SOURCE:


BBC Documentary Drone Attack Drones in Military Documentary History Channel  

        [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_tMNAAVxY0 ]

 

                  The Drone Revolution

                Less Than Meets the Eye

                                    By

                Lawrence D. Freedman

 

 

 

It is a measure of how much the United States’ security has improved since the more dangerous moments of the Cold War that the most troublesome issues in the military field today concern not weapons of mass destruction but targeted killing.

 

 

The power that comes with access to the nuclear codes, of course, remains foremost when considering a presidential candidate’s fitness for office. Yet no American leader has authorized the use of nuclear weapons since 1945. The last two U.S. presidents have regularly authorized the elimination of alleged Islamist terrorists.

 

 

The U.S. government has assassinated jihadists through a variety of means, including Special Forces and attack helicopters. But drones have become its new weapon of choice. This has prompted a large body of literature exploring the ethical, legal, and strategic dilemmas that these weapons pose. Some of these books, such as The Drone Debate, by the political scientists Avery Plaw, Matthew Fricker, and Carlos Colon, and Drones, by Sarah Kreps, also an academic, provide admirable overviews of the debate.

 

 

Objective Troy, meanwhile, by the New York Times reporter Scott Shane, presents a gripping account of the hunt for Anwar al-Awlaki, the charismatic New Mexico–born preacher and senior al Qaeda operative who, after a drone killed him in Yemen in 2011, became the first U.S. citizen to be assassinated since the American Civil War. The Assassination Complex, by the investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept (and which includes a foreword by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden), amounts to a searing indictment of the U.S. drone program. Other commentators are more gently critical, such as the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, in Drone, his thoughtful examination of the dilemmas this new weapon poses.

 

 

Although these books differ in style and focus, they cover a similar set of issues and are drawn to the same set of sources. Underlying them all is the claim that drones represent a new era of warfare, or at least of counterterrorism. It is true that with drones, governments can eliminate political leaders and activists with relative ease. And perhaps one day, fully autonomous military systems, once programmed, may be able to decide whom to watch and then eliminate. Yet for now, at least, drones are just another weapon in the military’s arsenal. Winning a war requires controlling territory, and that will always necessitate supporting ground forces. Drones are an important innovation, but they are not revolutionary.

 

 

"ADDICTIVE AS CATNIP"

 

Unmanned aerial vehicles have existed since the early days of airpower. The first was developed but not used during World War I, for target practice. But it was the Israeli engineer Abraham Karem, who had been working on drones to confuse Arab air defenses in the 1970s, who realized that with new technologies, drones could provide real-time intelligence. In his enthralling history of the U.S. drone program, Predator, Richard Whittle tells Karem’s story. After immigrating to the United States, Karem failed to convince the Pentagon of his idea, and in 1990, he went bankrupt. But General Atomics, a California-based defense contractor that had been developing drones of its own, saw the potential of his designs. Together, they built the Predator