Just Finished Reading: Drone Warfare – Killing by Remote Control by Medea Benjamin (FP: 2012)

Drones (or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as the military prefer them to be known) have been around for a little while now and until comparatively recently caused hardly a stir when they were used in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Part of the reason was, at least to begin with, the numbers where very low – less than 50 in 2000. By 2010 various arms of the US military and, increasingly, agencies such as the CIA had caused this number to increase to 7,500 and that number is still growing. Despite the global financial meltdown and the cut-backs in some defence spending the cost of drones has increased greatly and will continue to do so. Drones are big business and business is very good indeed.

Piloted often from thousands of miles away they are in many ways the ideal killing machine. They are relatively cheap (when compared to a fighter jet), can be deployed again and gain (unlike a cruise missile), can loiter over a target for hours before acting, have sensors powerful enough to pick out individual targets and can, now that they are increasingly armed with Hellfire missiles, eliminate most targets in seconds at zero risk to the pilot. It’s no real surprise that the US military are presently training more drone pilots that bomber and fighter pilots combined. There is even a persistent rumour that the latest NATO fighter – the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter – might actually be the last manned fighter built. It’s been said before but with the latest models of drones soon to come on-line this time it might actually be true.

Of course not everything is sweetness and light in the world of the drone. With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq practically over (at least from the boots on the ground perspective) drones are increasingly re-tasked to counter-terrorism operations. This means, in effect, targeted killing of terrorists or suspected terrorists largely (though not exclusively) in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The switched-on amongst you will already see the problem in that seemingly innocuous statement. For one thing we’re not in any kind of state of conflict with any of those countries yet we (in the Allied sense) are killing their citizens (and the occasional American citizen apparently) with little compunction. But, I hear some of you say, they’re bad guys doing (or planning) bad things. Indeed many of them are – ignoring for the moment the so-called collateral damage suffered by those unfortunate enough to be in the blast radius of the drone strike – but is that enough to justify the US (and it is largely the US presently) assassinating potential enemies anywhere in the world in the name of self-defense? Of course they can justify it to themselves – otherwise how could they produce and agree kill-lists - and some of them even call it legal (where clearly from many perspectives it is not). On the face of things it’s very effective. At a rough cost of $46,000 per missile per terrorist commander (if you’re lucky to get one) it’s great value for money. But what you’re actually doing, over time, is producing more resilient organizations (who can cope with its members being eliminated from time to time) populated by operatives that are skillful and lucky enough to avoid drone strikes. Drones are an evolutionary pressure that produces better terrorists – and many more of them as strikes themselves fuel the anger against a country that can kill from the sky at no risk to itself.

All this (and more) is outlined in this rather eye-opening, if sometimes overly polemical, discussion on the effects and likely future consequences of the continuation of the drone program. Presently only undertaken largely by the US, UK and (to a more constrained degree) Israel, the author rightly points out that such an effective weapon in the fight against terrorists of all persuasions will soon be used by any state capable of building/buying and deploying them. When the Russians, Chinese or Iranians start killing their enemies across the world using their own drones who can protest after the USA has already legitimized the practice? Welcome to the future and watch the skies!