Indeed, the 2011 Roadmap lists the
MQ-X as the future of Air Force drones. In
February 2012 however, Lieutenant General Larry
James told an Aviation Week-sponsored conference:
"At this point… we don't plan, in the near term,
to invest in any sort of MQ-X like program."
Instead, James said, the Air Force will be content
simply to upgrade the Reaper fleet and watch the
Navy's development of its Unmanned
Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike
or UCLASS drone to see if it soars or, like so
many RPAs, crashes and burns.
The Holy
Grail of drone ops is the ability of an aircraft
to linger over suspected target areas for long
durations. But ultra-long-term loitering
operations still remain in the realm of fantasy.
Admittedly, the Pentagon's blue skies research
arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, is pursuing an ambitious
drone project to provide
intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and
"communication missions over an area of interest"
for five or more years at a time. The project,
dubbed "Vulture," is meant to provide
satellite-like capabilities "in an aircraft
package."
Right now, it sounds downright
unlikely.
While the air force has had a
hush-hush unmanned space plane orbiting the Earth
for more than a year, much like a standard
satellite, the longest a US military drone has
reportedly stayed aloft within the planet's
atmosphere is a little more than 336 hours. Plans
for ultra-long duration flights took a major hit
last year, according to scientists at Sandia
National Laboratories and defense giant Northrop
Grumman.
In an effort to "to increase UAV
[unmanned aerial vehicle] sortie duration from
days to months while increasing available
electrical power at least two-fold," according to
a 2011 report made public by the Federation of
American Scientists' Secrecy News, the Sandia and
Northrop Grumman researchers identified a
technology that "would have provided system
performance unparalleled by other existing
technologies." In a year in which the Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear disaster turned a swath of Japan
into an irradiated no-go zone, the use of that
mystery technology, never named in the report but
assumed to be nuclear power, was deemed untenable
due to "current political conditions."
With the Pentagon now lobbying the Federal
Aviation Administration to open US airspace to its
robotic aircraft and ever more articles emerging
about drone crashes, don't bet on nuclear-powered,
long-loitering drones appearing anytime soon, nor
on many of the other major promised innovations in
Drone World to come online in the near term
either.
From dystopian fiction to
dystopian reality Until recently, drones
looked like a can't-miss technology primed for big
budget increases and revolutionary advances, but
all that's changing fast. "Realistic expectations
are for zero growth in the unmanned systems
funding," Weatherington explained by e-mail. "Most
increases will be in technical innovations
improving application of delivered systems on the
battlefield, and driving down the cost of
ownership."
Major Jeffrey Poquette of the
Army's Small Unmanned Air Systems Product Office
talked about just such an effort. By the late
summer, he said, the Army planned to introduce
more sophisticated sensors, including the ability
to track targets more easily, in its four-pound
Raven surveillance drones. Put less politely, what
this means is no roll-outs of sophisticated new
drone systems or revolutionary new drone
technology: the Army will simply upgrade a
glorified model airplane that first took flight
more than a decade ago.
Sci-fi it isn't,
but that doesn't mean that nothing will change in
the world of drone warfare.
The Terminator
films weren't exactly original in predicting a
future of unmanned planes dominating the world's
skies. At the end of World War II, General Henry
"Hap" Arnold of the US Army Air Forces praised
American pilots for their wartime performance, but
suggested their days might be numbered. "The next
war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them
at all," he explained. The future of combat
aviation, he announced, would be "different from
anything the world has ever seen."
The
most salient and accurate of Arnold's predictions
was not, however, his forecast about drone
warfare. Pilotless planes had taken flight years
before the Wright Brothers launched their manned
airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903,
and drones would not become a signature piece of
American weaponry until the 2000s.
Instead, Arnold's faith in a "next war" -
a clear departure from the sentiments of so many
Americans after World War I - proved accurate
again and again. Over the following decades,
American aircraft would strike in North Korea,
South Korea, Indonesia, Guatemala, Cuba, North
Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada,
Libya, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, the former
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq (again),
Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen (again), Libya (again),
and the Philippines. New technologies came and
went, air strikes were the constant.
In
Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq,
Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and the
Philippines, the US deployed pilotless planes as
per Arnold's other prediction. From Afghanistan
onward, all of the countries that have experienced
American air power have also experienced lethal
drone attacks - just how many is unknown because
figures on drone strikes are kept secret "for
security reasons," the Air Force's Spires recently
told TomDispatch. What we do know is that drone
attacks have increased radically over the years.
"More" has been the name of the game.
Still, barely a decade after our drone
wars began, dreams of Terminator-esque efficiency
and technological perfection are all but dead,
even if the drone itself is increasingly embedded
in our world. Fantasies of autonomous drones and
submarines fighting robot wars off the coast of
Africa are already fading for any near-term
future. But drone warfare is here to stay. Count
on drones to be an essential part of the American
way of war for a long time to come.
Air
Force contracting documents suggest that the
estimated five Reaper sorties flown each day in
2012 will jump to 66 per day by 2016. What that
undoubtedly means is more countries with drones
flying over them, more drone bases, more crashes,
more mistakes. What we're unlikely to see is armed
drones scoring decisive military victories,
offering solutions to complex foreign-policy
problems, or even providing an answer to the issue
of terrorism, despite the hopes of policymakers
and the military brass.
Keep in mind as
well that those global skies are going to fill
with the hunter-killer drones of other nations in
what could soon enough become a drone-eat-drone
world. With that still largely in the future,
however, the Pentagon continues to glow with
enthusiasm over the advantages drones offer the
US.
Regarding the importance of military
robots, for instance, the Pentagon's Dyke
Weatherington explained, "Combatant commanders and
warfighters place value in the inherent features
of unmanned systems - especially their
persistence, versatility, and reduced risk to
human life."
On that last point,
Weatherington is only thinking about American
military personnel and American lives. Tomorrow's
drone warfare will likely mean "more" in one other
area: more dead civilians. We've left behind the
fiction of Hollywood for a less high-tech but
distinctly dystopian reality. It isn't quite the
movies and it isn't what the Pentagon mapped out,
but it indisputably provides a clear path to a
grim and grimy Terminator Planet.
Nick Turse is the associate
editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning
journalist, his work has appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at
TomDispatch. He is the author/editor of several
books, including the just published Terminator
Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare,
2001-2050(with Tom Engelhardt). This piece
is the latest article in his new series on the
changing face of American empire, which is being
underwritten byLannan
Foundation. You can follow him on Twitter
@NickTurse, onTumblr,
and onFacebook.
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