Drone Warfare

by Medea Benjamin

  Having just massacred a group of civilians, the crew tried to tell themselves that they did nothing wrong—that they were just doing their jobs.

  “No way to tell, man,” the safety observer said.

  “No way to tell from here,” said the cameraman.

  For all the military’s vaunted checks and balances, for all of its screeners and intelligence coordinators and safety observers, the Predator drone crew had just killed innocent men, women, and children. According to the US government, fifteen people were killed and twelve wounded, including three kids. According to Afghans, twenty-three people were killed, including two young children aged three and four.

  For many soldiers, the forty-minute commute home is not enough time to decompress and forget horrors like that—even when the ones they’ve killed are militants, not civilians. As Col. Chris Chambliss put it: “To go to work, and to do bad things to bad people, and then when I go home and go to church and try to be a productive member of society, those don’t necessarily mesh well.”

  When pilots go home, they don’t talk about the bad people—or innocent civilians—they’ve killed. Instead, they bottle it up inside. A pilot identified only as “Captain Dan” told producers for a documentary on drones that his family knows he flies UAVs, but “I don’t go home and tell them what mission I flew or something like that. That’s a challenge in the job that you have to do day in and day out.”177

  While they may quietly suffer from combat related stress, many soldiers relish the idea of engaging in combat missions while remaining at home, pointing to the burden and worry it takes off their families and the opportunity it provides them to spend more time with their kids.178 The family of a drone pilot doesn’t have to deal with the stress of wondering if their loved one will make it back alive.

  Drone pilots sit safely, thousands of miles away from the physical danger of the war they are fighting. The only danger they face is mental. But that is still a very real danger—one that, in extreme cases, can boil out into home life in the form of abuse and the breakup of families.

  For drone pilots and other drone crewmembers, viewing the real time video feed is often the biggest stressor related to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Soldiers on the ground engage in brutal and deadly combat—and drone operators watch. That exacts a toll.

  A December 2011 government-commissioned report of Air Force drone pilots found that nearly half reported “high operational stress,” in contrast to thirty-six percent of a control group of six hundred Air Force members in logistics or support jobs.179 Nearly a third of the US Air Force’s 1,100 drone operators suffered “burnout,” with seventeen percent thought to be “clinically distressed,” though much of that distress may have come as the result of earlier deployments.

  Pilots operating drones that are supporting US troops in war zones like Afghanistan have an easier time because they have a sense of accomplishment from protecting troops on the ground. Soldiers and Marines who get pinned down in insurgent fire in Afghanistan often call in the drones for help, and directly communicate with drone operators to get precise targets. “These guys are up above firing at the enemy,” said Colonel McDonald, coauthor of the study.180 “They love that, they feel like they’re protecting our people. They build this virtual relationship with the guys on the ground.”

  “Physically, we may be in Vegas,” Air Force Major Shannon Rogers told Time magazine in 2005, “but mentally, we are flying over Iraq. It feels real.”181

  “A lot of people downplay it, saying ‘You’re eight thousand miles away. What’s the big deal?’ But it’s not really eight thousand miles away, it’s eighteen inches away,” Col. Pete Gersten, commander of the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing at Creech, told Stars and Stripes in 2009.182 “We’re closer in a majority of ways than we’ve ever been as a service.”

  “I’ve seen troops die before,” sensor operator Jesse Grace told the military paper. In one incident, Grace watched as an IED killed five of his comrades. All he could do was watch. “I felt like I was helpless,” Grace said. “It was a traumatic experience. It shocked me. I had just turned nineteen. It happened on Memorial Day. I remember that.” Many drone pilots have witnessed similar events and are just as affected by “survivor’s guilt” as if they were like any other soldier who was party to a firefight.

  “If I screw up or miss something, if I screw up a shot, I wish it was me down there, not them. Sometimes I feel like I left them behind,” said US Major Bryan Callahan.183

  The Air Force study found that the biggest source of stress for drone operators was long hours and frequent shift changes because of staff shortages. Drone crews work ten to twelve hour shifts. Alternating between day, evening and overnight shifts every three weeks prevents them from fully integrating into civilian life.184

  As a result, drone crews are generally “tired, disgruntled and disillusioned,” said a former fighter pilot who teaches at the Air Force Academy. “It’s insane,” he said. “You can’t run an Air Force like this without burning your people out.”

  Drone pilot Matt Martin recalled how, after months and months of long days staring at monitors, he became bored, cynical and suspicious of everyone he was watching. And, as military are wont to do, he found himself hoping that the targets he was following would prove themselves to be insurgents so he could “get some action.”

  One day, he spotted a group of men at a park in Iraq’s Sadr City, and wondered if it was a terrorist cell meeting or just a bunch of men smoking and dancing. He watched them for hours.

  “One of the men eventually got up off the ground and walked over to a nearby shack. I thought I finally had them. He was going for weapons,” Martin wrote. Alas, the man returned with folding chairs. Martin was disappointed. “I kept hoping somebody would pull out a rocket launcher,” he admitted. “At least it would mean I was making good use of the Predator’s time and resources. Beside, blowing up things was much more interesting than watching men sit around in the dark smoking cigarettes, dancing and holding hands.”185

  Another major problem drone personnel deal with is information overload. Tasked with sifting through unprecedented amounts of raw data to help the military determine what targets to hit and what to avoid, drone-based sensors find themselves drowning in a sea of endless data. And they are not alone. “There is information overload at every level of the military—from the general to the soldier on the ground,” said neuroscientist Art Kramer, a researcher contracted by the military to help soldiers cope with digital overload that has led not only to stress, but to tragic mistakes.186

  The military seems to be aware of the insanity. “It’s clear that we’ve pushed our units not to the breaking point, but close,” said Col. Eric Mathewson, commander of the Air Force’s Unmanned Aerial Systems Task Force. But it doesn’t seem the military is doing much about it.

  An interview request issued to the Veterans Affairs National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (NCPTSD) for this book was denied, with a spokesperson declaring that NCPTSD “does not have a subject matter expert to deal with your request.” Even though there are numerous interviews and books written on the topic of drone pilots experiencing symptoms related to PTSD, there is no official governmental expert who can speak about it.

  It seems that the military has another solution in mind—replace the pilots with automated, autonomous killing machines.187

  Already, the human role in drone warfare is rapidly becoming that of “a supervisor who serves in a fail-safe capacity in the event of a system malfunction,” notes retired Army Colonel Thomas Adams.188 Even then, Adams thinks that the speed, confusion, and information overload of modern-day war will soon move the whole process outside “human space.” Future weapons “will be too fast, too small, too numerous, and will create an environment too complex for humans to direct,” he says, and new technologies “are rapidly taking us to a place where we may not want to go, but probably are unable to avoid.”

  The trend toward greater autonomy
will only increase as the military moves from one pilot remotely flying one drone to one pilot remotely managing several drones at once. “Lethal autonomy is inevitable,” said Ronald C. Arkin, who authored a study on the subject for the Army Research Office.189

  Arkin believes autonomous drones could be programmed to abide by international law. Others vehemently disagree and question the ethics of robots making life and death decisions.

  But one thing is certain: autonomous weapons won’t suffer from PTSD. And that’s why—ethical or not—the military will most likely be expanding its dependency on machines that do not possess the troublesome emotions and consciences of its human pilots.

  Remote-Controlled Victims

  “The Khan family never heard it. They had been sleeping for an hour when a Hellfire missile pierced their mud hut. Black smoke and dust choked the villagers as they dug through the rubble. Four-year-old Zeerak’s legs were severed. His sister Maria, three, was badly scorched. Both were dead. When their cousin Irfan, 16, saw them, he gently curled them into his arms, squeezed the rumpled bodies to his chest, lightly kissed their faces, and slid into a stupor.”

  — Los Angeles Times190

  “Never before in the history of warfare have we been able to distinguish as well between combatants and civilians as we can with drones.”

  —Wall Street Journal editorial191

  Eking out a living among the stark, barren landscape of a remote land, known little even to their own country-folk and utterly anonymous to those in faraway America, more hapless victims could hardly be found than the people of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in northwest Pakistan. It was only in the decade after 9/11 that their anonymity became a fatal burden, counted in an ever-increasing number of lost lives.

  Beginning in 2004, when the CIA expanded its search for militants from the Afghan border into Pakistan, the regions of North and South Waziristan began to be pelted by missiles fired from UAVs.

  Before they fired, they hovered—their onerous, ominous buzzing casting shadows over village schools and homes, over weddings and funerals. The villagers never knew when they would fire, whether it would be at dawn, before the household woke for morning prayers, or when the men had left for the mosque, or in the middle of the day when bread baked in ovens and children played in courtyards.

  The attacks in Pakistan carried out via the CIA’s covert program, one the Obama White House never formally acknowledged, began in 2004 and as the years wore on, the number of drone strikes grew and grew and grew. On October 14, 2011 the grisly remote-controlled war reached a new milestone when the three hundredth drone strike took place in the early hours of dawn, killing six alleged militants.192

  Since the areas have been sealed off by the Pakistani security forces, journalists have not been able to enter the area and report on the damage in lives, property, and livelihoods that is being inflicted on Pakistan’s drone-battered northwest. Some reports rely on local sources and untrained journalists working with news agencies. Others rely on Pakistani and US intelligence agencies, which tend to label every kill a militant. That’s why there are such widely varying statistics about the number of civilian casualties.

  These stats start at zero, the intellectually insulting figure given in June 2011 by John O. Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser. He said, speaking about the preceding year, “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”193 Mr. Brennan later adjusted his statement somewhat, saying, “Fortunately, for more than a year, due to our discretion and precision, the US government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from US counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq.” His statement reflects, more than anything else, the US government’s callous refusal to investigate or acknowledge the results of its own attacks.

  According to statistics kept by the New America Foundation, from 2004–2011, between 1,717 and 2,680 individuals were killed, and of those, between 293 and 471 were civilians.194 The UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts those figures higher, saying that between 2,372 and 2,997 were killed in that timeframe. Of those, between 391 and 780 were civilians, 175 of them children.195

  The Bureau’s figures are probably more accurate, as it is one of the few groups that actually does have sources on the ground. In fact, they help get the voices of the victims themselves out from the war-battered region to challenge official accounts of the drone war and the deception that drones are a foolproof method of killing militants without collateral damage.

  Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who has been representing drone victims and who started the group Foundation for Fundamental Rights, disputes even these figures and claims that the vast majority of those killed are ordinary civilians. “I have a problem with this word ‘militant.’ Most of the victims who are labeled militants might be Taliban sympathizers but they are not involved in any criminal or terrorist acts,” he claimed. He said the Americans often use the fact that someone carries a weapon as proof they’re a combatant. “If that’s the criteria then the US will have to commit genocide, because all men in that area carry AK-47s and all believe in Sharia law. That is part of their culture. Since when can we kill people for their beliefs?” Shahzad believes that only those people who the Americans label “high-value targets” should be considered militants; all others should be considered civilian victims.

  Noor Behram, a photographer who is constantly putting his life at risk to photograph the aftermath of drone strikes, agreed. “For every ten to fifteen people killed, maybe they get one militant,” he said.196

  The US government prefers to stick to the myth that drone strikes are only killing militants. According to the official story, the tribal areas of Pakistan are infested with militants, shadowy figures planning acts of mass murder in the region’s stark caves and crannies that harbor the world’s worst terrorists—and that these, the worst of the worst, are the only ones being killed.

  And US officials have been getting away with telling that story, since corporate media outlets are more interested in running unverified government spin as “news” than talking to people on the ground to actually uncover the truth. Like clockwork, after every drone strike purporting to kill a handful of militants, an anonymous US government official speaks to the press, calmly reassuring reporters that only bad people die in America’s drone wars. And the press eats it up.

  The American government also plays the press by highlighting the supposedly big-time militant ringleaders it executes without trial; victories that help assuage any concerns about civilian deaths among the faint-hearted.

  On August 7, 2009, when the rest of the news from the War on Terror offered a decidedly bleak picture, a drone attack in the village of Zanghara in South Waziristan killed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and alleged mastermind of the assassination of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.197

  According to the report, Mehsud had been at the home of his father-in-law receiving an intravenous treatment for diabetes when a missile fired from a Predator drone rained down on the building and killed him. Scant mention was made of his wife, father-in-law and eight others who were killed as well. And there was no mention that this successful strike had been preceded by fifteen other unsuccessful strikes aimed at killing Mehsud—strikes that instead caused the death of between 204 and 321 victims, from low-level Taliban to elderly tribal leaders to children.198 All the American public heard was that justice had been done now that the evil Mehsud was dead.

  Two years and many less-touted drone strikes later, on June 3, 2011—a bare month after a helicopter raid by Navy Seals succeeded in killing Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbotabad—another top Al Qaeda leader, Ilyas Kashmiri, was also mowed down by a US Predator drone.199 Kashmiri, referred to as Pakistan’s most dangerous militant, was considered responsible for several attacks on Pakistani security forces.
These included an attack just one week earlier on a Pakistani naval base in Karachi in which two anti-submarine aircraft were destroyed.200 Kashmiri was also alleged to be the mastermind for the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, in 2008, which killed 163 people. His death was greeted as a victory by both American and Pakistani forces, though the latter had also claimed him dead after a drone attack in 2009.

  What actually happened in that 2009 attack is one of the many buried tragedies.201 On September 7, 2009, throughout the day two drones were hovering over the skies of Mirali Tehsil in North Waziristan. It was the month of Ramadan and people in the area were angry that the drones were interfering in their religious activities. They were also scared, but in Pashtun culture showing one’s fear is cowardice and a matter of shame, so the fear was left unspoken.

  Fifteen-year-old Sadaullah, a local student, was particularly happy that day as there was an iftar (breaking of the fast) feast planned at his house that evening. His grandfather and uncles were coming, and his mother was cooking his favorite meal. Sadaullah saw the unmanned machine in the air and joked with his friends about the “bangana,” a local name given to drones in the area due to the constant noise they make.

  In the evening, the house was crowded with all the men in the family—his grandfathers, uncles, and cousins. Everyone broke their fast and proceeded to the courtyard for prayers.

  The lucky ones had already reentered the house when the missile struck. Not Sadaullah. He fell unconscious under the debris of the fallen roof. When he awoke at a hospital in Peshawar, he was blind in one eye from the shrapnel and both his legs had been amputated. He later learned that his elderly uncle, who had been in a wheelchair, was dead, as were two of his cousins, Kadaanullah Jan and Sabir-ud-Din.

  “I had a dream to be a doctor,” said Sadaullah, “But now I can’t even walk to school.” So he studies religion in the village madrassah and has little hope for the future.