LRB, Vol. 42 No. 23 · 3 December 2020
Blips on the Screen
by Andrew Cockburn
The Drone Age: How Drone Technology Will Change War and Peace
by Michael Boyle.
Oxford, 336 pp., £22.99, September, 978 0 19 063586 2
Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium
by Thomas Stubblefield.
California, 218 pp., £70, February, 978 0 520 33961 3
Hellfire from Paradise Ranch: On the Front Lines of Drone Warfare
by Joseba Zulaika.
California, 289 pp., £25, June, 978 0 520 32974 4
The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare
by Christian Brose.
Hachette, 288 pp., £21, April, 978 0 316 53353 9
Amid the death and destruction of the current conflict between Armenia
and Azerbaijan, one shining success story has emerged: the
Turkish-designed and manufactured Bayraktar TB2 drone, widely credited
with stellar results against Armenian forces. ‘Thanks to advanced
Turkish drones owned by the Azerbaijan military, our casualties on the
front shrank,’ Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, boasted to the
Turkish news channel TRT Haber. ‘These drones show Turkey’s strength.
They also empower us.’ Few have been prepared to dispute this assertion.
‘Drone Wars: In Nagorno-Karabakh, the Future of Warfare Is Now,’ an
article on the Radio Free Europe website proclaimed, quoting a military
analyst’s unequivocal conclusion that the Turkish drones ‘are having a
significant effect on the battlefield ... We’re seeing battlefield gains
for Azerbaijan that we haven’t seen in 20, 25 years now.’ A story in the
Los Angeles Times from the beleaguered Armenian enclave headlined ‘A New
Weapon Complicates an Old War in Nagorno-Karabakh’ featured interviews
with civilians terrified by the buzz of drone engines presaging a hail
of high-explosive bombs and rockets. Six months ago, Turkey’s deployment
of its homegrown drones to ward off an Assad government offensive in
Syria’s Idlib province had glowing reviews from commentators such as
Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, who wrote
that the weapons had ‘transformed the strategic dynamic 180 degrees’ in
Idlib in just five days. The enthusiasm is easy to fathom. Drones create
their own marketing commercials in the form of the streaming video they
transmit to their controllers, while images of tanks and other targets
exploding can be whisked onto Twitter and other social media platforms.
Armed with Bayraktar TB2s, the Azeri military has been notably energetic
in this respect.
Both sides in this latest round of the South Caucasus war have attacked
towns and villages, clearly targeting non-military objectives. Hundreds
have been killed, and thousands more have fled: in one incident, the
Azeris showered cluster bombs on homes in an Armenian-populated city.
But the military efficacy of drones on the actual battlefield is less
obvious. The Azeris did grind out territorial gains, but in fighting
that largely devolved into First World War-type trench warfare,
dominated by artillery and other traditional weapons. The fighting in
Syria in the spring ended with Turkey’s drone-supported allies having
lost significant amounts of territory.
In any case, the Turkish/Azeri drones’ potency would be substantially
diminished if only the other side would use proven countermeasures. The
accuracy of drones’ laser-guided munitions depends on an unobstructed
view of the target: even smoke, easily generated, provides an effective
camouflage. What’s more, remote-controlled weapons rely on an
uninterrupted signal to their controller, which is eminently jammable –
a tactic at which the Iranian military seems adept, having used it to
capture an American ‘stealth’ drone in 2011.
The record of this year’s wars shows that although these weapons may not
provide a decisive edge in combat they excel in self-advertisement,
projecting an image of all-seeing omnipotence. Drones induce terror in
civilian populations and healthy profits for manufacturers. The spell
persists even when they are unarmed. Protesters in Minneapolis on the
morning of 29 May, three days after local police murdered George Floyd,
were monitored by a Reaper drone deployed by US Customs and Border
Protection, circling four miles above the city. News of the deployment
elicited widespread alarm; a letter signed by several senior members of
Congress condemned the use of ‘live video feeds’ for the purposes of
law-enforcement. All demonstrations during the post-Floyd protests were
exposed to the full machinery of Trump government surveillance –
intrusive monitoring of social media, cellphone traffic and cameras at
ground level – but it was the use of drones that caused the outrage, a
testament to the fascination these machines exert.
In fact, the Minneapolis video can’t have been of much help to
government agencies, however malign their intentions. The laws of
physics impose inherent restrictions on picture quality from distant
drones that no amount of money can overcome. Unless pictured from low
altitude and in clear weather, individuals appear as dots, cars as
blurry blobs. A ‘live video feed’ sounds ominous, but the quality of the
imagery depends on the quality of the cameras and the amount of
information conveyed in the signal stream transmitted back to the
controller. The resolution (sharpness of detail) of the image sent by
the drone – in any case inherently far worse than video – is dictated by
the size of the radar antenna, which is limited by the small size of the
aircraft. In 2010, a US air force drone crew watching infrared video of
a night-time convoy of Afghan vehicles, as revealed in the transcript of
their conversation, thought that warm dots in the trucks they saw on
their screens were weapons. In fact, they were turkeys, presents carried
by the peasant passengers for their relatives in Kabul. (The trucks were
attacked, killing 23 people.) Even in daylight, distinguishing children
from other potential targets poses particular difficulties. An air force
pilot once told me he had spent an afternoon circling high above
southern Afghanistan, watching four tiny stick figures on his cockpit
video screen. They clustered for some time at the side of a road in a
manner that suggested a Taliban bomb-laying party, which would qualify
them for instant incineration with a Hellfire missile. But as he
continued to watch they retreated across the fields to an isolated
farmhouse – at which point a visibly taller figure emerged to hustle the
children inside for supper.
Such technological realities seldom intrude on popular faith in drones,
and are hardly challenged in the books that have been written about
them. Michael Boyle describes Gorgon Stare, an array of video cameras
designed for the Predator B drone, a large-wingspan aircraft that
operates at an altitude of 25,000 feet, as offering ‘persistent,
wide-area surveillance of small towns’, enabling intelligence analysts
to track the movements of malefactors. But the air force unit assigned
to test the system in 2012 was less impressed. Alongside its derogatory
conclusions, their report included a pair of high-altitude photographs
of the unit’s own base. One had been taken by Gorgon Stare, developed at
a cost of $500 million to the taxpayer. The other, identical in quality
of detail, had been downloaded from Google Earth, free of charge. In
neither were humans distinguishable from bushes. Thomas Stubblefield
writes excitedly of Argus, an even more technologically ambitious system
that permits users to ‘zoom into pedestrian traffic on a given street,
follow a vehicle of interest, or even map the audio of intercepted
telephone calls spatially onto this representation of the city’. He
ruminates on the profound implications of a technology that can, by
cross-referencing historical patterns, provide ‘limitless temporal
parameters’. But when tried in Iraq, reviewing past drone video of sites
of insurgent bomb attacks in the hope that it would reveal perpetrators
in the act of planting bombs turned out to be fruitless.
It may seem unnecessary to belabour such shortcomings, especially in
view of the ease with which commercial drones – $80 for a simple
quadcopter from Best Buy, or £50 from Argos in the UK – have put
high-quality aerial views of the landscape in reach of any amateur
filmmaker. Low-altitude drone video has been a boon in carrying out many
important activities, from fire-fighting to pipeline maintenance. And
small, cheap, off-the-shelf drones have evened the score somewhat for
guerrilla operations, as demonstrated by Islamic State in their
deployment of quadcopters adapted to drop grenades on US forces in
Syria. The Yemeni Houthis went a step further, mass-producing their own
drones using a 3D printer supplied by the Iranians.
But the mystique of these unmanned machines ultimately derives from
their presumed ability to gather information, enabling the selection and
destruction of discrete targets with unique precision at the click of a
button on the other side of the world. In aspiration as well as
consequence, there is nothing fundamentally new here, since similar
claims have been advanced on behalf of strategic bombing for a hundred
years, with invariably disappointing results. Bombers dispatched by the
infant RAF in 1919 to eliminate the ‘mad mullah’ in British Somaliland
took their orders directly from London. But their best efforts, a local
British army commander subsequently recorded, left the mullah’s
supporters ‘cheerful, utterly defiant, and grossly slanderous about my
parentage’. The US strategic bombing campaign in the Second World War
was premised on the theory that targets vital to the enemy’s war effort
could be destroyed by bombers flown from distant bases, striking their
targets with unerring precision thanks to new technology. But results in
combat were deeply disappointing: the bombs almost always missed by a
wide margin. And the belief that the enemy’s war economy was analogous
to a mechanical device that could be disabled by the elimination of
crucial components, such as Germany’s ball-bearing factories, turned out
to be wrong. Since the staggering cost of the bombing effort had to be
justified and the myth of bombing as a war-winning tactic preserved, the
unachievable goal of precision strikes was ultimately abandoned in
favour of indiscriminate attacks, most dramatically the incineration of
300,000 civilians in the fire raid on Tokyo in March 1945.
Nevertheless, the dream of remote precision endured, along with the
belief that an opponent’s operational system could be comprehensively
understood and selectively dismantled. During the Vietnam War, civilian
scientists in service to the Pentagon devised an ‘electronic fence’,
made up of thousands of sensors dropped across the jungles of North
Vietnam. These were designed to detect enemy troop movements by such
tell-tale signs as the smell of urine or ground vibrations from the
movement of trucks and tanks. But the North Vietnamese soon devised
effective countermeasures, depositing buckets of urine far from their
troops in locations that were then duly bombed while supplies continued
to flow undetected along the jungle routes from north to south. The
super-secret operation was ultimately revealed in the Pentagon Papers,
leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. Even though it had proved to be a fiasco, the
notion of a remote-control killing machine caught the public
imagination, symbolising the soulless nature of the American war effort.
One embittered veteran, Eric Herter, spoke eloquently at a Boston
anti-war meeting in 1971 in terms that would be echoed by veterans and
other critics of the drone wars fifty years later: ‘This new war ...
will be a war not of men at arms, but of computers and weapons systems
against whole populations. Under its auspices, the people of the
villages have gone from being “gooks” and “dinks” to being grid
co-ordinates, blips on scan screens, dots of light on infrared film.’
The failure of technology to deliver results did not lead to a
fundamental rethink of American strategy. Instead, the preferred belief
was that improvements in technology would in the end do the trick. This
article of faith seemed to be vindicated by videos of bombs and missiles
unerringly striking their targets during the 1991 Gulf War, though an
exhaustive investigation by the Government Accountability Office
revealed that the attacks had been markedly less effective than military
publicists had suggested.
Advances in sensor technology, however inadequate, may have improved
the pictures enough to induce the trauma experienced by some drone crews
in recent years. In Hellfire from Paradise Ranch, Joseba Zulaika relays
the harrowing reminiscences of drone operators, their victims
obliterated in an instant by Hellfire missiles fired on command from a
trailer in the desert outside Las Vegas. Like others before him, he is
intrigued by the contrast between drone crews’ daily occupation –
staring at endless images of landscapes and people in the Third World,
sometimes killing the latter – and their mundane domestic existence once
they step out of the trailer and back into middle-class America, perhaps
stopping on their commute home to pick up milk for their children from
the grocery store. But the anguish expressed by the former crewmen he
quotes may not be widespread in their community. When the commander of
the team that orchestrated the killing of those 23 turkey-bearing Afghan
civilians denied that his men had been ‘out to employ weapons no matter
what’, an investigator responded that they had expressed exactly that
intention at least 14 times in the course of the mission. What’s more,
the sensor operator had complained about an inconvenient report that
there might be a child aboard one of the targeted vehicles, thereby
possibly impeding a kill shot. In almost twenty years of drone
assassinations there is no confirmed record of any drone crewmember ever
refusing an order to kill, though some half a dozen, including those
quoted by Zulaika, have spoken publicly of their subsequent remorse and
symptoms of PTSD. The US air force has trouble retaining drone
operators, and has promised more psychological counselling, but most
complaints appear to be about the irregular hours that result from the
constant shift changes ordered by headquarters.
However many drone operators actually suffer from ‘moral injury’,
defined in an article in the Journal of Clinical Psychology in 2009 as
‘perpetrating, failing to prevent or bearing witness to acts that
transgress deeply held moral beliefs’, the affliction evidently doesn’t
extend far up the chain of command, where the ability to order
politically risk-free assassinations holds great attraction. ‘Turns out
I’m really good at killing people,’ Barack Obama remarked on the day
when Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was executed by drone at his
command. ‘Didn’t know that was going to be a strong suit of mine.’
Zulaika reminds us just how avidly Obama took to the business, even
boasting in a radio interview of how he ‘took out’ a Taliban leader,
without mentioning that the man’s wife had been with him at the time.
This was one element of his predecessor’s legacy that Trump was happy to
preserve and enhance, killing more people in drone strikes in the first
year of his presidency alone – including 250 children in Pakistan and
Yemen – than Obama had managed in eight. Obama milked the killing of
Osama bin Laden for political advantage, and Trump has similarly
revelled in drone assassination as an extension of publicity by other
means. He reportedly insisted on killing Hamza bin Laden, a son of
al-Qaida’s founder but relatively unimportant in the organisation’s
hierarchy, solely because of his famous name. Trump also commissioned
and celebrated the killing of Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds
Force, and eliminated the IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a land
attack. As Boyle correctly points out, the real danger of the drone
programme is that it carries few political risks and so tempts leaders
into casual acts of war.
These tendencies have been vividly displayed by Turkey’s president,
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose drones – designed by his son-in-law, Selçuk
Bayraktar – have carried out innumerable assassinations, not only among
the leadership of the insurgent PKK and the civilians around them, but
also of senior foreign officials: Turkish drones killed two Iraqi
generals last April. Erdoğan clearly believes that his weapons, one of
which flies with his personal presidential signature on its bodywork,
‘show Turkey’s strength’, in the words of his Azerbaijani ally Aliyev,
without running the political risk of too many dead Turkish soldiers.
Turkey is only the most prominent example of drone proliferation, as an
increasing number of countries invest in their own fleets of aerial
robots, a trend that will surely encourage irresponsible military
adventures, not to mention assassination as an instrument of state policy.
The flaw in this approach is that robots don’t necessarily do the job.
If they do, the results tend to be unpredictable, and very often
unpleasant. The strategy of ‘high-value targeting’ has shifted focus
from things – those ball-bearing plants – to people, but the results
have proved no more satisfactory. US drug enforcement strategy has long
been focused on capturing or killing the leaders of drug cartels, the
ineffective consequences of which are unhappily reflected in an ever
increasing flow of narcotics to American consumers. The elimination of
insurgent jihadist leaders in Iraq in the years following 2003
immediately boosted attacks on American forces as new and more
aggressive leaders took command. The pattern was repeated in
Afghanistan, as the killing of Osama bin Laden was followed soon after
by the emergence of IS. The assassination of Soleimani may have been
welcomed in Tehran, given his record of alienating Iran’s supporters in
neighbouring countries, and the death of al-Baghdadi had little effect
on IS’s guerrilla campaign.
But there is little prospect that the strategy will change any time
soon, for reasons that are well described by Christian Brose, though
perhaps not in the way he intends. Brose, unlike the academic authors of
other recent books on drones, is a denizen of the defence complex.
Formerly staff director of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, which
oversees the military budget, he is currently employed by Anduril
Industries, a defence contractor spawned in Silicon Valley. His book
reveals him as a type of figure common enough in American
defence-intellectual culture: the self-proclaimed ‘maverick’ who in
reality is a staunch defender of the status quo. Starting from the
proposition that the US military is falling seriously behind in military
competition with China, he derides ‘legacy platforms’ such as the $13
billion aircraft carriers cherished by the US navy, and advocates
shifting to a force attuned to revolutionary technologies.
Drones feature heavily in the scenario Brose lays out in The Kill Chain,
including prospective designs that could be controlled by ‘neural
signals’ relayed directly from the brain, ‘not just one, but groups of
them’, making it possible for human beings to ‘direct and oversee the
operations of drones and other robotic military systems purely with
their thoughts’. Beyond that, he invokes the alluring prospect of
‘autonomous’ drones that operate independently of human guidance thanks
to the wonders of artificial intelligence. New and exciting though this
– along with other less fanciful but equally unlikely concepts promoted
by Brose – may sound, it is entirely in keeping with the rules of
classical budget enhancement as practised in the US defence complex.
These require in the first instance the egregious exaggeration of a
prospective opponent’s capabilities. Thus China – despite currently
being incapable of manufacturing its own advanced integrated circuits,
foreign supplies of which have been blockaded by Trump – is deemed to be
racing ahead in the development of advanced military technology of all
kinds, including drones. Meanwhile the US, held back by entrenched
bureaucratic interests, is not realising the potential of the
technologies available to it, a disaster in the making that can be
averted only by putting money in the right hands.
Brose’s novel proposal for overcoming the resistance to his reforms by
entrenched interests is to enlist the support of defence industry
lobbyists – the praetorian guard of those interests – with promises that
their clients will make just as much money with the new programmes.
Throughout, he pays fulsome tribute to his late employer, Senator John
McCain, a prominent exemplar of the ‘maverick’ syndrome, prolix in
eloquent denunciations of sacred military cows, while never taking any
practical action to discommode the Pentagon on any important matter –
and certainly not in the invocation of China as an imminent and
terrifying threat. Occupying a scarcely less prominent position in
Brose’s pantheon is the late Andrew Marshall, who was for decades the
director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. Marshall was an
immensely powerful bureaucrat who enjoyed a reputation for unorthodox
thinking, yet nevertheless somehow always wound up making the case for
increased defence spending. Following the supposedly decisive triumph of
precision weapons in the Gulf War at the turn of the 1990s, Marshall and
his adherents in the defence think tanks he was so lavishly funding
assiduously promoted the notion of an ongoing ‘revolution in military
affairs’ that would at last realise the dream of those early bombing
campaign planners. It was the funding doled out by Marshall that led to
the production of drone weapons that could pick off individuals.
The overall result of these developments has been to create an ever
widening distance between those in charge and the real world. Live video
feeds on the desks of four-star generals may give the illusion that they
are conveying reality, but they are two-dimensional images synthesised
by a preprogrammed centrally controlled system ever vulnerable to
opponents’ unanticipated actions (those diversionary buckets of urine
under the jungle canopy). But a change of course is vanishingly
unlikely. For the presiding authorities, in and out of uniform, the
principal if unspoken attraction of the current system is its enormous
cost and consequent profitability, not to mention the sense of
empowerment it affords. To take too clear-eyed a view of the world would
be dangerous.
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