It was ten years ago this month, on February 4, 2002, that the CIA first used an unmanned Predator drone in a targeted killing. The strike was in Paktia province in Afghanistan, near the city of Khost. The intended target was Osama bin Laden, or at least someone in the CIA had thought so. Donald Rumsfeld later explained, using the passive voice of government: “A decision was made to fire the Hellfire missile. It was fired.” The incident occurred during a brief period when the military, which assisted the CIA’s drone program by providing active service personnel as operators, still acknowledged the program’s existence. Within days of the strike, journalists on the ground were collecting accounts from local Afghans that the dead men were civilians gathering scrap metal. The Pentagon media pool began asking questions, and so the long decade of the drone began.
The CIA had been flying unarmed drones over Afghanistan since 2000. It began to fly armed drones after the September 11 attacks. Some were used during the air war against the Taliban in late 2001. But by February 2002 the CIA hadn’t yet used a drone for a strike outside military support. The February 2002 attack was a pure CIA kill operation, undertaken separately from any ongoing military operation. The drone operators were reported to have come across three people at a former mujahedeen base called Zhawar Kili—later, officials would never claim they were armed—including a “tall man” to whom the other men were “acting with reverence.” (On one previous occasion, a year before the September 11 attacks, CIA observers thought they’d seen bin Laden: a tall man with long robes near Tarnak Farm, bin Laden’s erstwhile home near Kandahar. This sighting by an unarmed drone was what had led to the first arguments among the White House and CIA about arming drones with missiles, a debate that simmered until it was snuffed out by the September 11 attacks.
After the February 2002 strike, military officials quickly acknowledged that the “tall man” was not bin Laden. But they insisted the targets were “legitimate,” although they struggled to explain why, using vague and even coy language to cover up what appeared to be uncertainty. Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clark said, “We’re convinced that it was an appropriate target.” But she added, “We do not know yet exactly who it was.” Gen. Tommy Franks told ABC News that he expected the identities of the three to prove “interesting.”
Pentagon spokesman John Stufflebeem spoke of the government’s being in the “comfort zone” of determining that the targets were “not innocent,” noting there were “no initial indications that these were innocent locals,” a curious phrase reflecting a presumption of guilt. “Indicators were there that there was something untoward that we needed to make go away…. Initial indications would seem to say that these are not peasant people up there farming.” Rumsfeld later chimed in, offering his signature pseudo-philosophical analysis to address the allegations that the dead were civilians. “We’ll just have to find out. There’s not much more anyone could add, except that there’s that one version, and there’s the other version.”
The government’s evasion was helped by the fact that Zhawar Kili, the site of the strike, was an infamous mujahedeen complex built with CIA and Saudi support by Jalaluddin Haqqani, the mujahedeen scion allied with the Taliban, then and now. In the 1980s CIA officers and journalists used to visit the base. It was the site of two major battles against Soviet forces in the mid-’80s. President Bill Clinton ordered a strike on the area with Tomahawk cruise missiles in 1998 after the two Africa embassy bombings, and the US military pummeled it with airstrikes beginning in late 2001. For a time the military thought that bin Laden and his Al Qaeda forces might have fled to Zhawar Kili after the battle of Tora Bora (a puzzling hypothesis because the area had already been hit by withering fire and was more exposed than Tora Bora). In January 2002 the military sent several search and demolition units there to gather leftover material with potential intelligence value and to blow up the caves.
By February 2002 the place had been deserted by militants for months. Several journalists headed to Zhawar Kili after the strike and spoke with local leaders and the families of the dead, who confirmed the identities of the men killed: Daraz Khan, the tall man, about 31, from the village of Lalazha, and two others, Jehangir Khan, about 28, and Mir Ahmed, about 30, from the village of Patalan. The New York Times’s John Burns was among those who spoke with the families, saw the men’s graves and confirmed their extreme poverty. The men had climbed to the mountainous area to forage for leftover metal from the US airstrikes, bits of shrapnel and bomb tail fins—scavengers could fetch about 50 cents per camel load. Although Daraz Khan was admittedly tall by Afghan standards—5 feet 11 inches—he was six inches shorter than bin Laden.
Reading about the strike later, I felt a slight connection with Daraz Khan. I am also 5 feet 11, and at around the same period I spent time foraging for bomb fragments in remote locations in Afghanistan. As a researcher for Human Rights Watch, working on an assessment of the US air war in the winter and spring of 2002, I had visited locations like Zhawar Kili. With colleagues I had climbed into craters, poked at the twisted tail fins of bombs, and interviewed witnesses and families of the dead. And I was the tallest among my colleagues. Perhaps I could have been mistaken for bin Laden too.
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Air warfare has been with us for a hundred years, since the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, and the development of drones was in the works from the start. The reason is simple: even with all the advantages offered by air power, humans still needed to strap themselves into the devices and fly them. There were limits to the risks that could be taken. Whatever an airplane was used for, it ultimately had to return to base with its pilot. Not surprisingly, from the start of the development of airplanes for use in war, engineers labored to circumvent this limitation.
During World War I, the Navy hired Elmer Ambrose Sperry, the inventor of the gyroscope, to develop a fleet of “air torpedoes,” unmanned Curtis biplanes designed to be launched by catapult and fly over enemy positions. A secret program was run out of a small outfield in central Long Island, New York. A New York Times report from 1926, when the secret was revealed, said that the planes were “automatically guided with a high degree of precision” and after a predetermined distance were supposed to suddenly turn and fly vertically downward, carrying enough TNT to “blow a small town inside out.” The program ran out of steam because the war ended in 1918. In reality, according to a Navy history, the planes rarely worked: they typically crashed after takeoff or flew away over the ocean, never to be seen again.
In World War II a different approach was taken: the Navy launched a new program, called Operation Anvil, to target deep German bunkers using refitted B-24 bombers filled to double capacity with explosives and guided by remote control devices to crash at selected targets in Germany and Nazi-controlled France. Remote control technology was still limited—involving crude radio-controlled devices linked to motors—so actual pilots were used for takeoff: they were supposed to guide the plane to a cruising altitude and then parachute to safety in England, after which a “mothership” would guide the plane to its target. In practice, the program was a disaster. Many planes crashed, or worse. John F. Kennedy’s older brother, Joseph, was one of the program’s first pilots: he was killed in August 1944 when a drone-to-be that he was piloting exploded prematurely over Suffolk, England.
And here lies a small irony in history. The target of that particular mission of Kennedy’s was a Nazi site where scientists were working on technology in the same vein, the remote delivery of explosives: the world’s first military rocket program. Indeed, German engineers had switched to rocketry, given the difficulties in building full-scale pilotless airplanes. They worked extensively on rockets during the war, and after the war US and Russian governments carried on their work. (In the late 1940s and ’50s, hundreds of former German rocket engineers and other Nazi scientists were brought to the United States and granted citizenship in exchange for their help on rocket engineering efforts—some despite clear ties to Holocaust-related atrocities. Stanley Kubrick’s character Dr. Strangelove was a caricature of an expatriate Nazi scientist.)
The development of drones stagnated for decades because there was little need for them, thanks to developments in rocketry. By the late 1950s, the US military had developed, in addition to many rockets, a slew of slower but more guidable “cruise missiles”—which, in their own way, were like little airplanes. Cruise missiles maintain airplanelike “lift” on stubby little wings, unlike ballistic missiles, which move through a long curve of flight comprising a launch and rise followed by a guided fall.
Cruise missiles were, in a sense, proto-drones, miniature versions of what the military had attempted as far back as 1917. They could be dispatched and guided in flight; some had cameras; and, in some incarnations, could even change target midflight. But cruise missiles could not linger over a battlefield in the manner of a holding pattern, nor could they return to base. And their weapons delivery was blunt and inflexible; the delivery was the missile itself, its single warhead. So in the 1960s and ’70s, Air Force engineers continued to tinker with unmanned aircraft—in particular for use in surveillance flights, which don’t engage in complex flight maneuvers and require less sophisticated piloting. Only with major improvements in computing and electronic controlling systems in the 1980s and ’90s were modern-day drones made possible. And it wasn’t until the late ’90s that the Air Force began working on the technical aspects of arming unmanned aircraft with missiles.
The CIA, which had been using the drones for surveillance, became involved with the military effort to arm them after September 11. Although the agency had been authorized to support military operations even before the attacks, the legal parameters governing its involvement in military or paramilitary operations were murky, then as now. There were questions about who was allowed to “pull the trigger” and in what settings. Outright assassinations were illegal under a presidential executive order in the wake of CIA scandals from the Nixon period, and the laws of armed conflict contained complicated provisions on the circumstances in which civilian personnel—CIA officers not in uniform—could use lethal force.
So government attorneys worried back in 2001. Ten years later, the CIA works side by side with the military, launching kinetic strikes from Pakistan to Somalia. Few concerns are raised anymore, except by a handful of academics and activists who worry that the CIA is less accountable than the military for its targetting (and, as we saw in Zhawar Kili, for its mistakes). Still, many people seem to be leery of drones in the abstract—whether they are used in armed conflict or in targeted killings.
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What, in the final analysis, is troubling about the CIA’s use of drones? Drones are only one weapon system among many, and the CIA’s role, while disturbing, is not the primary cause for alarm. Certainly the legal identity of drone operators, CIA or military, matters little to the victims of a Hellfire strike. So what is it about the drone, really, that draws the attention of victims, insurgent propagandists, lawyers and journalists, more than other forms of kinetic violent force? Why do drones interest us, fascinate us or disturb us?
Perhaps one clue comes from the linguistics. The weapons’ names suggest ruthless and inhumane characteristics. The first drone aircraft deployed by the CIA and Air Force after 2001 was the Predator, a rather coarse name even for a weapons system, suggestive that the enemy was not human but merely prey, that military operations were not combat subject to the laws of war but a hunt. (Some of the computer software used by the military and the CIA to calculate expected civilian casualties during airstrikes is known in government circles as Bug Splat.) The Predator’s manufacturer, General Atomics, later developed the larger Reaper, a moniker implying that the United States was fate itself, cutting down enemies who were destined to die. That the drones’ payloads were called Hellfire missiles, invoking the punishment of the afterlife, added to a sense of righteousness.
But the real issue is the context of how drones kill. The curious characteristic of drones—and the names reinforce this—is that they are used primarily to target individual humans, not places or military forces as such. Yet they simultaneously obscure the human role in perpetrating the violence. Unlike a missile strike, in which a physical or geographic target is chosen beforehand, drones linger, looking precisely for a target—a human target. And yet, at the same time, the perpetrator of the violence is not physically present. Observers are drawn toward thinking that it is the Predator that kills Anwar al-Awlaki, or its Hellfire missiles, not the CIA officers who order the weapons’ engagement. On the one hand, we have the most intimate form of violence—the targeted killing of a specific person, which in some contexts is called assassination—while on the other hand, the least intimate of weapons.
This characteristic, the distance between targets and CIA executive officers at Langley, is the defining characteristic of drones. They are the zenith of the technological quest that runs back to the invention of slings and arrows thousands of years ago, efforts of the earliest perpetrators of violence to get away from their victims. That process, which brought catapults and later artillery, reached its first peak with the development of intercontinental nuclear missiles; but those are weapons of limited tactical use and have never been used. Drones allow all the alienation of long-range missions but with much more flexibility and capacity for everyday use. The net result is everyday violence with all the distance and alienation of ICBMs. This is disturbing perhaps because alienation is disturbing.
The work of animal behaviorists like Konrad Lorenz sheds some light on why. Lorenz—a onetime member of the Nazi party who later renounced his politics and won the Nobel Prize in the 1970s—spent much of his life studying violence in animals. His book On Aggression posited a theory whereby many animals, male and female, have a natural “drive” to be aggressive against opponents, including members of their own species.
The aggression drive, Lorenz posited, was often limited within species by a “submission” phenomenon, whereby potential victims turn off the aggressive drive in others by displaying signs of submission. In this way, most animal violence is checked before it occurs. Lorenz suggested that in humans, the submission safety valve was blunted by the technological creation of weapons, which emotionally “distanced” the killer from his victim. When a spear or sling is used to kill, victims lose the opportunity to engage in submission and trigger the aggression “off switch.” The drone represents an extreme extension of that process. Drones crossed into a new frontier in military affairs: an area of entirely risk-free, remote and even potentially automated killing detached from human behavioral cues.
Military research seems to back this up. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a psychologist and former professor at West Point, has written extensively on the natural human aversion to killing. His 1995 book On Killing contains a collection of accounts from his research and from military history demonstrating soldiers’ revulsion with killing—in particular, killing at close range. He tells the story of a Green Beret in Vietnam describing the killing of a young Vietnamese soldier: “I just opened up, fired the whole twenty rounds right at the kid, and he just laid there. I dropped my weapon and cried.” The most telling accounts are with the “close” kills of hand-to-hand combat. Grossman tells of a Special Forces sergeant from the Vietnam War describing a close kill: “‘When you get up close and personal,’ he drawled with a cud of chewing tobacco in his cheek, ‘where you can hear ‘em scream and see ‘em die,’ and here he spit tobacco for emphasis, ‘it’s a bitch.’”
Obviously the primary advantage of the drone is that it insulates its operators from risk. Yet one can’t help wondering whether aversion to the unpleasantness of violence is another factor making drones popular with the military and CIA. Drones make the nasty business of killing a little easier. Or do they?
There are reports of military drone operators suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and studies showing that those who conduct strikes or watch videos of strikes suffer from “operational stress,” which officials believe is the result of operators’ long hours and extended viewing of video feeds showing the results of military operations after they have occurred—i.e., dead bodies. Still, these reports pale in comparison with those of PTSD among combat veterans. And there is no public information about stress among those ordering the strikes—the CIA strike operators or the decision-makers at Langley.
A little-noticed 2011 British Defense Ministry study of unmanned drones discusses some of these points: from concerns about drone operators’ potential alienation from violence to the propaganda opportunities for enemies (noting that drones’ use “enables the insurgent to cast himself in the role of underdog and the West as a cowardly bully—that is unwilling to risk his own troops, but is happy to kill remotely”). The paper also discusses concerns raised by military analyst Peter Singer, who has written on “robot warfare” and the risk that drones might acquire the capacity to engage enemies autonomously. The report envisions a scenario where a drone fires on a target “based solely on its own sensors, or shared information, and without recourse to higher, human authority.”
The authors note that in warfare, the risks of the battlefield and the horror that comes from carrying out violence can act as controls on brutality. Citing the oft-quoted adage of Gen. Robert E. Lee, reportedly uttered after the battle of Fredericksburg, “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would grow too fond of it,” the authors then ask:
If we remove the risk of loss from the decision-makers’ calculations when considering crisis management options, do we make the use of armed force more attractive? Will decision-makers resort to war as a policy option far sooner than previously?The issue is not that armed drones are more terrible or deadly than other weapons systems. On the contrary, the violence of drones today is more selective than many forms of military violence, and human rights groups recognize that drones, in comparison with less precise weapons, have the potential to minimize civilian casualties during legitimate military strikes.
Nor is the issue the remote delivery of weapons: alienation from the effects of violence reached a high-water mark in World War I. What makes drones disturbing is an unusual combination of characteristics: the distance between killer and killed, the asymmetry, the prospect of automation and, most of all, the minimization of pilot risk and political risk. It is the merging of these characteristics that draws the attention of journalists, military analysts, human rights researchers and Al Qaeda propagandists, suggesting something disturbing about what human violence may become. The unique technology allows the mundane and regular violence of military force to be separated further from human emotion. Drones foreshadow the idea that brutality could become detached from humanity—and yield violence that is, as it were, unconscious.
The U.S. military has been, and remains, a world leader in remote targeted killings. The drone has become central to U.S. national security strategy, which has switched from counterinsurgency in the city to counterterrorism from the skies. Whatever the size of the drone, they all essentially perform the same functions: providng war managers with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). The U.S. military’s fleet of drones varies by size, shape, and sophistication, from the army’s hand-thrown Ravens to the air force’s Global Hawk, which can reach altitudes of sixty thousand feet. The year before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, drone funding stood at around $284 million. By the fiscal year 2016, the Pentagon plans to spend close to $3 billion on drones. Indeed, between 2002 and 2010 the Pentagon’s inventory of drones increased forty-fold, and it now owns a fleet of some eleven thousand drones, hundreds of which are weaponized.
The MQ-1 Predator is perhaps the most well-known of all military drones used today. It has a wingspan of 55 feet, a length of 27 feet, and can reach speeds of up to 135mph. According to the U.S. Air Force, “The Predator system was designed in response to a Department of Defense requirement to provide persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information combined with a kill capability to the warfighter.” Its deathly name conjures images of a science-fiction dystopia where robots hover in the sky and exterminate humans on the ground. Of course, this is no longer science-fiction.
Drone operators sat in a Nevada desert, huddled in air-conditioned cubicles, now control a fleet of robots that can loiter above the landscape with advanced sensing capabilities. According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, up to 3,900 people have been killed in 422 strikes in Pakistan, where the drones are controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Dating back to 2004, the controversial program targets al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked militants, and generates fierce debate for its seeming violation of international humanitarian law and national sovereignty. Since then, the program of targeted killing – run jointly by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces (Joint Special Operations Command). As of 2013 the U.S. Department of Defense had 237 Predators and 112 Reaper drones, both of which can be remotely piloted from across the planet. And by the end of2015 these hunter–killer drones had been used over 500 times to kill an estimated 3,922 people outside traditional battlefields. The majority of these have been in Pakistan.
But we didn’t wake up in this brave new Droneworld overnight. Instead, there were a series of historical conditions and personalities that gave rise to this lethal atmosphere. The purpose of this essay is to review some of these key lines of descent.
The idea of the drone covers a lot of ground. Although we often associate it with the military robots of today, drones, in some form or another, have been used for decades. One of the first recorded uses was by Austrians in July 1849 after they launched around two hundred pilotless balloons mounted with bombs against the city of Venice. Less than two decades later in the U.S. Civil War, Confederate and Union forces both flew balloons for reconnaissance missions. In 1896 Samuel P. Langley developed a range of steam-powered aerodromes, unpiloted aircraft that were flown successfully along the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. In those ninety-second flights, a glimpse of the future could be seen in the hovering aerodrome. The practice of aerial surveillance later emerged in the 1898 Spanish–American War when the U.S. military fitted a camera to a kite, producing one of the first aerial reconnaissance photographs.
In World War I, aerial surveillance was used extensively. Analysts used stereoscopes to hunt for visual clues about enemy movements on photos that were stitched together to form mosaic maps. For example, the Royal Flying Corps took over 19,000 aerial photographs and collected a staggering 430,000 prints during the five months of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. This visual analysis upturned the horse as the dominant technology of military reconnaissance. Indeed, the evolution of U.S. drones can be understood as the passage of five overlapping phases.
It’s all about the radio…
In any case, remote control would not be possible without strides in radio technology. The telegraph heralded the start of the telecommunications revolution. In 1858, the first transatlantic telegraph was completed, marking a key annihilation of space by time. The first official message on August 16th 1858 read, “Europe and America are united by telegraphic communication. Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill to men.” The planet had suddenly become smaller. But the submarine cable was fragile and slow, and communication was bound to the physical limits of terrain and cable. Radio, however, could travel through the atmosphere. The electromagnetic spectrum offered a radical liberation for human exchange.
Nikola Tesla first demonstrated the remote control of vehicles at the end of the nineteenth century. On a pond in Madison Square Garden in 1898, the inventor and showman remotely controlled a boat with a radio signal. This was the first such application of radio waves in history, meaning that Tesla’s Patent No. 613,809 was the birthplace of modern robotics. On that body of water floated enormous, and largely unrecognized, military potential.
Throughout the 1920s, various remotely controlled ships were used for artillery target training. The late 1930s then saw a “rush of military interest in remotely controlled vehicles,” (Dickson, The Electronic Battlefield, p.181) out of which emerged the second generation “Bug,” as well as the “Bat,” a radio-controlled glide bomb used towards the end of World War II. The British-based “Queen Bee” (and later “Queen Wasp”) was also used for firing practice. In the mid-1940s the GB-1 Glide Bomb was developed to bypass German air defenses. It was a workable glider fitted with a standard 1,000 or 2,000-pound bomb. Made with plywood wings, rudders, and controlled by radio, the GB-1s were dropped from B-17s and then guided by bombardiers to their target below. In 1943, one hundred and eight GB-1s were dropped on Cologne, causing heavy damage. Later in the same war came the GB-4, or the “Robin,” which was the first “television-guided weapon.” Although potentially revolutionary, the crude image could only function in the best atmospheric conditions.
The English-located project known as Operation Aphrodite was one of the most ambitious drone projects in the Second World War. The plan was to strike concealed German laboratories with American B-17 “Flying Fortresses” and B-24 bombers that were stripped down and crammed with explosives. A manned crew would pilot these planes before parachuting out once they crossed the English Channel. At this moment, a nearby “mothership” would take control, receiving live feed from an on-board television camera. Despite the inventiveness of the U.S. Air Force and Navy, Aphrodite was a military failure. It even claimed the life of Joseph Kennedy Jr, after his B-17 exploded over the English countryside. But the military was not about to give up: the development of Aphrodite, together with the strides the Germans were making with the V1 and the more sophisticated V2 missiles, accelerated the development of U.S. unmanned projects. Set against this was the fact that around 40,000 U.S. aircraft were lost in World War II, together with 80,000 crewmembers. There was thus a financial and human drive towards a robotic air force: it was a cheaper, safer way to fight war.
In late 1946 a special “Pilotless Aircraft Branch” of the U.S. Air Force was established to develop three types of drones for use as training targets. Of the three, the airborne-launched Q-2 was the most important, becoming the “father” of a class of target drones built by the Ryan Aeronautical Company. The “Firebees” were first tested in 1951 at Holloman Air Force base. The early Firebee could stay in flight for two hours and was capable of reaching heights of up to 60,000 feet.
The Vietnam War
One of the most important lines of descent for understanding modern drone warfare is the Vietnam War. The conflict birthed the most sophisticated program of drone surveillance in the history of flight. Moreover, according to James Gibson’s (2000) influential analysis, the Vietnam War was history’s first “technowar”: a war conducted according to technical principles, statistical models, and machinic systems. Of particular importance was the rise of the electronic battlefield. During the 1960s the U.S. Department of Defense began to automate and computerize the battlefield with remote sensors and supercomputers. The Vietnam War was a technologically intensive conflict fought with sophisticated electronic prosthetics, from remote sensors that listened to enemy movements to jet-powered Firebee drones that screamed through the skies.
It In May of 1964, the U.S. first began to consider sending drones to replace its U-2s in spying missions over Cuba. Lightning Bugs flown by U.S. Strategic Air Command were subsequently used for surveillance in so-called “denied areas” across an increasingly widening Cold War battlespace: including Cuba, North Korea, and the People’s Republic of China. In November 1964, The Washington Daily News reported that, “Communist China claimed to have shot down a U.S. reconnaissance plane with no pilot.” Time also reported that, “Communist China held an official ceremony celebrating a “major victory” in the shooting down of ‘a pilotless, high-altitude reconnaissance military plane of U.S. imperialism’ over Central-South China.” The U.S. military remained quiet about the wreckage from the secret project: much like it would decades later after the Iranians captured an advanced CIA drone.
During the Vietnam War, Lightning Bugs were widely used over North Vietnam after Rolling Thunder officially ended in 1968. The “electronic battlefield” of the Vietnam War is pivotal to understanding the development of contemporary drone warfare. It marked the turning point in which drones morphed from being “targets” to remote “sensor” platforms that could survey the landscape below. According to Col. John Dale, who was director for Strategic Air Command’s 15th Air Force headquarters, the Lightning Bugs continually confounded MiG fighters over China, North Korea, and Vietnam, by flying at very low altitudes. As Dale stated, “from October 1968 to November 1972 – four years – we were the only aircraft flying in North Vietnam,” adding that thanks to CIA support, “we were able to do so much for so long, because there weren’t any politicians involved.”
Between 1964 and 1975, Lightning Bugs flew over 3,500 combat sorties in Vietnam. The Lightning Bugs were, however, expensive. In 1969 low-altitude drone operations were costing $250 million a year to maintain (over $1.3 billion today) and were funded mainly by the deep pockets of the National Reconnaissance Office’s black budget. By 1972 surveillance drones were fitted with LORAN technology, which drastically improved.
The robotic eyes in the sky were successful. “In Vietnam, the 147 drones [Lightning Bugs] were used so extensively and for such a variety of missions that Southeast Asia operations jocularly are referred to as the “Tonkin Gulf Test Range.” Between 1964 and 1975, more than 1,000 Lightning Bugs flew over 34,000 surveillance missions across Southeast Asia. Indeed, “Often unknown to both those who looked at them and those that published them, many of the aerial views of North Vietnam that appeared in the American press were taken by the drones” (Dickson, p.188). South of the seventeenth parallel, drones were being trialed as “electronic listening devices” in Igloo White. This included the QU-22B Beech aircraft (Pave Eagle), a prototype unmanned system that was ultimately beset by too many teething problems. But the war managers were not about to give up: thousands of U.S. airmen had died, and thousands of planes had been destroyed. As the Vietnam War was winding down, the robots were gearing up.
Indeed, in addition to funding the Lighting Bug through its proxy, the National Reconnaissance Office, the CIA developed other drones during the Cold War, such as the Aquiline and Axillary airplanes. These prototypes were created in partnership with the Douglas Aircraft Company in the 1960s and tested at Area 51, although they were tabled in the early 1970s
An emerging drone revolution was kickstarted by a May 1970 symposium sponsored by the Air Force and the RAND Corporation. After the second symposium in July, it was decided that the time was ripe for remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs). The Air Force launched the Compass Cope program in the 1970s to increase the range and electronic surveillance capabilities of RPVs. The program involved funding Boeing and Ryan to develop high-altitude, long-endurance drones. These prototypes were the most ambitious unmanned surveillance drones in Air Force history, capable of flying for over 24 hours and piloted from the ground. At the same time that drones were getting bigger– more like the U-2s they were replacing–a range of “mini-RPVs” were developed. An example would be the Praeire prototypes, which were capable of carrying laser designators and TV cameras. In addition to surveillance drones, the Air Force began experimenting with weaponized Firebees. In May of 1973, the Philco-Ford Corporation developed a laser designator that could be attached to a Ryan BGM-34B Firebee drone, with the aim of creating a “strike drone.”
The 1970s were defined by a mixture of unease, skepticism, speculation, and outright hyperbole about the end of the human pilot. Some of the unease stemmed from the day a human pilot was “defeated” by a drone. In 1971, a Ryan official challenged John Smith, then commander of the Navy Fighter Weapons “Top Gun” School to fly against a drone. The F-4 Phantom and its pilot could not keep pace with the inhuman twists and turns the robot was pulling.C ontrolled by pilots on the ground, the Firebee managed to score several “hits” on the F-4 The 1980s saw the robotic torch pass to Israel. It used Pioneer drones in the early 1980s against Syrian forces, leading to the formation of the joint Pioneer UAV Corporation (uniting Israel Aircraft Industries with the AAI Corporation). Nearly all the pieces were in place for the Predator Empire. Except, of course, the Predator. It would take decades before the next phase: the drone as weapon.
In the next section, I want to explore this phase, tracing the historical rise of the Predator drone, beginning in the 1980s. In particular, I want to explore how the American drone became an object of power in tandem with a series of legal objects. While advancements in drones were driven by the requirements of cartographic intelligence, these unmanned objects were very much bound to a series of legal objects that enabled their deployment. In other words, the relationship between technology and law is extremely important in charting the rise of the Predator drone: both come together in the production of geographic knowledge and surveillance, target acquisition, and wider economies of life and death. This relationship between technology and law is embodied in two contrasting figures that did more than most to fuel the motors of the Predator Empire: An Israeli engineer called Abraham Karem and a Saudi jihadist called Osama bin Laden.
The Birth of the Predator
“Rare is the technology that can change the face of warfare. In the first half of the past century, tanks and planes transformed how the world fought its battles. The fifty years that followed were dominated by nuclear warheads and ICBMs, weapons of such horrible power that they gave birth to new doctrines to keep countries form ever using them. The advent of the armed drone upended this calculus: War was possible exactly because it seemed so free of risk. The bar for war had been lowered, the remote-controlled age had begun, and the killer drones became an object of fascination inside the CIA”. (Mark Mazzetti, 2012, ‘The Way of the Knife’, p. 100)
Abraham Karem was born in Baghdad, the son of a Jewish merchant. His family
moved to Israel in 1951, and by the 1970s, the young Karem was already
building aircraft for the Israeli Air Force, during which time aviation
engineers were attempting to satisfy the need for real-time
intelligence. In 1980 he emigrated from Israel to Los Angeles and
started to build aircraft in his garage. A year later he wheeled out a
bizarre, cigar-looking aircraft called the ‘Albatross’ that would change
the face of warfare forever.
At Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, Karem demonstrated that his
Albatross could stay in the air for 56 hours straight. This was somewhat
of a revelation. During the Vietnam War, U.S. drones were programmed to
fly a pre-programmed route and take still-photographs. But they could
only stay in the air for around two hours. The flight of the Albatross
led to funding from DARPA, the military’s research and development
department. The first outcome from this seed money was a drone called
the Amber, developed by Karem’s company Leading Systems Incorporated.
Although the Amber enjoyed much success, including demonstrating a
flight endurance of 40 hours by 1988, it soon became apparent that the
Amber was insufficient for prolonged surveillance: it was unable to
carry large quantities of fuel or sophisticated sensor equipment. Leading Systems responded
to this deficiency by rolling out the GNAT-750 in 1989. The GNAT
improved on the Amber in a number of ways: it was equipped with GPS
navigation, which allowed for autonomous missions of up to 48 hours, and
also housed infrared and low-light cameras in a moveable sensor turret
under its nose.Karem’s company found itself in fiscal trouble when the military decided not to pursue large-scale development of the Amber. The U.S. Congress had become impatient with UAV development, and by 1990, the Pentagon was forced to consolidate its UAV research into a single Joint Program Office, which wasn’t budgeted for any research. Congress also banned DARPA from supporting UAV projects outside of the jurisdiction of the Pentagon’s JPO, which effectively killed off UAV development, including the embryonic Amber and GNAT programs. Financially stretched, Karem sold his company to Hughes Aircraft, which in turn sold it to San Diego-based General Atomics in 1990. General Atomics decided to continue development of the GNAT-750, and Karem was made part of the company’s subsidiary called General Atomics Aeronautical Systems.
Because of the urgent need for surveillance as the war unfolded, existing, cumbersome, military acquisition procedures were controversially skipped over. The CIA was able to circumvent the Congressional block on UAV development because it operated outside of military jurisdiction. To recall, drone development in the military been effectively halted through the Congressional JPO. And this presented the perfect opportunity for the CIA. By 1993 the agency had become frustrated with poor quality satellite intelligence over Bosnia. Woolsey, then director of the CIA, was already acquainted with Karem, and looked to General Atomics for a plane that could provide a persistent aerial presence and real-time surveillance. Under the codename LOFTY VIEW, the CIA would operate the GNAT-750 in total secrecy. The GNAT first flew over Bosnia in February of 1994 from nearby Albania (according to Mark Mazzetti – the hangar was rented in exchange for two trucloads of wool blankets, and money came from Representative Charlie Wilson). According to the CIA director, “I could sit in my office, call up a classified channel and in an early version of e-mail type messages to a guy in Albania asking him to zoom in on things”.
But codename LOFTY VIEW was not a real success. The GNAT was vulnerable to inclement weather. And the biggest impediment was the communication device housed in the aircraft’s fuselage: the C-band line-of-sight data link only had a range of around 150 nautical miles. This meant that the drone could only be controlled from a relatively close proximity; seriously restrict its surveillance capabilities. The CIA initially tried to overcome this by using an intermediary aircraft to relay the data, thereby extending the flight orbit of the GNAT. But this relay did not solve the GNAT’s data problems. The surveillance imagery produced simply had too far to travel: from a GNAT-750, to a relay aircraft, to a ground station in Albania, to a satellite circulating the planet, and then finally, onwards to the CIA headquarters in Langley.
In February 2001, under a newly elected Bush Administration, the U.S. State department’s lawyers waived concerns that an armed drone might violate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. This legislation was signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, and prevented ground launched ballistic and cruise missiles. As well as rubber stamping the Predator program, Hellfire missiles tests were successfully completed in exercises conducted in May and June. But the Bush administration wasn’t completely sold on drones or on Afghanistan, despite lobbying by the CIA.
By now of course, the armed Predator was virtually a CIA invention: a technology that perfectly embodied the agency’s desire to survey in secret from high in the sky. And yet, even by July 2001, the U.S. went on record to denounce Israel’s use of targeted killings. The U.S. ambassador to Israel said: “The United States government is very clearly on record as against targeted assassinations.… They are extrajudicial killings and we do not support that.”
In
the 20th Century, military research precipitated many widely used
technological innovations. Surveillance satellites enabled the
GPS-system, and defence researchers developed the information swapping
protocols that are fundamental to the Internet. UAVs (unmanned aerial
vehicles) fall into a similar category. Designed initially for
reconnaissance purposes, their para-military and commercial development
was often out of sight of the public. - See more at:
http://www.nesta.org.uk/drones-history-flying-robots#sthash.bfVKV6L0.dpuf
In
the 20th Century, military research precipitated many widely used
technological innovations. Surveillance satellites enabled the
GPS-system, and defence researchers developed the information swapping
protocols that are fundamental to the Internet. UAVs (unmanned aerial
vehicles) fall into a similar category. Designed initially for
reconnaissance purposes, their para-military and commercial development
was often out of sight of the public. - See more at:
http://www.nesta.org.uk/drones-history-flying-robots#sthash.bfVKV6L0.dpuf
In
the 20th Century, military research precipitated many widely used
technological innovations. Surveillance satellites enabled the
GPS-system, and defence researchers developed the information swapping
protocols that are fundamental to the Internet. UAVs (unmanned aerial
vehicles) fall into a similar category. Designed initially for
reconnaissance purposes, their para-military and commercial development
was often out of sight of the public. - See more at:
http://www.nesta.org.uk/drones-history-flying-robots#sthash.bfVKV6L0.dpuf
In
the 20th Century, military research precipitated many widely used
technological innovations. Surveillance satellites enabled the
GPS-system, and defence researchers developed the information swapping
protocols that are fundamental to the Internet. UAVs (unmanned aerial
vehicles) fall into a similar category. Designed initially for
reconnaissance purposes, their para-military and commercial development
was often out of sight of the public. - See more at:
http://www.nesta.org.uk/drones-history-flying-robots#sthash.bfVKV6L0.dpuf
