Droning On: the More Drones We Worry About, the Less We Care About What Matters
The past few months have revealed an American obsession with drones that touches nearly every aspect of modern life. Unfortunately for vulnerable civilians in other countries, we’re obsessing over the wrong drones.
Amazon’s R&D department is eyeing drone delivery, but you don’t have to wait until tomorrow to buy an actual drone on Amazon. You can make money off drones, and China wants to fight pollution with them. Dianne Feinstein changed her mind about U.S. drone policy when she saw a toy helicopter outside her window, and the Federal Aviation Administration is furious that the Washington Nationals used a drone to take photos of their own players during spring training. Farmers in Oregon hope to better identify areas of crop stress using agricultural drones. Zach Galifianakis even made a drone pun during the president’s appearance on “Between Two Ferns.” Apparently, drones are comedy now.
There will probably soon be drones the size of football fields floating in the stratosphere, doing whatever their owners want them to do up there. With new drones that can hack into your phones, there’s plenty of cause for concern, even as the United States falls behind in the global commercial drone race. Congress seems no more worried about drone–related privacy concerns than it is about America’s competitive position in the emerging drone economy, and at least one Menlo Park, California, C.E.O. thinks there’s an even bigger market for drone use in impoverished countries, where they can fly routes cars can’t easily traverse. A 14-talk TED playlist weighs whether drones will “save us or destroy us.”
Facebook and Google have their eyes on the sky as well. News of Facebook’s potential acquisition of Titan Aerospace—and the inevitable sizing-up against Google’s Project Loon—projected a far more believable and ominous picture of the future than Mark Zuckerberg’s essay on N.S.A.-centered privacy concerns.
Each of these developments presents interesting concerns about technology and privacy. But since when did the average reader care about how the Chinese are fighting pollution, how farmers are identifying crop stress, or how the U.S. measured up in the global market of some emerging technology? Toss the word “drone” in a headline and, suddenly, phone hacking is sexy again.
In fact, the only area where drones have achieved ho-hum status is on the battlefield, where 65 percent of Americans say they’re fine with continued drone strikes on “suspected terrorists” in “other countries.” Despite outcry from interested civilians and even The New York Times’ editorial board, critics of Obama’s drone policy aren’t just losing the battle for public opinion; they can’t even get anyone to pay attention.
America has been developing unmanned aircraft for war since World War I. In 2002, the C.I.A. used a Predator drone to fire a Hellfire missile for the first time. The target, a tall man near the Afghan city of Khost, was supposedly Osama bin Laden, but turned out to be a poor civilian looking for scrap metal from previous American attacks. All told, three innocent men were killed in the attack, but America never looked back when it came to drones. Obama dramatically ramped up the “targeted killing” program as a way to offset troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t long, however, before those vehicles began crossing borders, bringing a new, all-American form of remote-control warfare to at least Yemen, Algeria, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan.
The Obama administration has admitted to killing at least four U.S. citizens with drones. An apparent lull in U.S. drone bombings in Pakistan has accompanied an increase in Yemen, where four drone attacks were reported in the first two weeks of March. In December, 15 civilians were killed when a U.S. drone bombed a wedding procession mistaken for an al-Qaeda convoy. The United States has not officially acknowledged the attack, though anonymous sources told NBC News in January that an investigation was under way. A Human Rights Watch report found that the strike—which came months after the president claimed he would rein in the drone program—raises critical questions about the administration’s compliance with its own targeted “killing policy.” A 2013 Amnesty International report made note of the Pakistani government’s claim that 400 to 600 civilians had been killed by U.S. drone strikes.
Worse still, the Obama administration has expanded the definition of “militant” to mean any military-age male within the strike zone who is not posthumously proven innocent. That’s a breathtaking act of creative accounting, one all but guaranteed to skew reporting of civilian deaths in the government’s favor.
“Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on,” wrote former U.S. drone operator Heather Linebaugh for The Guardian. “I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.” Linebaugh continued:
“What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: ‘The feed is so pixelated, what if it’s a shovel, and not a weapon?’ I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.”
Earlier this month, the United Nations Human Rights Council demanded independent investigations into civilian deaths stemming from drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan, to name a few of the countries affected by America’s drone policy. Among the U.N.H.R.C.’s findings: a threefold increase in civilian deaths from drone strikes in Afghanistan in 2013. Drone warfare was previously thought to be more accurate than other forms or air attacks; the U.N.H.R.C.’s report does away with that notion.
According to The Washington Times, as of November of last year, the United States, Britain, and Israel were the only countries to have fired missiles from drones. But that is likely to change, with as many as 87 new countries possibly acquiring drone technology in recent years. Sources told The Washington Times that 26 of those nations have drones comparable to America’s Predator aircraft, and that 10 to 15 countries are working quickly on armed drones. An industry group predicts the U.A.V. market will reach $89 billion over the next 10 years, with China making huge inroads. U.S. intelligence sources also caution that it is “getting easier for non-state actors to acquire this technology.”
A global shift toward drone warfare is already under way, meaning Americans currently mostly disinterested in the debate may one day be up for a rude awakening. Governments the United States finds unsavory will end up pointing to America’s clandestine drone program as a precedent. “That’s where you have the problem,” the Brookings Institute’s Peter Singer told The Washington Times. “Turkey carries out a strike in northern Iraq and then cites U.S. precedent in Pakistan to justify it. Or Iran carries out a drone strike inside Syria that the Syrian government says it’s fine with because it’s a lawless area where what they call ‘terrorists’ are hanging out, and then they throw the precedent back at the U.S.”
The United States has boycotted the U.N.’s drone investigation, arguing that the U.N.H.R.C. lacks the expertise and narrowness of focus to be effective at policing drone warfare. With little domestic outrage over the killings of civilians like the victims of the Yemen wedding massacre, it’s hard to see why our government would give human-rights activists the time of day. After all, did you hear about the fancy realtors using drones to create marketing videos for high-value properties?
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