Aeronautical
Systems.
Everything, in fact, will be almost infinitely upgradeable, since we're still
in the robotics equivalent of the age of the "horseless carriage", as Peter
Singer of the Brookings Institution assures us. (Just hold your hats, for
instance, when the first nano-drones make it onto the scene! They will,
according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, be able to "fly after their prey
like a killer bee through an open window".)
And here's another flash from the drone development front: the US Navy wants
in. Chief of naval operations, Admiral Gary Roughead, reports Jason Paur of
Wired's Danger Room blog, is looking for "a robotic attack aircraft that can
land and take off from a carrier". Fortunately, according to Paur, the X-47B,
which theoretically should be able to do just that, is to make its first test
flight before year's end. It could be checking out those carrier decks by 2011,
and fully operational by 2025.
Not only that, but drones are leaving the air for the high seas, where they are
called unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). In fact, Israel - along with the US
leading the way on drones - will reportedly soon launch the first of its USVs
off the coast of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The US can't be far behind and it seems
that, like their airborne cousins, these ships, too, will be weaponized.
Taking the measure of a slam-dunk weapons system
Robot war. It just couldn't be cooler, could it? Especially if the only blood
you spill is the other guy's, since our "pilots" are flying those planes from
thousands of miles away. Soon, it seems, the world will be a drone fest. In his
first nine months, President Barack Obama has authorized more drone attacks in
the Pakistani tribal borderlands than the George W Bush administration did in
its last three years in office and is now considering upping their use in areas
of rural Afghanistan where US troops will be scarce.
In Washington, drones are even considered the "de-escalatory" option for the
Afghan war by some critics, while the CIA director, Leon Panetta, whose agency
runs the US's drone war in Pakistan, has hailed them as "the only game in town
in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al-Qaeda leadership". Among
the few people who don't adore them in the US are hard-core war-fighters who
don't want an armada of robot planes standing in the way of sending in oodles
more troops. Joe Biden, the vice president, however, is a drone-atic. He loves
'em to death and reportedly wants to up their missions, especially in Pakistan,
rather than go the oodles route.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates jumped onto the drone bandwagon early. He has
long been pressing the air force to invest ever less in expensive manned
aircraft - he's called the F-35, still in development, the last manned fighter
aircraft - and ever more in the robotic kind. After all, they're so lean, mean
and high-tech sexy - for Newsweek, they fall into the category of "weapons
porn".
Okay, maybe there's the odd scrooge around like Philip Alston, the United
Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, who recently complained
to the press that the US program might involve war crimes under international
law: "We need the United States to be more up front and say, 'OK, we're willing
to discuss some aspects of this program,' otherwise you have the really
problematic bottom line that the CIA is running a program that is killing
significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in
terms of the relevant international laws."
But as Christmas approaches, somebody's always going to say, "Bah, humbug!" And
let's face it, just about everyone who matters to the mainstream media swears
that the drones are just so much more "precise" in their "extra-judicial
executions" than traditional air methods, which can be so messy. Better yet,
when nothing in Afghanistan or Pakistan seems to be working out, the drones are
actually doing the job. They're reportedly knocking off the bad guys right and
left. At least 13 senior al-Qaeda leaders and one senior Taliban leader (aka
"high-value targets") have been killed by the drones, according to the Long War
Journal, and many more foot soldiers have been taken out as well.
And they're not just the obvious slam-dunk weapons system for our present
problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they're potentially the royal path to the
future when it comes to war-fighting, which is surely something else to be
excited about.
The wonder weapons succeed - at home
So why am I not excited - other than the fact that the drones are also killing
civilians in disputed but significant numbers in the Pakistani tribal
borderlands, creating enemies and animosity wherever they strike, and turning
the US into a nation of 24/7 assassins beyond the law or accountability of any
sort? Thought of another way, the drones put wings on the original Bush-era
Guantanamo principle - that Americans have the inalienable right to act as
global judge, jury and executioner, and in doing so are beyond the reach of any
court or law.
And here's another factor that dulls my excitement just a tad - if the history
of air warfare has shown one thing, it's this: it never breaks populations.
Rather, it only increases their sense of unity, as in London during the Blitz
under Winston Churchill, in Germany under Adolf Hitler, Imperial Japan under
Emperor Hirohito, North Korea under Kim Il-sung, North Vietnam under Ho Chi
Minh, and (though we never put ourselves in such company, being the exceptions
to all history), the United States after September 11, 2001, under Bush. Why
should the peoples of rural Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands be any
different?
Oh, and there's just one more reason that comes to mind: it so happens that I
can see the future when it comes to drones, and it's dismal. I'm no prophet -
it's only that I've already lived through so much of that future. In fact, we
all have.
Militarily speaking, we might as well be in the film Groundhog Day in
which Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell are forced to live out the same 24 hours
again and again - with all the grimness of that idea and none of the charm of
those actors. In my lifetime, I've repeatedly seen advanced weapons systems or
mind-boggling technologies of war hailed as near-utopian paths to victory and
future peace (just as the atomic bomb was soon after my birth).
In the Vietnam War, the glories of "the electronic battlefield" were limned as
an antidote to brute and ineffective American air power. That high-tech,
advanced battlefield of invisible sensors was to bring an end to the impunity
of guerrillas and infiltrating enemy armies. No longer capable of going
anywhere undetected, they would have nowhere to hide.
In the 1980s, it was president Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative,
quickly dubbed "Star Wars" by its critics, a label that he accepted with
amusement. ("If you will pardon my stealing a film line - the Force is with
us," he said in his usual genial way.) His dream, as he told the American
people, was to create an "impermeable" anti-missile shield over the United
States - "like a roof protects a family from rain" - that would end the
possibility of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union and so create peace in our
time (or, if you were of a more cynical turn of mind, the possibility of a
freebie nuclear assault on the Soviets).
In the Gulf War, "smart bombs" and smart missiles were praised as the military
saviors of the moment. They were to give war the kind of precision that would
lower civilian deaths to vanishing point and, as the neo-conservatives of the
Bush administration would claim in the next decade, free the US military to
"decapitate" any regime the US loathed.
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