Proliferation of Military Drones
Growth in Numbers of Drone Atrocities
The beginning of the modern era of military and police use of drones can be marked with the 2001 failed U.S. attempt to use a drone to assassinate Taliban leader Mullah Omar on the first day of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. At that time, the U.S. and Israel were the only nations believed to have operational weaponized drones.
Since then, drone attacks, which can accurately be termed atrocities, have been carried out by at least 13 nations, primarily by the United States, but also by other governments, including France, Israel, Turkey and the United Kingdom. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that U.S. drone attacks alone have killed as many as 16,901 people and wounded 3,922 in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
We have no reliable figures on the casualties from drone attacks by all killer drone powers in Iraq, Syria, Niger, Mali, Libya, Turkey’s Kurdish regions, Gaza, the West Bank and the Philippines, and possibly other nations. Certainly, the numbers are in the thousands.
Nor do we have information on the numbers killed and wounded through attacks by conventional weapons that were enabled by drone surveillance, such as Turkey’s attacks against Kurds that were guided by U.S. drone surveillance in “Operation Nomad Shadow”, reportedly discontinued in 2019.
And finally, we have no reliable estimates or understanding of the numbers of individuals and communities – tens of thousands of people – who have been severely and permanently traumatized by experiencing drone attacks, losing family members to these attacks or living in drone attack zones in which no one is certain of what action will prompt a drone attack. Nor do we know anything about the scope of the social and economic suffering that drone attacks have caused.
We do know that drone attacks have profound political effects, as witnessed in the degeneration of political mechanisms in Yemen, caused by U.S. drone assassinations and attacks on populations, which will be discussed in greater detail in the “Dangers” section of this website.
Why So Little Information?
One reason that we have so little information on the numbers of drone casualties and trauma victims is because drone war perpetrators keep secret information on numbers of drone attacks and casualties, even though all attacks are presumably visually and audio recorded. But the U.S. for one, has sufficient accounting of the casualties from its drone attacks to be able to award drone operators with certificates praising them for the numbers of “kills” for which they are responsible.
In addition, we have relatively little information from human rights monitors because drone attacks often occur in remote regions where it is difficult and sometimes dangerous to travel, and quick response is even more difficult. What we do know of casualties and the human impact of drone killing we gratefully learn from long-after-the- attack human rights survey teams who have produced reports such as “Living Under Drones”, “License to Kill”, ”Traumatizing Skies”, “Death Falling From the Sky” and “Precisely Wrong”.
And, while the “body count” of a drone attack may be known to its perpetrator, it may not be known even to those who have been attacked because bodies are often blown to smithereens. For example, “Living Under Drones” researchers, investigating U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, reported:
“Idris Farid, who survived the strike with a severe leg injury, explained how funerals for the victims of the March 17 (2011) strike were ‘odd and different than before.’ The community had to collect [the victims’] body pieces and bones and then bury them like that, doing their best to ‘identify the pieces and the body parts’ so that relatives at the funeral would be satisfied that they ‘had the right parts of the body and the right person.’”
“The precise number of people who died in the March 17, 2011 strike has never been determined…”, the report says. About 40 people were killed, including 35 government-appointed officials and several locally appointed auxiliary police.
And, finally, although drone attacks continue to spread into new nations, the global press has largely lost interest, accepting governmental lumping of these attacks under the normalizing terminology “air strikes”, apparently having accepted the slow, steady advance of drone atrocity as a relatively minor issue, almost certainly because those being killed are almost exclusively poor people of color.
Growth in the Spread of Drone Weaponry
The Center for the Study of the Drone reported in March 2020 that an estimated 102 nations have active military drone programs, seven more than the previous year, with an additional six having pending drone plans.
While all of these nations appear to have military surveillance drones, the report found that only 10 nations, foremost among them the U.S., were using weaponized drones. An additional 20 nations had used them, were buying them or building them, the report said, and another 18 nations operated drones capable of being weaponized but were not as yet arming them.
But, “Unarmed and Dangerous”, also published by the Center for the Study of Drone, reports that the surveillance drones held by all 100+ nations with active drone programs “can directly enable lethal strikes by other weapons in a wide variety of ways” and “expand the effectiveness, scope, range and lethality of strikes, while also enabling strikes that may have otherwise been too dangerous, too strategically or politically risky, even physically impossible by other means.”
The report continues: “As such, unarmed drone use may raise ethical, tactical, strategic and legal questions that have largely gone unaddressed.”
A New Wave of Killer Drones
Most of the weaponized drones being used in the world today, listed by Army Technology, are produced by the United States, Israel and China. These are largely propeller-driven, relatively slow aircraft.
However, a new wave of jet-powered subsonic and supersonic weaponized drones is being developed, such as Kelley Aerospace’s “Arrow”.
While the “Arrow” seems to be only in the conceptual stage, Boeing Corporation and Kratos Defense and Security are flying developmental models of weaponized jet-powered drones that will rely heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) and fly in company with, and be semi-controlled by, pilots in manned jet aircraft in what is dubbed the “loyal wingman” project. (Boeing is reportedly working on “loyal wingman” with the Australian air force because there are fewer export restrictions on drones in Australia than in the U.S.)
“Loyal wingman” type drones are to become part of the U.S. Air Force’s “Skyborg” AI-dependent combat drone program.
A major development is AI-guidance of “swarms” of weaponized drones, of various sizes, that can communicate with each other as well as humans in relentlessly attacking targets. This is one of the advertised features of “loyal wingman”. Airbus has produced a video showing its work on a system that would enable drones to be launched from a flight of multiple cargo aircraft.
This new wave of combat drones, of substantial size and weapons-carrying capacity, utilizing more and more AI, are clearly being prepared for warfare among major global military powers, such as between the U.S. and China.
On the other end of the size scale, are micro-drones that can be weaponized. For example, there has been experimentation with such drones by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, and the laboratory sponsors micro-drone races involving obstacle courses that obviously test technology that has a military application.
These maps from NewAmerica.org show the progress of weaponized drone proliferation and the progressive increase in drone attacks since 2000. NewAmerica.org also lists non-governmental groups that have been reported to use weaponized drones.
Growth in the Spread of Police Drones
There is also global growth in use of surveillance drones by police, some of which can be armed. For example, DroneWars.net reported in a study published in February, 2020, that the numbers of police forces using drones in England and Wales had increased in three years from 28 to at least 40. The study said that 100% of the forces reported using them for searches, including for missing persons; 66% used them for crime scene investigations; 56% used them for collisions; and 37% used them to monitor protests, sports events and concerts.
The Atlas of Surveillance, published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2020, shows that police surveillance is extensive in the U.S.
At this point, it seems that most police are using relatively small drones, very similar to those used by hobbyists. However, larger, military-sized drones may be introduced because of their greater capacity to carry surveillance gear and weapons.
For example, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., maker of the Reaper drone, intended to fly their next-generation SkyGuardian, over the City of San Diego in 2020 to demonstrate its advanced surveillance equipment for police work. But the planned flight was postponed and eventually cancelled by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. The exact reasons have not been released, but skepticism over the safety of the on-board anti-collision gear was almost certainly a factor. The Voice of San Diego went to court to try to force answers out of the FAA and General Atomics. Read their latest article here.
Like many local, state and federal police departments, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol uses various technologies to surveil the nation’s borders, including the Predator B, the same craft that is armed with missiles by the military, known as the MQ-9 Reaper. It is reported that the CBP does not limit its surveillance to its 100-mile border zone mandated by law. “You can view this extension of the border as a [way] for federal authorities to maintain jurisdiction over large swaths of land,” says Mana Azarmi, a policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, “[and] permit them to do more and more invasive things.” CBP drones also regularly violate Mexican airspace, violating the very border it is supposed to be protecting. It is not a coincidence that drones are deployed by the CBP on the border primarily to spy on and control people of color, just as the police in U.S. cities and the military overseas use them.
A Daunting New Era
The military, diplomatic and human rights impact of the surge in the use of weaponized, by both military and police, surveillance drones is daunting to consider and impossible to overestimate.
For example, a November 11, 2020, report in The Washington Post, Azerbaijan’s drones owned the battlefield in Nagorno-Karabakh — and showed future of warfare, tells of remotely-controlled drones that Azerbaijan acquired from Turkey and Israel “targeting Armenian and Nagorno-Karabakh soldiers and destroying tanks, artillery and air defense systems — providing a huge advantage for Azerbaijan in the 44-day war and offered the clearest evidence yet of how battlefields are being transformed by unmanned attack drones rolling off assembly lines around the world.”
However, Jakob Foerster, an AI researcher, who advocates against weaponizing drones, said: “Without combat drones, this murderous war would probably not have taken place!”
In addition, it is important to note that there were civilian casualties on both sides of this war, in which Turkey backed Azerbaijan. A Turkish military analyst said: “Overwhelmed by the Azerbaijani offensive, the Armenian side has resorted to targeting Azerbaijan’s population centers…”. This raises the question about the total human impact of this “new” type of war, and also whether civilians, non-combatants, may have been killed preemptively by drone operators on suspicion that they might be aiding combatants.
Additionally, it is important to note that weaponized drones in this war were being used against relatively highly mechanized forces rather than more mobile, un-mechanized opponents, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Same Old Game
While the missile-firing drones that are now produced in many countries have been called a game-changer in the way wars are waged, the same old game is being played by the U.S.; the Pentagon and the CIA continue to expand their drone assassination program that began in 2001. The MQ-9 Reaper drones’ “hunter-killer platforms” are employed killing combatants and noncombatants in illegal wars of occupation, as in Afghanistan, or in countries in which even the U.S. has not designated formal battlefields, such as Somalia.
Indeed, most U.S. drones being used are designed for attacks against relatively defenseless opponents. “Predators and Reapers are useless in a contested environment,” said Gen. Mike Hostage, chief of the U.S. Air Combat Command in 2013′.
These U.S. drone attacks, often under the authority of the civilian CIA rather than the military, have had a negative impact on the battlefield, creating more enemies than they are killing, according to many military and intelligence experts.
Remains were found of a vehicle in the convoy in which Iranian General Qasem Soleimani was assassinated by a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone near the Baghdad, Iraq airport in January 2020. Credit: Government of Iraq/Associated Press
Where’s the Sheriff?
Despite their vigilantism. these drone attacks, whether by the U.S., or other nations, against local resistance groups, have not been able to be stopped through diplomacy or imposition of international law.
For example, no international body has chosen to address the January 2020 drone assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani at the civil Baghdad International Airport in Iraq or the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011, two of the most high-profile “extrajudicial” executions carried out by the U.S.
Remarkably, former President Barack Obama, in his 2020 memoir, “A Promised Land,” admitted that the “kill list” drone assassinations under his administration were motivated not by military necessity but by the perception that a “new, liberal president couldn’t afford to look soft on terrorism.”
AUMFs Provide Cover for Proliferation
President Obama sought to justify drone killings based on the 2001 umbrella approval that the U.S. Congress granted to the U.S. under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to declare the world a battlefield in which the U.S. effectively has the right to attack anyone, any place, at any time.
In spite of U.S. officials speaking of the AUMF as if it were a globally supported and approved legal document, it has not been endorsed or approved by the U.N. or any other international body. It was passed by the U.S. Congress shortly after 9/11 to underwrite the illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Another AUMF was approved in 2002 to cover the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. These colonial moves intended to achieve strategic political and resource goals, under the cover of fighting “terrorists”, the very people who had turned to violent resistance in opposition to U.S. attempts at domination. Former President Donald Trump used the 2002 Iraq AUMF to justify the assassination of General Soleimani. Calls continue in the U.S. for ending both AUMFs, but while President Biden has indicated a willingness to narrow AUMF coverage, there is no sign of movement to abandon this self-proclaimed privilege, which arguably is racist, given its application largely against people of color.
Although the U.S. was urged by many to treat 9/11 not as a matter for the military instead of the police, the chosen military option offered the possibility of occupation.
At the same time, the development of weaponized drones, based on the U.S. experience with drones in Kosovo, offered a new weapon to suppress indigenous opposition to occupation.
The U.S. asserts that it has a right under international law to use drones to assassinate on the battlefield of Afghanistan, even though there would have been no “battlefield” had there been no illegal invasion by the U.S. The same is true in Iraq.
The U.S. has justified drone assassination where there is no “battlefield” on the basis of self-defense, even though the those “threatening” the U.S. are simply reacting to U.S. intervention in their countries.
The weaponized drone then became a weapon with which the U.S. could selectively kill not only opponents of the U.S. but opponents of governments that the U.S. wants to support, such as aiding Saudi Arabia in its struggle for control of Yemen.
Other nations that have wanted to use drones for repression and conquest are thus effectively acting in the shadow of the AUMFs, while the elites who control the U.N. ignore these nations as they transform drone assassination and killing into a normal, widely used tool of international military and political operations.
Jon Todd, a University of Pennsylvania law student, pointed out a review of the implications of the 2001 AUMF on international law:
“As the world’s premier military force, and the preeminent player in the new era of non-traditional warfare, the United States undoubtedly has tremendous sway in the direction the War Convention (international law on rules of war) ultimately takes.”
Of course, the relative ease with which U.S. leaders were able to normalize drone killing at home and around the world must be viewed through the lens of race and ethnicity, with drone killing profoundly enabled by “the bad guys” being poor people of color.
Now we are confronted with the transformation of weapons employed for racist, colonial goals into weapons that have the potential to be used in full-scale wars between major powers with devastating, and thanks to AI, completely unpredictable consequences.