Game of Drones

“A fighter jet might see a target for 20 minutes. We had to watch a target for days, weeks and even months. We saw him play with his kids. We saw him interact with his family. We watched his whole life unfold. You are remote but also very much connected. Then one day, when all parameters are met, you kill him. Then you watch the death. You see the remorse and the burial. People often think that this job is going to be like a video game, and I have to warn them, there is no reset button.”

          —— Neal Scheuneman, a drone sensor operator who retired as a master sergeant from the Air Force in 2019. 

A Droning Comes Across the Sky…



sam enderby

Originally Posted on July 5, 2012

There are many connections to be made in observing (and participating in) the fight for the Soul Of Amercia (as Mitt likes to say) and if you’re like me and given to a paralyzing despondency – my wife doesn’t want me to use Depression (although I fail to see the difference), our present state of affairs can be quite sobering, no more so than upon our booze budget and a remembered fondness for the better gin angels of the top shelf variety for the lower orders suffice us now and with long disposed expertise in assembling our evening’s martini we manage to save a small fortune ( financial advise when you least need it) in vermouth by using a technique favored by Mr. Winston Churchill and that’s just to wave the cap or cork of the vermouth over the glass of gin, served chilled with an olive of course or, having read something about Sir Winny and his habituations during the war, it seems there was a shortage of his favorite French vermouth so

upon pouring the Plymouth -his preferred blend- he would give a little bow in the direction of that conquered country. Why take up all that gin space anyway. Which somehow brings me to an article by John Burns in last Friday’s (June 29) New York Times about a new WWII Memorial honoring the Bomber Crews who, with the “enthusiastic support”, at least in the beginning, of Sir Winston himself, carried out what has become known as Area or Carpet Bombing of large population centers- there were thousands of these raids mostly done at night and the targets of  these Firestorms are now well known to history – Dresden (thank God Vonnegut survived), Nuremberg, Dusseldorf; the Germans, too did their share of it , Rotterdam, Warsaw, the Americans did it to Tokyo (before we really did it to Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and, of course later we applied the same technique but with different chemicals in Vietnam – all in pursuit of hard political ends via long distance death. The lost to those bombed and to those who did the bombing was and is horrific. Now to get back to Royal Air Force Bomb Crews this memorial – privately financed by the way thanks to the late Bee Gee Robin Gibb –

Four more, barkeep!

took these 70 years to finally resolve itself as this particular chapter of the war soon became a political liability when the war ended- what with the Cold War heating up and the Shock of the Holocaust playing out across newsreels how would it look if the Allies had to acknowledge the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians they themselves deliberately caused. Especially when now we needed the Germans to be our friends. (And not to forget the devastation visited upon London by those V rockets launched from Germany and the resultant civilian deaths and the destruction of whole neighborhoods and the rounding up and importation- most to the U.S.- after the war of these very same Nazi rocket techs and military attendants that provided the Thrust to put a man on the moon. Incidentally, the Father of Space Medicine  would get his final degree experimenting at of all places Dachau . And don’t get us started on “DORA”) It is at a place beyond the Death and Destruction from

great distances that the article reaches us and as you will see connects us- today – with those guys in the bomber crews 70 years ago. Beyond the white stone and bronze statues are the almost matter of fact words of one of the surviving crew who was 21 years old at the time:

“When I pushed the button and saw the bombs going down, I saw what looked like a housing estate and I thought, ‘There are women and children down there’. But right away I had to get back to scanning the sky…Apart from that I never, ever had any doubt that what I was doing was right.”

A momentary misgiving as Burns describes it. But the guy – now 88 – was finally getting some sort of recognition for his button-pushing I guess and who am I to decry such as had I been him 70 years ago I would have pushed too and have no doubt that it was the right thing to do- such certitude at that time and in that place and with THAT enemy. But still you have to wonder through the many years if the thought of those houses and those women and those kids ever rose up again. Which is why another article posted this week by Nan Levinson that I read on the TOMDISPATCH.com (and here I tender an all important plug to those of you who may not know of this site – go there.) and it may have been published too on the HuffingtonPost and in Mother Jones online (always connect, to borrow from E.M. Forster) shifts into the present and offers us, at least the spectators from afar, the bleacher BUMS, if you will, of the DESOLATION and AGONY of our fierce doings (to steal from Coleridge- see previous post anent Dwight MacDonald) a glimpse perhaps into the painedpsyche of those “mandates we send for the certain death of thousands and ten thousands” and what and how is being done or trying to be done to help the healing. In the article, titled “MAD, BAD, SAD-What’s Really Happened to America’s Soldiers”, Ms. Levinson writes:

“I’ve spent the past seven years talking with current GI’s and recent veterans, and among the many things they’ve taught me is that nobody gets out of war unmarked. Thats especially true when your war turns out to be a shadowy, relentless occupation of a distant land, which requires you to do things that you regret and that continue to haunt you.”

The toll such MORAL INJURY exacts can be relentless and the official manuals both military and psychiatric are starting to finally take a good hard look at what is undoubtably a well precedented pathology leading to what is now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Ms Levinson again:

            ”In trying to heal from a moral injury, people struggle to restore a sense of themselves as decent human beings, but the stumbling block for many veterans of recent US wars is that their judgment about the immorality of their actions may well be correct. Obviously, suffering which can be avoided should be, but it’s not clear what’s gained by robbing soldiers of a moral compass, save a salve to civilian conscience. And despite all the gauzy glory we swath soldiers in when we wave them off to battle, nations need their veterans to remember how horrible war is, if only to remind us not to launch them as heedlessly as the US has done over these last years.”

Cemetery at Gettysburg, 1863

Now one of the more astonishing (to me) “developments” over time, meaning over a number of wars , is the Progress that our Military leaders have made in getting our boys and girls in uniform to use their weapons more ( its ironic that this little piece is taking me a little longer to get down as there is always -it seems -one more connection, one more reference that will bind this together better than what it is right now- get to the point mister- yeah, well its July 3 now which in case you’re keeping score is the 149th anniversary of the Third and Last Day of the Battle of Gettysburg and you want to talk of firing weapons), and now, finally, we’re getting the volunteers to shoot first and ask questions later (I could get snide and make a comment here regarding the good training they receive for a career in the NYPD but I won’t). Still the big Brass is finally able to start moving away from those Boots on the ground approach ( although for the past 60 odd years there was always the unspoken of eventuality of a more permanent end to this- and to everything else for that matter but as things went along the military and their favorite corporations just found the money to be too good- I guess) and with the advance in technology and weapon systems and computers and, well like everything else lately they are finding out that hey maybe we don’t need so many public employees afterall – although I’ve also read that the Privateers- the Third Party Contractors, Cheney’s Friends, are doing quite well (I wonder if thats what President Obama had in mind when he caught all sort of flak for saying the “private sector’s doing ok”?) So the hell with trying to win the Hearts and Minds as we did in Vietnam – oh, wait a minute- that’s not right but we are in Afghanistan and Pakistan(?) just like we did in Iraq because everywhere we go we’re treated as Liberators and Conquering Heroes or am I mixing my non sequiturs again because Sen. John Kerry once told us, nay warned may be better, that they  ( the soldiers) found” that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from” over 40 years ago so why wouldn’t it work today? They’re fighting terrorists Over There so they won’t have to Over here? And how do you tell who’s a terrorist and who’s just your average Afghani or Pakistani or Somali or Omani or Iraqi or Irani (or Armani- just kidding) person with an unwieldy beard, a long nightgown with sandals, and a shmatta on his head – the same way we differentiated the good Gooks from the bad in Vietnam (now Sam.)? And from thirty thousand feet in a flying machine?

“As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups….the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboo (I believe that was Cheney’s second choice after waterboarding)- all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.”-wrote  George Orwell in yet another context but not altogether that different in finding himself in a somewhat similar situation between his conscience and his country and the Moral Injury inflicted. But the CIA never seems to have any qualms (this may seem a harsh and unreasonable statement but I believe history bears it out ) in their ever expanding role in our lives and wars and an article that appeared last Fall in the Wall Street Journal explained that the expansion of the CIA’s “undeclared drone war” in certain areas required a Wider Standard as to who was being targeted. Evidently the Drones or as the army Techs know them – the UAVs (show of hands please? – the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles)  are as precise and accurate as they can be – right now – but they still have some tweaking to go through so in the meantime we need newer standards that preclude “knowing” who the targets are and to include anyone who was anyway associated with the presumed unknown target or mark so we won’t aim at mere individuals but groups  who happen to be around the intended mark and call this a Signature Strike ( we’re supposed to give Pakistan some advance notice if we intend to kill 20 or more “unknowns” at once). I’d hate to think that the CIA is thinking, too, that such a standard could eliminate any unexpected witnesses to the event so not knowing is a help – just blips on some electronic screen or a stick figure in a shoot-em up video and we can fill in the names later or in an ironic ( for me, because I like the guy) plot twist it now has been reported that President Obama has a little Kill List (Michael Corleone as The Mikado) of those he has condemned. And so Signature Strikes are the lessons not learned in another part of the world a couple of generations ago although we are now more moderate in our violence. 

Meanwhile the Drones drone on in Pakistan (yes Pakistan) for 

somewhere over Waziri

stan

reasons that all of us living in a so-called post 9/11 World need not bother to think about for all that was handled rather pathetically by the Bush Administration and now the Obama Administration ( The WAR ON TERROR will just continue and in case you haven’t figured it out we can do nothing but lose – How many of us feel freer? Is the price of freedom so cheap that America sells out to fascist dollars in the guise of so-called teaparty patriots? That right-wing politicians blatantly state they want America to fail because they hate the thought of a Black Man in the white house and then proceed to do everything they can do to succeed at it and this is not regarded as treason- there is, afterall, a war on- right?) and just as another  ”northern” part of a country once received its share of our bombs the DRONES this time are falling on a region called NORTH WAZIRISTAN (and yes there is a south), more then 70% according to the New America Foundation. Its web-site has one of those user-interactive maps like the Google apps; it shows the mountainous topography of Pakistan and uses multi-colored

YOU are not here

push pin icons that you can click on within any cluster of them and read something about the Drone attack on that particular place; i.e. Dec 26, 2009-Cocuta Babar Raghzin, 4 miles North of Miram Shah, North Waziristan, Militant Leader killed-0, Militants killed 0, Others 3-13, Assumed Target- House of a local tridesman apparently linked with the Taliban. So I’m wondering (cause I just read this but if I wasn’t trying to connect I never would have cared to think – are ya listening, kids?) what was the person who was remotely controlling this UAV thinking a half world away-how many points he was about to score or was it along the lines of the old bombardier from England-    

” When I pushed the button and saw the bombs going down, I saw what looked like a housing estate and I thought there are women and children down there..”  

And Pakistan is an ally. Listen to another witness among our “friends on the ground” in the near and dear places of our faraway combat ( and forgive me the loss of this citation. I found it on line and wrote down the “address” then promptly misplaced it – along with the vermouth cap) The quote is verbatim, 

“Well,the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq. They don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attack. Living in the U.S., Americans only care about their own people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.” 
We may take issue with some of his facts but there is no denying his anger and outrage and, quite frankly, we still haven’t got the knack for winning those elusive hearts and minds.

On another site – this one given over to the review of computer video games – ok, I was reaching here but I was hoping for a description of just what a drone impact would be like; something I haven’t been able to come up with in all the places I’ve been online, so- one participant was kind of naysaying the quality of his visuals when he wrote ” about their drones only dealing damage when it is destroyed (I took this to mean like a kamikaze). HITS LIKE A DAMN TRUCK (now we’re getting there),dies in like 2 secs, but manages to Damage and Stagger” and this “The Pulse & The Death EXplosion”. This is the language of our video game players and I doubt that our Military Drone drivers and support techs and such can come up with a more descriptive phrase for their actions than this from one of those video-game participants- “If I go fishing with someone, I wouldn’t want him to use a grenade, even if that means we’d get a ton of fish.” There are rules.
When John Kerry spoke 41 years ago on behalf of Vietnam Vets Against the War and others before Sen Fulbright’s Committee on Foreign Relations during the March on

I’m Somewhere to the right of the monument and about 3/4 of the way back

Washington (your martini drinking blogger remembers sleeping in the rain hard by the Washington Monument – there was a stage nearby and plenty of grass but no martinis for me back then) he cited some statistics regarding the care of the Vietnam veterans or the lack thereof – at the time now remember- April, 1971- 57% of the Vets entering VA hospitals Talked of Suicide and 27% tried! “because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn’t really care.”  And then in the midst of this extraordinary testimony by this very brave and articulate soldier he says, “No ground troops are in Laos so it is all right to kill Laotians by remote control” in a context involving false body counts and winding down the war. He was using a biting sarcasm to make this point. Even then we were testing the drone out.  One more because I can’t resist: “Finally this administration (this would be Nixon- ask your grandparents about this guy) has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifices we made for this country. In their blindness and fear they have tried to deny that we are veterans or that we served in Nam. We do not need their testimony. Our own scars and stumps of limbs are witness enough for others and for ourselves.” Oh, yeah. Just wait until you try to run for president.
Today, according to the V.A. (see the Levinson article) it is estimated that upwards of 20% of the 2.3 Million troops who have cycled (and recyled and…) through Iraq and Afghanistan Suffer from PTSD. Thats a lot of healing to tend to. In a larger sense and certainly not to detract from the wounds of our current  returning veterans we as a country, as a nation, have never as a People (if we are) really confronted ourselves in an honest way over our engagement in Vietnam but enough about me. 


There’s a new institution underway being set up by the good folks at the Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Tx called the SOUL REPAIR CENTER which will conduct research and education about Moral Injury in combat veterans and we can only wish them the best. Now if we could just have some of these centers for the rest of us bleacher bums; for those who “have loved to swell the war-whoop”.

What is it like to push a button a half a world away and blow up some people you were trying or not to kill? What does that do to a person? Anything? Or is the world become one big Video Game?
A Mr. Middleton , an analyst with a British think tank, ( cited in the Independent?) has this to say regarding the U.S. use of “killer” drones in Somalia: “There is a danger that a War prosecuted in Somalia exclusively with Drones will disengage the U.S. from finding a political solution. If you can control the threat that way, you have no incentive to build a sustainable solution.” Of course this can obtain in all other areas and for how long? A Moises Naim writing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will have to have the final word here- but only for now- He conveys that the American Drone “fleet” is now spread out through Turkey, the Horn Of Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. Soon there will be if there isn’t already a huge demand for civilian use of drones and of course there is the Elephant in the room- the one Orwell didn’t shoot- and that is eventually the Terrorists themselves will start making these things and with just the right kind of warhead “suitable to travel from Afghanistan to Manhattan, from remote mountain roads to stadiums full of people”. Great.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A.I. Drones Are Coming. We Are Not Ready.

July 20, 2026

Aleksey Kondratyev For The New York Times

Aleksey Kondratyev For The New York Times

On a clear afternoon this month, high above the Mojave Desert, an A.I.-powered drone launched a missile in a test that could reshape modern warfare.

Since the dawn of the jet age, the U.S. military has used the isolation over this stretch of sand to push secret, experimental aircraft to their aerodynamic and technological limits. It’s doing the same today: fine-tuning machines capable of engaging in aerial combat with barely any human intervention. These drones’ flight is controlled not by a pilot, not by human remote control, but entirely by onboard software. It’s a historic advancement in drone technology that aims to incorporate artificial intelligence into everyday war-fighting.

Today’s conflicts are increasingly defined by unmanned weapons, delivering destruction over battlefields in Ukraine, Iran and Sudan. But in almost all these cases, there is a human operator sitting somewhere, steering each robot toward its target.

The two types of next-generation drones being tested over Southern California today, built for the Air Force by Anduril and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, can fly entirely on their own. They make hundreds of split-second decisions to maneuver, evade and attack enemy targets, based upon countless hours of flight data and computer processing. A human is involved at just a few key moments in their flight: to program the drone’s mission, to start and stop it and to decide whether or not it should launch a weapon. Late last year, the companies’ drones flew for the first time. Anduril fired its first missile two weeks ago, and General Atomics says it is not far behind.

General Atomics’s YFQ-42A drone idles before a test flight at its Gray Butte airfield.Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times

The Air Force program is part of a sweeping overhaul in how the American military prepares for war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in January that he intends to make the military “an ‘A.I. first’ warfighting force across all domains.” Throughout the Pentagon, Uncle Sam-style recruitment posters with Mr. Hegseth’s likeness declaring “I want YOU to use A.I.” are plastered on the walls. His department has requested $54.6 billion in next year’s budget for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, or DAWG, a body recently set up to coordinate all autonomous weapons programs across U.S. forces.

The United States isn’t alone in this pursuit. Around the world, and particularly in China and Russia, an arms race is emerging to mass-produce autonomous, A.I.-operated war machines. President Vladimir Putin of Russia declared in 2017 that whoever leads in A.I. “will become the ruler of the world.” President Xi Jinping of China has poured billions of dollars into A.I. development for the country’s military. Prototypes of smaller, rudimentary A.I.-assisted weapons have already been reported in action in Ukraine, Libya, Azerbaijan and Gaza. In a few years, we could see swarms of self-guiding robots not only in the skies, but also at sea and on the ground.

As the world’s militaries race to weaponize artificial intelligence, the international community has failed to establish limits on its use. The United Nations has spent a decade deliberating how to restrict autonomous weapons — a rare instance of anticipating a global threat before it arrives. Yet these efforts have yielded no binding rules or codes of conduct.

Instead, global leaders are accelerating toward an era of automated warfare. The fear of body bags has been one of the greatest deterrents to conflict in history. Mass-produced, expendable robots do not carry the human or financial costs that have tempered the urge to go to war for centuries.

“Right now, we’re racing in the dark,” said Jack Shanahan, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and former director of the military’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. “No one is talking to one another about the technology their nations are developing, and there’s an incentive to rush it into the field. I do think, unfortunately, something may go horribly wrong before it gets better.”

It’s difficult to overstate how fundamentally drones have revolutionized modern conflict. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress handed the president unilateral authority to take military action against anyone and any nation he deemed responsible. Technology soon caught up with the mandate of nearly unconstrained presidential power. Successive commanders in chief opted for missile-firing remote-controlled drones as their weapon of choice in the new war on terror.

Humanitarian and civil rights groups have spent the intervening years criticizing combat drones for lowering the threshold of war, creating a means for pilots sitting in front of computer screens to kill people in faraway countries without putting Americans in harm’s way. Despite the outcry and untold thousands of civilians killed and injured, open-ended drone wars became politically acceptable to much of the American public after Sept. 11, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Nigeria and, most recently, Iran.

The Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, as the A.I. drone program is called, aims to have more than 150 robotic wingmen flying alongside manned fighter jets by the decade’s end. For now, the goal is for the drones to be able to fight other aircraft. But software engineers are already at work developing other types of missions that can be installed on the drones, just as you would swap one app for another on your smartphone. Soon, an autonomous drone could carry out bombing runs on ground targets, perform reconnaissance overflights, conduct electronic warfare to fry enemy air defenses or simply serve as a decoy to lure enemy fire away from piloted planes. “This is stuff that’s never been done before,” said Jason Levin, a senior engineering executive at Anduril.

The YFQ-44A drone fired its first missile in July over the Mojave, where Anduril has a development facility.via Anduril and Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times

The Pentagon believes the technology will make war more efficient, cost-effective and decisive. Analysts inside and outside the government argue that any military that wields automation and A.I. will be able to identify enemy weaknesses, process intelligence data and share it among troops faster than any army of humans possibly could, giving that military the upper hand in combat over adversaries.

During the war in Iran, for instance, an A.I. program condensed the time it took to identify and strike a target from days to minutes, resulting in 1,000 targets hit within the conflict’s first 24 hours. It remains an open question whether A.I. was involved in the U.S. airstrike on a school that killed at least 175 people, many of them children. If it was, it would be the highest-profile case of civilian killings involving the technology.

Turning over the bloody business of warfighting to self-thinking machines comes with obvious risk. Algorithms can be wrong, be corrupted or result in unintended consequences. And machines, of course, aren’t capable of making ethical choices. A military officer deciding to strike a target typically has years of training and combat experience. What if an A.I.-controlled drone flying a future mission misidentifies a passenger jet as an enemy plane and targets it? Is the military responsible for that failure? Or the defense firm that coded the software?

For now, the drones are built to keep humans engaged at key junctures to avoid such catastrophes. This makes them “semiautonomous,” according to Col. Timothy Helfrich, who oversees the C.C.A. program for the Air Force. In their current design, the final decision to approve a missile launch will come down to a human pilot, whom Colonel Helfrich referred to as a “quarterback.” That person will also manage the mission in real time with the option to abort if anything goes awry. But many worry this won’t always be the case. As the technology improves and becomes more reliable, the military’s incentive to shorten the “kill chain” — finding, locking on to and striking targets on the battlefield — could one day outweigh the imperative to supervise the drones’ work during a time of war.

Colonel Helfrich and other U.S. military leaders are quick to dismiss the idea that the handoff of war to machines is inevitable, citing the Defense Department policy on autonomous weapons, known as Directive 3000.09, that requires the involvement of a human to “exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.” But while the directive defines what an autonomous weapon is and states that a rigorous senior review process is necessary before one is deployed, for now, there’s nothing stopping the design, development and production of these fully automated weapons.

With so many blinking warning signs, why is the military pressing ahead on such a short timeline? The Air Force sees autonomous drones as a low-cost way to address an immediate problem: its dwindling number of fighter jets. The service now has about 5,000 aircraft — fewer than at any point in its 79-year history — many of which aren’t battle-ready. As Beijing continues to add new antiaircraft missile batteries, fighter jets and its own autonomous drones, the United States understands the need to quickly replace its vulnerable Cold War-era warplanes. If it can build a large fleet of robotic drones at a fraction of the cost of current fighter jets, it can maintain its formidable presence across the globe for decades to come, the thinking goes.

The nearly $1 billion that the Air Force wants for the C.C.A. program next fiscal year is a pittance compared to the cost of high-end fighter jets, which war planners see as continuing to play a prominent role in retaining military dominance. The Air Force wants to integrate at least 1,000 autonomous drones, at an estimated cost of around $25 to $30 million apiece, into its operations, with the first handful produced next year.

One of the firms making drones for the program, General Atomics, based in Poway, Calif., has been selling drones to the U.S. military for decades. On a sweltering morning in July, its YFQ-42A Dark Merlin drone sat under a sand-colored shelter blotting out the Southern California sun. Beads of sweat dotted the brows of the General Atomics and Air Force maintenance crews at the remote airfield near Palmdale, Calif., as the temperature inched toward 100 degrees.

It’s not often you see military personnel working shoulder to shoulder with defense contractors on prototypes, but it’s one of the exceptions the Air Force is making on this project as it rushes to get the drones in the air. The quicker humans trust the machines, the quicker they can be assimilated into the battlefield. “The Air Force needs to have 100 percent assurance in the aircraft if they’re going to allow pilots’ lives to depend on it,” said Mike Atwood, head of advanced programs in General Atomics’ aeronautical unit.

Just a half-hour drive away across an expanse of high desert, at the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, lies the Victorville airport. Here, technicians were tinkering with the other drone in the program, the YFQ-44A Fury, built by Anduril. The software-centric upstart based in Costa Mesa, Calif., is eager to add the combat drone program to its growing list of lucrative Pentagon contracts. In May 2025, it partnered with Meta to build virtual reality devices for the U.S. Army. Two months later, it won a $100 million contract to build the Army’s command-and-control software. But it seeks a larger production contract from the military.

In March, Anduril began manufacturing drones and other autonomous weapons at its new plant in Ohio. Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times

In a gamble rarely seen in the defense industry, the company has already constructed a one-million-square-foot production factory outside Columbus, Ohio, to mass-produce the YFQ-44A — with just a handful of confirmed U.S. military orders — in hopes that the company will either win a bigger Air Force contract or sell the drones to other governments. The if-we-build-it-they-will-come attitude runs counter to the ethos of larger weapons manufacturers, which typically shy away from investing without a guarantee of financial returns. “We want to move fast, and so does the Air Force,” said Mr. Levin, Anduril’s engineering executive. “We’re all willing to accept some risk if it means we’re making up for time on the schedule.”

The pressure to race ahead is palpable. China displayed several autonomous drones at a military parade in September, while Russia and Ukraine have actively fielded A.I.-assisted drones during the years they’ve been at war. France, Germany and Spain are moving ahead on their own robotic wingman programs amid Mr. Trump’s repeated public upbraiding of NATO. India, Israel, Australia and other nations already have A.I. military programs, as will many more nations that can afford it.

The looming challenge for the United States is how to fast-track this technology while balancing the safety and ethics issues with other nations. All weapons are subject to existing prohibitions and restrictions under international humanitarian law. But autonomous weapons raise novel concerns. Humanitarian groups say it’s morally bankrupt to hand over lethal action to machines, no matter how advanced. Can technology reliably differentiate adults from children, or soldiers with guns from TV journalists with camera equipment, or a truckload of fighters from a truckload of war-injured? Can it ascertain if someone is surrendering?

Questions like these prompted the International Committee of the Red Cross to call for new, binding prohibitions and restrictions on the development and use of these systems, calling it “an urgent humanitarian and legal priority.” That message has found a growing audience. In November, 156 countries signed a U.N. General Assembly resolution expressing deep concern over the risks of A.I.-enabled weapons, believing they could lead to unpredictable escalations of conflict. Not surprisingly, the United States, China and Russia were among the minority of countries that declined to support the resolution. On July 6, at the first Global Dialogue on A.I. Governance in Geneva, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said: “Our institutions were built to govern machines that follow commands. They are not ready for machines that decide. And some lines, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed.”

Militaries have advanced the technology so quickly that it seems unlikely that an outright abolition of autonomous A.I. weapons is achievable. However, there are practical paths to create international red lines that will make them safer — for instance, barring such systems from independently selecting and firing on human targets. Another sensible mandate would be to ensure militaries have a human in the loop in any lethal operation to stop it if and when things go haywire. A third would be a prohibition on using the systems for any strike that put civilians or critical civilian infrastructure at risk.

Something must be done. The Trump administration has worked to roll back Biden-era guidelines for safety controls on A.I. development and use in the military. In February, it threatened to bar the tech start-up Anthropic from working with the military because the firm wouldn’t allow the Pentagon to have uncontrolled access to its A.I. software, specifically to control autonomous weapons. In June, Mr. Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum that both seeks to accelerate A.I. adoption in federal agencies and orders the Defense Department to update its policy on autonomous weapons.

The YFQ-42A takes off for an autonomous test flight above General Atomics’s facility in the Mojave Desert.Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times

In Washington, there is growing recognition that the United States is as vulnerable to this budding technology as every other country. A bill introduced last month by Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona would turn the language of the Defense Department’s 3000.09 policy — which is a department guideline and subject to change — into federal law. Another bill introduced in June by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York not only requires human oversight on conventional weapons that use A.I., but also ensures nuclear command and control does as well.

Congress should pass both, and the Trump administration should join the U.N. secretary general and the International Committee of the Red Cross in their calls for a new international treaty to be concluded by year’s end on autonomous weapons systems.

We’re not far from the day when one state’s autonomous weapons will be capable of shooting at its adversary’s autonomous weapons. And once that possibility exists, there is a very real risk that it could happen by mistake, or by misunderstanding. As in the doomsday nuclear scenarios of the Cold War, the world could find itself in an escalatory exchange that could quickly spiral out of control — but this time with limited human oversight.

The age of A.I. is already here. It’s up to humans to address how and when it can be used before machines dominate the battlefield.

W.J. Hennigan writes about national security, foreign policy and conflict for the Opinion section.

from April 15, 2022 New York Times:

The Casualties at the Other End of the Remote-Controlled Kill https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/us/drones-airstrikes-ptsd.html?smid=tw-share  

From December 18, 2021- New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes-pentagon-records-civilian-deaths.html

Please check out this important work by J. Scahill in The Intercept

https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-life-and-death-of-objective-peckham/ 

seven plus years later:
from New York Times (March 10 is the 75th anniversary of the U.S. firebomb raid on Tokyo)

‘We Hated What We Were Doing’: Veterans Recall Firebombing Japan

By John Ismay

March 9, 2020

Beyond the World War II We Know

American airmen who took part in the 1945 firebombing missions grapple with the particular horror they witnessed being inflicted on those below.

An aerial view of Tokyo after it was firebombed by U.S. Army Air Forces on March 10, 1945.Mondadori, via Getty Images

For the latest article from “Beyond the World War II We Know,” a series from The Times that documents lesser-known stories from World War II, The Times spoke to four former B-29 bomber crew members who participated in the firebombings of Japan in spring 1945.

Just past midnight, hundreds of B-29 Superfortress bombers arrived over Tokyo, having launched from the Mariana Islands, which the United States had recently captured from the Imperial Japanese Army at great human cost. The aircraft had largely been stripped of their armaments so that they could carry even more clusters of small incendiary munitions. Young American officers in the sky dropped hundreds of thousands of bomblets on the working-class section of the city, with its densely packed wooden dwellings mainly inhabited at the time by women, children and men too old to fight.

Before that March 10, 1945, assault, named Operation Meetinghouse, the Army Air Forces had been conducting high-altitude, high-explosive “precision” attacks during the day on military sites and factories in Japan, with limited success. So Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, the officer in charge of strategic bombing from the Marianas, drew upon years of U.S. military research on the flammability of Japanese buildings to usher in a more aggressive tactic: dropping firebombs (also known as incendiary bombs) at night on population centers. If they couldn’t take out the factories, they could kill the people who worked in them.

Over several hours, U.S. Army Air Forces warplanes destroyed the shitamachi, or the low -lying section of Tokyo, and killed an estimated 100,000 Japanese citizens in a firestorm. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey later wrote that “probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” The devastating results motivated military leaders to continue incendiary bombing raids on Japan’s other cities — both large and small — in hopes of forcing the Japanese to surrender. Before the war’s end, firebombs dropped by B-29s killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens in more than 60 cities before nuclear bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“We hated what we were doing,” said Jim Marich, one of the airmen who flew over Tokyo that night as part of the B-29 aircrews. “But we thought we had to do it. We thought that raid might cause the Japanese to surrender.” Marich’s somber account of his role in the missions is a grim reminder of the indelible scars left on both the survivors of the attack and those who conducted it.

In interviews with The Times, Marich, now 94, and three other airmen who took part in the firebombings reflected on their determination to accomplish their missions and get home as soon as possible, while grappling with the particular horror they witnessed being inflicted on those below.

Richard Gross, 95

Mercer Island, Wash.

First Lieutenant, 874th Bomb Squadron, 498th Bomb Group

On Saipan, I was in Quonset hut barracks with another crew. And that crew was chosen as the lead crew on the first firebomb mission. The crew members were brought in and asked if they objected to firebombing the cities of Japan. A number of people raised their hands. But the order came down: “Well, that’s your opinion, but the orders are you’re going to go on the mission.” I guess they could have declined, but I don’t know if any did. This was the first information people had that we were going to be bombing the cities.

I was a navigator. At the time, you just didn’t think about those things. We had a job to do and we did it. We were burning houses, but we didn’t think about the people. I didn’t reflect on the war until much later. You start to think about how awful the war was. Afterward, I decided to go to medical school and do something positive for a change.

Jim Marich, 94

Mercer Island, Wash.

Second Lieutenant, 869th Bomb Squadron, 497th Bomb Group

Our group, the 497th, was the last one to go in. It started out like a regular mission. We had changed from fragmentary bombs to the incendiaries at Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s request — or demand. He brought us down from high-altitude bombing with fragmentary bombs to low-level with incendiaries. We wiped out that whole area on that one night. It was terrifying, really.

You could smell, I’m sorry to say, burning flesh in the airplane. And we were really tossed around from the updrafts. We safely went on with the mission and went on with lesser-known missions. But by then, the Japanese fighter response was practically nil. And we knew that the war was going to be over pretty doggone soon. I was home in October of that year in my own little bed, and I had not even achieved my 20th birthday.

Ed Lawson, 96

Fredonia, N.Y

Technical Sergeant, 882nd Bomb Squadron, 500th Bomb Group

I was a gunner, looking out the right blister window, right behind the wing. All I wanted to do was go home. The Japanese laid out their cities like a big checkerboard, and so we had pathfinder crews that went in first and then the other bombers came in after. Since we were behind other planes, we ran into smoke clouds that could send you up 20,000 feet with the snap of a finger. There were at least two B-29s I knew of that collided and went down in a smoke cloud.

My job was to stand by the open bomb-bay doors and throw chaff out — these long strips of aluminum foil to confuse Japanese radar. Can you imagine standing in front of an open bomb-bay door and smelling a city burn up? It was terrifying. At low altitude like that, I didn’t wear an oxygen mask. All I can say is that the smell was nauseating. I’ve never smelled anything like it since, and I don’t want to.

The original idea of the Geneva Convention is that civilian targets were out, and it was military targets that should be used. In Europe, you had the Russians and the Germans — especially the Nazis — bombing civilians. When we did the firebombings, we were killing civilians.

Clint Osborne, 96

Golden Eagle, Ill.

Technical Sergeant, 873rd Bomb Squadron, 498th Bomb Group

I made one firebomb mission with my second crew on March 24. We went in at about 6,800 feet. There were something like 400 planes up that night. We were about 200 in. You could see flames, they estimated, about 100 miles away. I’ve always felt bad about that. I thought, Where will the people go? If everything around you is burning, what do you do? They burned up an awful lot of Nagoya that night. I don’t remember how many square miles. If I remember correctly, when they announced what was going to happen, there were a few pilots who refused to fly because of humanitarian reasons. But eventually there was enough pressure put on them that they changed their mind.

I still wouldn’t approve of it today. Of course the rules of war are pretty vague, but one of the things is that you don’t attack civilians. But they justified it by saying people were manufacturing things for the war effort in their homes. I often questioned how much they could really be doing. But one thing people agree on is that the fire raids were probably worse than the atomic bomb.

These accounts have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

FROM NYTIMES SEPT 14, 2019

Drones Strike Big Saudi Oil Centers, and Houthis Claim Responsibility

By Ben Hubbard, Palko Karasz and Stanley Reed

Updated 12:28 p.m. ET

Drone strikes set fire to a Saudi Aramco plant in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia, early Saturday. The location was one of two Saudi Aramco facilities targeted, and Yemen’s Houthi rebel faction has claimed responsibility for the strikes.Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters

Yemen’s Houthi rebels launched drone attacks on key Saudi oil facilities on Saturday, setting off blazes that could be seen from space and showcasing how cheap new technologies allow even minor militant groups to inflict serious damage on major powers.

The drone attacks — some 500 miles from Yemeni soil — not only exposed a Saudi vulnerability in the kingdom’s war against the Houthis, but raised the specter of other Iranian-backed groups using similar techniques elsewhere in the Middle East, including against American targets, experts said.

“This takes the proxy war to a new level in the region,” said Farea Al-Muslimi, co-founder of the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies, a research group focused on Yemen. Of the Houthis’ drones, he said, “Their ability to cause pain is very high and it costs very little.”

It was not clear how badly damaged the facilities were, but shutting them down for more than a few days would disrupt world oil supplies. Between them, the two centers can process 8.45 million barrels of crude oil a day, amounting to the vast majority of the production in Saudi Arabia, which produces almost one-tenth of the world’s crude oil.

The difference in resources available to the attacker and the victim could hardly have been greater, illustrating how David-and-Goliath style attacks using cheap drones are adding a new layer of volatility to the Middle East.

Such attacks not only damage vital economic infrastructure, they increase security costs and spread fear — yet they are remarkably cheap. The drones used in Saturday’s attack may have cost $15,000 or less to build, said Wim Zwijnenburg, a senior researcher on drones at PAX, a Dutch peace organization.

While the Houthis benefit from no significant financial resources, the drones have given them a way to hurt Saudi Arabia, which was the world’s third highest spender on military equipment in 2018, spending an estimated $67.6 billion on arms.

The attacks hit deeper into Saudi territory than previous strikes, and the Houthis claimed to have used 10 drones in the operation, which they said was one of the largest aerial operations they have carried out.

Iran has supplied drone technology to the Houthis fighting the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, a panel of experts reported in January 2018 to the United Nations Security Council.

A still image from a video obtained from social media showing smoke billowing at an Aramco facility in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia, one of two oil processing centers struck by drones on Saturday. It was not clear how badly damaged the facilities were, but such strikes have the potential to disrupt world oil supplies.via Reuters

United Nations investigators say the Houthis have since obtained a more advanced drone than those cited in that report, with a range of 930 miles, The Associated Press reported.

The Houthis have attacked Saudi infrastructure before, primarily hitting less vital targets with missiles that had much shorter ranges.

The strike on one of the centers hit, in Abqaiq, is particularly worrying because it processes crude from several key Saudi oil fields, said Helima Croft, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, an investment bank.

“This is the mother lode for an attack on Saudi infrastructure,” she said. “We have always been concerned about an attack on Abqaiq.”

Whether world oil supplies are disrupted “will depend on the degree of the damage,” she said. Such a disruption could lead to a release of oil from the United States’ strategic petroleum reserve.

A former senior executive of Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant, said the company had enough reserves to keep world supplies steady if the plants were shut down for a few days, but a long disruption would be another matter.

While there were no reports of casualties, the attacks struck at the core of the Saudi economy. They came just as Aramco accelerated plans for what could be the largest initial public offering of stock in the world, an event closely watched by investors globally.

The Saudi interior ministry reported fires at the two processing centers, in Abqaiq and Khurais, before dawn on Saturday, and later said they had been attacked with drones. In a statement, the ministry said both fires had been “controlled and contained,” the Saudi-owned news network Al Arabiya reported, but gave no further detail.

A Houthi spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yahya Sare’e, said in a statement broadcast by Al-Masirah, the faction’s news organization, that the group’s forces “carried out a massive offensive operation of 10 drones targeting Abqaiq and Khurais refineries.”

The Houthis — supported by Iran, the kingdom’s chief foe in the region — have tried to take the fight to Saudi Arabia before, though their efforts have been pinpricks compared to the devastation in Yemen.

How the War in Yemen Became a Bloody Stalemate — and the Worst Humanitarian Crisis in the World

Saudi Arabia thought a bombing campaign would quickly crush its enemies in Yemen. But three years later, the Houthis refuse to give up, even as 14 million people face starvation.

The war in Yemen began in 2014, when the Houthi rebels seized control of the capital and most of Yemen’s northwest, eventually sending the government into exile. A coalition of Arab nations led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with some support from the United States, began bombing Yemen in 2015, hoping to push the Houthis back and restore the government.

Instead, the war has settled into a stalemate and the Houthis have developed increasingly sophisticated ways of striking back at Saudi Arabia, most notably with drones.

Mr. Zwijnenburg, the researcher, said the drones gave the Houthis an edge because they were cheap to produce, hard to detect and shoot down, and able to cause damage and disruption that was hugely disproportionate to their cost. While the Houthis’ exact capabilities are not known, they have clearly developed over time.

“They are learning to adapt their drone capabilities to specifically attack Saudi targets, avoiding detection, avoiding interception, which means that in the future they have a larger set of targets to choose from,” he said.

The Houthis’ alliance with Iran also raises the possibility that its successes could be shared with other Iranian-aligned militant groups elsewhere in the region.

“These are also lessons that can be shared with other Shia groups in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon,” he said.

The conflict in Yemen has killed thousands of civilians, many of them in Saudi airstrikes using American-made weapons. It has also created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, put millions of people at risk of starvation and left millions of others homeless.

In a report presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva this week, a panel of experts said both sides in the conflict were committing horrific human rights abuses including arbitrary killings, rape and torture, with impunity. The atrocities underscored the collective failure of the international community, the panel said.

After a period of relative calm, following a cease-fire brokered late last year, tensions have escalated again in recent months. Houthi forces attacked Saudi pipelines and other oil infrastructure in May, temporarily halting the flow of crude oil, and in June they struck an airport in Saudi Arabia, wounding dozens of people.

In July, in a major blow to the Saudi-led coalition, the United Arab Emirates, which had been providing arms, money and, crucially, ground troops in Yemen, announced a rapid pullout from a conflict that had become too costly. The move left diplomats and analysts wondering whether Saudi Arabia would continue the war on its own.

Although the Trump administration has been a vocal supporter of Saudi efforts to deter Iran and its allies in the region, congressional opposition to the sale of arms and the deployment of extra troops in Saudi Arabia has limited the scope of support from the United States.

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

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April 19, 2018 (6 yrs hence & counting)

Trump Administration Seeks to Expand Sales of Armed Drones

By GARDINER HARRISAPRIL 19, 2018

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Drones like the Reaper have been the workhorse and controversial symbol of the fight against insurgents in Afghanistan and the tribal regions of Pakistan.CreditLt. Col. Leslie Pratt/U.S. Air Force, via Associated Press 

WASHINGTON — A day after President Trump promised to slash the red tape involved in weapons sales, the administration announced on Thursday a new policy that could vastly expand sales of armed drones, a contentious emblem of the shift toward remotely controlled warfare.

That change, in addition to a newly released update to the policy governing which nations are allowed to buy sophisticated American-made weapons, is intended to accelerate arms sales, a key priority of Mr. Trump.

The president seemed to foreshadow the new policies on Wednesday night, when he said at a news conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan that after allies order weapons from the United States, “we will get it taken care of, and they will get their equipment rapidly.”

“It would be, in some cases, years before orders would take place because of bureaucracy with Department of Defense, State Department,” Mr. Trump said. “We are short-circuiting that. It’s now going to be a matter of days. If they’re our allies, we are going to help them get this very important, great military equipment.”

The new policies, though, will do little to change the often yearslong intervals between orders and deliveries of weapons, but the State Department announced that it intended over the next 90 days to re-evaluate the process that can sometimes lead to such gaps.

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Delays in delivering weapons systems have long been an irritant to foreign governments and domestic manufacturers, and almost every administration in the modern era has tried to fix the process. Top aides in the Trump White House have frequently called officials at the State Department and the Pentagon to try to hurry things along.

But the deals can pose an array of challenges, involving not only national security issues, such as the transfer of sensitive technologies, but also economic ones. India, the world’s largest weapons buyer, often requires defense firms to build weapons in India in partnership with Indian firms, the kind of requirements that the Trump administration finds objectionable in China with regard to cars and other products.

The biggest change announced on Thursday involves the sale of larger armed drones like the Predator and the Reaper, which have been the workhorses of the fight against insurgents in Afghanistan and the tribal regions of Pakistan. President Barack Obama embraced the weapons but was also so troubled by such remote warfare tools that he placed unusual restrictions on their sale.

Those restrictions have allowed drone makers in Israel, China and Turkey to capture a large part of a market that American manufacturers had pioneered, something the Trump administration wants to reverse.

Under the old policy, only Britain, France and Italy were approved to purchase armed drones, according to Dan Gettinger, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College.

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As more countries are approved, “the risk is that countries may be more willing to use military force when they can do so without risking their own people,” Mr. Gettinger said.

Sales of smaller, unarmed drones have fewer restrictions, and American manufacturers dominate the market for those, Mr. Gettinger said.

The newly announced changes in the policy governing which countries can purchase sophisticated American-made weapons, known as the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, instruct the government to take domestic economic concerns into greater account than it has in the past.

The new policy also says that consideration should be given to minimizing civilian casualties. That could potentially justify sales of “smart” bombs, which are easier to direct to specific targets.

But experts said that the changes are not likely to have much effect on sales.

“I think it’s political posturing,” said Rachel Stohl, managing director of the Stimson Center, a think tank focusing on foreign policy. “We already sell to almost everybody in the world. Are we really going to open markets to places like Iran and North Korea now? I don’t think so.”

The Obama administration was also enthusiastic about foreign weapons sales, which soared during its tenure. Direct weapons sales declined in the first year of the Trump administration from the year before and are now roughly half the level seen in 2011, the first full year of the Arab Spring.

The policy changes were announced two days after a hearing on Capitol Hill during which senators from both parties expressed anguish at the vast humanitarian crisis in Yemen, caused in part by Saudi Arabia’s use of American weapons.

A bipartisan group of senators has proposed legislation that would require the State Department to routinely certify that Saudi Arabia is taking steps to end the suffering there, the sort of review that slows weapons purchases. The Trump administration opposes the legislation.

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4 1/2 YRS HENCE:

Papers Offer a Peek at ISIS’ Drones, Lethal and Largely Off-the-Shelf

By ERIC SCHMITT 

JAN. 31, 2017

 

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Members of American Special Operations inspected a drone in Mosul, Iraq, in January. The craft had been used by Islamic State militants to drop explosives on government forces. Credit Muhammad Hamed/Reuters

WASHINGTON — The standardized four-page checklist describes each Islamic State drone mission in chillingly impassive detail: Mission type (spy, bombing, training). Location (city, province). Drone components (motor, bomb ignition). Operation (successful or not).

The form, apparently filled out by Islamic State drone operators in Iraq after every mission, was part of a batch of documents discovered in January by a Harvard researcher embedded with Iraqi troops in the battle of Mosul and then turned over to American military analysts for review.

The documents — in Arabic and English — offer a rare window into how the Islamic State has cobbled together a rapidly advancing armed drone program that increasingly threatens allied troops fighting the militant group, also known as ISIS or ISIL. They show how the group has institutionalized a program using off-the-shelf technology to bedevil the militarily superior American armed forces.

The Islamic State has used surveillance drones on the battlefield for about two years. But an increase in attacks since October — mostly targeting Iraqi troops — has highlighted its success in adapting readily accessible technology into a potentially effective new weapon.

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In the past two months, the Islamic State has used more than 80 remotely piloted drones against Iraqi forces and their allies. About one-third of the aircraft, some as small as model airplanes, dropped bombs or were rigged with explosives to detonate on the ground, said Col. John L. Dorrian, the spokesman for the American-led operation against the Islamic State in Baghdad.

Iraqi officials said bombs dropped by the drones, which were primarily quadcopters, had killed about a dozen government soldiers and injured more than 50. “It poses a threat to troops on the ground, and it has value as a propaganda technique,” Colonel Dorrian said of the Islamic State drone program in an email. “However, it’s certainly not a game-changer when it comes to the outcome of the battle to liberate Mosul.”

A new video message from the Islamic State, “Knights of the Departments,” appeared to depict these new drone missions.

The documents were discovered by Vera Mironova, an international security fellow at the Belfer Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Ms. Mironova obtained the documents while she was conducting research in Iraq on the individual behavior of Islamic State fighters. She said in an interview via Skype that she had come across the materials in a drone workshop formerly under the control of the Islamic State in the Muhandeseen neighborhood of Mosul, near Mosul University.

Iraqi soldiers were not interested in the documents, Ms. Mironova said. But recognizing their potential value to the American military, she contacted the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, which has previously published her work.

Two researchers at the center, Don Rassler and Muhammad al-Ubaydi, reviewed the roughly 30 pages she sent. Confirming the authenticity of documents from a war zone is always tricky. But in a nine-page assessment, an advance copy of which was provided to The New York Times along with the documents themselves, the authors concluded the materials were genuine based on where and how Ms. Mironova obtained them and the center’s experience working with an array of captured battlefield material.

All of the documents appear to be from around 2015 — the early phases of the drone program — and the collection includes a mix of official Islamic State forms and handwritten notes, according to the researchers’ analysis.

The materials reveal that the Islamic State, much like its forerunner, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq, is detail-oriented and bureaucratic when it comes to its operations. According to the assessment of the documents, the Islamic State’s drone unit falls under the Al Bara’ bin Malik Brigade, a part of the aviation sector of the Islamic State’s Committee for Military Manufacturing and Development.

The standardized four-page checklist for drone operations provided another example. On the first page, drone operators were asked to provide details about their mission — specifically, the type of mission (there are six options, including “Bombing” and “Explosive Plane”), the militants who were involved, the location and the way point coordinates for the flight.

The second page of the form consisted of a checklist that seems to have been designed to help the drone operators conduct pre- or post-mission checks of their systems and equipment (including “Bomb Ignition sys” and “Bomb igniter RC”), the assessment said. The third page was a checklist of gear in the operator’s “tool case,” including “screwdriver,” “pliers” and “knife.”

The last page of the form asked the operators to note whether their mission had succeeded or failed. It also provided space for the operators to write notes, perhaps to document lessons learned from failed missions or interesting events that occurred during successful ones, the assessment said.

The documents also contained detailed acquisition records, essentially shopping lists for the off-the-shelf commercial technology that the Islamic State is buying.

The lists showed the group’s efforts to buy items like a GoPro camera, memory cards, GPS units, digital video recorders and extra propeller blades, the assessment said. The purchasing lists also highlighted the group’s efforts to enhance the range and performance of its drones, whether bought commercially or not. For example, to protect the transmission of their drone video feeds, members of the group wanted to acquire encrypted video transmitters and receivers, the assessment said.

“There seems to be a list of material necessary to the construction of those drones,” said Damien Spleeters, head of operations in Iraq for Conflict Armament Research, a private arms consultancy that has been investigating weapons recovered from the Islamic State since 2014. Mr. Spleeters has also reviewed the documents for the West Point center. “So it shows consistency and standardization, certainly with some sort of chain of supply in place,” he said.

American military officials said that the Pentagon had dedicated significant resources to stopping Islamic State drones but that few Iraqi and Kurdish units had been provided with the sophisticated devices that the American troops had to disarm them. The officials said they had ordered the Pentagon agency in charge of dealing with explosive devices — known as the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization — to study ways to thwart hostile drones. Last summer, the Pentagon requested an additional $20 million from Congress to help address the problem.

The recovered documents offer few clues about how the militants view the future of their drones.

“In the short term, we should expect the Islamic State to refine its drone bomb-drop capability,” the assessment concluded. “It is likely that the Islamic State’s use of this tactic will not only become more frequent, but more lethal as well.”

Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad.

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WE'VE WAITED OVER 4 YEARS FOR THIS HEADLINE: WHAT TOOK THEM?

Pentagon Confronts a New Threat From ISIS: Exploding Drones

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and ERIC SCHMITT

OCT. 11, 2016

• 
  

WASHINGTON — Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State in northern Iraq last week shot down a small drone the size of a model airplane. They believed it was like the dozens of drones the terrorist organization had been flying for reconnaissance in the area, and they transported it back to their outpost to examine it.

But as they were taking it apart, it blew up, killing two Kurdish fighters in what is believed to be one of the first times the Islamic State has successfully used a drone with explosives to kill troops on the battlefield.

In the last month, the Islamic State has tried to use small drones to launch attacks at least two other times, prompting American commanders in Iraq to issue a warning to forces fighting the group to treat any type of small flying aircraft as a potential explosive device.

The Islamic State has used surveillance drones on the battlefield for some time, but the attacks — all targeting Iraqi troops — have highlighted its success in adapting readily accessible technology into a potentially effective new weapon. American advisers say drones could be deployed against coalition forces by the terrorist group in the battle in Mosul.

• 
  
• 
  
• For some American military analysts and drone experts, the episodes confirmed their view that the Pentagon — which is still struggling to come up with ways to bring down drones — was slow to anticipate that militants would turn drones into weapons.

“We should have been ready for this, and we weren’t,” said P. W. Singer, a specialist on robotic weaponry at New America, a think tank in Washington.

Military officials said that the Pentagon has dedicated significant resources to stopping drones, but that few Iraqi and Kurdish units have been provided with the sophisticated devices that the American troops have to disarm them. The officials said they have ordered the Pentagon agency in charge of dealing with explosive devices — known as the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization — to study ways to thwart hostile drones. This summer, the Pentagon requested an additional $20 million from Congress to help address the problem.

In recent months, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency both rushed to complete classified assessments about the Islamic State’s drone use. And the secretary of the Army, Eric Fanning, recently assigned a special office he had created to respond to emerging threats and to study how to stop drones.

Unlike the American military, which flies drones as large as small passenger planes that need to take off and land on a runway, the Islamic State is using simpler, commercially available drones such as the DJI Phantom, which can be purchased on Amazon. The group attaches small explosive devices to them, essentially making them remotely piloted bombs.

“This is an enemy that learns as it goes along,” said Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, the top American military commander in Iraq until August.

Of the three known drone attacks in Iraq, only the one involving the Kurdish soldiers caused casualties. “The explosive device inside was disguised as a battery — there was a very small amount of explosives in it, but it was enough to go off and kill them,” said a senior American official who had been provided with a detailed report on the episode.

Photo

Eric Fanning, the secretary of the Army, right, earlier this month in Washington. Mr. Fanning recently assigned a special office he had created to respond to emerging threats and to study how to stop drones. Credit Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Last week, the Islamic State used a drone strapped with an explosive to attack a checkpoint. The device did not kill anyone but destroyed buildings. On Oct. 1, Iraqi troops shot down a drone that was only a foot long and a foot wide but had a small explosive attached to the top.

“The drone could only hold one small bomb in the middle of it — no bigger load could be on it,” said Gen. Tahseen Sayid, a senior Iraqi officer in the area.

The Islamic State first used drones to film suicide car bomb attacks, which militants have posted online. But American and Iraqi commanders said that earlier this year it became clear the group was using drones to help them on the battlefield.

In March, General MacFarland and American military commanders in Baghdad received an intelligence report that the Islamic State had posted surveillance video online that had been taken by a small drone. The video footage showed a newly created series of bases in northern Iraq where American and Iraqi forces were stationed.

Just days after the video was put up, a Katyusha rocket landed in the middle of an outpost of more than 100 American Marines, killing one who was rushing to get others to shelter in a nearby bunker. The strike was so accurate that military officials described it as a “golden shot” to pierce the defenses put in place, and there was speculation that a drone was used in the targeting.

General MacFarland said he did not believe the footage — which did not include positional data like GPS locations — helped militants.

“It couldn’t be used for precise targeting,” he said in a recent email exchange. “Its value was limited to propaganda.”

In the weeks afterward, American forces in the area unleashed a barrage of retaliatory airstrikes against Islamic State fighters who had launched the drone.

“Whatever capability they had, they lost a lot of it,” General MacFarland said, referring to the Islamic State’s operations in the area.

Throughout the summer, however, American troops in Iraq and Syria reported seeing small drones hovering near their bases and around the front lines in northern Iraq. In August, the Islamic State called on its followers to jury-rig small store-bought drones with grenades or other explosives and use them to launch attacks at the Olympics. There were ultimately no such attacks at the Games.

On the battlefields in Iraq and Syria, the United States has dedicated resources to take out the Islamic State’s drone capabilities. In the past 18 months, the United States has launched at least eight airstrikes that have destroyed Islamic State drones on the ground, according to news releases from the American military command in Baghdad.

Despite these efforts, military analysts believe that drones will continue to be a problem in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. A new report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point says that in the future, off-the-shelf drones used by terrorist groups will be able to carry heavier payloads, fly and loiter longer, venture farther from their controller and employ secure communications links. The center provided an advance copy of the report to The New York Times.

“The number and sophistication of drones used is also likely to enhance the scope and seriousness of the threat,” said Don Rassler, the center’s director of strategic initiatives.

Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Alain Delaquérière contributed research from New York.

It’s Not Like Hollywood: Why U.S. Airstrikes Go Awry

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

SEPT. 20, 2016

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Photo

A hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan, was in ruins after it was bombed in an errant American airstrike in 2015. Credit Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — If there is a single link between the wars fought by the United States in the Middle East and Afghanistan, it is the long list of errant airstrikes carried out by American warplanes. Weddings, funerals, hospitals and friendly forces have been mistakenly attacked, with each strike prompting fresh outrage.

While most of those killed have been civilians — in Afghanistan alone, the United Nations recorded 1,243 civilians killed in airstrikes between 2009 and 2015 — American-led forces have repeatedly struck friendly forces. It is a pattern that was repeated last weekend with a pair of separate airstrikes in Syria and Afghanistan that have again cast a harsh spotlight on the seeming inability of the United States to avoid hitting the wrong targets in its air campaigns.

The two latest strikes, like the many that came before them, each had its own specific and complex circumstances. But military officers and experts say that almost all the mistaken strikes over the years have come down to two main reasons: Faulty intelligence, and what military strategists call “the fog of war,” referring to the confusion of the battlefield.

Wrong Targets

Many of the deadliest American airstrikes to hit civilians in the last 15 years have taken place in Afghanistan.

• JULY 1, 2002

  An American AC-130 gunship struck an engagement party in the village of Kakrak in Uruzgan Province, killing 48 people.

• MAY 4, 2009

  American airstrikes in the village of Granai in Farah Province killed 147 civilians, the Afghan government said. The United States estimated that 20 to 30 civilians and as many as 65 Taliban fighters had been killed.

• SEPT. 4, 2009

  An American F-15E fighter jet, acting on orders from a German commander, dropped a 500-pound bomb on a tanker truck outside the village of Haji Sakhi Dedby in Kunduz Province, killing at least 70 people, and possibly dozens more.

• OCT. 3, 2015

  An American AC-130 gunship, called in by American Special Forces, struck a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, killing 42 people.

As long as there are airstrikes, “there’s always going to be some percentage of the strikes that are going to go awry,” said Robert Farley, a professor at the University of Kentucky who has written about the use of American air power.

“People and data are imperfect,” he said. “You’re always going to have some percentage of the time that you’re fed inaccurate data by either the drones above you or the maps you have or the forward air controllers right there on the ground.”

Collateral damage is a problem as old as airstrikes themselves. The first instance of aerial bombardment — an Italian plane dropped grenades against an encampment of enemy troops in Libya in 1911 — resulted in accusations that the pilot had hit a field hospital, injuring several civilians.

Unlike the grenades dropped then, which the pilot had to screw together in midflight, modern bombs and missiles rarely, if ever, miss their mark. If a hospital or friendly troops are hit in an airstrike, it is almost always because the target was chosen in error. There are no known instances in the last 15 years of American-led forces deliberately targeting noncombatants or allied troops in airstrikes (though there have been massacres by American ground troops).

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The problem is that “as good as Hollywood portrays what we can know or see from drones or anything else, the situational awareness we’ve got is nowhere near that,” said Scott F. Murray, a retired Air Force colonel who oversaw airstrikes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

No matter what the intent, killing civilians by mistake can amount to a war crime, though the military almost never brings criminal charges against those involved. That was the case with the strike on a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, in 2015, that killed 42 people. The military’s own investigation found that those who took part in the attack “failed to comply with the” laws of armed conflict, and though 12 service members were disciplined, none faced criminal charges.

Fixing the problem, though, has proved far harder than identifying it. One of the issues, experts say, is the culture of the Air Force itself, which does not give much credence to the idea of the fog of war, experts said.

“One of the core aspects of air power theory is this idea that with enough reconnaissance, with enough data with enough data crunching, we can paint an extremely hyper-accurate picture of the battlefield that is going to not only eliminate accidental strikes, but it’s going to make it so we can strike directly and precisely,” Mr. Farley said.

“So in some sense, that kind of extreme optimism about air-power targeting is baked into Air Force culture, is baked into the Air Force cake,” he added.

But bad information leads to bad outcomes. Faulty readings of surveillance from drones and other sources appear to have been involved in the strike in Syria, which infuriated the Syrian government and its Russian backers, further undermining an already shaky cease-fire there.

The attack occurred on Saturday night when fighter jets from the American-led coalition struck what the military believed was an Islamic State position. The attack was methodical and merciless — the jets took run after run over the camp in an effort destroy it, cutting down men as they fled.

But about 20 minutes into the strike, Russia notified the United States that the jets were hitting troops loyal to the Syrian government, not the Islamic State. Russia and Syria have since said that more than 60 Syrian troops were killed.

Details about the strikes remain closely held by the military, which has started an investigation. But American military officials said the area had been under surveillance from drones for at least two days before the strike — a tank was spotted at the camp and the people there did not appear to be moving in any kind of military formations — suggesting the fault lay with the intelligence analysis used to plan the strike.

The Pentagon is also reportedly investigating a possible explanation for how American officers mistook a Syrian base for an Islamic State position: The encampment that was hit may have been used by the Syrian military to detain soldiers who were being disciplined and who were not wearing uniforms.

But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., on Monday urged against a rush to judgment.

“Maybe before we start going on a path of ‘what went wrong,’ let’s do an investigation and actually ensure that something did go wrong,” he said, according to Reuters.

If the attack was a mistake, it would be unusual in that it came during a planned strike. Typically in recent years, airstrikes have accidentally killed civilians or friendly troops in the heat of an ongoing battle, or during a hastily arranged strike on a moving target. The strike on Sunday in Afghanistan falls into that category.

It occurred when American aircraft were called in to aide a police post that was under attack in Uruzgan, a province in the country’s south. At least seven police officers were killed, Afghan officials said.

But an American official, who asked not to be identified because the incident was under investigation, said it did not appear that the aircraft accidentally hit the police defending the post.

Rather, the official said, it appears that the aircraft struck the men who were attacking the police post. The assailants may have been police themselves, or from a village militia, and were attacking the post as part of some kind of turf war with another faction within the police.

In almost every situation, “What’s going on is very complex,” said Mr. Murray, the retired colonel.

“I’ve lived this on the intel end, and, you know, ‘Eye in the Sky’ was a really good movie. But it kind of does a disservice,” he said. “We tend to focus on simple solutions.”

Follow Matthew Rosenberg on Twitter @AllMattNYT.

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The Upstate NY Coalition to
Ground the Drones & End the Wars

Home Blog Drone Info Contact Us Links Archive Calendar

--- Identity and Mission Statement --

Founded in 2010, Upstate Drone Action also known as The Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars, is a decentralized, informally-organized grassroots organization, primarily composed of upstate New York activists representing a diverse assortment of Peace and Justice organizations in different cities.

We seek to educate the public and Hancock Air Base personnel about the war crimes perpetrated in Afghanistan with the MQ9 Reaper drone piloted from Hancock Air National Guard Base, on the outskirts of Syracuse. It is also our mission to illuminate the perversity of a society that chooses war over all other solutions.

We also seek to educate the public about drone proliferation and the danger of blowback, as well as the surveillance and civil liberties threat the Predator, Reaper and other military robots pose domestically.

Drawing legitimacy from International Law and from the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Upstate Drone Action members heed our consciences and the Nuremberg mandate to expose and impede our nation's war crimes. Committed to nonviolent direct action as well as other forms of public education, members periodically endure arrest, trial and even incarceration.

And from the Dark Side
•     Flightglobal News on UAVs
•     The Drone Industry's new website as of 2/13: Increasing Human Potential

_______________________________________________________________________________________________and please check out Pratap Chatterjee's recent article from Tom's Dispatch, reprinted in AlterNet:

The Capricious Way America Conducts Drone Strikes

The perpetrators become the victims of drone warfare.

By Pratap Chatterjee / TomDispatch

July 12, 2015

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Print

5 COMMENTS

The myth of the lone drone warrior is now well established and threatens to become as enduring as that of the lone lawman with a white horse and a silver bullet who rode out into the Wild West to find the bad guys. In a similar fashion, the unsung hero of Washington’s modern War on Terror in the wild backlands of the planet is sometimes portrayed as a mysterious Central Intelligence Agency officer.  Via modern technology, he prowls Central Asian or Middle Eastern skies with his unmanned Predator drone, dispatching carefully placed Hellfire missiles to kill top al-Qaeda terrorists in their remote hideouts......

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WORLD

A New Kind of Mental Disturbance? Drone Pilots Are Quitting in Droves

The people on the ground are not the only ones being traumatized.

By Pratap Chatterjee / TomDispatch

March 5, 2015

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Print

13 COMMENTS

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

The U.S. drone war across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa is in crisis and not because civilians are dying or the target list for that war or the right to wage it just about anywhere on the planet are in question in Washington. Something far more basic is at stake: drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.

We hate to brag but - we told ya so...

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Reprinted from AlterNet December 30, 2013:   News & Politics  Please check out the full article-
We’re going to need more SOUL REPAIR CENTERS.

The Guardian / By Heather Linebaugh

I Worked on the U.S. Drone Program—Here’s What Really Happens

“But here’s the thing: I may not have been on the ground in Afghanistan, but I watched parts of the conflict in great detail on a screen for days on end. I know the feeling you experience when you see someone die. Horrifying barely covers it. And when you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience. UAV troops are victim to not only the haunting memories of this work that they carry with them, but also the guilt of always being a little unsure of how accurate their confirmations of weapons or identification of hostile individuals were.

Of course, we are trained to not experience these feelings, and we fight it, and become bitter. Some troops seek help in mental health clinics provided by the military, but we are limited on who we can talk to and where, because of the secrecy of our missions. I find it interesting that the suicide statistics in this career field aren’t reported, nor are the data on how many troops working in UAV positions are heavily medicated for depression, sleep disorders and anxiety..”

11 MONTHS LATER:

U.S. Drone Strike Kills at Least 7 in Pakistan as New Prime Minister Announces Cabinet

By SALMAN MASOOD

Published: June 7, 2013

• ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — At least seven people were killed late Friday when an American drone fired three missiles at a house in northwestern Pakistan, according to an intelligence official, hours after the country’s new prime minister announced his cabinet.

During his campaign, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif often criticized the United States for using drone aircraft to kill militants.

The drones that struck Friday targeted a house in Mangroti village in the Shawal area of North Waziristan, the tribal region straddling the border with Afghanistan. The identities of the victims were not immediately known, but an intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described them as militants.

Shawal links North Waziristan with the South Waziristan tribal region and is a stronghold of militants of all stripes.

TEN MONTHS LATER:

U.S. Drone Pilot Explains What It’s Like When You Realize You Just Killed A Kid

NPR recently aired an amazing interview by Kelly McEvers with a former U.S. drone pilot named Brandon Bryant.

Bryant flew military drones for the U.S. from 2006 to 2010.
Bryant worked in a trailer in Nevada. And he blasted targets in the Middle East, half a world away.
This is Bryant’s description of his first “shot”:
MCEVERS: In 2006, Bryant found himself wearing a flight suit and sitting in a kind of trailer in Las Vegas, Nevada, surrounded by monitors and the low hum of computers and servers. On his very first sortie as a pilot, Brandon watched from the drone’s camera as American soldiers got blown up in Afghanistan. There was nothing he could do. That was before he’d ever taken his first so-called shot. I asked him about that.
What was one of the more – if it’s OK to talk about this – one of the more memorable moments when that – when you had to do that?
BRYANT: I’ll talk about my first shot because I still think about that.
MCEVERS: This time, it was insurgents Brandon saw on the screen – one group who had been firing at U.S. troops and another group who was standing away from them. Brandon was ordered to fire a missile at the second group.
BRYANT: We fired the missile, and 1.2 seconds after the missile fires, it sonic booms. And so the sonic boom gets there before the missile does. And the guy in the rear hears this, and he runs forward to the two guys in front and then the missile hits. And after the smoke clears, there’s a crater there. You can see body parts of the people. But the guy that was running from the rear to the front, his left leg had been taken off above the knee, and I watched him bleed out.
The blood rapidly cooled to become the same color as the ground, because we’re watching this in infrared. And I eventually watched the guy become the same color as the ground that he died on.
MCEVERS: Wow. So these guys had weapons strapped on their backs, but you did not see them using them, threatening to use them in any way.
BRYANT: Correct. These guys had no hostile intent. And in my own mind, I thought of, you know – in Montana, here, we have – everyone has a gun. Like, these guys could’ve been local people that had to protect themselves or something similar to that. And I think we jumped the gun, you know?
MCEVERS: Do you provide that information in any kind of follow-up reporting? You know, is there any exit interview where you report that information to your superiors?
BRYANT: There’s an after-action report, but the pilots are the ones that put it together. And the only thing that was in there was enemy combatants, confirmed weapons, all three taken out by one – by AGM-114 hellfire strike. So it doesn’t really go into very much detail other than to tell what happened and what was the result.

Brandon Bryant (Der Spiegel)
Brandon Bryant.

That was Bryant’s first shot. His second shot left an even more indelible impression:
MCEVERS: Did you ever have to take a shot that hit someone that was clearly a civilian?
BRYANT: There was one, as actually my second shot, which was about a month after my first shot. This one was routine. We’re watching this house. And end of my shift, it’s coming close to being dawn in Vegas, and so it’s nighttime over there. And there’s very little activity. Like, every once in a while, a guy leaves the back of the house. And this guy was some sort of lieutenant of the commander of the area or something. I don’t remember.
I think there was supposedly three people left in the building and all were military males. We just aim at the corner of the building, we’re going to fire, and we do. And there’s about six seconds left before the missile impacts and something runs around the corner of the building. And it looked like a small person. There’s no other way for me to describe. It was a small two-legged person.
And the missile hits. There’s no sign of this person. A large portion of the building’s collapsed. There’s no movement coming in and out of the building. So we lock our camera on there, and I ask the screener who disseminates the video feed, I asked: Can you review that? Like, what was that thing that ran on the screen? And he’s, like, “one second–reviewing” and comes back and says: Oh, that was a dog.
MCEVERS: When you reviewed that tape, what did you see?
BRYANT: It was a person. It was a small person. Like, there’s no doubt in my mind that that was not an adult.
MCEVERS: And that was the end of your shift, so you just, like, walked out into Nevada after that, right? What did it look like? You said the sun had just come up…
BRYANT: So I was getting out. The sun was coming over the mountains off in the background. And I remember just kind of – the light was too bright, and the dark places were too dark. I felt really numb. I didn’t feel distraught like I felt my first shot. I felt numb because this is – this was the reality of war. Like, three instances in three months showed me pretty much every aspect that there is: that good guys can die, bad guys can die, and innocents can die as well.
But Bryant didn’t quit. Until a few years later, when he realized how much he had changed.
MCEVERS: What made you finally quit? What was it?
BRYANT: One day, it was late 2010, we had a wall that had five pictures on it of top al-Qaida leaders. And I remember walking in one day, and I kind of stopped and looked at one of these guys. And I was like, man, which one of these mother (bleep) is going to die today? And I stopped myself, and I was like, that’s not me. Like, that’s just not who I am. I don’t think like that. I was taught to respect life, even if in the realities of war that we have to take it, it should be done with respect. And I wanted this guy to die.
So I tried to talk to a couple of people about it. And one of the weird things about the whole drone community is that you don’t talk about anything that you’ve done. You just don’t. So I just shut up and didn’t talk to anyone about how I was feeling or how I was doing.
MCEVERS: So you quit.
BRYANT: Yeah. I just – I couldn’t do it anymore.
Bryant lives in Montana now. He’s going to college on the G.I. bill. Otherwise, things aren’t going that well for him. He has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He doesn’t have a place to live. He just stays with friends.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/us-drone-pilot-interview-2013-5#ixzz2TCzk4Jnx
NINE MONTHS LATER:

David Wood

Senior Military Correspondent, The Huffington Post

Obama Drone War ‘Kill Chain’ Imposes Heavy Burden At Home

Posted: 05/05/2013 9:16 am

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1. Additional references:  Drone Warfare by Medea Benjamins
tikkun.org/nextgen/drone-warfare;Striking Back At the Drones
inthesetimes.com/article/13363/s…(be sure to read the comment by “Fred)

2. (Senator Patty Murray of Washington, again)
NATIONAL PTSD AWARENESS DAY — (Senate – June 28, 2012)

Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I am honored to join my colleagues today in recognizing the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, as their month-long PTSD awareness campaign comes to a close and in reflecting on our participation in the third annual National PTSD Awareness Day. I thank Senator Conrad for introducing the resolution to honor Army National Guard SSG Joe Biel who suffered from PTSD and tragically took his own life in April 2007 after returning from his second tour in Iraq.
   All this month, we draw attention to PTSD which affects millions of Americans at some point in their lives. As chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, I am especially concerned with the impact that PTSD has had on our Nation’s serv ice mem bers and veterans. The number of veterans treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, VA, for PTSD or related symptoms has reached 475,000 and there are likely more cases that go unreported, undiagnosed, or untreated each year. In fact, as the drawdown of Afghanistan troops continues, we can only expect those numbers to follow the steady rise previously reported. VA and the Department of Defense, DoD, need to be ready now.
   This unpreparedness is a tragedy. Whether the wounds they return home with are visible or invisible, no veteran should be left to face their injuries alone, and I am committed to seeing that they never have to.
   Already, we have seen a change in how VA and the DoD treat PTSD. Earlier this year, we learned that hundreds of serv ice mem bers and veterans had their PTSD diagnoses reversed over the course of 5 years at Madigan Army Medical Center in my home State of Washington. In the wake of this shocking discovery, Secretary of the Army John McHugh ordered a comprehensive, Army-wide review of medical files from the past decade to uncover any other problems with misdiagnoses. Two weeks ago, Secretary Panetta announced that he would be ordering a similar review across all of the armed services. I applaud these actions taken by Secretary Panetta and Secretary McHugh, but we are a long way from winning the battle on mental and behavioral health conditions.
   That is why earlier this week I introduced the Mental Health ACCESS Act of 2012. This bill will require VA and DoD to offer a range of supplemental mental and behavioral health services to ensure that veterans, serv ice mem bers, and their families are receiving the care that they need and deserve. The Mental Health ACCESS Act of 2012 provides for comprehensive standardized suicide prevention programs, expanded eligibility to families for support services, improved training for healthcare providers, new peer-to-peer counseling opportunities, and reliable measures for mental health services.
   Finally, we must overcome the stigma that surrounds PTSD. As VA’s National Center for PTSD has demonstrated, once diagnosed, PTSD and its symptoms can be treated and those who suffer from it can resume healthy and productive lives. Efforts like National PTSD Awareness Day and PTSD Awareness Month are critical to combating some of the most damaging misperceptions about PTSD.
   In closing, as we look back on our efforts to raise awareness of PTSD throughout the month, we must also reaffirm our commitment to those veterans, serv ice mem bers, and families affected by PTSD. Our veterans and serv ice mem bers have made tremendous sacrifices for us and our country and we owe them the support and care that they deserve. 
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Addendum #3 : In a NYTimes Op-Ed of Sunday, July 15, Scott Shane writes in “THE MORAL CASE FOR DRONES” (!) -parenthesis mine-
“…any analysis of actual results from the CIA’s strikes in Pakistan, which has become the world’s unwilling test ground for the new weapon, is hampered by secrecy and wildly varying casualty reports. But one rough comparison has found that even if the highest estimates of collateral deaths are accurate, the drones kill fewer civilians than other modes of warfare.”
The article has a few paragraphs of percentage citations worthy of a MacNamara or Bundy back in the day when such statistics counted for something (what?) and then there’s that last bit when a Henry A. Crumpton, identified as a former deputy chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center “who tells in his recent memoir (I always find it fascinating when all these spy types take it upon themselves to write their memoirs)-We never said Lets build a more humane weapon. Lets be as precise as possible, because thats our mission-to kill Bin Laden and the people around him” . “Look at the firebombing of Dresden, and compare what we’re doing today…”
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4. “Colonel Brenton acknowledges the peculiar new disconnect of fighting a telewar with a joystick and a throttle from his padded seat in American suburbia. ” -
from Elisabeth Bumiller’s NYTimes article July 30, 2012-see link below
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/drone-pilots-waiting-for-a-kill-shot-7000-miles-away.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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5. Ex-president Truman’s grandson visits Hiroshima | Alternet.
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6. 18 Vets Kill Themselves a Day: We Hail Them As Heroes Then Treat Them Like
Garbage | Alternet.
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7. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/world/asia/qaeda-operatives-killed-in-drone-strike-official-says.html?ref=todayspaper
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8. http://livingunderdrones.org/report/
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/a-potent-but-crash-prone-weapon-in-the-counterterrorism-war/2012/10/25/42905082-1d2c-11e2-ba31-3083ca97c314_gallery.html#photo=1
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11/8/12 -AND THIS FROM A RECENT POST AT ALTERNET BY AL MCCOY
http://www.alternet.org/world/new-weapons-systems-could-give-pentagon-unprecedented-power-over-planet-or-lead-future?page=0%2C5
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AlterNet / By Alex Kane

 1 COMMENT

“Did We Just Kill a Kid?”: Drone Operator Who Killed Afghan Child Can’t Sleep After Waging War Miles Away

The German publication Der Spiegel shines light on how drones are having an effect on the soldiers back home controlling them.

December 17, 2012  |

Photo Credit: Gwoeii/ Shutterstock.com

The human costs of the drone war the Obama administration has escalated are rarely talked about. Hundreds of civilians have been killed in Pakistan and Yemen by U.S. drone strikes. Now, a report in a German publication is shining a light on how drones are having an effect on the humans back home controlling the unmanned aerial vehicles–though the suffering of soldiers in comfortable locales pales in comparison to the suffering inflicted on civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan.
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S. drone strikes in Pakistan on rise for 2013

Getty - People hold a banner as they shout slogans during a protest against a U.S. drone attack in North-Waziristran, in Multan, Pakistan, on Jan. 8.

• By Greg Miller, Published: January 10

The CIA has opened the year with a flurry of drone strikes in Pakistan, pounding Taliban targets along the country’s tribal belt at a time when the Obama administration is preparing to disclose its plans for pulling most U.S. forces out of neighboring Afghanistan.A strike Thursday in North Waziristan was the seventh in 10 days, marking a major escalation in the pace of attacks. Drone attacks had slipped in frequency to fewer than one per week last year.

• Current and former U.S. intelligence officials attributed the increased tempo to a sense of urgency surrounding expectations that President Obama will soon order a drawdown that could leave Afghanistan with fewer than 6,000 U.S. troops after 2014. The strikes are seen as a way to weaken adversaries of the Afghan government before the withdrawal and serve notice that the United States will still be able to launch attacks.

The rapid series of CIA strikes “may be a signal to groups that include not just al-Qaeda that the U.S. will still present a threat” after most American forces have gone, said Seth Jones, a counterterrorism expert at the Rand Corp. “With the drawdown in U.S. forces, the drone may be, over time, the most important weapon against militant groups.”U.S. officials also tied the increase to recent intelligence gains on groups blamed for lethal attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Among those killed in the drone strikes, according to U.S. officials, was Maulvi Nazir, a Taliban commander accused of planning cross-border raids and providing protection for al-Qaeda fighters.The CIA may see a diminishing window for using drones with such devastating effectiveness as the military begins sharp reductions in the 66,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, current and former officials said.A former U.S. intelligence official with extensive experience in Afghanistan said the CIA has begun discussing plans to pare back its network of bases across the country to five from 15 or more because of the difficulty of providing security for its outposts after most U.S. forces have left.The CIA declined to comment.“As the military pulls back, the agency has to pull back,” the former U.S. intelligence official said on the condition of anonymity, particularly from high-risk outposts along the country’s eastern border that have served as bases for running informant networks and gathering intelligence on al-Qaeda and Taliban strongholds in Pakistan.Such a retrenchment could slow the process of identifying fresh targets for drone strikes, although the agency is expected to continue operating the remotely piloted planes from fortified bases, such as a landing strip in Jalalabad.“Essentially we will become Fort Apache in Kabul and the major cities,” the former U.S. intelligence official said, describing a pared back CIA presence. Even if the drones continue to take off and land, the diminished presence in Khost and other locations could hamper “our ability to gather intelligence on where Zawahiri is and what al-Qaeda is doing in the North-West Frontier Province” of Pakistan, he said, referring to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and the region now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
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Tending to Veterans’ Afflictions of the Soul

Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

The Rev. Rita Nakashima Brock focuses on helping people whose actions in war have shaken their deeply held moral beliefs.

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Published: January 11, 2013

• FORT WORTH — On a drizzly Saturday afternoon in September 2005, the Rev. Rita Nakashima Brock awaited her instructions at a vast Washington rally against the Iraq war. The protest march, numbering more than 100,000, was the latest and among the largest events in her nearly 40 years of pacifist activism.

Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Photos of Ms. Brock’s parents, who helped inform her work, in her office at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth.

When an organizer placed Ms. Brock near the end of the procession, though, something instantly felt wrong. Around her she noticed many other clergy members, as well as war veterans and Gold Star Mothers. She could not rid herself of the sensation that people like her were outsiders even to the movement they supported.

“When you said you were a Christian, they thought you were a Jerry Falwell person,” Ms. Brock, 62, recalled. “I don’t think I ever said I was the daughter of a veteran. It was something I tried to forget from my life. It didn’t fit anywhere.”

That moment of painful clarity redirected Ms. Brock’s life and ministry. She has devoted the years since then to tending the spiritual wounds of warriors, seeking theological answers to the condition among veterans called “moral injury.” In her current position at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, she has begun the first program in the nation to develop a treatment that she terms “soul repair.”

Moral injury might best be defined as an affliction of the soul, as distinct from a specific mental health condition like post-traumatic stress disorder. It arises, to speak in a very broad way, from the way a combatant’s actions in war seem to violate and thus undermine the most deeply held moral beliefs.

Ms. Brock did not formulate the concept of moral injury, which is attributed to the clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay. In books like “Achilles in Vietnam,” Dr. Shay has traced moral injury back as far as the Trojan War. But for Ms. Brock and her colleagues, the kind of counterinsurgency wars America has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan has left soldiers uniquely vulnerable to moral injury.

“There’s no good choice,” she said. “If you’re looking at a kid on the side of the road with something in his hand, if it’s a grenade and he throws it and kills someone in your unit, you’ve failed your comrade. But if it’s a rock, you’ve just shot a kid with a rock.

“If you’re praying that your company gets out or that your best friend isn’t shot, and it doesn’t turn out that way, it can collapse your whole moral system. It feels like God abandoned you.”

Her description closely matched that of Michael Yandell, 28, a student at the Brite seminary who worked on a bomb disposal team during the Iraq war. “Most deeply, it’s a loss of confidence in one’s own ability to make a moral judgment with any certainty,” he said. “It’s not that you lose your ability to tell right from wrong, but things don’t seem so clear any more. For me, it’s whether or not what I did, did any good.”

Ms. Brock’s affinity for veterans, and her knowledge of their suffering, has long, deep roots. Her father, Roy Brock, was taken prisoner during World War II and underwent electroshock treatments after liberation for his psychological distress. He later served two tours in Vietnam as a medic, enduring the deaths not only of countless soldiers but the local translator he had befriended.

Still, the military father and his hippie daughter argued bitterly after his return home in 1969, and Mr. Brock died seven years later with the two of them still unreconciled. Only afterward did Ms. Brock learn about the death of the translator, which helped explain her father’s palpable torment.

The personal and the pastoral, then, both inform Ms. Brock’s work. She writes about her father in her recent book “Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War.” Her co-author, Gabriella Lettini, is a theologian whose extended family includes veterans emotionally damaged by wartime experience. In the Soul Repair Center, Ms. Brock collaborates with the Rev. Herman Keizer Jr., who was an Army chaplain for 40 years.

Over the past three years, Ms. Brock and Ms. Lettini have spoken about moral injury and soul repair at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting and at denominational gatherings of Presbyterians and Unitarian Universalists.

Now, with a $650,000 two-year grant from the Lilly Endowment and the formal support of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Soul Repair Center is beginning to teach congregational leaders how to address moral injury in veterans. The first such training session will take place in early February.

Ms. Brock’s vision of spiritual therapy takes its inspiration from models as varied as early Christian rites of communal penitence after wartime and the Navajo ritual of purification in a sweat lodge. Her goal is to resist both finger-pointing at veterans and “premature forgiveness” for the blood they have shed.

What is essential, she said, is that a community participates with the veterans, reducing the shame and isolation associated with moral injury. “The attempt to regain entry requires accepting responsibility for what we have done,” she and Ms. Lettini write in “Soul Repair,” “but doing so may cost people their lives if they have to go back alone.”

Having found her mission among warriors, Ms. Brock has moved away from the pacifism that once defined her belief system — not because she yearns any less for the dream but because the dream leaves people like her father stranded and cast out.

“I don’t envision a world where a standing army isn’t necessary,” she said. “If that is the case, then whether or not I agree with an administration and the wars it chooses to fight, I feel that as a citizen, I have a responsibility to restore the people who’ve fought, to return them to our communities. It’s nothing wrong with them individually. It’s what we owe them as a society.”
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Drone Strikes’ Dangers to Get Rare Moment in Public Eye

Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

Tribesmen on the rubble of a building destroyed on Sunday in an American drone strike against suspected militants in Shabwa Province in southeastern Yemen.

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By ROBERT F. WORTH, MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

Published: February 5, 2013 109 Comments

SANA, Yemen — Late last August, a 40-year-old cleric named Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber stood up to deliver a speech denouncing Al Qaeda in a village mosque in far eastern Yemen.

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Members of the Kaual tribe in the capital, Sana, on Tuesday.  Two of their relatives died in a drone strike last month, they said.

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“He’s probably had more power and influence than anyone in a comparable position on the last 20 years.” Daniel Benjamin, a former top counterterrorism official at the State Department, speaking about John O. Brennan, President Obama’s choice to lead the C.I.A.

It was a brave gesture by a father of seven who commanded great respect in the community, and it did not go unnoticed. Two days later, three members of Al Qaeda came to the mosque in the tiny village of Khashamir after 9 p.m., saying they merely wanted to talk. Mr. Jaber agreed to meet them, bringing his cousin Waleed Abdullah, a police officer, for protection.

As the five men stood arguing by a cluster of palm trees, a volley of remotely operated American missiles shot down from the night sky and incinerated them all, along with a camel that was tied up nearby.

The killing of Mr. Jaber, just the kind of leader most crucial to American efforts to eradicate Al Qaeda, was a reminder of the inherent hazards of the quasi-secret campaign of targeted killings that the United States is waging against suspected militants not just in Yemen but also in Pakistanand Somalia. Individual strikes by the Predator and Reaper drones are almost never discussed publicly by Obama administration officials. But the clandestine war will receive a rare moment of public scrutiny on Thursday, when its chief architect, John O. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser, faces a Senate confirmation hearing as President Obama’s nominee for C.I.A. director.

From his basement office in the White House, Mr. Brennan has served as the principal coordinator of a “kill list” of Qaeda operatives marked for death, overseeing drone strikes by the military and the C.I.A., and advising Mr. Obama on which strikes he should approve.

“He’s probably had more power and influence than anyone in a comparable position in the last 20 years,” said Daniel Benjamin, who recently stepped down as the State Department’s top counterterrorism official and now teaches at Dartmouth. “He’s had enormous sway over the intelligence community. He’s had a profound impact on how the military does counterterrorism.”

Mr. Brennan, a former C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has taken a particular interest in Yemen, sounding early alarms within the administration about the threat developing there, working closely with neighboring Saudi Arabia to gain approval for a secret C.I.A. drone base there that is used for American strikes, and making the impoverished desert nation a test case for American counterterrorism strategy.

In recent years, both C.I.A. and Pentagon counterterrorism officials have pressed for greater freedom to attack suspected militants, and colleagues say Mr. Brennan has often been a restraining voice. The strikes have killed a number of operatives of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network’s affiliate in Yemen, including Said Ali al-Shihri, a deputy leader of the group, and the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

But they have also claimed civilians like Mr. Jaber and have raised troubling questions that apply to Pakistan and Somalia as well: Could the targeted killing campaign be creating more militants in Yemen than it is killing? And is it in America’s long-term interest to be waging war against a self-renewing insurgency inside a country about which Washington has at best a hazy understanding?

Several former top military and intelligence officials — including Stanley A. McChrystal, the retired general who led the Joint Special Operations Command, which has responsibility for the military’s drone strikes, and Michael V. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director — have raised concerns that the drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen are increasingly targeting low-level militants who do not pose a direct threat to the United States.

In an interview with Reuters, General McChrystal said that drones could be a useful tool but were “hated on a visceral level” in some of the places where they were used and contributed to a “perception of American arrogance.”

Mr. Brennan has aggressively defended the accuracy of the drone strikes, and the rate of civilian casualties has gone down considerably since the attacks began in Yemen in 2009. He has also largely dismissed criticism that the drone campaign has tarnished America’s image in Yemen and has been an effective recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.

“In fact, we see the opposite,” Mr. Brennan said during a speech last year. “Our Yemeni partners are more eager to work with us. Yemeni citizens who have been freed from the hellish grip of A.Q.A.P. are more eager, not less, to work with the Yemeni government.”

Christopher Swift, a researcher at Georgetown University who spent last summer in Yemen studying the reaction to the strikes, said he thought Mr. Brennan’s comments missed the broader impact.

“What Brennan said accurately reflected people in the security apparatus who he speaks to when he goes to Yemen,” Mr. Swift said. “It doesn’t reflect the views of the man in the street, of young human rights activists, of the political opposition.”

Though Mr. Swift said he thought that critics had exaggerated the role of the strikes in generating recruits for Al Qaeda, “in the political sphere, the perception is that the U.S. is colluding with the Yemeni government in a covert war against the Yemeni people.”

“Even if we’re winning in the military domain,” Mr. Swift said, “drones may be undermining our long-term interest in the goal of a stable Yemen with a functional political system and economy.”

A Parallel Campaign

American officials have never explained in public why the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command are carrying out parallel drone campaigns in Yemen. Privately, however, they describe an arrangement that has evolved since the frantic, ad hoc early days of America’s war there.

The first strike in Yemen ordered by the Obama administration, in December 2009, was by all accounts a disaster. American cruise missiles carrying cluster munitions killed dozens of civilians, including many women and children. Another strike, six months later, killed a popular deputy governor, inciting angry demonstrations and an attack that shut down a critical oil pipeline.

Not long afterward, the C.I.A. began quietly building a drone base in Saudi Arabia to carry out strikes in Yemen. American officials said that the first time the C.I.A. used the Saudi base was to kill Mr. Awlaki in September 2011.

Since then, officials said, the C.I.A. has been given the mission of hunting and killing “high-value targets” in Yemen — the leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who Obama administration lawyers have determined pose a direct threat to the United States. When the C.I.A. obtains specific intelligence on the whereabouts of someone on its kill list, an American drone can carry out a strike without the permission of Yemen’s government.

There is, however, a tighter leash on the Pentagon’s drones. According to American officials, the Joint Special Operations Command must get the Yemeni government’s approval before launching a drone strike. This restriction is in place, officials said, because the military’s drone campaign is closely tied to counterterrorism operations conducted by Yemeni special operations troops.

Yemen’s military is fighting its own counterinsurgency battle against Islamic militants, who gained and then lost control over large swaths of the country last year. Often, American military strikes in Yemen are masked as Yemeni government operations.

Moreover, Mr. Obama demanded early on that each American military strike in Yemen be approved by a committee in Washington representing the national security agencies. The C.I.A. strikes, by contrast, resulted from a far more closed process inside the agency. Mr. Brennan plays a role in overseeing all the strikes.

There have been at least five drone strikes in Yemen since the start of the year, killing at least 24 people. That continues a remarkable acceleration over the past two years in a program that has carried out at least 63 airstrikes since 2009, according to The Long War Journal, a Web site that collects public data on the strikes, with an estimated death toll in the hundreds. Many of the militants reported killed recently were very young and do not appear to have had any important role with Al Qaeda.

“Even with Al Qaeda, there are degrees — some of these young guys getting killed have just been recruited and barely known what terrorism means,” said Naji al Zaydi, a former governor of Marib Province, who has been a vocal opponent of Al Qaeda and a supporter of Yemen’s president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Mr. Zaydi, a prominent tribal figure from an area that has long been associated with members of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, pointed out that the identity and background of these men were no mystery in Yemen’s interlinked tribal culture.

A Deadly Ride

In one recent case, on Jan. 23, a drone strike in a village east of Sana killed a 21-year-old university student named Saleem Hussein Jamal and his cousin, a 33-year-old teacher named Ali Ali Nasser Jamal, who happened to have been traveling with him. According to relatives and neighbors of the two men, they were driving home from a nearby town called Jahana when five strangers offered to pay them for a ride. The drone-fired missile hit the vehicle, a twin-cab Toyota Hilux, just outside the village of Masnaa at about 9 p.m. The strangers were later identified in Yemeni news reports as members of Al Qaeda, though apparently not high-ranking ones.

After the strike, villagers were left to identify their two dead relatives from identity cards, scraps of clothing and the license plate of Mr. Jamal’s Toyota; the seven bodies were shredded beyond recognition, as cellphone photos taken at the scene attest. “We found eyes, but there were no faces left,” said Abdullah Faqih, a student who knew both of the dead cousins.

Although most Yemenis are reluctant to admit it publicly, there does appear to be widespread support for the American drone strikes that hit substantial Qaeda figures like Mr. Shihri, a Saudi and the affiliate’s deputy leader, who died in January of wounds received in a drone strike late last year.

Al Qaeda has done far more damage in Yemen than it has in the United States, and one episode reinforced public disgust last May, when a suicide bomber struck a military parade rehearsal in the Yemeni capital, killing more than 100 people.

Moreover, many Yemenis reluctantly admit that there is a need for foreign help: Yemen’s own efforts to strike at the terrorist group have often been compromised by weak, divided military forces; widespread corruption; and even support for Al Qaeda within pockets of the intelligence and security agencies.

Yet even as both Mr. Brennan and Mr. Hadi, the Yemeni president, praise the drone technology for its accuracy, other Yemenis often point out that it can be very difficult to isolate members of Al Qaeda, thanks to the group’s complex ties and long history in Yemen.

This may account for a pattern in many of the drone strikes: a drone hovers over an area for weeks on end before a strike takes place, presumably waiting until identities are confirmed and the targets can be struck without anyone else present.

In the strike that killed Mr. Jaber, the cleric, that was not enough. At least one drone had been overhead every day for about a month, provoking high anxiety among local people, said Aref bin Ali Jaber, a tradesman who is related to the cleric. “After the drone hit, everyone was so frightened it would come back,” Mr. Jaber said. “Children especially were affected; my 15-year-old daughter refuses to be alone and has had to sleep with me and my wife after that.”

Anger at America

In the days afterward, the people of the village vented their fury at the Americans with protests and briefly blocked a road. It is difficult to know what the long-term effects of the deaths will be, though some in the town — as in other areas where drones have killed civilians — say there was an upwelling of support for Al Qaeda, because such a move is seen as the only way to retaliate against the United States.

Innocents aside, even members of Al Qaeda invariably belong to a tribe, and when they are killed in drone strikes, their relatives — whatever their feelings about Al Qaeda — often swear to exact revenge on America.

“Al Qaeda always gives money to the family,” said Hussein Ahmed Othman al Arwali, a tribal sheik from an area south of the capital called Mudhia, where Qaeda militants fought pitched battles with Yemeni soldiers last year. “Al Qaeda’s leaders may be killed by drones, but the group still has its money, and people are still joining. For young men who are poor, the incentives are very strong: they offer you marriage, or money, and the ideological part works for some people.”

In some cases, drones have killed members of Al Qaeda when it seemed that they might easily have been arrested or captured, according to a number of Yemeni officials and tribal figures. One figure in particular has stood out: Adnan al Qadhi, who was killed, apparently in a drone strike, in early November in a town near the capital.

Mr. Qadhi was an avowed supporter of Al Qaeda, but he also had recently served as a mediator for the Yemeni government with other jihadists, and was drawing a government salary at the time of his death. He was not in hiding, and his house is within sight of large houses owned by a former president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and other leading figures.

Whatever the success of the drone strikes, some Yemenis wonder why there is not more reliance on their country’s elite counterterrorism unit, which was trained in the United States as part of the close cooperation between the two countries that Mr. Brennan has engineered. One member of the unit, speaking on the condition of anonymity, expressed great frustration that his unit had not been deployed on such missions, and had in fact been posted to traffic duty in the capital in recent weeks, even as the drone strikes intensified.

“For sure, we could be going after some of these guys,” the officer said. “That’s what we’re trained to do, and the Americans trained us. It doesn’t make sense.”

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Robert F. Worth reported from Sana, and Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane from Washington.

<nyt_correction_bottom>

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 5, 2013

An earlier version of a photo caption with this article misstated the given name of a former official at the State Department who said John O. Brennan wielded great influence in the counterterrorism field. He is Daniel Benjamin, not David.

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Drone Pilots Are Suffering From Low Morale: GAO Report

by Amanda Terkel

Posted: 04/18/2014 2:21 pm EDT Updated: 04/19/2014 11:59 am EDT

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WASHINGTON -- The negative attention on drone strikes appears to be taking a toll on the people who control these unmanned aircraft, with a new government report finding that Air Force drone pilots are suffering from low morale.

The Government Accountability Office report, released this week, looked at 10 focus groups of active-duty Air Force drone pilots, known as remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) operators. Investigators found that these individuals feel stressed and overworked as they face uncertainty in their careers, long hours, negative public perception and a prohibition on talking about what they do, which is often classified.

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FROM THE NYTIMES: Almost 3 years later:

As Stress Drives Off Drone Operators, Air Force Must Cut Flights

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and DAVE PHILIPPS

JUNE 16, 2015

Photo

A Predator drone on a training flight from Creech Air Force Base, Nev., in 2009. Credit Ethan etty

CREECH AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. — After a decade of waging long-distance war through their video screens, America’s drone operators are burning out, and the Air Force is being forced to cut back on the flights even as military and intelligence officials are demanding more of them over intensifying combat zones in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

The Air Force plans to trim the flights by the armed surveillance drones to 60 a day by October from a recent peak of 65 as it deals with the first serious exodus of the crew members who helped usher in the era of war by remote control.

Air Force officials said that this year they would lose more drone pilots, who are worn down by the unique stresses of their work, than they can train.

“We’re at an inflection point right now,” said Col. James Cluff, the commander of the Air Force’s 432nd Wing, which runs the drone operations from this desert outpost about 45 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

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The cut in flights is an abrupt shift for the Air Force. Drone missions increased tenfold in the past decade, relentlessly pushing the operators in an effort to meet the insatiable demand for streaming video of insurgent activities in Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones, including Somalia, Libya and now Syria.

Photo

Trevor Tasin with three of his sons: John, 11; Ben, 13; and Dominic, 2. Mr. Tasin, a pilot who retired as a major in 2014 after flying Predator drones and training new pilots. Credit Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

The reduction could also create problems for the C.I.A., which has used Air Force pilots to conduct drone missile attacks on terrorism suspects in Pakistan and Yemen, government officials said. And the slowdown comes just as military advances by the Islamic State have placed a new premium on aerial surveillance and counterattacks.

Some top Pentagon officials had hoped to continue increasing the number of daily drone flights to more than 70. But Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter recently signed off on the cuts after it became apparent that the system was at the breaking point, Air Force officials said.

The biggest problem is that a significant number of the 1,200 pilots are completing their obligation to the Air Force and are opting to leave. In a recent interview, Colonel Cluff said that many feel “undermanned and overworked,” sapped by alternating day and night shifts with little chance for academic breaks or promotion.

At the same time, a training program is producing only about half of the new pilots that the service needs because the Air Force had to reassign instructors to the flight line to expand the number of flights over the past few years.

Colonel Cluff said top Pentagon officials thought last year that the Air Force could safely reduce the number of daily flights as military operations in Afghanistan wound down. But, he said, “the world situation changed,” with the rapid emergence of the Islamic State, and the demand for the drones shot up again.

Officials say that since August, Predator and Reaper drones have conducted 3,300 sorties and 875 missile and bomb strikes in Iraq against the Islamic State.

What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed.

“Having our folks make that mental shift every day, driving into the gate and thinking, ‘All right, I’ve got my war face on, and I’m going to the fight,’ and then driving out of the gate and stopping at Walmart to pick up a carton of milk or going to the soccer game on the way home — and the fact that you can’t talk about most of what you do at home — all those stressors together are what is putting pressure on the family, putting pressure on the airman,” Colonel Cluff said.

While most of the pilots and camera operators feel comfortable killing insurgents who are threatening American troops, interviews with about 100 pilots and sensor operators for an internal study that has not yet been released, he added, found that the fear of occasionally causing civilian casualties was another major cause of stress, even more than seeing the gory aftermath of the missile strikes in general.

A Defense Department study in 2013, the first of its kind, found that drone pilots had experienced mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Trevor Tasin, a pilot who retired as a major in 2014 after flying Predator drones and training new pilots, called the work “brutal, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

• The exodus from the drone program might be caused in part by the lure of the private sector, Mr. Tasin said, noting that military drone operators can earn four times their salary working for private defense contractors. In January, in an attempt to retain drone operators, the Air Force doubled incentive pay to $18,000 per year.

Another former pilot, Bruce Black, was part of a team that watched Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, for 600 hours before he was killed by a bomb from a manned aircraft.

“After something like that, you come home and have to make all the little choices about the kids’ clothes or if I parked in the right place,” said Mr. Black, who retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2013. “And after making life and death decisions all day, it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to care.”

Colonel Cluff said the idea behind the reduction in flights was “to come back a little bit off of 65 to allow some breathing room” to replenish the pool of instructors and recruits.

The Air Force also has tried to ease the stress by creating a human performance team, led by a psychologist and including doctors and chaplains who have been granted top-secret clearances so they can meet with pilots and camera operators anywhere in the facility if they are troubled.

Colonel Cluff invited a number of reporters to the Creech base on Tuesday to discuss some of these issues. It was the first time in several years that the Air Force had allowed reporters onto the base, which has been considered the heart of the drone operations since 2005.

The colonel said the stress on the operators belied a complaint by some critics that flying drones was like playing a video game or that pressing the missile fire button 7,000 miles from the battlefield made it psychologically easier for them to kill. He also said that the retention difficulties underscore that while the planes themselves are unmanned, they need hundreds of pilots, sensor operators, intelligence analysts and launch and recovery specialists in foreign countries to operate.

Some of the crews still fly their missions in air-conditioned trailers here, while other cockpit setups have been created in new mission center buildings. Anti-drone protesters are periodically arrested as they try to block pilots from entering the base, where signs using the drone wing’s nickname say, “Home of the Hunters.”

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Drone Strike Statistics Answer Few Questions, and Raise Many

By SCOTT SHANE

JULY 3, 2016

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Monitoring Air Force drone footage from Afghanistan in 2010. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The promise of the armed drone has always been precision: The United States could kill just the small number of dangerous terrorists it wanted to kill, leaving nearby civilians unharmed.

But the Obama administration’s unprecedented release last week of statistics on counterterrorism strikes underscored how much more complicated the results of the drone program have been.

It showed that even inside the government, there is no certainty about whom it has killed. And it highlighted the skepticism with which official American claims on targeted killing are viewed by human rights groups and independent experts, including those who believe the strikes have eliminated some very dangerous people.

“It’s an important step — it’s an acknowledgment that transparency is needed,” said Rachel Stohl, an author of two studies of the drone program and a senior associate at the Stimson Center, a research group in Washington. “But I don’t feel like we have enough information to analyze whether this tactic is working and helping us achieve larger strategic aims.”

More broadly, President Obama’s move to open a window on the secret counterterrorism program takes place against a background of escalating jihadist violence that can be called up by a list of cities that includes Paris; San Bernardino, Calif.; Brussels; Orlando, Fla.; Kabul, Afghanistan; Istanbul; Baghdad; and now Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Apart from the dispute over the number of civilian deaths, the notion that targeted drone strikes are an adequate answer to the terrorist threat appears increasingly threadbare.

“There’s a massive failure of strategy,” said Akbar S. Ahmed, a former Pakistani diplomat and the chairman of Islamic studies at American University in Washington. Drones have simply become one more element of the violence in countries like Pakistan and Yemen, not a way to reduce violence, he said.

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Among young people attracted to jihadist ideology, “the line to blow yourself up remains horrifyingly long,” he said. “That line should be getting shorter.”

A senior Obama administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program, said the recent series of major terror attacks in urban areas had all been directed or inspired by the Islamic State.

The classified counterterrorism drone campaign, he said, has targeted other groups, notably Al Qaeda’s old core in Pakistan, its branch in Yemen and the Shabab in Somalia. No attack in the West in the past year has been traced to those groups, suggesting that the strikes have been effective, he said. The drone strikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan are, for the most part, carried out by the military in a separate program.

In Friday’s release, the White House made public an executive order laying out policies to minimize civilian casualties in counterterrorism strikes and a plan to start making public the basic statistics on strikes each year.

At the same time, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the first official estimates of those killed during Mr. Obama’s presidency in strikes outside the conventional wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Though the announcement did not say so, the classified strikes took place in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and the vast majority used missiles fired from unmanned drone aircraft, though a few used piloted jets or cruise missiles fired from the sea.

Photo

Military officers prepared an American drone for a mission at Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan in March. Credit Josh Smith/Reuters

Since 2009, the government said, 473 strikes had killed between 2,372 and 2,581 combatants. They are defined as members of groups, like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, that are considered to be at war with the United States, or others posing a “continuing and imminent threat” to Americans.

In the most sharply debated statistics, the statement estimated that between 64 and 116 noncombatants had been killed. Officials said those numbers included both clearly innocent civilians and others for whom there was insufficient evidence to be sure they were combatants.

The numbers were far lower than previous estimates from the three independent organizations that track strikes based on news reports and other sources. The Long War Journal, whose estimates are lowest, counted 207 civilian deaths in Pakistan and Yemen alone. The security policy group New America in Washington estimated a minimum of 216 in those two countries, and the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimated the civilian toll under Mr. Obama between 380 and 801.

With no breakdown by year or country, let alone a detailed strike-by-strike account, the Obama administration’s new data was difficult to assess. For example, according to multiple studies by Human Rights Watch, Yemen’s Parliament and others, an American cruise missile strike in Yemen on Dec. 17, 2009, killed 41 civilians, including 22 children and a dozen women. At least three more people were killed later after handling unexploded cluster munitions left from the strike.

If those 41 are included in the new official count, as appears likely, that would leave only 23 civilians killed in all other strikes since 2009 to reach the low-end American estimate of 64. By nearly all independent accounts, that number is implausibly low. Obama administration officials declined over the weekend to discuss any specific strikes or otherwise elaborate on the statistics.

Scott F. Murray, who retired from the Air Force as a colonel after 29 years, was a career intelligence officer involved in overseeing airstrikes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. He said that while he had not been involved directly in the counterterrorist strikes outside those war zones, the civilian death estimates were “lower than I would have expected.”

He said civilian deaths could result from multiple causes, including incomplete intelligence about the identities of people on the ground, equipment failure and human error.

Perhaps most often, Mr. Murray said, problems arise when civilians enter a target area before drone surveillance begins, or when a civilian suddenly enters the strike zone just before a strike.

“The night you choose to strike, it may be that the in-laws arrived earlier in the day or the children’s birthday party is ongoing and you weren’t watching when everyone arrived,” Mr. Murray said. “Those are the things in war that drive you to drink. You never ever have perfect information.”

Brandon Bryant, who worked on Air Force drone teams from 2006 to 2011 and has become an outspoken critic of the program, recalled one strike in 2007 targeting a local Taliban commander. As the Hellfire missile sped toward the small house, he said, a small child — possibly frightened by the missile’s sonic boom — ran into the house and was killed.

“Those things are burned into my brain — I can’t really forget them,” Mr. Bryant said. He added that he believed total civilian deaths were much higher than the administration’s estimate because of officials’ wishful thinking, rather than deliberate deception. “They’re just deluding themselves about the impact,” he said.

The senior administration official acknowledged the fear and frustration produced by the recent urban attacks and said Mr. Obama’s strategy went far beyond drone strikes, incorporating the military battle against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, counter-messaging against jihadist groups, and support for allies facing the same enemies as the United States.

American officials strongly defend the necessity of targeted killing, and the president’s executive order suggests that he believes the drone program will endure far beyond his presidency. But deaths from terrorism have risen sharply since 2011, according to the Global Terrorism Index, compiled annually by researchers, and there is worry inside and outside the government that the United States and its allies are winning battles but losing the ideological war.

Of particular concern is the possibility that the rash of attacks carried out in the name of the Islamic State is just the beginning — not because the group is getting stronger but because it is getting weaker. As the United States and its allies uproot the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, its supporters may turn to terrorism wherever they are, many terrorism experts believe. In most of those places, like the cities hit hardest in recent months, no drone strikes will be possible.