by Mark Bowden
He’s passed the baton. But no matter how different the demands on a fighter pilot have become, Rodriguez is convinced that the job itself hasn’t changed that much.
“It’s the same person,” he said. “He’s just introduced to technology. I mean, when you think about it, today kids are growing up exposed to multitasking, multisensory inputs when they play a video game. So that person is going to evolve into someone technically friendly with everything new that comes up. Back in World War I, World War II, the concept of flying itself was a leap, you know, a leap of faith in some cases. And that’s the same one that we want flying fighters today, the one willing to take the leap.”
The Killing Machines
How to Think About Drones
Atlantic, September 2013
1. Unfairness
Consider David. The shepherd lad steps up to face in single combat the Philistine giant Goliath. Armed with only a slender staff and a sling, he confronts a fearsome warrior clad in brass and mail from head to toe, wielding a spear with a head as heavy as a sledge and a staff “like a weaver’s beam,” nearly three inches thick and about seven feet long. Goliath scorns the approaching youth: “Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves?” (I Samuel, 17:43).
David then famously slays the boastful giant with a single smooth stone from his sling.
A story to gladden the hearts of underdogs everywhere, its biblical moral is, Best to have God on your side—but subtract the theological context and what you have is a parable about technology. The sling, a small, lightweight weapon that applies simple physics to launch a missile with lethal force from a distance, was an innovation that made all of the giant’s advantages irrelevant. It ignored the spirit of the contest. David’s weapon was, like all significant advances in warfare, essentially unfair.
As anyone who has ever been in combat will tell you, the last thing you want is a fair fight. Technology has been tilting the balance of battles since Goliath fell. I was born into the age of push-button war. Ivy Mike, the first thermonuclear bomb, capable of vaporizing an entire modern metropolis, of killing millions of people at once, was detonated over the Pacific before my second birthday. When I was growing up, the concept of global annihilation wasn’t just science fiction. We held civil defense drills to practice for it.
Within my lifetime, that evolution has taken a surprising turn. Today we find ourselves tangled in legal and moral knots over the drone, a weapon that can find and strike a single target, often a single individual, by remote control.
Unlike nuclear weapons, the drone did not emerge from some multibillion-dollar crash program on the cutting edge of science. It isn’t even completely new. The first Predator drone was a snowmobile engine mounted on a radio-controlled glider. When linked via satellite to a distant control center, the slow-moving aircraft exploits telecommunications methods perfected years earlier by TV networks—in fact, the air force has gone to ESPN for advice. But when you pull together this disparate technology, what you have is a weapon capable of finding and killing someone just about anywhere in the world.
Drone strikes are a far cry from the atomic vaporizing of whole cities, but the horror of war doesn’t seem to diminish when it is reduced in scale. If anything, the act of willfully pinpointing a human being and summarily executing him from afar distills war to a single ghastly act.
Fast-forward two millennia, to January 2013. A small patrol of marines in southern Afghanistan was working its way at dusk down a dirt road not far from Kandahar, staying to either side to avoid planted bombs, when it unexpectedly came under fire. The men scattered for cover. A battered pickup truck was closing on them and popping off rounds from what sounded like a big gun.
Continents away, in a different time zone, a slender nineteen-year-old American marine lance corporal sat at a desk before a large color monitor watching this action unfold in startlingly high definition. He had never been near a battlefield. He had graduated from boot camp straight out of high school, and was one of a select few recruits invited to train and fly Predators. This was his first time at the controls, essentially a joystick and the monitor. The drone he was flying was roughly fifteen thousand feet above the besieged patrol; each member was marked clearly in monochrome on his monitor by an infrared uniform patch. He had been instructed to watch over the patrol, and to “stay frosty,” meaning, Whatever happens, don’t panic. No one had expected anything to happen. Now something was happening.
The young marine zoomed in tight on the approaching truck. He saw in its bed a fifty-caliber machine gun, a weapon that could do more damage to an army than a platoon of Goliaths.
A colonel, watching over his shoulder, said, “They’re pinned down pretty good. They’re gonna be screwed if you don’t do something.”
He told the pilot to fix on the truck. A button on the joystick pulled up a computer-generated reticle, a grid displaying exact ground coordinates, distance, direction, range, etc. Once the computer locked on the pickup, it kept the moving target precisely zeroed.
“Are you ready to help your fellow marines?” the colonel asked.
An overlay on the grid showed the anticipated blast radius of an AGM Hellfire missile—the drone carried two. The colonel instructed the men on the ground to back off, then gave them a few seconds to do so.
The pilot scrutinized the vehicle. Those who have seen unclassified clips of aerial attacks have only a dim appreciation of the optics available to the military and the CIA. The young marine describes his view as “perfect,” and “cinematic.”
“I could see exactly what kind of gun it was in back,” he told me later. “I could see two men in the front [the cab]; their faces were covered. One was in the passenger seat and one was in the driver’s seat, and then one was on the gun and I think there was another sitting in the bed of the truck, but he was kind of obscured from my angle.”
On the radio, they could hear the marines on the ground shouting for help.
“Fire one,” said the colonel.
The Hellfire is a hundred-pound antitank missile, designed to destroy an armored vehicle. When the blast of smoke cleared there was only a smoking crater on the dirt road.
“I was kind of freaked out,” the pilot said. “My whole body was shaking. It was something that was really different. The first time doing it, it feels bad almost. It’s not easy to take another human being’s life. It’s tough to think about. A lot of guys were congratulating me, telling me, ‘You protected them; you did your job; that’s what you are trained to do, supposed to do,’ so that was good reinforcement, but it’s still tough.”
One of the things that nagged at the lance corporal, and that was still bugging him months later, was that he had delivered this deathblow without having been in any danger himself. The men he killed, and the marines on the ground, were at war. They were risking their hides, whereas he was working his scheduled shift in a comfortable office building, on a sprawling base, in a peaceful country. It seemed unfair. He had been inspired to enlist by his grandfather’s manly stories of battle in the Korean war. He had wanted to prove something to himself and to his family, to make them as proud of him as they had been of his Pop-pop.
“But this was a weird feeling,” he said. “You feel bad. You don’t feel worthy. I’m sitting there safe and sound, and those guys down there are in the thick of it, and I can have more impact than they can. It’s almost like I don’t feel like I deserve to be safe.”
After slaying Goliath, David was made commander of the Israelite armies and given the hand of King Saul’s daughter. When the Pentagon announced earlier this year a new medal for drone pilots and cyberwarriors, it provoked such outrage from veterans that production of the new decoration was halted and the secretary of defense sentenced it to a review and then killed it. Members of Congress introduced legislation to ensure that any such award be ranked beneath the Purple Heart, the medal given to every wounded soldier. How can someone who has never physically been in combat receive a combat decoration?
/>
The question hints at something more important than war medals, getting at the core of our uneasiness about the drone. Like the sling, the drone fundamentally alters the nature of combat. While the young Predator pilot has overcome his unease—his was a clearly justifiable kill shot fired in conventional combat, and his fellow marines on the ground conveyed their sincere gratitude—the sense of unfairness lingers.
If the soldier who pulls the trigger in safety feels this, imagine the emotions of those on the receiving end, left to pick up the body parts of their husbands, fathers, brothers, or friends. Where do they direct their anger? When the wrong person is targeted, or an innocent bystander is killed, imagine the sense of impotence and rage. How do those who remain strike back? No army is arrayed against them; no airfield is nearby to be attacked. If they manage to shoot down a drone, what have they done but disable a small machine? No matter how justified a strike seems to us, no matter how carefully weighed and skillfully applied, to those on the receiving end it is profoundly arrogant, the act of an enemy so distant and superior that he is untouchable.
“The political message [of drone strikes] emphasizes the disparity in power between the parties and reinforces popular sup port for the terrorists, who are seen as David fighting Goliath,” Gabriella Blum and Philip B. Heymann, both law professors at Harvard, wrote in their 2010 book Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists: Lessons from the War on Terrorism. “Moreover, by resorting to military force rather than law enforcement, targeted killings might strengthen the sense of legitimacy of terrorist operations, which are sometimes viewed as the only viable option for the weak to fight against a powerful empire.”
Is it any wonder that the enemy seizes on opportune targets—a crowded café, a passenger jet, the finish line of a marathon? There is no moral justification for deliberately targeting civilians, but one can understand why it is done. Arguably the strongest force driving lone-wolf terror attacks in recent months throughout the western world has been anger over drone strikes.
The drone is effective. Its extraordinary precision makes it an advance in humanitarian warfare. In theory, when used with principled restraint, it is the perfect counterterrorism weapon. It targets indiscriminate killers with exquisite discrimination. But because its aim can never be perfect, can be only as good as the intelligence that guides it, it sometimes kills the wrong people—and even when it doesn’t, its cold efficiency is literally inhuman.
So how should we feel about drones?
2. Gorgon Stare
The Department of Defense has a secret state-of-the-art control center in Dubai with an IMAX-sized screen at the front of the main room that can project video feed from dozens of drones at once. The air force has been directed to maintain capability for sixty-five simultaneous Combat Air Patrols, or CAPs, as they are called. Each of these involves multiple drones; the CAP maintains a persistent eye over a potential target. The Dubai center, according to one who has seen it, resembles the control center at NASA, with hundreds of pilots and analysts arrayed in rows before monitors.
This is a long way from the first known drone strike, on November 4, 2002, when a Hellfire launched from a Predator over Yemen blew up a car carrying Abu al-Harithi, the Al Qaeda leader responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. Killed with him in the car were five others, including an American citizen, Kamal Derwish, who was suspected of leading a terror cell based near Buffalo, New York. The drone used that day had only recently been reconfigured as a weapon. During testing, its designers had worried that the missile’s backblast would shatter the lightweight craft. It didn’t. Since that day drones have killed thousands of people.
John Yoo, the law professor who, as a legal counselor to President George W. Bush, got caught up in tremendous controversy over harsh interrogation practices, was surprised that drone strikes have provoked so little hand-wringing.
“I would think if you are a civil libertarian, you ought to be much more upset about the drone than Guantánamo and interrogations,” he told me when I interviewed him recently. “Because I think the ultimate deprivation of liberty would be the government taking away someone’s life. But with drone killings you do not see anything, not as a member of the public. You read reports perhaps of people who are being killed by drones, but it happens three thousand miles away and there are no pictures, there are no remains, there is no debris that anyone in the United States ever sees. It’s kind of antiseptic. So it is like a video game; it’s like Call of Duty.”
As illustrated by the dimensions of the hub in Dubai, one of many, the drone war has gone global. After 2014, when American combat forces leave Afghanistan, the drone will be the primary weapon we have in the fight.
The least remarkable thing about the system is the drone itself. The air force bristles at the very word—drones conjures autonomous flying robots, reinforcing the notion that human beings are not piloting them. The air force prefers that they be called “remotely piloted aircraft.” But this linguistic battle has already been lost: my New Oxford American Dictionary now defines drone as—in addition to a male bee and monotonous speech—“a remote-controlled pilotless aircraft or missile.” Even though drones now come in sizes that range from the handheld Ravens thrown into the air by infantry units so they can see over the next hill to the Global Hawk, which looks more like a Boeing 737, the craft itself is just an airplane. Most drones are propeller driven and slow moving—early-twentieth-century technology.
In December 2012, when Iran cobbled together a rehabilitated version of a ScanEagle that had crashed there, the catapult-launched weaponless navy drone was presented on Iranian national television as a major intelligence coup.
“They could have gone to Radio Shack and captured the same ‘secret’ technology,” Vice Admiral Mark I. Fox, the navy’s deputy chief for operations, plans, and strategy told the New York Times. The vehicle had less computing power than a smartphone.
Even when, the year before, Iran managed to recover a downed RQ-170 Sentinel, a stealthy, weaponless, unmanned vehicle flown primarily by the CIA, one of the most sophisticated drones in the fleet, it had little more than a nifty flying model. Anything sensitive inside had been remotely destroyed before the Sentinel was seized.
James Poss, a retired air force general who helped oversee the Predator’s development, says he has grown so weary of fascination with the vehicle itself that he’s adopted the slogan, “It’s the data link, stupid.” The craft is essentially a conduit, an eye in the sky. Cut off from its back end—from its satellite links and its data processors, its intelligence analysts and its controller—the drone is as useless as an eyeball disconnected from the brain. What makes the system remarkable is everything downrange—what the air force, in its defiantly tin-eared way, calls “Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination,” PED. Despite all the focus on missiles, what gives a drone its singular value is its ability to provide perpetual, relatively low-cost surveillance, watching a target continuously for hours, days, weeks, even months. Missiles were mounted on Predators only because too much time was lost when a fire mission had to be handed off to more conventional weapons platforms—a manned aircraft or a ground-based or ship-based missile launcher. That delay reduced or erased the key advantage afforded by the drone. With steady, real-time surveillance, a controller could strike with the target in his sights. He can, for instance, choose a moment when his victim is isolated, or traveling in a car, reducing the chance of harming anyone else.
I recently spoke with an air force pilot who asked to be identified only as “Major Dan.” He has logged six hundred combat hours in the B-1 bomber and, in the past six years, well over two thousand hours flying Reapers—larger, more heavily armed versions of the Predator. He describes the Reaper as a significantly better war-fighting tool for this mission than the B-1, by every measure. The only thing you lose when you go from a B-1 to a Reaper, he says, is “the thrill of lighting four afterburners” on a runway.
From a pilot’s perspective, drones have several
critical advantages. First, mission duration can be vastly extended, with rotating crews. No more trying to stay awake for long missions, nor enduring the physical and mental stresses of flying. (“After you’ve been sitting in an ejection seat for twenty hours, you are very tired and sore,” Dan says.) In addition, drones provide far greater awareness of what’s happening on the ground. They routinely watch targets for prolonged periods—sometimes for months—before a decision is made to launch a missile. Once a B-1 is in flight, the capacity for ground observation is far more limited than what is available to a drone pilot at a ground station during this final, attack stage of the mission. From his control station at the Pentagon, not only is Dan watching the target in real time; he has immediate access to every source of information about it, including a chat line with soldiers on the ground. Dan calls his station an “information node.”
Dan was so enthusiastic about these and other advantages of drones that, until I prodded him, he didn’t even mention the benefit of being home with his family and sleeping in his own bed. Dan is thirty-eight years old, married, with two small children. In the years since he graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy, he deployed several times to far-off bases for months-long stretches. Now he is regularly home for dinner.
The dazzling clarity of the drone’s optics does have a downside. As a B-1 pilot, Dan wouldn’t learn details about the effects of his weapons until a post-mission briefing. But flying a drone, he sees the carnage close-up, in real time—the blood and severed body parts, the arrival of emergency responders, the anguish of friends and family. Often he’s been watching the people he kills for a long time before pulling the trigger. Drone pilots become familiar with their victims. They see them in the ordinary rhythms of their lives—with their wives and friends, with their children. War by remote control turns out to be intimate and disturbing. Pilots are sometimes shaken.
