Indiana companies benefit from UAV trend
Shortly after the turn of the century, drones expanded beyond mere surveillance when the Predator was outfitted with Hellfire missiles.
The drones are operated remotely by computer and video display, often by Air Force personnel in Nevada or Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) staff in Virginia, even when the drone is flying several thousand miles away. The lack of an onboard pilot eliminates direct risk to U.S. personnel, and is part of a movement toward robotizing military missions chronicled in P. W. Singer’s book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.
As Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command told Singer regarding machines like the drones, “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.”
The extent of the current U.S. use of drones for attack purposes is not completely clear. The U.S. military and the CIA have resisted requests by Phillip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, for an explanation of the program, and a Freedom of Information Act request for similar information filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has not yet yielded a response. Quigley writes that it is known that the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command maintain a list of individuals to kill or capture, many of them located in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and drone-launched missiles are a preferred method for conducting the assassinations. The New America Foundation recently conducted an extensive study of drone attacks and concluded that the U.S. launched 51 drone missile strikes in Pakistan alone in 2009, with anywhere from 372 to 632 people killed, about a third of whom were civilians.
The election of Barack Obama ushered in an era of significant reliance on drone warfare. Jane Mayer recently reported in the New Yorker that, within three days of Obama taking office, a U.S. Predator airstrike in Pakistan hit the wrong target, killing an entire family including a five-year-old child.
Despite that inauspicious beginning, the Obama administration has conducted drone attacks at a rate that far exceeds that seen during the George W. Bush administration (see “New U.S. Strategy Begins to Take Shape in Pakistan,” 24 February 2009 HSNW; “UAV War in Pakistan Expands,” 13 March 2009 HSNW; and “UWS. widens UAV War over Pakistan,” 14 December 2009 HSNW). CIA director Leon Panetta has said of drone attacks, “Very frankly, it is the only game in town in terms of confronting and disrupting the al Qaeda leadership.”
Quigley notes that it seems inevitable that the cycle of drone violence will soon include robot attacks on U.S. targets as well — more than forty countries are reportedly developing UAV technology, including Iran, Russia, and China, and Hezbollah has already deployed UAVs during its 2006 war with Israel. In P. W. Singer’s 23 March testimony to the U.S. House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, he compared the current state of robotics in war to the early twentieth century use of the automobile or the state of computers around 1980. “The point here is that every so often in history, the emergence of a new technology changes our world,” Singer told Congress. “Like gunpowder, the printing press, or even the atomic bomb, such ‘revolutionary’ technologies are game-changers not merely because of their capabilities, but rather because the ripple effects that they have outwards onto everything from our wars to our politics.”
Ripple effects notwithstanding, the U.S. drone program is clearly gaining momentum. Seven thousand drones are operated by the U.S. currently, the military budget for drones has more than doubled in just the past four years, and the New America Foundation reports that as many as 211 people have been killed by U.S. drone missiles in just the first three months of 2010.
