Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control by Chris Jones
01 August 2013
Medea Benjamin, a longstanding peace and human rights campaigner, takes a critical look at the expansion of the use of military drones by the US government since 2001. Although popular with the Bush administration, it is since Obama came to power in 2008 that their use has escalated dramatically: “In 2003 and 2004, the [US] Army flew UAVs about 1,500 hours a month...by mid-2006, that number had risen to about 9,000 hours a month...In Afghanistan, by 2010 the Air Force was flying at least twenty Predator drones over stretches of hostile Afghan territory each, providing a daily dose of some five hundred hours of video.” Drones, of course, do not just fly and spy: they can also kill. There were 74 US drone strikes in Afghanistan in 2007; by 2012 this had grown to 333. In May 2012 it was revealed that Obama “had weekly meetings with his advisors on ‘Terror Tuesdays’ to look at profiles of terror suspects much as one would flip through baseball cards, and ‘nominate’ people to be on a kill list.”
It is the consequences of this approach to war – “killing by remote control”, as the book’s title puts it – which Benjamin argues most forcefully against. The foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich notes that “in many ways, drones present the same moral issues as any other action-at-a-distance weapon,” but Benjamin makes it clear that drones cannot be considered solely as a logical development of the manned fighter jet or bomber plane. This is particularly so given the potential development of autonomy: Benjamin quotes one Colonel who thinks that future weapons “will be too fast, too small, too numerous and will create an environment too complex for humans to direct,” a potential development that the author notes will mean “dependency on machines that do not possess the troublesome emotions and consciences of its human pilots.”
Along with chapters on the industry behind the machines, legality and morality, and the military infrastructure behind drone warfare, Benjamin also highlights the experiences of those “living under drones,” in areas that are subjected to persistent surveillance and occasional, unpredictable missile strikes. Based on interviews with victims and victims’ families in areas of rural Pakistan affected by the US’ drone program, the effects on ordinary people are made clear: civilian deaths, disabilities, bereavement, stress, fear and reprisals by the Taliban against people accused of providing intelligence to the US.
The last two chapters of the book seek to highlight the efforts made by campaigners to challenge the growing use of drones by military forces around the world – predominantly in the US, where a formidable movement has sprung up over the last few years; in Pakistan and other countries affected by drone strikes such as Afghanistan and Yemen; and also in the UK and Europe, where the more belated and relatively less aggressive use of drones by national governments has only more recently begun to attract negative attention. It is the work of these activists that Benjamin sees as crucial in addressing the growing use of unmanned and potentially autonomous, global, robotic warfare: “The burden is now squarely on we the people to reassert our rights and push back against the normalisation of drones as a military and law enforcement tool.”