Death by remote control

At one time Eli of “Eli’s Lookout” fame had at least two serious hobbies. He installed an impressive and much admired model train set in the basement of his home and was also a radio controlled model airplane enthusiast.

His children have grown up and are busy playing with their own children. The model planes are either packed away or given away, however rumour has it that the train set is still running in Eli’s basement.

We are becoming increasingly reliant on remote control operation for almost every electronic gadget and appliance we have in our homes and at work. Remote controlled devices have become an essential part of our way of life.

Eli's radio-controlled model airplanes came to mind the other day when I read Roger Cohen's article - “Of fruit flies and drones”, which appeared in The New York Times.

I suppose remote-controlled warfare can be traced to early human combat when projectiles (stones, spears and arrows) were used instead of or as an adjunct to hand to hand fighting. Although the various sling-throwers, lancers and archers were protectively distanced from the thrusts and jabs of close-combat weapons, they were, nevertheless, not safe from counterattacks by projectiles of the same kind. We have come a long way from the time when arrows and javelins were projected by and large indiscriminately at a visible enemy, to the present time when targeted assassinations are carried out by remote control from unmanned aircraft.

Roger Cohen has a number of ethical qualms about this detached remotely controlled killing. In his NYT article he quotes from Jane Mayer's article "The Predator War" printed in The New Yorker, and mentions a recent study by the New America Foundation, which notes that "Obama has authorized as many drone strikes in Pakistan in nine and a half months as George W. Bush did in his last three years in office — at least 41 C.I.A. missile strikes, or about one a week, that may have killed more than 500 people." Both Mayer and Cohen are appalled by the lack of accountability regarding these "hits."

“The intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.”

Endorsing Mayer further Cohen quotes "The dead have included high-value targets like Osama bin Laden’s oldest son and Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader in Pakistan — as well as bystanders. Circling drones have struck panic. The embrace of the Predator program (the Predator is a U.S armed unmanned aerial vehicle) has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.”

Roger Cohen quotes P.W. Singer author of “Wired for War,” “We are at a breakpoint in history. The U.S. Air Force this year will train more unmanned system pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

Cohen is perturbed because "these targeted international killings are no less real and indeed more insidious, for their video-game aspect. The thing about robotic warfare is you can watch people get vaporized on a screen in Langley, Virginia, and then drive home for dinner with the kids. The very phrase “go to war” becomes hard to distinguish from going to work. That’s a conflation fraught with ethical danger. The barriers to war get lowered."

A brief aside, a middle of the page footnote concerning accountability, informing the public, the need to consider other methods etc., Jane Mayer quotes Daniel Byman, the director of Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies, who argues that, when possible, "it's almost always better to arrest terrorists than to kill them. You get intelligence then. Dead men tell no tales." However, we are dealing with villains of the worst possible kind and trying to apprehend them in their own familiar territory is hazardous. Maybe the US and NATO forces could take a page from Israel. They don't have to take the credit for every slaying even when the evidence is incriminating. Furthermore, "When you have to shoot, shoot don't talk."

In an early September issue of The Economist the author of an article entitled "Spies in the sky," distilled to an essence this new revolution in military technology: “Smaller and smarter unmanned aircraft are transforming spying and redefining the idea of air power.”

He described how early in the present Afghan war NATO commanders mounted a show of force for the governor of a northern province, to emphasise their commitment to the region. They called in a group of F-16 fighter jets, which swooped over the city of Baghlan, their thunderous afterburners engaged. This display of air power was an effective way to garner the respect of the local people. But fighter jets are a limited and expensive resource. And in conflicts like that in Afghanistan, they are no longer the most widespread form of air power. The nature of air power, and the notion of air superiority, have been transformed in the past few years by the rise of remote-controlled drone aircraft, known in military jargon as “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAVs).

At this juncture it’s opportune to wedge in a comment on Israel’s UAVs and their growing importance in both our defence array and sales of military equipment.

Drones are much less expensive to operate than manned warplanes. The cost per flight-hour of Israel’s drone fleet, for example, is less than 5% the cost of its fighter jets. In the past two years the Israeli Defence Forces’ fleet of UAVs has tripled in size. Almost all IDF ground operations now have drone support.

Associated Press reported that Israel Aerospace Industries has sold its indigenous “Heron” drones to the German air force. The drones will be used in reconnaissance missions in northern Afghanistan.

Today, these drones complement the US Air Force's dominant role in Afghanistan air space, thanks to two useful features and the CIA's shortage of Predators for its own and NATO use:

The Israeli drones are cheaper and one of them the "Heron,” possesses a long-distance range, the ability to stay aloft for 52 hours non-stop and tracking and targeting capabilities. It can carry out complex functions such as in-flight refueling and slotting into strategic missile defense systems.

The Heron carries 250 kilos of ordnance, mainly air-ground missiles. With this load, it can reach an altitude of 11,000 metres. Flying empty, it can reach a height of13,700 metres. This means that it can fly above regular commercial air traffic without becoming icebound thanks to another special feature, which is important in the freezing Afghan winters.

Israel ranks second in the world after the United States, for development and possession of drones.

Some analysts say Georgian armed forces, equipped with Israeli drones, outperformed Russia in aerial intelligence during their brief war in August 2008. (Russia also buys Israeli drones.)

In military parlance, drones do work that would be “dull, dirty and dangerous” for soldiers. Some of them can loiter in the air for long periods. The Eagle-1, for example, developed by Israel Aerospace Industries and EADS, Europe’s aviation giant, can stay aloft for more than 50 hours at a time. (France deployed several of these aircraft this year in Afghanistan.) Such long flights help operators, assisted with object-recognition software, to determine normal (and suspicious) patterns of movement for people and vehicles by tracking suspects for two wake-and-sleep cycles.

Seven years ago the CIA tracked and destroyed a car carrying Al Qaeda's "top man in Yemen," Qaed Salim Sinan Al-Harethi. This was the first concrete instance of the Bush preemptive strike policy, it signaled a radical escalation in the war on terrorism, and was criticised both at home and abroad.

Harethi was suspected of planning the October 2000 USS Cole attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors.

Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh condemned the attack as a "summary execution that violates human rights." Her comments struck a nerve in the Bush administration, which had criticised and sought to distance itself from the Israeli policy of "targeted killings" of Palestinian terrorists. State Department spokesman at the time Richard Boucher tried to explain that even though the CIA carried out a targeted killing, "our policy on targeted killings in the Israeli Palestinian context has not changed," but that the reasons for that policy "do not necessarily apply to other circumstances." Despite this qualified double standard, some Israeli scholars interpreted the CIA's attack as an endorsement of their policy and recognition that in light of the September 11th attacks, "the U.S. situation has become more like the Israeli situation."

It seems there is a certain ambivalence regarding targeted killings

Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer, who now teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, observed, "People are a lot more comfortable with a Predator strike that kills many people than with a throat-slitting that kills one." But, she added, "mechanized killing is still killing."

A few months before the CIA assassination of Al-Harethi, Israel ratcheted up its targeted assassinations policy when it used a one-ton bomb dropped from an F-16 fighter jet to kill Salah Shihada, the leader and founder of Hamas' military wing of ‘Izz ad-Din al-Qassam in Gaza. Shihada was one of the most senior activists to be targeted since the outbreak of the intifada. The organisation under him was responsible for fifty-two attacks on Israeli targets, killing a total of 220 Israeli non-combatants and sixteen soldiers. Despite that, the assassination drew heavy criticism from the international community and a few overly concerned Israelis.

In addition to Shihada the bomb killed fifteen civilians. This method was never repeated.

A year later Gal Luft wrote in the Middle East Quarterly

“Israelis dislike the term ‘assassination policy.’ They would rather use another term—‘extrajudicial punishment,’ ‘selective targeting,’ or ‘long-range hot pursuit’—to describe the pillar of their counterterrorism doctrine. But semantics do not change the fact that since the 1970s, dozens of terrorists have been assassinated by Israel's security forces, and in the two years of the al-Aqsa intifada, there have been at least eighty additional cases of Israel gunning down or blowing up Palestinian militants involved in the planning and execution of terror attacks.”

Roger Cohen rightly identifies an Achilles heel common to many nations, “The loss of more than 5,000 U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 has concentrated minds on putting robots rather than flesh and blood in harm’s way.

There are also broader questions. When robots are tomorrow’s veterans, does war become more likely and more endless? Do drones cow enemies with America’s technological prowess or embolden them to think America is not man enough to fight? What is the psychological toll on video-screen warriors?”

Jane Mayer notes that, “In Israel, which conducts unmanned air strikes in the Palestinian territories, the process of identifying targets, in theory at least, is even more exacting. Military lawyers have to be convinced that the target can't reasonably be captured, and that he poses a threat to national security. Military specialists in Arab culture also have to be convinced that the hit will do more good than harm. “Mayer quotes Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah who once advised the IDF regarding targeted killings in Gaza "You have to be incredibly cautious, not everyone is at the level appropriate for targeted killing. You want a leader, the hub with many spokes." Guiora concludes

"Once you start targeted killing, you better make damn sure there's a policy guiding it. It can't be just catch-as-catch-can."

The article in The Economist sums up the debate on targeted killing,”There is a troubling side to all this. Operators can now safely manipulate battlefield weapons from control rooms half a world away, as if they are playing a video game.”

Finally another quote from P.W. Singer’s “Wired for War”, “Drones also enable a government to avoid the political risk of putting combat boots on foreign soil. This makes it easier to start a war. But like them or not, drones are here to stay. Armed forces that master them are not just securing their hold on air superiority—they are also dramatically increasing its value.”

Have a good weekend.

Beni 19^th of November, 2009.