The Killing Machines: How to Think About Drones by Mark Bowden, The Atlantic.
... Today we find ourselves tangled in legal and moral knots over the drone, a weapon that can find and strike a single target, often a single individual, via remote control.
Unlike nuclear weapons, the drone did not emerge from some multibillion-dollar program on the cutting edge of science. It isn’t even completely new. The first Predator drone consisted of a snowmobile engine mounted on a radio-controlled glider. When linked via satellite to a distant control center, drones exploit telecommunications methods perfected years ago by TV networks—in fact, the Air Force has gone to ESPN for advice. But when you pull together this disparate technology, what you have is a weapon capable of finding and killing someone just about anywhere in the world.
Drone strikes are a far cry from the atomic vaporizing of whole cities, but the horror of war doesn’t seem to diminish when it is reduced in scale. If anything, the act of willfully pinpointing a human being and summarily executing him from afar distills war to a single ghastly act...
Comments
When you feel like you can't…
When you feel like you can't handle writing your thesis, you can ask professionals to help you and get some guidance on how to do it skillfully. You can order cheap essays right now, because we work 24/7.
The general public love to get excited about the technology produced from their tax dollars. Unfortunately it is never quite as sexy as what they see portrayed by Hollywood (movies often show preds and reapers with jet engines). This author, for example, highlighted several capabilities and while doing so made many optimistic assumptions about those capabilities. To put things in perspective he should have also considered some of the technical limitations, but let’s be honest, that’s not what people want to hear.
I have been in the ISR community for years and I have watched the unmanned capabilities grow over the last decade. We still struggle today with many of same issues that we had ten years ago. I’m glad the author mentioned the data-link, as everything hinges on this. If we are to use UAVs in conventional wars this center of gravity needs to be addressed.
I laughed when I read how the author described the soldier watching the feed in stunning HD. I just have to comment about this, while trying not to reveal too much information about our assets. Bottom-line, the feeds I have been watching over the last few years have improved, but even now it can still be very difficult to discern people from animals. Identifying personnel carrying small arms or trying to determine intent can be very difficult. Weather also plays a major role.
The young soldier watching the feed from 3000 miles away cannot possibly appreciate or understand what he is seeing. Much of what an untrained eye will see depends on his imagination and biases. I’ve seen many close calls and a few bad calls when it comes to lethal force and most of these started with a lack of understanding the conditions/environment on the ground and all of them can be attributed to imagination. People who watch feed for too long start to see things. We have a saying “everyone looks nefarious in IR”, as the black and white IR turns people into either blobs of white or black, but the point is that not everyone moving around at night is bad. Example: Is that guy planting an IED or stealing chunks of the newly paved road to build a home? Almost everyone saw an IED being implanted because that is what they expected to see… bias.
Even aside from the lethal force aspect, the intelligence value is greatly diminished when the analyst has no ground experience. People who live 3000 miles away are much different from us. The things they do are not easily understood by a 20 year old who hasn’t traveled to the region. Over the years we have gained a greater understanding of the people in Afghanistan, but even in theater, I still run across FMV folks who don’t know anything about the human terrain and fail to explain apparent human activities. It seems it will take years for us to grow into the technology that we have now, but instead we’re pushing forward putting more and more assets in the sky and spending less time learning how to properly use what we have already, or better yet, training for not having it at all.