Demon Drones & War without Borders

They don’t get hungry. They are not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans?

 

Yes. (They also don’t commit suicide, desert, suffer PTSD, become conscientious objectors, protest, talk to Rolling Stone or send embarrassing videos to Wikileaks!)

 

The above non-parenthetical remarks were made by Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon Joint Forces Command bragging about America’s efficient, stealthy and deadly “wonder weapon”, the drone. I came across a troubling and enlightening article about drones by Tom Engelhardt.

 

Engelhardt observes: “after all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this. If anything, since Vietnam when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.”

 

Engelhardt shares an image from Christopher Drew of the New York Times of a "video warrior" before a console, as if accessing his or her PlayStation (remember Matthew Broderick’s inadvertent unleashing of imminent global disaster in War Games?), casually armed with coffee or Red Bull to help him or her endure a 12-hour shift, sitting 7,000 miles away from the soon-to-be targets of horrifying, burn-to-ash annihilation.

 

Engelhardt explains that an entire drone “crew” is comprised of the young pilot (this is his or her generation’s forte, after all), the cameraperson and the intelligence analyst.

 

He goes on: “The Air Force “detachments” that “manage” the drone war from places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada are “detached” from war in a way that even an artillery unit significantly behind the battle lines or an American pilot in an F-16 over Afghanistan (who could, at least, experience engine failure) isn’t.”

 

Engelhardt asserts that the drone warfare enabling such profound detachment of human beings from the battle (on only one side, he adds) is a “basic redefinition of what war is about.”

 

Engelhardt discloses a disturbing history related to the drones. Interestingly, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Tenet visited the Congress in Sept. 2002 to make the case for War with Iraq, they ramped up the fantasy of Saddam’s attacking US cities with chemical weaponry. Included in their provocative scenario was the specter of unmanned aerial vehicles transporting and spraying the devastating chemicals. As Senator Ben Nelson of Florida later revealed, he had become convinced ships off the eastern seaboard would be arriving with such UAVs and their deadly cargo.

 

The Bushco story of WMDs was a big fat lie. The story about the UAVs armed with WMDs attacking our coast was also a big fat lie. How typical of the neocon playbook. What they claim to want to defend the U.S. against – like terrorism or drone warfare – is soon enough what they themselves perpetrate.

 

Engelhardt reveals that drone surveillance planes were used over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By late November 2001, they were armed with missiles flying over Afghanistan.

In November 2002, a Predator drone unleashed a Hellfire missile on a car in Yemen. We were not at war with this country! Six suspected al Qaeda members were pulverized. Engelhardt calls this “the first targeted killings of the American robotic era.”

 

The drones would also strike again and again in Afghanistan, especially in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan where an escalating, not–so-secret covert war was happening. There were multiple drone attacks each week. Iraq urban areas would also be hit hard by drones.

 

Engelhardt points out that by now Americans have become so acclimated to cryptic references to drone strikes, the reports of them are often relegated to secondary headlines and summaries. Considering that the Times Square bomber cited revenge for drone killings in Pakistan as his motivation, one would think drones deserved more respectful and exploratory attention from both the U.S. citizenry and media.

 

Apparently the drone successes, destroying some of the top members of al Qaeda leadership, have garnered break out enthusiasm in Washington. Leon Panetta declared, “It’s the only game in town.” The “assassination campaign” targeting only top al Qaeda leaders has widened to take in lower-level militants in the tribal borderlands. (Funny how that escalation works.) Engelhardt claims that the operation has now morphed from a “drone assassination campaign” to a “full scale drone war”!

 

If the temperature is again rising in Washington when it comes to these weapons, this time it’s a fever of enthusiasm for the spectacular future of drones (which the Air Force has plotted out to the year 2047), of a time when single pilots should be able to handle multiple drones in operations in the skies over some embattled land, and of a far more distant moment when those drones should be able to handle themselves, flying, fighting, and making key decisions about just who to take out without a human being having to intervene.

 

When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it. Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight.

 

Now it’s the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized. It’s the U.S. which is developing a 22-ton tail-less drone 20 times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It’s the Pentagon which is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700% over the next decade.

 

If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment.

 

Seven thousand of them, the vast majority surveillance varieties, are reportedly already being operated by the military, and that’s before swarms of “mini-drones” come on line. Our American world is being redefined accordingly.

 

There is what Engelhardt calls a “modest counter-narrative” to the enthusiasm for this celebrated robotic technological “prowess". Philip Alston, UN Special Representative on Extrajudicial Execution, has issued a 29-page report criticizing the US government’s “ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.” Alston warns that limits should be put on such actions, as the CIA’s drone war over Pakistan, before other nation states follow in America’s “footsteps”, labeling terrorists and tracking them down, also defying national sovereignty.

 

Engelhardt cites Alston: “Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield,” he wrote, “and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a ‘PlayStation’ mentality to killing.”

 

Engelhardt goes on: “Similarly, the ACLU has filed a freedom of information lawsuit against the U.S. government, demanding that it “disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas, as well as the ground rules regarding when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and the number of civilian casualties they have caused.”

 

Engelhardt declares that despite earnest protest from people and organizations of conscience Washington is not listening: “… The arguments may be legally compelling, but not in Washington, which has mounted a half-hearted claim of legitimate “self-defense,” but senses that it’s already well past the point where legalities matter. The die is cast, the money committed. The momentum for drone war and yet more drone war is overwhelming. “

 

It’s a done deal. Drone war is, and will be, us.

 

Right now, in what still remains largely a post-Cold War arms race of one, the U.S. is racing to produce ever more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight. In the process, we’re also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances. In the process, we may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike.

 

“Obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty.” I guess they have become “quaint”, too, along with the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Constitution. America and its “might makes right,” “ends justifies the means,” terrorizing amorality. No respect for international law and justice. Short-sighted to those hard-hitting, karmic-answering, unintended consequences.

 

Like us training and equipping the ferocious Taliban years ago to fight off the Russians. Or, in the present, us creating more terrorists with each victim killed. Or in the future, what happens when and if a drone malfunctions? Finally, this "drones warfare" precedent sets us up for not only revenge terrorist bombings, but drone borderless "one-way slaughters" against ourselves ultimately.

 

Engelhardt: “We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won’t long be flying solo. And when the first Iranian, or Russian, or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of "terrorists," we won’t like it one bit. When the first “suicide drones” appear, we’ll like it even less. And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we’ll be truly unnerved.”

 

In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of “globalization” which was widely hailed as good news. Now, the U.S. and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones. It’s a nasty combination, this globalization of death.

 

The “globalization of death.” How well and chillingly put, Mr. Engelhardt!

 

Is that what it finally will take to induce “empathy” and “moral consciousness” in Americans to drone warfare? Deadly American karmic payback for the war criminality of its psychopathic, patriarchal military leadership cheered on by an equally amoral, corporate-lobbied legislature and administration? Is there at present a more powerful and lawless government? A more morally obtuse and unconscious citizenry?