Page 1 of 2 Drone surge: Today, tomorrow and 2047
By Nick Turse
One moment there was the hum of a motor in the sky above. The next, on a recent
morning in Afghanistan's Helmand province, a missile blasted a home, killing 13
people. Days later, the same increasingly familiar mechanical whine preceded a
two-missile salvo that slammed into a compound in Degan village in the North
Waziristan tribal area of Pakistan, killing three.
What were once unacknowledged, relatively infrequent targeted killings of
suspected militants or terrorists in the George W Bush years have become
commonplace under the Barack Obama administration. And since a devastating
December 30 suicide attack by a Jordanian double agent on a Central
Intelligence Agency forward operating base in Afghanistan, unmanned aerial
drones have been hunting humans in the AfPak war zone at a record pace.
In Pakistan, an "unprecedented number" of strikes - which have killed armed
guerrillas and civilians alike - have led to more fear, anger and outrage in
the tribal areas, as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with help from the
United States Air Force, wages the most public "secret" war of modern times.
In neighboring Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft, for years in short supply and
tasked primarily with surveillance missions, have increasingly been used to
assassinate suspected militants as part of an aerial surge that has
significantly outpaced the highly publicized "surge" of ground forces now
underway. And yet, unprecedented as it may be in size and scope, the present
ramping up of the drone war is only the opening salvo in a planned 40-year
Pentagon surge to create fleets of ultra-advanced, heavily-armed, increasingly
autonomous, all-seeing, hypersonic unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
Today's surge
Drones are the hot weapons of the moment and the upcoming Quadrennial Defense
Review - a soon-to-be-released four-year outline of Department of Defense
strategies, capabilities and priorities to fight current wars and counter
future threats - is already known to reflect this focus. As the Washington Post
recently reported, "The pilotless drones used for surveillance and attack
missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with the goals of speeding
up the purchase of new Reaper drones and expanding Predator and Reaper drone
flights through 2013."
The MQ-1 Predator - first used in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s - and its
newer, larger and more deadly cousin, the MQ-9 Reaper, are now firing missiles
and dropping bombs at an unprecedented pace. In 2008, there were reportedly
between 27 and 36 US drone attacks as part of the CIA's covert war in Pakistan.
In 2009, there were 45 to 53 such strikes. In the first 18 days of January
2010, there had already been 11 of them.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the US Air Force has instituted a much-publicized
decrease in piloted air strikes to cut down on civilian casualties as part of
Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal's counter-insurgency strategy.
At the same time, however, air UAS attacks have increased to record levels.
The air force has created an interconnected global command-and-control system
to carry out its robot war in Afghanistan (and as Noah Shachtman of Wired's
Danger Room blog has reported, to assist the CIA in its drone strikes in
Pakistan as well). Evidence of this can be found at high-tech US bases around
the world where drone pilots and other personnel control the planes themselves
and the data streaming back from them.
These sites include a converted medical warehouse at al-Udeid Air Base, a
billion-dollar facility in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar where the air force
secretly oversees its ongoing drone wars; Kandahar and Jalalabad air fields in
Afghanistan, where the drones are physically based; the global operations
center at Nevada's Creech air base, where the air force's "pilots" fly drones
by remote control from thousands of kilometers away; and - perhaps most
importantly - at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a 12-square-mile (32 square
kilometers) facility in Dayton, Ohio, named after the two local brothers who
invented powered flight in 1903. This is where the bills for the current drone
surge - as well as limited numbers of strikes in Yemen and Somalia - come due
and are, quite literally, paid.
In the waning days of December 2009, in fact, the Pentagon cut two sizeable
checks to ensure that unmanned operations involving the MQ-1 Predator and the
MQ-9 Reaper would continue full speed ahead in 2010. The 703rd Aeronautical
Systems Squadron based at Wright-Patterson signed a $38 million contract with
defense giant Raytheon for logistics support for the targeting systems of both
drones. At the same time, the squadron inked a deal worth $266 million with
mega-defense contractor General Atomics, which makes the Predator and Reaper
drones, to provide management services, logistics support, repairs, software
maintenance and other functions for both drone programs. Both deals essentially
ensure that, in the years ahead, the stunning increase in drone operations will
continue.
These contracts, however, are only initial down payments on an enduring drone
surge designed to carry US unmanned aerial operations forward, ultimately for
decades.
Drone surge: The longer view
In 2004, the air force could put a total of only five drone combat air patrols
(CAPs) - each consisting of four air vehicles - in the skies over American war
zones at any one time. By 2009, that number was 38, a 660% increase according
to the air force. Similarly, between 2001 and 2008, hours of surveillance
coverage for US Central Command, encompassing both the Iraqi and Afghan war
zones, as well as Pakistan and Yemen, showed a massive spike of 1,431%.
In the meantime, flight hours have gone through the roof. In 2004, for example,
Reapers, just beginning to soar, flew 71 hours in total, according to air force
documents. In 2006, that number had risen to 3,123 hours; and last year, 25,391
hours. This year, the air force projects that the combined flight hours of all
its drones - Predators, Reapers and unarmed RQ-4 Global Hawks - will exceed
250,000 hours, about the total number of hours flown by all air force drones
from 1995-2007. In 2011, the 300,000 hour-a-year barrier is expected to be
crossed for the first time, and after that the sky's the limit.
More flight time will, undoubtedly, mean more killing. According to Peter
Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the Washington-based think-tank the New
America Foundation, in the George W Bush years, from 2006 into 2009, there were
41 drone strikes in Pakistan which killed 454 militants and civilians. Last
year, under the Barack Obama administration, there were 42 strikes that left
453 people dead. A recent report by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies,
an Islamabad-based independent research organization that tracks security
issues, claimed an even larger number, 667 people - most of them civilians -
were killed by US drone strikes last year.
While assisting the CIA's drone operations in the Pakistani tribal borderlands,
the air force has been increasing its own unmanned aerial hunter-killer
missions. In 2007 and 2008, for example, air force Predators and Reapers fired
missiles during 244 missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, while all the US
armed services have pursued unmanned aerial warfare, the air force has outpaced
each of them.
From 2001, when armed drone operations began, until the spring of 2009, the air
force had fired 703 Hellfire missiles and dropped 132 GBU-12s (250-kilogram
laser-guided bombs) in combat operations. The army, by comparison, launched
just two Hellfire missiles and two smaller GBU-44 Viper Strike munitions in the
same time period. The disparity should only grow, since the army's drones
remain predominantly small surveillance aircraft, while in 2009 the air force
shifted all outstanding orders for the medium-sized Predator to the even more
formidable Reaper, which is not only twice as fast but has 600% more payload
capacity, meaning more space for bombs and missiles.
In addition, the more heavily-armed Reapers, which can now loiter over an area
for 10 to 14 hours without refueling, will be able to spot and track ever more
targets via an increasingly sophisticated video monitoring system. According to
air force Lieutenant General David Deptula, deputy chief of staff for
Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, the first three "Gorgon Stare
pods" - new wide-area sensors that provide surveillance capabilities over large
swathes of territory - will be installed on Reapers operating in Afghanistan
this spring.
A technology not available for the older Predator, Gorgon Stare will allow 10
operators to view 10 video feeds from a single drone at the same time. Back at
a distant base, a "pilot" will stare at a tiled screen with a composite picture
of the streaming battlefield video, even as field commanders analyze a portion
of the digital picture, panning, zooming and tilting the image to meet their
needs.
A more advanced set of "pods", scheduled to be deployed for the first time this
autumn, will allow 30 operators to view 30 video images simultaneously. In
other words, via video feeds from a single Reaper drone, operators could
theoretically track 30 different people heading in 30 directions from a single
Afghan compound. The generation of sensors expected to come online in late 2011
promises 65 such feeds, according to air force documents, a more than 6,000%
increase in effectiveness over the Predator's video system. The air force is,
however, already overwhelmed just by drone video currently being sent back from
the war zones and, in the years ahead, risks "drowning in data", according to
Deptula.
The 40-year plan
When it comes to the drone surge, the years 2011-2013 are just the near
horizon. While, like the army, the navy is working on its own future drone
warfare capacity - in the air as well as on and even under the water - the air
force is involved in striking levels of futuristic planning for robotic war. It
envisions a future previously imagined only in science-fiction movies like the Terminator
series.
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