SOME FASCINATING INFORMATION ON MILITARY USE DRONES!

 SOME FASCINATING INFORMATION ON MILITARY USE DRONES!

The title of this post, “What Do You Know about Drones?,” caught my eye because I recently made an effort to learn everything I could about drones of the military kind. I have just completed a book entitled “The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to Trump,” about half of which is devoted to the extreme militarization of American science. Two of its 22 chapters discuss drones. The book is now in the hands of the publisher, Haymarket Books, and is scheduled for publication on May 5, 2020. It is already listed in the Haymarket catalogue:

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1467-the-tragedy-of-american-science

The first of the two chapters, “Video-Game War,” explains the main thing to know about military drones: They are mass murder machines. American civilians tend to think of drones as relatively small contraptions, like the cute little quadcopters we sometimes see buzzing overhead at sporting events and elsewhere. But the military drones’ wingspans often match those of midsize jet aircraft, and they can launch cruise missiles and drop 500-pound bombs. The Air Force’s Reaper drone, for example, is 36 feet long and has a 66-foot wingspan. It can carry 3,750 pounds of attack munitions, including laser-guided air-to-ground Hellfire missiles, the weapon most frequently launched from U.S. drones.

A console operator in Nebraska targets humanoid avatars on a computer screen, squeezes a trigger on a joystick, and instantly rains death upon dozens of flesh-and-blood human beings in Pakistan. The act of killing is sanitized and dehumanized by geographical and emotional distance. Traditional military values nostalgically exalted by old soldiers, such as courage and honour, lose their meaning in the context of drone warfare. Even the illusion of glory is gone.

Armed drones were first used in battle in Afghanistan in late 2001, and then rapidly became ubiquitous. The Bush-Cheney administration extended their use beyond declared war zones, a monumental step in the progression toward permanent, globalized American warfare.

A total of 57 drone strikes were authorized on Bush-Cheney’s watch, but that was just for openers. Barack Obama in his first year in office carried out more drone strikes than George W. Bush did in his entire eight-year tenure. Obama earned the ironic sobriquet “President Drone” by launching almost ten times as many strikes—563—as Bush and Cheney had.

Obama also vastly expanded the presidential prerogative to wage war with no congressional oversight, a precedent the Trump administration warmly embraced. In October 2017, more than 240,000 troops in at least 172 countries and territories were fighting what the New York Times calls “America’s Forever Wars.” American forces were “actively engaged” not only in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, but also in Niger, Somalia, Jordan, Thailand, and elsewhere. “An additional 37,813 troops serve on presumably secret assignment in places listed simply as ‘unknown.’ The Pentagon provided no further explanation” [NYT Editorial Board, Oct. 22, 2017].

While drone technology and the proliferation of remote-control warfare have already created a nightmare scenario for humanity, there is, I regret to report, much worse on the horizon. The second of the two chapters on drones in my book explains that if there is a class of weapons more to be dreaded than remote-controlled drones, it is drones that are not remotely controlled. The coupling of remote-strike capability with artificial intelligence (AI) throws open yet another Pandora’s box. Remote-control murder was bad enough—now we are faced with fully automated murder.

The euphemism used by military policymakers to describe their robotized warfighters is “lethal autonomy.” A Washington Post article [Sept. 19, 2011] envisioned “the future of the American way of war” as one in which “drones hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans.” An aspect of AI of particular interest to the military is facial recognition, a key step in enabling robot drones to memorize faces of targeted individuals from photographs, pick them out of crowds, follow them home, and kill them—all on their own, all without the guidance of human operators.

Although almost everything having to do with autonomous weapons research is highly classified, the American military has openly declared its intention to devote major attention and resources to it for years to come.

As depressing as all of this sounds, Ken, I have actually ended the book on a somewhat hopeful note. Ever the optimist, I have tried to project a possible way out of the ultramilitarization trap. That’s too much to go into here, though

I also want to thank you, Ken, for the information you provided about the use of drones in agriculture.  Although drones originated in military research during the Vietnam war, they have become—as many military research efforts have—a “dual use” technology, with civilian as well as military applications.

Cliff