The US use of drones for targeted killing has rightly received a lots of media attention over the past week. Since the beginning of 2012 the US has stepped up its drone assassination programme in Yemen, while continuing to launch drone strikes in Pakistan despite repeated pleas from the Pakistan authorities to stop. Kill lists and extrajudicial killing of suspects, once seen as completely unacceptable to the global community (and to the vast majority, still does) now seems to have become almost a matter of routine for the US and its President.
Journalists as well as commentators - and now churches – have rightly been investigating and criticising this particular use of drones, and in both the US and the UK legal challenges are underway to stop further attacks and to reveal more detail about the process.
But it’s important to remember that targeted killing is not the only problem with unmanned drones.
Earlier this week I took part in an online discussion about the use of drones hosted by the Canadian think tank CIC. Author and drone expert Peter Singer and Oxford Professor of Ethics and Law, Jennifer Walsh, argued that there was no particular problem with drones per se. They argued (as most mainstream commentators do) that it’s not the development and use of remote armed technology that is the problem, but rather the fact that they are it is being used outside ‘official’ armed conflicts to undertake targeted killing. Just to be very clear, the use of drones to undertake assassinations far away from any battlefield is a very serious problem which must be investigated and challenged.
But it’s not just the fact that drones have enabled the expansion of targeted killing. The problem with drones goes deeper than that.
To put it simply, armed unmanned technology and the concept of ‘remote war’ alters the balance of options available to our political and military leaders in favour of a military response. Armed drones are making the political cost of military intervention much lower than it had previously been.
Before the advent of armed drones (and particularly since the Vietnam war) public antipathy towards risking troops lives in foreign wars has meant the balance of the options available to our leaders weighed more on the side of political rather than military intervention (with notable exceptions of course). Now however, the scales have shifted in the opposite direction and drones enable our political leaders to intervene militarily overseas by launching remote attacks at great distances with no risk to their own forces. Although some argue that it has been possible to launch attacks at great distances for many years by using cruise missiles for example, it is the ability of the drone to sit and loiter over towns and compounds for many hours and days rather than the ‘one-off shot’ of a cruise missile that makes a crucial difference.
While it is still very early in the drone wars era, the fact that the US used unmanned drones to launch attacks in six different countries during 2011 – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya – shows how much easier it now is to undertake military interventions.
On top of this, is the concern that drones may also make it much easier to launch attacks within particular theatres of war.
According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) there have been around 330 US drone strikes in Pakistan and around 40 drone strikes in Yemen. Though the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are the first ‘official’ wars in which armed drones have been used in a sustained and comprehensive way, there is as yet no public analysis of the impact of unmanned drones in these conflicts. Given that the US has ten times the number of Britain’s five armed Reaper drones in Afghanistan – and Britain’s drones have launched over 250 drone strikes – it is quite possible that there have been over 2,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan (although this is simply a guess).
Due to the secrecy surrounding the use of armed drones it is difficult at this stage to say for definite that the ‘risk free’ nature of drone is actually increasing the frequency of attacks. However an official US military report into an attack in February 2010 which resulted in the deaths of a number of Afghan civilians found that the drone pilots in Creech “had a propensity/bias for kinetic operations”.
We know that drones are loitering over particular areas, towns and compounds for hours and days at a time looking for “targets of opportunity” and this is of serious concern. Laura Arbour, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and currently chief of the International Crisis Group said about the growing use of unmanned drones recently “The most serious concern is the secrecy which surrounds these operations, added to the fact that they are mostly deployed in isolated, inaccessible areas, which makes it virtually impossible to determine whether they are used in compliance with the laws of war.”
While it is right and important that there is growing condemnation of the use of drones for targeted killing, we need also to be challenging the growing use of unmanned weapons technology itself. No doubt some will respond with the cliché that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’. And like most clichés there is a rather grim element of truth to that. And others will say also that drones are not intrinsically bad like cluster bombs or anti-personnel landmines as they can be used in other ways than for killing. Nevertheless armed drones by their nature and the way they are designed to be used, simply makes the world a more dangerous place.
Is Drone Proliferation about to Explode?
Over the past few months we have been compiling information about which countries have large drones in military service. We have posted the results of our research here in our new database of large drones in military service. According to our research 31 countries currently have Class 3 or Class 2 military drones in their inventories. Many others are working to develop or acquire large drones or will have the smaller Class 1 drone in their inventory. (see here for a general guide to drone sizes)
Out of the 31 counties that currently have large drones in military service, 28 have either directly purchased some or all of their drones from another country or manufactured their drones with the help of another country. The primary exporter of drones and drone technology is Israel. Israel has directly exported the larger types of drones to 13 countries and assisted 4 others in developing their own drones. The US has directly exported larger drones to 6 countries while assisting in the development of 1 other; France has directly exported to 3 other countries, while South Africa has exported to 1 (see table below).
Countries which have exported drones & drone technology
While some of these exports and drone programmes reach back over many years, there are indications that drone proliferation is set to explode. Just over the past weeks for example there have been a number of press reports about drone sales agreed or being explored.
Firstly NATO signed a contact with US company Northrop Grumman to purchase five Global Hawk UAVs. The $1.7 billion deal, which has long been discussed, was signed at the NATO Summit in Chicago earlier this week. NATO expects to spend another $2 billion to operate the aircraft over the next two decades.
After the NATO summit officials briefed journalists that President Obama had told the Turkish President Abdullah Gul, that the US was willing to sell armed drones to Turkey but had to get approval through congress. Iraq has also announced this week that it is purchasing US drones to protect Iraqi oilfields. Although most press articles carried pictures of Reaper or Predator drones to accompany the story it is highly unlikely the drones concerned will be armed.
Meanwhile the most prolific exporter of drones, Israel, continues to make sales. This week Israel company Elbit Systems announced it had secured a $160m contract to supply drones to a European country but wouldn’t say who, while a senior Russian defence official said Russia may also be buying $50m of Israeli UAVs in the near future. Also this weeek Singapore announced that it had inaugurated their first Heron drone into the Air Force.
There have also been recent reports that Switzerland and the UK are evaluating Israeli drones with a view to purchase. Both countries already possess drones built in conjunction with Israeli companies.
The proliferation of drones is supposed to be controlled under the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) but it is a non-binding, voluntary agreement which seems close to being ignored in relation to drones.
Two years ago the then US Defense Secretary said it was ‘in the United States interest to share drone technology with allies despite the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR)’ while manufacturers are lobbying hard to ease the so-called ‘tough restrictions’ on exports of drones.
Some are suggesting that the MTCR, which is not primarily aimed at controlling drones, may no longer be the appropriate mechanism to regulate their proliferation. However if a new control regime is to be developed, it needs to happen very quickly – or it will simply be too late.
Later this year, the 34 partner nations of the MTCR will meet for their annual plenary review and it is vital that there is progress on curtailing the growing proliferation of drones.
Bath drones conference in the spotlight
Bath’s Assembly Rooms – Hosting Drones Conference in June
Next month the great and the good of the UK drones industry will gather together for a four-day conference in Bath.
Organised by Clarion Events and endorsed by the British drone lobby organisation, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems Association, the conference is billed as an opportunity to “meet leading civilian and military technology experts working on the next generation of unmanned systems” as well as “listen to the leading thinkers and policy makers who are shaping UAS requirements for the future”
Local activists have begun to prepare for the conference, which is being held at the historic Bath Assembly Rooms between 25th and 27th June with a final day taking place at Larkhill Barracks in Salisbury. Bath Stop the War Coalition and others are calling on the council to withdraw the letting of the Assembly Rooms to Clarion for the event and they are asking people far and wide to sign this petition on the local council’s website.
Others have written to the local press pointing out that “having been gutted by fire caused by incendiaries dropped in the final raid on Bath you would think that the Assembly Rooms would be a wholly unsuitable venue to showcase the latest methods of delivering aerial bombardment by remote control.” Still others have also been a teeny bit sarcastic!
If you would like to write to the council here is an open letter that can be used as inspiration:
An open letter from a local resident to B&NES Councillors:
I was appalled to read in the Bath Chronicle that B&NES Council is ‘delighted’ to welcome to this city a conference which, if successful, will find ever more efficient and sophisticated means of bringing death and destruction to innocent people. I refer to the proposed ‘Unmanned Aerial Systems’ conference at the Assembly Rooms in June.
While ‘Unmanned Aerial Systems’, or drones to give them their more common name, do have civilian applications such as surveillance or policing, their main use has been by the military. It is clear that this conference will be dominated by the military and their concerns. Please look at the website www.unmanned-aerial-systems.com and you will see that over half of the featured speakers have direct links with the military. Also note that serving military personnel are encouraged to attend the conference for free.
The conference is sponsored by Qinetiq, a ‘defence systems supplier’ – in other words, an arms manufacturer – who boast that they are successful ‘in delivering improved capabilities and value for money’ – which in plain English means they are good at killing more people for less cost.
The conference is being organised by Clarion Events who also run and promote Britain’s largest and most notorious arms fair, the Defence & Security Equipment International. Each year this event generates a torrent of criticism as they invite arms dealers and military delegations from countries involved in conflict and human rights abuses, as well as those with desperately underfunded development needs. ‘Trade delegates’ from Libya, Bahrain, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are very in much evidence – each of whom have turned their weapons on democracy protesters. Would you be happy to see such people using the Assembly Rooms?
Are you as councillors comfortable with ‘looking forward to welcoming delegates’ whose main achievement in life has been to devise a means of delivering death and destruction to over 3,000 men, women and children?
Does the Council ‘delight’ in the revenge attacks being inflicted on our troops in Afghanistan as a result of drone attacks on civilians?
Does the Council wish our city to be associated with what are now being classified as war crimes, carried out in countries we are not at war with, such as Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia?
Surely it cannot have escaped your notice that the deployment of these drones is highly controversial? Has it passed you by that the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, is being sued over their use? Did you know that President Obama is being taken to court by the American Civil Liberties Union over the killing of three US citizens by CIA operated drones? Did you not read of international lawyers and Harvard scholars arguing that the drone strikes amount to little more than state-sanctioned extra-judicial executions? Drones are being used by the CIA in ways that are totally outside the accepted laws of war or the Geneva Convention. Read more…
Just a few days after a senior US counter-terrorism expert warned that US drone strikes were turning Yemen into the “Arabian equivalent of Waziristan”, US drone strikes yesterday aped the tactic of ‘follow up’ strikes used by the US in Pakistan.
According to CNN, a strike in which seven suspected Al-Qaeda militants were killed was followed by a strike on local residents rushing to the scene to help the injured. Local sources said that between eight and twelve civilians were killed in the second, follow-up strike. A Yemeni security officials expressed regret for the civilian casualties and injuries. “The targets of the raids were not the civilians, and we give our condolences to the families of those who lost a loved one.”
Over the past few weeks US drone strikes and other military activity has been ratcheted up in Yemen as the White House has given ‘greater leeway’ to the CIA and JSOC to launch attacks. Micah Zenko at the US Council on Foreign Relations estimates there will be more US strikes this month in Yemen than there has ever been in a single month in Pakistan. For details see the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s excellent database of US covert activity in Yemen.
Drone strikes continue in Pakistan of course and no doubt in Afghanistan although almost no details of these are released. Last week the US apologised after a strike killed a mother and her five children in Afghanistan but it was not revealed if the strikes was from a drone or a manned aircraft.
Drone fatalities continue to spread around the globe. As we reported last year, US drones from Iraq were moved to Turkey to help the Turkish military “monitor” Kurdish separatists. Today (16 May) it was revealed by the Wall Street Journal that information from one of these drones led directly to a Turkish military attack in which 38 civilians were killed last December. Last week an engineer working for an Austrian company was killed and two others injured when a drone they were demonstrating to the South Korean military crashed.
Meanwhile preparations aimed at enabling the use of unmanned drones to fly in civil airspace continues at a brisk pace both in the US and the UK.
Yesterday the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it had met the deadline for the first changes demanded by the new FAA Act aimed at allowing drones to fly in US civil airspace by September 2015. The Act mandated that the FAA must streamline the process for government agencies to gain Certificates of Authorization (COA) to fly drones within US civil airspace within 90 days.
Meanwhile in the UK BAE Systems has begun a series of flight tests over the Irish Sea as part of a programme aimed at allowing unmanned drones to fly within UK civil airspace. BAE Systems is one of a number of military aerospace companies funding the ASTRAEA (Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessment) programme. According to the ASTRAEA website it is “a UK industry-led consortium focusing on the technologies, systems, facilities, procedures and regulations that will allow autonomous vehicles to operate safely and routinely in civil airspace over the United Kingdom.”
According to The Engineer, BAE has fitted an “autonomous navigation system” on a Jetstream 31 passenger aircraft to enable it to fly without a pilot – although a pilot was on board in case of problems.
A BAE spokesperson told the Guardian that the tests “will demonstrate to regulators such as the Civil Aviation Authority and air traffic control service providers the progress made towards achieving safe routine use of UAVs [unmanned air vehicle] in UK airspace.” Further flights will take place over the next three months testing infra-red systems as well as ‘sense-and-avoid’ systems.
- Paperback
- Publisher:OR Books (2012)
- ISBN-10: 1935928813
Reviewed for Peace News May 2012
As if the peace movement hasn’t enough on its plate already, the military-industrial complex goes and invents a new and easier way to wage war: the unmanned drone.
For the busy activist trying to grapple with the growing development of the drone wars, what’s needed is a well-written, easy-to-read book, coming from a committed nonviolent perspective, that lays out the issues in an accessible but not simplistic way. Thankfully, long-time US peace activist, Medea Benjamin, has written the very thing: Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.
Benjamin teases apart the varying overlapping issues connected with the growing use of drones (or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as the military insists on calling them).
Individual chapters explore the birth and growth of the industry as well as their spreading use in armed conflicts from Gaza and Afghanistan to Yemen and Somalia. The legality of their use is also investigated, in particular their use for so-called ‘targeted killings’ and their impact on civilians in Pakistan and elsewhere.
Unmanned drones seemingly give the ability to launch armed attacks at great distances with no risk or cost. Benjamin demonstrates that this is a lie on many levels.
For example she tells the story of an attack launched by a drone pilot in his Nevada base on a group of insurgents standing around a truck thousands of miles away. Just as the missile is launched, two kids on a bicycle suddenly appear.
The pilot says: ‘Mesmerized by approaching calamity, we could only stare in abject horror as the silent missile bore down upon them out of the sky.… When the screens cleared, I saw the bicycle blown 20 feet away. One of the tires was still spinning. The bodies of the two little boys lay bent and broken among the bodies of the insurgents.’
Benjamin goes on to quote US major Bryan Callahan saying that drone pilots are taught ‘early and often’ to compartmentalise their lives, to separate the time they spend firing missiles on battlefields from the time they spend at home. This is perhaps the essence of the problem. The idea that we can separate ourselves off (at the personal and political level) from the economic, political, moral and human consequences of our actions has been taken to a new level by this new way to wage war.
The book concludes by looking at some of the initial efforts of the US and European peace movements to respond to the rise of the drone wars.
This book will, I am sure, encourage and enable more people to take further action.
John Brennan, White House Terrorism Adviser
Over the past week there has been what looks like the beginning of a concerted effort by advocates of drones to put their case to the public.
On Monday, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan gave a widely reported speech defending the use of drone strikes. Brennan stated that “in full accordance with the law—and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives—the United States Government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qa’ida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones.” He argued that the targeted drone strikes on known individuals (he didn’t talk about or even mention the other sort of targeted drone strikes – so called ‘signature strikes’) were not only “legal” and “ethical” but also “wise”. (see full transcript of speech here)
Others much more knowledgeable about the intricacies of international law and targeted killing have already critiqued the speech. See for example ‘Thoughts on Brennan’s Speech’ by Human Rights First, and Further Reflections About John Brennan’s Targeted Killing Speech on the ACLU blog.
Although Brennan’s speech received the most coverage, his was not the sole instance of drone supporters making their case this week.
Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal – seen by many as a kind of unofficial media outlet for those conducting ‘the war on terror’ – made a rare TV appearance on the US cable news network, C-Span. Several time Roggio made the point that not speaking about the drones strikes was a “public relations nightmare” and that ”the American public really should have an understanding of what we are doing”. He argued that the US administration needed to “be more open” and “we should be making the case as to why we are conducting this program.”
In addition it was reported this week that during a seminar organised by US think tank The Stimson Center, US Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. Norton Schwartz, went on the offensive in regard to the ethical questions that surround the use of drones. As National Defense magazine, put it Schwartz insisted that ethics were ‘not a relevant question’:
“Is it more honorable for us to engage a target from an F-16 or an F-15 [manned fighter] than it is from an MQ-9 [remotely piloted aircraft]? Is that somehow more ethical? .. Oh come on,” “We have very explicit criteria, rules of engagement, legal standards to engage a whole variety of targets.” The issue is not whether this is ethical, he said. If a weapon is intended to strike a legitimate target that poses a threat to U.S. forces or allies, “I would argue that the manner in which you engage that target — in close combat or not — is not a terribly relevant question. … If what we’re doing is righteous, and I believe it is, the exact modality is less relevant.”
Of course none of these arguments are new. But what is interesting is the sudden desire of those advocating or supporting drone strikes to be speaking about the issue in public. Perhaps there is a feeling they are beginning to losing the argument? Whether this is true or not, those of us challenging the rise of the drone need to respond loudly and clearly. Speaking of which…..
