Spring 2016

Spring 2016
(All Works Cited Posted with Conclusions)

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Weaponized drones Epidemic By: Patrick Hickman


                                  History and Examples of the Weaponized Drone

            Drones are classified as remotely-piloted aircraft (RPAS) or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS) that are either controlled by pilots from the ground or autonomously following a pre-programmed mission. According to Wordpress.org the evolution of the drone can be interpreted as the passage of five overlapping phases. First, drones were used as practice targets for the military in the early twentieth century (wordpress). Secondly, in the interwar period and into WW II as a kind of flying bomb. Thirdly, during the Cold War as a viable surveillance platform. Fourthly, the drone has been weaponized fusing surveillance with killing. Lastly, as a policing tool for domestic law enforcement. The drone epidemic began on August 22, 1849 when Austria launched 200 pilotless balloons against the city of Venice. The balloons were armed with bombs that were controlled by timed fuses and fuses electrically triggered via copper wires fed up to the balloon. Some of the bombs exploded as planned, but as the wind changed direction, it blew several balloons back over Austrian lines (P.B.S). This is, by most accounts, the first recorded use of a weaponized drone. In 1883, an Englishman named Douglas Archibald who experimented with kites was able to successfully capture the first aerial photograph by equipping a camera to a large kite, however in 1898 during the Spanish-American War the U.S. Military familiar with Archibald’s design realized the potential for a wartime application and produced the first ever wartime aerial reconnaissance photos. Two decades later, as a secret project the first functioning unmanned aerial vehicle was developed under the supervision of Orville Wright and Charles F. Kettering. When the U.S. entered World War I, Kettering’s engineering prowess was applied to the war effort and under Kettering’s direction the development of the world’s first self-flying aerial torpedo came about, which would later be called “The Kettering Bug.” According to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, the “Bug” was a 12-foot-long wooden biplane with a wingspan of nearly 15 feet and weighed in at 530 pounds, which includes a 180 pound bomb. Fewer than 50 “Bugs” were built but the war ended before any could be used in battle. In the mid to late 1930’s, the Royal Navy realized the need for an anti-aircraft gunnery target for anti-aircraft training and developed the Fairey Queen (Warren). Only three were built and all could only be launched from naval ships. The first two crashed immediately after launch, however the third was successful. After the success of the Fairey Queen, the Royal Navy and De Havilland built the DH-82B also known as the “Queen Bee.” Although these planes were similar in appearance they were very different. The “Queen Bee” could be operated remotely by another pilot or by a controller in another aircraft, on a warship or from a control panel on land. It also could either take-off via a runway or be launched off a warship. At the rise of WWII the U.S. Army Air Corps began the development of the GB-1 Glide Bomb. The GB-1 was developed to bypass German air defenses. It was a workable glider fitted with a standard 2,000-pound bomb. The bombs were dropped from B-17s and then guided by bombardiers to their target below. In 1943, one hundred and eight GB-1s were dropped on Cologne, causing heavy damage. However in 1942, the USAAF began the development of the GB-4 it was almost identical to the GB-1 but, under its fuselage it carried an AN/AXT-2 TV camera and transmitter. This was the first television-guided weapon. Although potentially revolutionary, the crude image could only function in the best atmospheric conditions. After WWII ended a special “Pilotless Aircraft Branch” of the U.S. Air Force was established to develop the Q-2 also known as the “Firebee”. This was by far the most important class of target drones built by the Ryan Aeronautical Company. The “Firebee” would later be known as the grandfather to the modern drone according to Gizmodo.com. At the rise of the Cold War, Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union while piloting a U-2 spy plane. This caused the Eisenhower administration to replace its manned reconnaissance program with that of an unmanned program. In 1962, the Ryan Aeronautical Company built its first surveillance drone. It was known as the “Lightning Bug”. The “Lightning Bug” formerly known as the “Firebee.” The Lightning Bugs were launched from the wings of a Lockheed DC-130 Hercules airplanes, which acted as a coordinating mothership for the drones. The Lightning Bugs flew pre-programmed routes and were also controlled by Airborne Remote Control Officers onboard the Hercules. With the battle space of the Cold War widening the U.S. consider sending drones to replace its U-2s in spying missions over Cuba. Lightning Bugs were subsequently used for surveillance in so-called “denied areas” including Cuba, North Korea, and the People’s Republic of China. During the Vietnam War the “Lightning Bugs” were extensively used for surveillance. According to Pbs.org over 34,000 surveillance missions were flown by the Lightning Bugs across Southeast Asia. Over the last hundred years many improvements in technology advanced the drone tremendously (PBS). Which brings us to the birth of the predator. In 1988 Abraham Karem’s company Leading Systems Incorporated developed a drone called the Amber. The “Amber” demonstrated that an endurance flight of 40 hours could be obtained; however the Amber was insufficient for prolonged surveillance due to the lack of sophisticated sensor equipment. In 1989, Karem and his team of scientists responded to this deficiency and developed the “GNAT-750 (Smithsonian).” This drone is referred to as the father of today’s hunter killer drones. The GNAT improved on the Amber by being capable of longer autonomous flight, it was equipped with GPS navigation, and also housed infrared and low-light cameras in a moveable sensor turret under its nose. After Karem faced financial trouble he was obligated to sell his company to Hughes Aircraft, which in turn sold it to San Diego based General Atomics in 1990. General Atomics decided to continue development of the GNAT-750. From 1992-1995, the Bosnian War took place and as a result 100,000 people were killed, tens of thousands of women raped, and millions more displaced.  By 1993 the CIA had become frustrated with poor quality satellite intelligence over Bosnia. In February of 1994 the GNAT took on its first mission over Bosnia; however the GNAT faced the same challenges that satellite intelligence did and that was due to inclement weather. However, the biggest impediment was the communication device housed in the aircraft’s fuselage. This was the C-band line-of-sight data link which only has a range of around 150 nautical miles (Lee). This meant that the drone could only be controlled from a relatively close proximity and seriously restrict its surveillance capabilities. The CIA realizing this to be a major problem tried to solve this by using an intermediary aircraft to relay the data, thereby extending the flight orbit of the GNAT; however this relay did not solve the GNAT’s data problems. The surveillance imagery produced simply had too far to travel: from a GNAT-750, to a relay aircraft, to a ground station in Albania, to a satellite circulating the planet, and then finally, onwards to the CIA headquarters in Langley. General Atomics responded to these problems with the Predator. The Predator has a wingspan of 55 feet, is 27 feet long, 6.9 feet high and carries a payload of up to 450 pounds and has a maximum speed of 135 mph. The Predator drones were first flown in June 1994, and were deployed to the Balkans (Word press). In 1995 Predators were shown in an aviation demonstration at Fort Bliss. Impressed by the drone’s capabilities, the U.S. Air Force soon established the very first UAV squadron, the 11th Reconnaissance Squadron at Indian Springs Airfield in Nevada. After the CIA’s Predator drone spotted who they believed was bin Laden at Tarnak Farm, Afghanistan, in 2000, research went into shortening the kill-chain. The Predator’s Hellfire was the solution. In 2001 tests were made early in the year to turn the hunter into a killer (Wordpress). In summary, what started in Abraham Karem’s Los Angeles garage as a funny-looking Albatross had become a Predator drone with global ambitions and war would never quite be the same.          

Solutions                                

An obvious solution for weaponized military drones is to stop the use, as a form of war. Drones initial purpose was for surveillance, this should be its only form of use. When Barack Obama took office as the reluctant heir to George W. Bush’s “War on Terror,” he renounced some of his predecessor’s most extreme policies. There is one Bush-era policy, though, that President Obama made emphatically his own: the summary killing of suspected militants and terrorists, usually by drone. President Bush started the drone wars, but Mr. Obama vastly expanded them. Almost entirely on his watch, United States strikes have killed as many as 5,000 people (Simonite). The president approved strikes in places far from combat zones. He authorized the C.I.A. to carry out “signature strikes” aimed at people whose identities the agency did not know but whose activities supposedly suggested militancy. He approved the deliberate killing of an American, Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. The administration also argued in court that federal judges lacked the authority to say whether drone strikes were lawful. It refused to release the evidence that it claimed made Mr. Awlaki a lawful target (Simonite). In lieu of information, the administration offered assurances that the president and his aides were deeply moral people who agonized over authorizing lethal force. As this election season has underscored, powers this far-reaching should not rest solely on the character of the president and his advisers. In a democracy, the ability to use lethal force must be subject to clear and narrow limits and the public must be able to evaluate whether those limits are being respected. Mr. Obama observed almost three years ago that “the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power (Warrior).” At the very least, the president has the responsibility to ensure that drone strikes are subject to meaningful oversight. The president should begin by publishing the Presidential Policy Guidance, a document that has provided the legal and administrative framework for the drone campaign since 2013. In response to litigation, the administration informed a federal judge last week that it would release parts of the document, but it remains to be seen how extensive the disclosure will be and whether it will be accompanied by a broader reconsideration of the secrecy surrounding the program. The president should also release the legal memos that claim to justify drone strikes away from battlefields. Courts have compelled the administration to release portions of two of these memos, but the public should have access to all of the government’s legal reasoning about who may be targeted, where and for what reasons. The government has a legitimate interest in protecting properly classified information, but the law behind the drone program should not be a secret. The president should also make it the country’s default practice to acknowledge all drone strikes — not just those carried out on conventional battlefields, as in Iraq and Syria. To facilitate this shift toward greater transparency and to strengthen congressional oversight, he should withdraw the C.I.A.’s authority to carry out drone strikes and provide that any future strikes will be authorized and carried out by the Department of Defense. The president’s chief counterterrorism adviser said that the government intended to disclose annual assessments of casualties from lethal strikes “outside areas of active hostilities.” This information will be of limited use to the public, however, unless the government also discloses information about individual strikes — when and where they took place, and numbers of casualties (Lee). Finally, the president should establish a policy of investigating and publicly explaining strikes that kill innocent civilians, and of compensating those victims’ families. After an American drone strike last year killed two Western hostages, Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, the government apologized, opened an investigation and said it would offer compensation. It should do the same when drone strikes kill or maim innocent Pakistanis, Yemenis and Somalis. These kinds of changes, of course, will not quiet the drone campaign’s critics. Many of those critics believe, as we do, that the campaign is broader than international law permits. that congressional oversight should be far more stringent and that, at least in some circumstances, the lawfulness of strikes should be subject to after-the-fact review by the courts.

At a minimum, the changes we propose would allow for a more informed debate about a subject that urgently needs one, and they would create new, if modest, checks against overreach and abuse. Equally important, the president could make the changes we propose on his own in the limited time he has left in office. President Obama has established a dangerous precedent, and consequently whoever prevails in November will inherit a sweeping power to use lethal force against suspected terrorists and militants, including Americans. Whether Democrat or Republican, the new president, should also inherit policies that limit that power.

Camus thoughts                        

 Camus was said “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioner (Camus)”. Camus’ also once wrote an essay on the barbarity of the death penalty was written in 1956, against the backdrop of the executions of hundreds of dissidents during the Soviet crackdown in Hungary, as well as the execution of Algerian revolutionaries condemned to death by French tribunals. He notes that by 1940 all executions in France and England were shielded from the public. If capital punishment was meant to deter crime, why hold the killings in secret? Why not make them a public spectacle?

Because, Camus argues, deterrence isn’t the purpose of state murder. The real objective is vengeance through the exercise of extreme state power. “Let us recognize it for what it is essentially: a revenge. A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge. It is a quasi-arithmetical replay made by society to whoever breaks its primordial law (Camus).”

Public executions became a threat to the state, because the dreadful act tends to provoke revulsion in ordinary citizens, like Camus’ father, who see it clearly for what it is: a new form of murder “no less repulsive than the crime(Camus).” A form of murder that is performed, in theory, in the name of the citizens and for which they are complicit.

This kind of state-sanctioned killing, Camus reasoned, leads only to more murder, a vast panorama of murder. “Without the death penalty,” Camus writes, “Europe would not be infected by the corpses accumulated for the last twenty years on its soil (Camus).”

So what would Albert Camus, the great moralist of the 20th century, think about the latest innovation in administrative murder, Obama’s drone program, a kind of remote-control gallows, where the killers never see their victims, never hear their screams, smell their burning bodies, touch their mutilated flesh?

The conscience of the killer has been sterilized, the drone operator, fully alienated from the act he is committing, can walk out the door after his shift is over and calmly order an beer at the local brewery or play a round of golf under the desert sky. He is left with no blood on his hands, nor savagery weighing on his conscience, no degrading images to stalk his dreams.

Drone strikes, Camus would argue, are not just meant to kill. They are programmed to terrorize. In this regard, whether the missile strikes its intended target or incinerates a goat-herder and his flock is incidental. In fact, the occasional killing of civilians may well be a desired outcome since collateral deaths intensify the fear. This is punishment by example, not for any particular crime or impending threat, but merely because of who you are, where you live, what you might believe. These new circuitries of death are meant to humiliate, subdue and dehumanize.

Conclusion                      

In conclusion, you know the history of the weaponized drones, the harm they do on innocent people, and the backlash of people against weaponized drones. I strongly urge you to join against the epidemic. While drones have improved the capabilities of the U.S. military, unmanned systems will never replace humans on the battlefield. Particularly in counterinsurgency warfare, UAVs can help protect soldiers and minimize civilian casualties, but the human element is still crucial to the success of low intensity conflict. The capabilities of UAVs must never be mistaken for a strategy or a way to wage a “costless war (Chapa).” Viewing technological improvements as such will only lead to a militarization of foreign policy and unnecessary conflicts. Policymakers must therefore proceed cautiously when employing these technologies in the field and develop new standards for their use. Unmanned systems may lead to a safer type of warfare for U.S. soldiers, but they will be unable to eliminate the inherent brutality of war. If we continue down this slippery slope we too will or may have already become the very terrorist we are fighting against. Libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and rugged individualists have always based their visions of a capitalist paradise on the idea that the state is the main threat to the power and freedom of the individual. And in the Age of the Gun, that was true. But in the Age of the Drone, that is no longer the case. When the rich hold unlimited military power in their own two hands, who’s going to stop them from just taking the property of everyone else? If you’re a card-carrying National Rifle Association member, you should ask yourself whether you’re going to be one of the Robot Lords … or one of the rest (Chapa).

Works Cited


"Aerial America." Smithsonian Channel. Web. 12 May 2016. <http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/shows/aerial-america/701>.


"Albert Camus." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television. Web. 12 May 2016. <http://www.biography.com/people/albert-camus-9236690>.

Chapa, Joseph O. "Drones and the Ethics of Targeted Killing." Journal of Military Ethics 14.3-4 (2015): 284-86. Web.


"History of U.S. Drones." Understanding Empire. 2012. Web. 12 May 2016. <https://understandingempire.wordpress.com/2-0-a-brief-history-of-u-s-drones/>.


Lee, Brianna. "Drones." PBS. PBS, 2012. Web. 12 May 2016. <http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/drones/12659/>.


"Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)." Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Home Page. Web. 12 May 2016. <https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/uav/>.


Simonite, Tom. "Can We Trust Military Drones to Decide When to Fire?" New Scientist 202.2713 (2009): 20. Web.


Warrior, Lindsay Cohn. "Drones and Targeted Killing: Costs, Accountability, and U.S. Civil-Military Relations." Orbis 59.1 (2015): 95-110. Web.

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