War porn By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, March 28, 2012, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NC30Ak02.html
The early 21st century is addicted to war porn, a prime spectator sport consumed by global couch and digital potatoes. War porn took the limelight on the evening of September 11, 2001, when the George W Bush administration launched the "war on terror" - which was interpreted by many of its practitioners as a subtle legitimization of United States state terror against, predominantly, Muslims.
Like porn, war porn cannot exist without being based on a lie - a crude representation. But unlike porn, war porn is the real thing; unlike crude, cheap snuff movies, people in war porn actually die - in droves.
The lie to finish all lies at the center of this representation was definitely established with the leak of the 2005 Downing Street memo, in which the head of the British MI6 confirmed that the Bush administration wanted to take out Iraq's Saddam Hussein by linking Islamic terrorism with (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction (WMD). So, as the memo put it, "The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
In the end, George "you're either with us or against us" Bush did star in his own, larger-than-life snuff movie - that happened to double as the invasion and destruction of the eastern flank of the Arab nation.
The new Guernica
Iraq may indeed be seen as the Star Wars of war porn - an apotheosis of sequels. Take the (second) Fallujah offensive in late 2004. At the time I described it as the new Guernica. I also took the liberty of paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre, writing about the Algerian War; after Fallujah no two Americans shall meet without a corpse lying between them. To quote Coppola's Apocalypse Now, there were bodies, bodies everywhere.
The Francisco Franco in Fallujah was Iyad Allawi, the US-installed interim premier. It was Allawi who "asked" the Pentagon to bomb Fallujah. In Guernica - as in Fallujah - there was no distinction between civilians and guerrillas: it was the rule of "Viva la muerte!"
United States Marine Corps commanders said on the record that Fallujah was the house of Satan. Franco denied the massacre in Guernica and blamed the local population - just as Allawi and the Pentagon denied any civilian deaths and insisted "insurgents" were guilty.
Fallujah was reduced to rubble, at least 200,000 residents became refugees, and thousands of civilians were killed, in order to "save it" (echoes of Vietnam). No one in Western corporate media had the guts to say that in fact Fallujah was the American Halabja.
Fifteen years before Fallujah, in Halabja, Washington was a very enthusiastic supplier of chemical weapons to Saddam, who used them to gas thousands of Kurds. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the time said it was not Saddam; it was Khomeinist Iran. Yet Saddam did it, and did it deliberately, just like the US in Fallujah.
Fallujah doctors identified swollen and yellowish corpses without any injuries, as well as "melted bodies" - victims of napalm, the cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel. Residents who managed to escape told of bombing by "poisonous gases" and "weird bombs that smoke like a mushroom cloud ... and then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. The pieces of these strange bombs explode into large fires that burn the skin even when you throw water over them."
That's exactly what happens to people bombed with napalm or white phosphorus. The United Nations banned the bombing of civilians with napalm in 1980. The US is the only country in the world still using napalm.
Fallujah also provided a mini-snuff movie hit; the summary execution of a wounded, defenseless Iraqi man inside a mosque by a US Marine. The execution, caught on tape, and watched by millions on YouTube, graphically spelled out the "special" rules of engagement. US Marine commanders at the time were telling their soldiers to "shoot everything that moves and everything that doesn't move"; to fire "two bullets in everybody"; in case of seeing any military-aged men in the streets of Fallujah, to "drop 'em"; and to spray every home with machine-gun and tank fire before entering them.
The rules of engagement in Iraq were codified in a 182-page field manual distributed to each and every soldier and issued in October 2004 by the Pentagon. This counter-insurgency manual stressed five rules; "protect the population; establish local political institutions; reinforce local governments; eliminate insurgent capabilities; and exploit information from local sources."
Now back to reality. Fallujah's population was not protected: it was bombed out of the city and turned into a mass of thousands of refugees. Political institutions were already in place: the Fallujah Shura was running the city. No local government can possibly run a pile of rubble to be recovered by seething citizens, not to mention be "reinforced". "Insurgent capabilities" were not eliminated; the resistance dispersed around the 22 other cities out of control by the US occupation, and spread up north all the way to Mosul; and the Americans remained without intelligence "from local sources" because they antagonized every possible heart and mind.
Meanwhile, in the US, most of the population was already immune to war porn. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke out in the spring of 2004, I was driving through Texas, exploring Bushland. Virtually everybody I spoke to either attributed the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to "a few bad apples", or defended it on patriotic grounds ("we must teach a lesson to "terrorists").
In thesis, there is an approved mechanism in the 21st century to defend civilians from war porn. It's the R2P - "responsibility to protect" doctrine. This was an idea floated already in 2001 - a few weeks after the war on terror was unleashed, in fact - by the Canadian government and a few foundations. The idea was that the concert of nations had a "moral duty" to deploy a humanitarian intervention in cases such as Halabja, not to mention the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the mid-1970s or the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
In 2004, a panel at the UN codified the idea - crucially with the Security Council being able to authorize a "military intervention" only "as a last resort". Then, in 2005, the UN General Assembly endorsed a resolution supporting R2P, and in 2006 the UN Security Council passed resolution 1674 about "the protection of civilians in armed conflict"; they should be protected against "genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity".
Now fast-forward to the end of 2008, early 2009, when Israel - using American fighter jets to raise hell - unleashed a large-scale attack on the civilian population of the Gaza strip.
Look at the official US reaction; "Israel has obviously decided to protect herself and her people," said then-president Bush. The US Congress voted by a staggering 390-to-5 to recognize "Israel's right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza". The incoming Barack Obama administration was thunderously silent. Only future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "We support Israel's right to self-defense."
At least 1,300 civilians - including scores of women and children - were killed by state terror in Gaza. Nobody invoked R2P. Nobody pointed to Israel's graphic failure in its "responsibility to protect" Palestinians. Nobody called for a "humanitarian intervention" targeting Israel.
The mere notion that a superpower - and other lesser powers - make their foreign policy decisions based on humanitarian grounds, such as protecting people under siege, is an absolute joke. So already at the time we learned how R2P was to be instrumentalized. It did not apply to the US in Iraq or Afghanistan. It did not apply to Israel in Palestine. It would eventually apply only to frame "rogue" rulers that are not "our bastards" - as in Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. "Humanitarian" intervention, yes; but only to get rid of "the bad guys."
And the beauty of R2P was that it could be turned upside down anytime. Bush pleaded for the "liberation" of suffering Afghans - and especially burqa-clad Afghan women - from the "evil" Taliban, in fact configuring Afghanistan as a humanitarian intervention.
And when the bogus links between al-Qaeda and the non-existent WMDs were debunked, Washington began to justify the invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq via ... R2P; "responsibility to protect" Iraqis from Saddam, and then to protect Iraqis from themselves.
The most recent installment in serial episodes of war porn is the Kandahar massacre, when, according to the official Pentagon version (or cover up) an American army sergeant, a sniper and Iraqi war veteran - a highly trained assassin - shot 17 Afghan civilians, including nine women and four children, in two villages two miles apart, and burned some of their bodies.
Like with Abu Ghraib, there was the usual torrent of denials from the Pentagon - as in "this is not us" or "we don't do things these way"; not to mention a tsunami of stories in US corporate media humanizing the hero-turned-mass killer, as in "he's such a good guy, a family man". In contrast, not a single word about The Other - the Afghan victims. They are faceless; and nobody knows their names.
A - serious - Afghan enquiry established that some 20 soldiers may have been part of the massacre - as in My Lai in Vietnam; and that included the rape of two of the women. It does make sense. War porn is a lethal, group subculture - complete with targeted assassinations, revenge killings, desecration of bodies, harvesting of trophies (severed fingers or ears), burning of Korans and pissing on dead bodies. It's essentially a collective sport.
US "kill teams" have deliberately executed random, innocent Afghan civilians, mostly teenagers, for sport, planted weapons on their bodies, and then posed with their corpses as trophies. Not by accident they had been operating out of a base in the same area of the Kandahar massacre.
And we should not forget former top US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who in April 10, 2010, admitted, bluntly, "We've shot an amazing number of people" who were not a threat to the US or Western civilization.
The Pentagon spins and sells in Afghanistan what it sold in Iraq (and even way back in Vietnam for that matter); the idea that this is a "population-centric counter-insurgency" - or COIN, to "win hearts and minds", and part of a great nation building project.
This is a monumental lie. The Obama surge in Afghanistan - based on COIN - was a total failure. What replaced it was hardcore, covert, dark war, led by "kill teams" of Special Forces. That implies an inflation of air strikes and night raids. No to mention drone strikes, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan's tribal areas, whose favorite targets seem to be Pashtun wedding parties.
Incidentally, the CIA claims that since May 2010, ultra-smart drones have killed more than 600 "carefully selected" human targets - and, miraculously, not a single civilian.
Expect to see this war porn extravaganza celebrated in an orgy of upcoming, joint Pentagon-Hollywood blockbusters. In real life, this is spun by people such as John Nagl, who was on General David Petraeus' staff in Iraq and now runs the pro-Pentagon think-tank Center for New American Security.
The new stellar macho, macho men may be the commandos under the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). But this a Pentagon production, which has created, according to Nagl, an "industrial strength counter-terrorism killing machine".
Reality, though, is much more prosaic. COIN techniques, applied by McChrystal, relied on only three components; 24-hour surveillance by drones; monitoring of mobile phones; and pinpointing the physical location of the phones from their signals.
This implies that anyone in an area under a drone watch using a cell phone was branded as a "terrorist", or at least "terrorist sympathizer". And then the focus of the night raids in Afghanistan shifted from "high value targets" - high-level and mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban - to anyone who was branded as helping the Taliban.
In May 2009, before McChrystal arrived, US Special Forces were carrying 20 raids a month. By November, they were 90 a month. By the spring of 2010, they were 250 a month. When McChrystal was fired - because of a story in Rolling Stone (he was competing with Lady Gaga for the cover; Lady Gaga won) - and Obama replaced him with Petraeus in the summer of 2010, there were 600 a month. By April 2011, they were more than 1,000 a month.
So this is how it works. Don't even think of using a cell phone in Kandahar and other Afghan provinces. Otherwise, the "eyes in the sky" are going to get you. At the very least you will be sent to jail, along with thousands of other civilians branded as "terrorist sympathizers"; and intelligence analysts will use your data to compile their "kill/capture list" and catch even more civilians in their net.
As for the civilian "collateral damage" of the night raids, they were always presented by the Pentagon as "terrorists". Example; in a raid in Gardez on February 12, 2010, two men were killed; a local government prosecutor and an Afghan intelligence official, as well as three women (two of them pregnant). The killers told the US-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command in Kabul that the two men were "terrorists" and the women had been found tied up and gagged. Then the actual target of the raid turned himself in for questioning a few days later, and was released without any charges.
That's just the beginning. Targeted assassination - as practiced in Afghanistan - will be the Pentagon's tactic of choice in all future US wars.
Libya was a major war porn atrocity exhibition - complete with a nifty Roman touch of the defeated "barbarian" chief sodomized in the streets and then executed, straight on YouTube.
This, by the way, is exactly what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a lightning visit to Tripoli, had announced less than 48 hours before the fact. Gaddafi should be "captured or killed". When she watched it in the screen of her BlackBerry she could only react with the semantic earthquake "Wow!"
From the minute a UN resolution imposed a no-fly zone over Libya under the cover of R2P, it became a green card to regime change. Plan A was always to capture and kill Gaddafi - as in an Afghan-style targeted assassination. That was the Obama administration official policy. There was no plan B.
Obama said the death of Gaddafi meant, "the strength of American leadership across the world". That was as "We got him" (echoes of Saddam captured by the Bush administration) as one could possibly expect.
With an extra bonus. Even though Washington paid no less than 80% of the operating costs of those dimwits at NATO (roughly $2 billion), it was still pocket money. Anyway, it was still awkward to say, "We did it", because the White House always said this was not a war; it was a "kinetic" something. And they were not in charge.
Only the hopelessly naïve may have swallowed the propaganda of NATO's "humanitarian" 40,000-plus bombing which devastated Libya's infrastructure back to the Stone Age as a Shock and Awe in slow motion. This never had anything to do with R2P.
This was R2P as safe sex - and the "international community" was the condom. The "international community", as everyone knows, is composed of Washington, a few washed-up NATO members, and the democratic Persian Gulf powerhouses of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), plus the House of Saud in the shade. The EU, which up to extra time was caressing the helm of Gaddafi's gowns, took no time to fall over themselves in editorials about the 42-year reign of a "buffoon".
As for the concept of international law, it was left lying in a drain as filthy as the one Gaddafi was holed up in. Saddam at least got a fake trial in a kangaroo court before meeting the executioner (he ended up on YouTube as well). Osama bin Laden was simply snuffed out, assassination-style, after a territorial invasion of Pakistan (no YouTube - so many don't believe it). Gaddafi went one up, snuffed out with a mix of air war and assassination. They are The Three Graceful Scalps of War Porn.
Syria is yet another declination of war porn narrative. If you can't R2P it, fake it.
And to think that all this was codified such a long time ago. Already in 1997, the US Army War College Quarterly was defining what they called "the future of warfare". They framed it as "the conflict between information masters and information victims".
They were sure "we are already masters of information warfare ... Hollywood is 'preparing the battlefield' ... Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable ... Our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures ... Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the flow of information simply will not be competitive. They might master the technological wherewithal to watch the videos, but we will be writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties. Our creativity is devastating."
Post-everything information warfare has nothing to do with geopolitics. Just like the proverbial Hollywood product, it is to be "spawned" out of raw emotions; "hatred, jealousy, and greed - emotions, rather than strategy".
In Syria this is exactly how Western corporate media has scripted the whole movie; the War College "information warfare" tactics in practice. The Syrian government never had much of a chance against those "writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties".
For example, the armed opposition, the so-called Free Syrian Army (a nasty cocktail of defectors, opportunists, jihadis and foreign mercenaries) brought Western journalists to Homs and then insisted to extract them, in extremely dangerous condition, and with people being killed, via Lebanon, rather than through the Red Crescent. They were nothing else than writing the script for a foreign-imposed "humanitarian corridor" to be opened to Homs. This was pure theater - or war porn packaged as a Hollywood drama.
The problem is Western public opinion is now hostage to this brand of information warfare. Forget about even the possibility of peaceful negotiations among adult parties. What's left is a binary good guys versus bad guys plot, where the Big Bad Guy must be destroyed at all costs (and on top of it his wife is a snob bitch who loves shopping!)
Only the terminally naïve may believe that jihadis - including Libya's NATO rebels - financed by the Gulf Counter-revolution Club, also know as Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are a bunch of democratic reformists burning with good intentions. Even Human Rights Watch was finally forced to acknowledge that these armed "activists" were responsible for "kidnapping, detention, and torture", after receiving reports of "executions by armed opposition groups of security force members and civilians".
What this (soft and hard) war porn narrative veils, in the end, is the real Syrian tragedy; the impossibility for the much-lauded "Syrian people" to get rid of all these crooks - the Assad system, the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Syrian National Council, and the mercenary-infested Free Syrian Army.
2012 is the new 2002; Iran is the new Iraq; and whatever the highway, to evoke the neo-con motto, real men go to Tehran via Damascus, or real men go to Tehran non-stop.
Perhaps only underwater in the Arctic we would be able to escape the cacophonous cortege of American right-wingers - and their respective European poodles - salivating for blood and deploying the usual festival of fallacies like "Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map", "diplomacy has run its course", "the sanctions are too late", or "Iran is within a year, six months, a week, a day, or a minute of assembling a bomb". Of course these dogs of war would never bother to follow what the International Atomic Energy Agency is actually doing, not to mention the National Intelligence Estimates released by the 17 US intelligence agencies.
Because they, to a great extent, are "writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties" in terms of corporate media, they can get away with an astonishingly toxic fusion of arrogance and ignorance - about the Middle East, about Persian culture, about Asian integration, about the nuclear issue, about the oil industry, about the global economy, about "the Rest" as compared to "the West".
Just like with Iraq in 2002, Iran is always dehumanized. The relentless, totally hysterical, fear-inducing "narrative" of "should we bomb now or should we bomb later" is always about oh so very smart bunker buster bombs and precision missiles that will accomplish an ultra clean large-scale devastation job without producing a single "collateral damage". Just like safe sex.
And even when the voice of the establishment itself - the New York Times - admits that neither US nor Israeli intelligence believe Iran has decided to build a bomb (a 5-year-old could reach the same conclusion), the hysteria remains inter-galactic.
Meanwhile, while it gets ready - "all options are on the table", Obama himself keeps repeating - for yet another war in what it used to call "arc of instability", the Pentagon also found time to repackage war porn. It took only a 60-second video now on YouTube, titled Toward the Sound of Chaos, released only a few days after the Kandahar massacre. Just look at its key target audience: the very large market of poor, unemployed and politically very naïve young Americans.
Let's listen to the mini-movie voice over: "Where chaos looms, the Few emerge. Marines move toward the sounds of tyranny, injustice and despair - with the courage and resolve to silence them. By ending conflict, instilling order and helping those who can't help themselves, Marines face down the threats of our time."
Maybe, in this Orwellian universe, we should ask the dead Afghans urinated upon by US Marines, or the thousands of dead in Fallujah, to write a movie review. Well, dead men don't write. Maybe we could think about the day NATO enforces a no-fly one over Saudi Arabia to protect the Shi'ites in the eastern province, while Pentagon drones launch a carpet of Hellfire missiles over those thousands of arrogant, medieval, corrupt House of Saud princes. No, it's not going to happen.
Over a decade after the beginning of the war on terror, this is what the world is coming to; a lazy, virtually worldwide audience, jaded, dazed and distracted from distraction by distraction, helplessly hooked on the shabby atrocity exhibition of war porn.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
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Predators, reapers, ravens - and revolution
Brian Glyn Williams, March 30, 2012, Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NC30Df01.html
With very little discussion, the United States and as many as 50 other nations have inaugurated what amounts to a "drone revolution" that will profoundly change our very understanding of the security environment.
There can be no doubt that unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, represent the future of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency in remote and insecure lands such as Pakistan's tribal region, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and beyond. [1] Where US boots cannot be placed on the ground to hunt terrorists, drones will increasingly strike at those whom America deems to be its enemies.
John Brennan, the president's top counter-terrorism adviser, recently announced that, "The United States does not view our authority to use military force against al-Qaeda as being restricted solely to 'hot' battlefields like Afghanistan".
This means that the Barack Obama administration believes it can utilize drones wherever al-Qaeda or allied terrorists may be, from North Africa to the southern Philippines. All signs indicate that the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are planning a future where drones will play an increasingly important role in warfare and anti-terrorist operations.
This means more strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the primary focus of current drone operations. As the United States draws down its troops in Afghanistan in 2013-2014 and prepares to hand the fight against the Taliban over to the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, its presence on the ground in this strategic country will be much diminished.
It is increasingly clear that the Pentagon will transfer its anti-Taliban combat efforts to small, elite Special Forces groups, manned support aircraft and drones. These elements, which will most likely be based in so-called "Joint Facilities" in Jalalabad (eastern Afghanistan) Kandahar (southern Afghanistan) and Bagram (north of Kabul), will be used to assist the Afghan Army's defensive efforts or to carry out offensives against Taliban-held sanctuaries. They will also be engaged in "hunt and kill" missions designed to take out local Taliban commanders and disrupt their networks.
With the coming withdrawal of most US troops in Afghanistan, the need for counter-terrorism "personality strikes" (ie strikes on high value targets) will be greater than ever. This will certainly mean a continuation of "signature strike" attacks (ie strikes based on "pattern of life" activities, such as transporting weapons to a known Taliban safe house or crossing the Afghan border with weapons) on Taliban foot soldiers as well.
The drones will also play a key role in keeping up the pressure on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen and al-Shabab militants in Somalia. New Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur al-Hadi appears to have condoned the recent strikes against the terrorists who have taken advantage of the recent turmoil following the 2011 downfall of the Saleh government to carve out sanctuaries in Abyan province. In Somalia, US Special Forces and drones are increasingly being used to raid al-Shabab militants and to monitor pirates who have seized Western captives.
In Libya there were more drone strikes in 2011 during the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi than in Pakistan. The Global Post described this as the new model for similar campaigns in the future saying Gaddafi's death is "the latest victory for a new American approach to war: few if any troops on the ground and the heavy use of air power, including drones". By contrast, the conventional model of military intervention involving the insertion of ground forces is extremely costly and invites domestic and external criticism in a way that drones do not.
Drone-centric alternatives to conventional warfare dovetail with the Pentagon and CIA's long-term plans for counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations in the Islamic world and beyond. Former CIA official Bruce Riedel has said the Obama administration "has made a very conscious decision that it wants to get out of large conventional warfare solutions and wants to emphasize counter-terrorism and a lighter footprint on the ground".
Obama has announced the US military of the future will focus on "intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, counter-terrorism, countering weapons of mass destruction, and the ability to operate in environments where adversaries try to deny us access" [2]. All of these missions translate to more drones.
While the recent economic crunch has led to huge cuts in the US military's size and budget, the Pentagon has called for a 30% increase in the US drone fleet. This represents a shift from big bloody wars, like the invasion of Iraq which cost almost a trillion dollars and 4,500 American lives, to the model of the aerial campaign in Libya, which cost just over 1 billion dollars with no American loss of life. Other nations are following suit; British military officials have said that almost one third of the Royal Air Force will be drones in 20 years.
In addition to bases in Turkey, Sicily, Afghanistan and possibly once more in Pakistan, drones will be found in forward staging areas some advisers are calling "lily pad bases", like the ones currently found in Camp Lemonier (Djibouti) or Arba Minch (Ethiopia). Such bases may also be built in Jordan and Turkey to help monitor Iraq and in the Seychelles Islands of the Indian Ocean to hunt Somali pirates.
Obama has also authorized the building of a new drone base in the Arabian Peninsula to carry out strikes on al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen. Obama's defense budget also calls for funding for the construction of a new "Afloat Forward Staging Base" (AFSB), a launching pad for drones and Special Forces that can be sailed to potential hot spots.
A few facts about drones will make this abundantly clear:
More than 50 countries have built or bought drones. Even Lebanon's Hezbollah has used Iranian-built drones. Over the next decade more than $94 billion is expected to be spent globally on drone research and procurement. China unveiled 25 new drone models at an air show in 2011 and Iran claims their Karrar (Striker) drones are capable of long-range missions.
Last month 13 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nations agreed to jointly deploy a fleet of its own Global Hawk surveillance drones after seeing how useful the American drones were in the air war against Gaddafi's forces in Libya. NATO has already begun building a 1.3 billion euro (US$1.7 billion) drone base at Sigonella in Sicily. Many observers are worried that a future drone race will see other countries besides the United States hunting down their enemies with remote controlled planes.
In 2000 the US had just 50 drones. Today almost one in three US warplanes is a drone. That translates to approximately 7,500 drones in the US fleet. The majority (5,346) are Ravens, a small hand-launched surveillance drone heavily used by the army in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since 2005 there has been a 1,200% increase in patrols by drones. The US Air Force trained more drone pilots in 2011 than pilots for fighter and bomber aircraft combined.
New jet-powered drones threaten to make current inventories of propeller-driven drones obsolete. The US Air Force has begun deploying a new jet drone known as the Predator C or Avenger that will allow it to mount attacks at a much faster speed than the propeller driven Predators and Reapers in its current fleet.
The Avenger carries even more ordnance than the Reaper. The US Navy is developing a carrier-based jet drone known as the X-47B which can fly 10 times farther than manned planes and defend aircraft carriers from threats such as "carrier killer" missiles. [3] The US has also launched the "Phantom Eye," a hydrogen-fueled surveillance drone that can remain aloft for four days at 65,000 feet. [4] Meanwhile, the UK has developed a $225 million intercontinental jet propelled drone known as the Taranis after the Celtic god of thunder. Unlike the Predator and Reaper, the stealthy Taranis has an internal bomb bay which can carry a wide array of weapons.
The US Air Force is developing nano-drones like the Wasp, which weigh less than a pound and can fly to 1,000 feet. The air force has also planned Project Anubis to build killer micro-drones that weigh less than a pound. The small drones will be used to terminate "high value targets" and will one day fly in swarms against the enemy.
The US Army recently developed a small backpack size drone known as the Switchblade, a small kamikaze-style aircraft carrying explosives that can be launched from a tube, loiter in the sky and then dive at a target upon command. [5]
The US Army has developed a surveillance drone that can be flown by the crew of an Apache AH-64D Longbow attack helicopter to help it find its targets on the ground.
Predator drones are already being used to monitor the US-Mexican border. Mexico is using much smaller US built drones for the same purpose.
America has already experienced its first attempt by a terrorist to use a drone to carry out a terrorist act. In September 2011 Rezwan Ferdaus was arrested in the Boston area after the Federal Bureau of Investigation found him plotting to use seven foot remote control toy planes loaded with C-4 plastic explosives in them to fly into the Pentagon and other targets in Washington DC.
In December 2010 the US Air Force announced that it had test flown the X-37B, an unmanned space vehicle modeled on the Space Shuttle. This development caused many drone critics to worry that the Air Force was involved in the development of drones for space warfare.
While the first drone attack on al-Qaeda in Yemen in 2002 was greeted with tremendous coverage by the international media, drone strikes today have become so mundane that they are now relegated to small articles on back pages of newspapers, if they are picked up at all.
Both Democrats and Republicans seem to have accepted this radical development with little real debate as have the vast majority of Americans. In fact 83% of Americans are reported to approve of Obama's stepped up drone policy. For Americans, drone attacks in distant locations seem to be an accepted part of the new scheme of things in the post-9/11 world.
As for the CIA, which was so reluctant to get into the drone assassination business prior to 9/11, current CIA head David Petraeus has said, "We can't get enough drones." Former defense secretary Robert Gates has said, "We are buying as many Reapers as we possibly can." The air force's 147th Reconnaissance's Wing Commander, Colonel Ken Wisian said of drones "The demand for this kind of capacity is insatiable."
Conclusion
While America's CIA is currently the only intelligence agency that flies killer drones beyond its borders, it is perhaps only a matter of time before Russia, China, India, Israel and other countries deploy killer drones abroad in search of their foes. Israel is already deploying its drones in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian sources say they have killed over 800 people, mostly civilians.
David Cortright of Notre Dame University has asked: "What kind of a future are we creating for our children? We face the prospect of a world in which every nation will have drone warfare capability, in which terror can rain down from the sky at any moment without warning?"
As rare voices like Cortright's ponder the future of remote controlled aerial killers and their impact on war and counter-terrorism, drones are increasingly coming to shape the way the United States and other countries hunt and kill those they deem to be enemies. Peter Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century best sums up the future by writing "The [drone] technology is here. And it isn't going away. It will increasingly play a role in our lives ... The real question is: How do we deal with it?"
Notes
1. For an introductory survey of the CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan see: Brian Glyn Williams, "The CIA's Covert Drone War in Pakistan, 2004-2010. The History of an Assassination Campaign," Studies in Terrorism and Conflict. 33, 2010.
2. White House, Office of the Press Secretary; "Remarks by the President on the Defense Strategic Review," January 5, 2012.
3. See here.
4. See video here.
5. Innovation News Daily, September 6, 2011; see also here.
Dr Brian Glyn Williams is Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. His interactive web page can be found at: www.brianglynwilliams.com.
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