Using drones: principles, tactics and results (amended title)

[slapout9]

When a person attacks their own government, they may have been influenced by a variety of sources, but they were most likely "radicalized" by their government. Step one is admitting responsibilities for one's actions. Most addicts, and most governments, never get to step one. Far easier to rationalize such things off on others.

That is deep Bob...really deep. How many people in the government could even realize that?

[davidbfpo]

Slap,

Yes Bob is on target and you asked:

How many people in the government could even realize that?

Very few I would contend, it would be a rare politician who would admit this:

..they were most likely "radicalized" by their government..

Try this September 2005 article, based on talking to John Denham, a Labour minister who resigned over the Iraq War:http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/al...security.thtml

There are some civil servants who have advised government here, the most often cited example being the Foreign Office and Home Office advice in 2004 that foreign policy decisions could alienate young Muslims. We know that advice was rejected, yes by Tony Blair and his government.

As the "smoke" cleared from Northern Ireland more civil servants have talked, with regret, over decisions taken that were counter-productive; I am only aware of local politicians talking in the same terms, such as Geoffrey Donaldson:http://www.jeffreydonaldson.org/

[Kiwigrunt]

Not sure this is the best place for it but it does kinda fit.

Malcolm Gladwell in a 16 min TED talk on military technology and precision and the utility of it.

[davidbfpo]

Kiwi,

Thanks for the TED link. I thought the last few minutes the most poignant. Gladwell cited a 95% accuracy for drone strikes in NW Pakistan and a ten-fold increase in attacks by those made angrier and angrier. We assume the things we make will solve our problems.

[davidbfpo]

An article that looks back to arrive at today:

The problems with remote-controlled warfare are legion. The human operator ‘is terribly remote from the consequences of his actions; he is likely to be sitting in an air-conditioned trailer, hundreds of miles from the area of battle.’ He evaluates ‘target signatures’ captured by various sensor systems that ‘no more represent human beings than the tokens in a board-type war game.’

The rise of this new ‘American way of bombing’, as it’s been called, has two particularly serious consequences. First, ‘through its isolation of the military actor from his target, automated warfare diminishes the inhibitions that could formerly be expected on the individual level in the exercise of warfare’. In short, killing is made casual. Secondly, once the risk of combat is transferred to the target, it becomes much easier for the state to go to war. Domestic audiences are disengaged from the violence waged in their name: ‘Remote-controlled warfare reduces the need for the public to confront the consequences of military action abroad.’

(My emphasis)All familiar stuff, you might think, except that these warnings were not prompted by the appearance of Predators and Reapers in the skies over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia or Yemen. They appeared in Harper’s Magazine in June 1972, the condensed results of a study of the US air war in Indochina by a group of scholar-activists at Cornell University.1 As they suggest, crucial elements of today’s ‘drone wars’ were assembled during the US bombing of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. There were three of them: drones, real-time visual reconnaissance, and the electronic battlefield.

Link:http://www.opendemocracy.net/derek-g...way-of-bombing

This essay is part of Derek Gregory's current research on ‘Killing space: cultural and political histories of bombing’. Next week: Look out for his detailed account of the path that led us from bombing cities, forests and target boxes to putting 'warheads on foreheads' in Pakistan and Afghanistan, 'Lines of Descent'.

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to the Lowry Institute.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (based at City University in London) is conducting a project where they monitor all reported drone attacks in Pakistan. Based on their documentation of 306 missile strikes from remotely piloted drones in Pakistan (as of November 2011), there are reports of at least 2,349 deaths with, at minimum, 392 civilians killed — including 175 children.

Link to cited research, which is more than casualties:http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com...ts/drone-data/

[davidbfpo]

I may have missed allegations that UK citizens / residents were the target of a drone strike, so I read this press report with interest 'Britain's 'most wanted' killed in drone attack':http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...ne-attack.html

He was killed in the tribal region of Waziristan alongside Mohammed Azmir Khan, 37. Both men and their brothers were believed to be part of an established network of radicals from Ilford, East London with connections to al-Qaeda. Adam's father confirmed that his son had been killed and a close friend of Khan's family, who did not want to be named, said: "They have taken it very badly - this is the second son who has been killed in a drone strike."

As Slap has said long ago watch the family members (or similar) as they will be the first to be radicalised and join the violent Jihad.

He is not the first UK target hit, as the "mastermind" Rashid Rauf was killed in November 2008, his name appears in today's article too and there is some background on:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_Rauf

[Fuchs]

Using drones: principles, tactics and results (amended title)

Isn't it remarkable how much this thread is focused on assassination?


Drone tactics are so much more.

For example: It's tricky to keep them from getting shot down when you face a somewhat capable enemy. The French were dumb enough to fly their Cerecelle (?) type UAVs on a predictable schedule and course in 1999 and lost several of them to Yugoslav ManPADS.

Another aspect of drone tactics are the interesting games played with decoy drones, such as MALD (?) or the Ryan models over North Vietnam.

There's also a huge tactical problem associated with the use of loiter munitions - kamikaze drones that cannot be recovered and should thus not be launched without a good reason. Worse; at least some types of them were autonomous (a German model, for example - and the British Brimstone missile is similar).

There are also interesting problems associated with transport drones, such as the Kaman K-Max-based drone (a helicopter with external payload). How could they be used in other than flat terrain?

There are also EW drones, most notably some radio comm jamming drones which were developed to do radio comm jamming in incredible depths (up to 150 km IIRC). How could you keep such a electromagnetic lighthouse from getting shot down against an opponent who warrants such a jamming effort?

Or superficially simple operational analysis problems regarding the slow cruise speed of a Predator or (still slow) Reaper when facing an opponent who is smart enough to learn the reaction time and break off his actions after a few minutes? You may be able to loiter over an area for hours with such drones, but not over all areas!

How about deconfliction? Shouldn't it be possible to fly drones at a few narrow altitude bands and free them this way from deconfliction concerns? Mortars, artillery, fighter-bombers - they all should not have any deconfliction concerns with drones, but last I heard is there are such concerns. And they keep especially the very small drones in practice almost always on the ground. Should a huge country ("airspace") like Afghanistan with few hundred manned aircraft in-theatre really have an elaborate deconfliction regime at all? I was especially astonished by the huge effort spent on having a flying deconfliction clearing house in form of AWACS aircraft...it doesn't get more expensive than that.