In Star Wars II Anakin Skywalker and his friends battle the evil Count Dooku and the Dark Side of Darth Sidious with the help of a clone army developed on the hidden planet of Camino. Our times are a bit more primitive, but we do have the dubious distinction of watching the birth of a new form of mechanised warfare fully as revolutionary as the Second World War’s tank battles and almost fully motorised infantry.
This is the drone war being fought in Afghanistan, Iraq to a lesser extent, Iran, Somalia, Libya, Yemen and, of course, wherever Israel decides to take on its enemies. Human involvement is minimal and indirect, confined to deployment. In a drone zone there is no real frontline because the weapon can be launched tens, sometimes hundreds, of miles from the battleground. This is technology to the max, with humans as remote controllers, where machines wreak widespread destruction on targets they have been programmed to fly to. The original meaning of ‘drone’ is ‘a male bee, especially a honeybee, that is characteristically stingless, performs no work, and produces no honey. Its only function is to mate with the queen bee’. The military drone, however, is extremely hardworking, though sexless, and has a deadly sting. The dictionary defines it as “a pilotless aircraft operated by remote control”. It is also known as a UAV (unmanned air vehicle). The task it performs is basically two-fold; it is a spy plane designed to reconnoitre and it is an airborne weapons system designed to kill by remote control. The last is the drone’s defining characteristic. This is one of the enduring legacies of the Vietnam War in which some 58,000 US combatants were killed for little apparent benefit.
For the US military Vietnam provided many lessons, but the basic one was that ordinary Americans may be willing to countenance war, but not the inevitable human cost.
Contrast Vietnam with the First Gulf War (1992) in which US demographer Beth Daponte estimated that 148 soldiers died in combat. The second invasion of Iraq in 2003 was more costly; the engagement lasted nearly seven years and over 4,000 US soldiers were killed. This is still far short of the toll in Vietnam.
The first use of modern drones dates to Vietnam, when the Pentagon tested unmanned aerial vehicles for so-called ISR: intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Drones flew some 3,500 spy missions in Vietnam.
By the end of the century miniaturisation had made possible an entirely new generation of unmanned flying killers, just in time for the so-called War on Terror. The first major success was a Predator strike in 2002, which assassinated the leader of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda in Yemen. Since then, the drone has come into its own as a military tool, for spying and waging war. Their low cost and lethality have made drones the weapon of choice, especially in an insurgency-like situation, as in Afghanistan. As with every advance in technology, drones are transforming the battlefield. They enable a commander to dispense with the traditional reconnaissance patrol. A squad leader, for instance, can view the landscape for miles in every direction through a drone. The information is in real time, so a decision to attack can be taken with a much greater chance of success.
But the implications of the drone go further. For one it means the US, or any other country, can go to war without being at war, without deploying a single trooper. Washington is not at war with Islamabad but it has killed hundreds of Pakistanis, soldiers and civilians, in drone strikes from sites in Afghanistan. Pakistanis can only watch in impotent rage, fear and hatred as the machines take a regular toll of innocents.
Second, the drone is the assassin’s tool par excellence. Only a side that has the same technology can even hope to track down this killer; the rest live or die with it. “Drones have become the counterterrorism weapon of choice for the Obama administration,” says Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor. It has enabled the US government to unleash its military might without worrying about body bags or even a declaration of war.
The drone has transformed the way we wage war, but has also raised troubling questions on accountability, transparency and the inequity of secret sanctions for killings. The only answer lies in prompt and complete discovery mechanisms, but the nature of governments is to increase the power to coerce and to conceal their actions from public scrutiny. The United States is no exception, despite the lofty speeches about freedoms and rights.
Not all drones are malign in purpose. There are plenty of benign applications, including the finding of people lost in the wilderness or tagging and continuously tracking rare species, exploring inhospitable environments in a risk-free manner, but the first aims appear to be military or covert violence.