American Way of War

by Tom Engelhardt

  Approximately 5,500 UAVs, mostly unarmed—less than 250 of them are Predators and Reapers—operated in 2009 over Iraq and the so-called Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) theater of operations. Part of the more than century-long development of war in the air, drones have become favorites of U.S. military planners.

  And yet, keep in mind that the UAV still remains in its (frightening) infancy. Such machines are not, of course, advanced cyborgs. They are in some ways not even all that advanced. Because someone wants publicity for the drone-war program, reporters from the United States and elsewhere have been given “rare behind-the-scenes” looks at how it works. As a result, and also because the “covert war” in the skies over Pakistan makes Washington’s secret warriors proud enough to regularly leak news of its “successes,” we know something more about how our drone wars work.

  We know, for instance, that at least part of the air force’s Afghan UAV program runs out of Kandahar Air Base in southern Afghanistan. It turns out that, pilotless as the planes may be, a pilot does have to be nearby to guide them into the air and handle landings. As soon as the drone is up, a two-man team, a pilot and a “sensor monitor,” backed by intelligence experts and meteorologists, takes over the controls either at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, or at Creech Air Force Base northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, some 7,000-odd miles away. (Other U.S. bases may be involved, as well, including Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar from which the air force evidently oversees its drone wars.)

  According to Christopher Drew of the New York Times, who visited Davis-Monthan, where Air National Guard members handle the controls, the pilots sit unglamorously “at 1990s-style computer banks filled with screens, inside dimly lit trailers.” Depending on the needs of the moment, they can find themselves “over” either Afghanistan or Iraq, or even both on the same work shift. All of this is remarkably mundane—pilot complaints generally run to problems “transitioning” back to wife and children after a day at the joystick over battle zones—and at the same time, right out of Ali Baba’s One Thousand and One Nights.

  In those dimly lit trailers, the UAV teams have taken on an almost godlike power. Their job is to survey a place thousands of miles distant (and completely alien to their lives and experiences), assess what they see, and spot “targets” to eliminate—even if on their somewhat antiquated computer systems it “takes up to 17 steps—including entering data into pull-down windows—to fire a missile” and incinerate those below. They only face danger when they leave the job: a sign at Creech warns a pilot to “drive carefully” because this is “the most dangerous part of your day.” Those involved claim that the fear and thrill of battle do not completely escape them, but the descriptions we now have of their world sound discomfortingly like a cross between the far frontiers of sci-fi and a call center in India.

  The most intense of our various drone wars, the one on the other side of the Afghan border in Pakistan, is also the most mysterious. We know that some or all of the drones engaged in it take off from Pakistani airfields; that this “covert war” (which regularly makes front-page news) is run by the CIA out of its headquarters in Langley, Virginia; that its pilots are also located somewhere in the United States; and that at least some of them are hired private contractors.

  William Saletan of Slate has described our drones as engaged in “a bloodless, all-seeing airborne hunting party.” Of course, in the twenty-first century what was once an elite activity performed in person has been transformed into a 24/7 industrial activity fit for human drones.

  Our drone wars also represent a new chapter in the history of assassination. Once upon a time, to be an assassin for a government was a furtive, shameful thing. In those days, of course, an assassin, if successful, took down a single person, not the targeted individual and anyone in the vicinity (or simply, if targeting intelligence proves wrong, anyone in the vicinity). No more poison-dart-tipped umbrellas, as in past KGB operations, or toxic cigars, as in CIA ones. Assassination has taken to the skies as an everyday, year-round activity. Today, we increasingly display our assassination wares with pride. To us, at least, it seems perfectly normal for aerial assassination operations to be a part of an open discussion in Washington and in the media. Consider this a new definition of “progress” in our world.

  Proliferation and Sovereignty

  One of the truths of our time is that no weapons system, no matter where first created, can be kept as private property for long. Today, we talk not of arms races, but of “proliferation,” which is what you have once a global arms race of one takes hold. But don’t for a minute imagine that those hunter-killer skies dominated by Predators and Reapers won’t someday fill with the drones of other nations. The Chinese, the Russians, the Israelis, the Pakistanis, the Georgians, and the Iranians, among others, already have drones. In 2006, Hezbollah flew drones over Israel. In fact, if you have the skills, you can create your own drone, more or less in your living room (as do-it-yourself drone websites make clear).

  Undoubtedly, the future holds unnerving possibilities not just for states, but for small groups intent on assassination from the air. Already the skies are growing more crowded. In March 2009, not long after coming into office, President Barack Obama issued what Reuters termed “an unprecedented videotaped appeal to Iran…offering a ‘new beginning’ of diplomatic engagement to turn the page on decades of U.S. policy toward America’s longtime foe.” It was in the form of a Persian New Year’s greeting. But, as the New York Times also reported, the U.S. military beat the president to the punch. They sent their own “greetings” to the Iranians a couple of days earlier. The U.S. military sent out Colonel James Hutton to meet the press and “confirm” that “allied aircraft” had shot down an “Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle” over Iraq on February 25, more than three weeks earlier. Between that day and mid-March, the relevant Iraqi military and civilian officials were, the Times tells us, not informed. The reason? That drone was intruding on our (borrowed) airspace, not theirs. You probably didn’t know it, but according to an Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesperson, “protection of Iraqi airspace remains an American responsibility for the next three years.” And naturally enough, we don’t want other countries’ drones in “our” airspace, though that’s hardly likely to stop them. The Iranians, for instance, have already announced the development of “a new generation of ‘spy drones’ that provide real-time surveillance over enemy terrain.”

  Of course, when you openly control squads of assassination drones patrolling airspace over other countries, you’ve already made a mockery of whatever national sovereignty might once have meant. It’s a precedent that might someday even make us distinctly uncomfortable. But not right now.

  If you doubt this, check out the stream of self-congratulatory comments being leaked by Washington officials about our drone assassins. These often lead off news pieces about America’s “covert war” over Pakistan (“An intense, six-month campaign of Predator strikes in Pakistan has taken such a toll on Al Qaeda that militants have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust, U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials say”). But be sure to read to the end of such pieces. Somewhere in them, after the successes have been touted and toted up, you get the real news: “In fact, the stepped-up strikes have coincided with a deterioration in the security situation in Pakistan.”

  In Pakistan, a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror—and terrorism—as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means fundamentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of the country.

  The Future Awaits Us

  If you want to read the single most chilling line yet uttered about drone warfare American-style, it comes at the end of Christopher Drew’s piece. He quotes Brookings Institution analyst Peter Singer saying of our Predators and Reapers, “these systems today are very much Model T Fords. These things will only get more advanced.” In other words, our drone wars are being fo
ught with the airborne equivalent of cars with cranks, but the “race” to the horizon is already under way. Soon, some Reapers will have a far more sophisticated sensor system with twelve cameras capable of filming a two-and-a-half mile round area from twelve different angles. That program has been dubbed “Gorgon Stare,” but it doesn’t compare to the future 92-camera Argus program whose initial development is being funded by the Pentagon’s blue-skies outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

  Soon enough, a single pilot may be capable of handling not one but perhaps three drones, and drone armaments will undoubtedly grow progressively more powerful and “precise.” In the meantime, BAE Systems already has a drone four years into development, the Taranis, that should someday be “completely autonomous,” meaning it theoretically will operate without human pilots. Initial trials of a prototype were scheduled for 2010. By 2020, so claim UAV enthusiasts, drones could be engaging in aerial battle and choosing their victims themselves. As Robert S. Boyd of McClatchy reported, “The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons.”

  It’s a particular sadness of our world that, in Washington, only the military can dream about the future in this way, and then fund the “arms race” of 2018 or 2035. Rest assured that no one with a governmental red cent is researching the health care system of 2018 or 2035, or the public education system of those years.

  In the meantime, the skies of our world are filling with round-the-clock assassins. They will only evolve and proliferate. Of course, when we check ourselves out in the movies, we like to identify with John Connor, the human resister, the good guy of this planet, against the evil machines. Elsewhere, however, as we fight our drone wars ever more openly, as we field mechanical techno-terminators with all-seeing eyes and loose our missiles from thousands of miles away (“Hasta la vista, baby!”), we undoubtedly look like something other than a nation of John Connors to those living under the Predators.

  True, we can’t send our drones into the past to wipe out the young Ayman al-Zawahiri in Cairo or the teenage Osama bin Laden speeding down some Saudi road in his gray Mercedes sedan. True, the UAV enthusiasts, who are already imagining all-drone wars run by “ethical” machines, may never see anything like their fantasies come to pass. Still, the fact that without the help of a single advanced cyborg we are already in the process of creating a Terminator planet should give us pause for thought…or not.

  FOUR

  The Language of War, American-Style

  Which War Is This Anyway?

  Consider this description:The “rebels” or “freedom fighters” are part of a nationwide “resistance movement.” While many of them are local, even tribal, and fight simply because they are outraged by the occupation of their country, hundreds of others among the “resistance fighters”—young Arabs—are arriving from as far away as “Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Jordan,” not to speak of Saudi Arabia and Algeria, to engage in jihad, ready as one of them puts it, to stay in the war “until I am martyred.” Fighting for their “Islamic ideals,” “they are inspired by a sense of moral outrage and a religious devotion heightened by frequent accounts of divine miracles in the war.” They slip across the country’s borders to fight the “invader” and the “puppet government” its officials have set up in the capital in their “own image.” The invader’s sway, however, “extends little beyond the major cities, and even there the…freedom fighters often hold sway by night and sometimes even by day.”

  Sympathetic as they may be, the rebels are badly overwhelmed by the firepower of the occupying superpower and are especially at risk in their daring raids because the enemy is “able to operate with virtual impunity in the air.” The superpower’s soldiers are sent out from their bases and the capital to “make sweeps, but chiefly to search and destroy, not to clear and hold.” Its soldiers, known for their massive human rights abuses and the cruelty of their atrocities, have in some cases been reported to press “on the throats of prisoners to force them to open their mouths while the guards urinate into them, [as well as] setting police dogs on detainees, raping women in front of family members and other vile acts.”

  On their part, the “guerrillas,” armed largely with Russian and Chinese rifles and rocket propelled grenade launchers, have responded with the warfare of the weak. They have formed car-bombing squads and use a variety of cleverly constructed wheelbarrow, bicycle, suitcase, and roadside bombs as well as suicide operations performed by volunteers chosen from among the foreign jihadists. They engage in assassinations of, for example, university intellectuals and other sabotage activities in the capital and elsewhere aimed at killing the occupying troops and their sympathizers. They behead hostages to instill fear in the other side. Funding for the resistance comes, in part, from supporters in sympathetic Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia. However, “if the mujaheddin are ever to realize their goal of forcing [the occupiers] out, they will need more than better arms and training, more than their common faith. They will need to develop a genuinely unified resistance…. Above all, the analysts say, they will need to make the war…even costlier and more difficult for the [occupiers] than it is now.”

  It’s easy enough to identify this composite description, right? Our recent wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, as portrayed perhaps in the Arab press and on Arab websites. As it happens, actually not. With the exception of the material on bombs, which comes from Steve Coll’s book Ghost Wars, and on the beheading of hostages, which comes from an Amnesty International report, all of the above is taken from either the statements of U.S. officials or coverage in either the Washington Post or the New York Times of the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, fostered, armed, and funded to the tune of billions of dollars by the Central Intelligence Agency with the help of the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services.

  Well, then try this one:Thousands of troops of the occupying power make a second, carefully planned “brutal advance” into a large city to root out Islamic “rebels.” The first attack on the city failed, though it all but destroyed neighborhoods in a “ferocious bombardment.” The soldiers advance behind “relentless air and artillery strikes.” This second attempt to take the city, the capital of a “rebellious province,” defended by a determined “rebel force” of perhaps five hundred to three thousand, succeeds, though the fighting never quite ends. The result? A “razed” city, “where virtually every building has been bombed, burned, shelled beyond recognition or simply obliterated by war”; a place where occupying “soldiers fire at anything that moves” and their checkpoints are surrounded by “endless ruins of former homes and gutted, upended automobiles.” The city has been reduced to “rubble” and, for the survivors, “rebel” fighters and civilians alike, it and surrounding areas are now a “killing field.” The city lacks electricity, water, or much in the way of food, and yet the rebels hold out in its ruins, and though amusements are few, “on one occasion, a…singer came and gave an impromptu guitar concert of patriotic and folk tunes [for them].”

  In the carnage involved in the taking of the city, the resistance showed great fortitude. “‘See you in paradise,’ [one] volunteer said. ‘God is great.’” Hair-raising news reports from the occupied city and from refugee camps describe the “traumatized” and maimed. (“Here in the remains of Hospital Number Nine—[the city’s] only hospital with electricity—she sees a ceaseless stream of mangled bodies, victims of gunfire and shellings”); press reports also acknowledge the distance between official promises of reconstruction and life in the gutted but still resistant city, suggesting “the contrast between the symbolic peace and security declared by [occupation] officials and the city’s mine-ridden, bullet-flying reality.” Headlines don’t hesitate to highlight claims made by those who fled and survived—“Refugees Describe Atrocities by Occupation Troops”—and reports bluntly use the label giv
en the acts of the occupiers by human rights organizations—“war crimes.” Such organizations are quoted to devastating effect on the subject. The rebels may be called “bandits” by the occupiers, but it’s clear in news reports that they are the ones to be admired.

  No question of the sources here at least. Obviously the above is a composite account of the 2004 American assault on the Sunni city of Falluja taken from Arab press reports or sympathetic Arab websites. As it happens, if you believed that, you’d be zero for two. In fact, all of the above is taken from contemporary accounts of the January 2000 Russian assault on Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, that appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, or the Boston Globe.

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