• “There is no prohibition under the laws of war on the use of technologically advanced weapons systems in armed conflict,” he said. “Indeed, using such advanced technologies can ensure both that the best intelligence is available for planning operations, and that civilian casualties are minimized in carrying out such operations.” Koh’s legal analysis is certainly correct as a matter of traditional law-of-war doctrine, particularly as understood in the United States.
• The current drone-warfare program marks the first time in U.S. history that a state-of-the-art, cutting-edge weapons system has been placed in the hands of the CIA, marking the continued evolution of the CIA as a paramilitary force with advanced tactical weaponry

• New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who's accountable?

   

  The Navy is testing an autonomous plane that will land on an aircraft  carrier. The prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies  without direct human control is unnerving to many.
• What's even more remarkable is that it will do that not only without a pilot in  the cockpit, but without a pilot at all.
  

  • Human precourse set that can be changed
• The X-47B marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have  far-reaching consequences. With the drone's ability to be flown autonomously by  onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be  dealt by machines operating semi-independently.
• Although humans would program an autonomous drone's flight plan and could  override its decisions, the prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through  the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many.
  
  
• Weapons specialists in the military and Congress acknowledge that policymakers  must deal with these ethical questions long before these lethal autonomous  drones go into active service, which may be a decade or more away
• "It's a different world from just a few years ago — we've entered the realm of  science fiction in a lot of ways," Cuellar said

  • Henry Cuellar

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• What kind of a future are we creating for our children? We face the prospect of a world in which every nation will have drone warfare capability, in which terror can rain down from the sky at any moment without warning.
• The U.S. government claims that drone strikes are an effective tool against al Qaeda leaders, but most of those being killed are low-level militants.

•  

  Force may be used by soldiers against combatants in legally authorized armed conflicts, but this right does not extend to civilians. The U.S. covert counterterrorism drone campaign is managed and operated by the CIA, an agency notorious for its past policy failures and violations of the law. Those who are conducting these raids operate in secret beyond the restraints of military discipline and are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
• Drone weapons are very precise, but they do not eliminate the problem of civilian casualties. White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan claimed in June that no civilians have been killed in Pakistan in the last year because of drone strikes. The White House quickly backed away from that outlandish claim, but administration officials continue to insist that so-called collateral damage is very low.
• Drone weapons raise many troubling security, legal and moral questions. Rather than pushing ahead to develop more of these systems, our government should pause to consider the consequences of this new revolution in military technology.

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• Denny thought his radio-controlled planes would make perfect target drones for  anti-aircraft gunners. In the late 1930s he pitched the U.S. Army on his RP-4  Radioplane, the "Dennymite," powered by a 6-hp engine with a 12-foot, 3-inch  wingspan. In 1940 the Army ordered 53 of the RP-4, redesignating it the OQ-1. A  few months later the attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the war  created an urgent need for anti-aircraft gunners—and target drones. During the  war the U.S. military bought nearly 15,000 Dennymites, making the type the first  mass-produced unmanned plane in history.
• Attempts to build lifelike machines stretch back to ancient Greek mathematician  and scientist Archytas of Tarentum (400–350 BC), who built a steam-propelled  mechanical dove. The first real advances in what we now call "military robotics"  started with Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), the pioneer electrical engineer and rival  of Thomas Edison.
• The only system operationally deployed during World War I was Germany's FL-7  wire-guided motorboat. Designed to be rammed into enemy ships, it carried 300  pounds of explosives.

  • 1916 1917

• In World War II Germany again proved more inclined than its enemies to  develop and use unmanned systems. The vehicle that saw most use was the Goliath  tracked mine, which carried 100 pounds of explosives. Designed to be steered  into enemy tanks and bunkers, it was about the size of a small go-cart, powered  at first by electric motors and later by 12.5-hp gasoline engines. The Germans  built some 7,000 Goliaths, using them on the Eastern Front, at Normandy and  during the Warsaw Uprising. Its effectiveness was limited, however, by its low  speed, poor ground clearance and vulnerability to small-arms fire.
• The FX 1400 "Fritz" was a 3,000-pound (1,400-kg) glide bomb with a 700-pound  warhead, four small wings, controllable tail surfaces and a rocket motor. The  Germans would drop the device at high altitude from a Dornier Do 217 bomber. A  bombardier would then steer the Fritz via radio link using a joystick. In  September 1943 a fleet of Fritz-carrying Do 217s attacked an Italian naval fleet  defecting to the Allies near Sardinia.

• In 1944 the United States' focus on aerial weapons led the U.S. Army Air  Forces and U.S. Navy to launch Operations Aphrodite and Anvil, respectively. The  idea was to strip heavy bombers of all unnecessary equipment, then pack them  with 10 tons of Torpex, an explosive more powerful than TNT. A crew would get  the plane in the air, arm the explosives and then bail out. A nearby mother ship  would then take radio remote control and, using television cameras mounted in  the drone's cockpit, steer the plane into targets too well protected for manned  bombers to risk approaching.

• Aphrodite and Anvil weren't the only Allied remote-control weapon programs.  Starting in early 1944 American B-24s dropped more than 450 Army-developed VB-1  Azons—1,000 pound radio remote-control glide bombs steered visually by  bombardiers—over the Pacific and Burma.
• the only substantial military contract awarded in this period was to Ryan  Aeronautical in 1962 to manufacture an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft. The  resultant air-launched, jet-powered drone, the Model 147 Lightning Bug, and its  many high- and low-altitude variations, flew 3,435 missions (photo  reconnaissance, decoy, chaff dispensing, radar-jamming and propaganda drops)  over Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1975
• The next major U.S. military contract toward unmanned aircraft came in 1979 with  the Lockheed MGM-105 Aquila program
• By 1987 the program that originally budgeted $560 million for 780 Aquila drones  had spent more than $1 billion for just a few prototypes. The Aquila was  canceled and the cause of unmanned vehicles set further back, again more by  policy decisions than by the technology itself.
• During one mission a Pioneer overflew a group of Iraqi soldiers, who, rather  than waiting to be hit by a 2,000-pound high explosive shell, waved white sheets  and undershirts at the drone—the first time in history that human soldiers  surrendered to an unmanned system
• While unmanned aircraft accelerated in capability during the early 1990s, the  1995 integration of the Global Positioning System marked what one U.S. Air Force  officer called a "magic moment" in UAV history.

• By the start of the 21st century the technology had matured, each year  getting more effective and easier to use. Moreover, unmanned systems were  garnering a portfolio of success stories that proved their value. Since the 2001  terrorist attacks on America, the amount spent on ground robots has roughly  doubled each year, while the amount spent on aerial systems has grown by around  23 percent annually.

• With each life saved and each new use found for them in combat, acceptance of  and demand for the unmanned systems has grown. Indeed, U.S. soldiers in  Afghanistan were so pleased with prototypes of the tactical PackBot—used to  locate and dispose of IEDs—that they refused to return them when the 2001 field  test ended. Manufacturer iRobot has since sold more than 2,500 of the devices to  the military.
• The U.S. military inventory now comprises more than 12,000 ground robots and  7,000 UAVs. The robot of science fiction is thus now a very real part of war,  one spreading globally. In addition to the United States, 44 other countries are  now pursuing unmanned military systems.

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• American fighter jets screamed over the Iraqi countryside heading for the MQ-1  Predator drone, while its crew in California stood by helplessly. What had begun  as an ordinary reconnaissance mission was now taking a ruinous turn. In an  instant, the jets attacked and then it was all over. The Predator, one of the US  Air Force's workhorse hunter/killer robots, had been obliterated.
  
  
• Launched and landed by aircrews close to battlefields in places like  Afghanistan, the drones are controlled during missions by pilots and sensor  operators - often multiple teams over many hours - from bases in places like  Nevada and North Dakota. They are sometimes also monitored by "screeners" from  private security contractors at stateside bases like Hurlburt Field in Florida.  (A recent McClatchy report revealed that it takes nearly 170 people to keep a  single Predator in the air for 24 hours.)
  
  
• In that November 2007 Predator incident in Iraq, for instance, an electronic  failure caused the robotic aircraft to engage its self-destruct mechanism and  crash, after which US jets destroyed the wreckage to prevent it from falling  into enemy hands.
• In other cases, drones - officially known as remotely piloted aircraft, or RPAs  - broke down, escaped human control and oversight, or self-destructed for  reasons ranging from pilot error and bad weather to mechanical failure in  Afghanistan, Djibouti, the Gulf of Aden, Iraq, Kuwait and various other  unspecified or classified foreign locations, as well as in the United States
• In 2001, air force Predator drones flew 7,500 hours. By the close of last year,  that number topped 70,000. As the tempo of robotic air operations has steadily  increased, crashes have, not surprisingly, become more frequent. In 2001, just  two drones were destroyed in accidents. In 2008, eight drones fell from the sky.  Last year, the number reached 13. (Accident rates are, however, dropping  according to an air force report relying on figures from 2009.)
  
  
• Examples include a haywire MQ-9 Reaper drone that had to be shot out of the  Afghan skies by a fighter jet in 2009, a remotely-operated navy helicopter that  went down in Libya last June, an unmanned aerial vehicle whose camera was  reportedly taken by Afghan insurgents after a crash in August 2011, an advanced  RQ-170 Sentinel lost during a spy mission in Iran last December, and the recent  crash of an MQ-9 Reaper in the Seychelles Islands.
  
  
• His commander never had a chance to respond. Lacking weather avoidance equipment  found on more sophisticated aircraft or on-board sensors to clue the pilot in to  rapidly deteriorating weather conditions, and with a sandstorm interfering with  ground radar, "severe weather effects" overtook the Predator.
  
  In an  instant, the satellite link between pilot and plane was severed. When it  momentarily flickered back to life, the crew could see that the drone was in an  extreme nosedive. They then lost the datalink for a second and final time. A few  minutes later, troops on the ground radioed in to say that the $4 million drone  had crashed near them.
  
  
• To get it back on track, he initiated a turn that - due to the aggressive nature  of the maneuver, wind conditions, drone design and the unbalanced weight of a  missile on just one wing - sent the plane into a roll. Despite the pilot's best  efforts, the craft entered a tailspin, crashed on the base, and burst into  flames.
  
• Going rogue
  On occasion, RPAs have simply escaped from human control.  Over the course of eight hours on a late February day in 2009, for example, five  different crews passed off the controls of a Predator drone, one to the next, as  it flew over Iraq. 
  
  

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• North Korea is developing unmanned attack aircraft using U.S. target drones  purchased from the Middle East, a military source in Seoul said Sunday,  indicating the aircraft will likely target the South

• Pros:
  
  • Perfect Tools for Unconventional, Single-Target Warfare says Annie Lowrey at Foreign Policy. "But if the U.S. military can kill such looming figures in the radical world without sacrificing a single troop, or ground efforts, or too many civilians? We're looking at a very different vision of counter-terrorism and war."
• Cons:
  
  • "Surgical" Killings Won't Root Out Terrorism says Spencer Ackerman. "What we've learned, at painful cost, over years and years and years, is that the issue isn't the leader of an extremist movement. It's the network that supports it, and the conditions that allow it to take root among a population."

• Pros include:

   

  1) significantly lower cost compared to manned vehicles (although they can get pretty expensive depending on their sophistication); this should allow the military to buy UAVs in much larger quantities than manned aircraft
   2) expendability, you can afford to send them into heavily defended areas and risk losing some without endangering a pilot
   3) more maneuverable than manned planes without the limitations of a human pilot
   4) can be built stealthier than a manned plane since one of the least stealthy parts of the aircraft (the cockpit) is unnecessary
   5) should be lighter, smaller, and easier to transport

• “And if things go wrong, at worst the ‘enemy’ can show the remains of a UAV – ownership of which can be denied by the actor that used it (no captured pilot or dead pilot to show),” Wezeman said
• “Some have suggested that drones as such are prohibited weapons under international humanitarian law because they cause, or have the effect of causing, necessarily indiscriminate killings of civilians, such as those in the vicinity of the targeted person,” the report said.

• It killed all the militants — a clean strike with no civilian casualties, extending what is now a yearlong perfect record of avoiding collateral deaths.
• Or so goes the United States government’s version of the attack, from an American official briefed on the classified C.I.A. program. Here is another version, from a new report compiled by British and Pakistani journalists: The missiles hit a religious school, an adjoining restaurant and a house, killing 18 people — 12 militants, but also 6 civilians, known locally as Samad, Jamshed, Daraz, Iqbal, Noor Nawaz and Yousaf.
• The government’s assertion of zero collateral deaths meets with deep skepticism from many independent experts. And a new report from the British Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which conducted interviews in Pakistan’s tribal area, concluded that at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 strikes during the last year.
• Mr. Roggio said. “There are families and neighbors around. I believe the people conducting the strikes work hard to reduce civilian casualties. They could be 20 percent. They could be 5 percent. But I think the C.I.A.’s claim of zero civilian casualties in a year is absurd.”
• Many informants have their own agendas: militants use civilian deaths as a recruiting tool, and Pakistani officials rally public opinion against the drones as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty.
• The agency’s critics counter that an intelligence officer watching a video screen thousands of miles away can hardly be certain of the identity of everyone killed in a strike. In a tribal society where men commonly carry weapons and a single family compound can include a militant fighter, an enlistee in the Pakistani government’s Frontier Corps, and a shopkeeper, even villagers may be uncertain about the affiliations of their neighbors.
• The standard drone weapons, Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs, like other ordnance, are not absolutely predictable. A strike last Oct. 18, all reports agree, hit a militant compound and killed a number of fighters. But Mr. Akbar, the lawyer, said the family next door to the compound had told his investigators their 10-year-old son, Naeem Ullah, was hit by shrapnel and died an hour after being taken to the hospital in nearby Miram Shah. Neighbors confirmed the account, Mr. Akbar said.

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• “With the advance of technologies, they depersonalize warfare and therefore you have people willing to use them and you have people who do not understand the consequences,” said Lawrence J. Korb, senior advisor for Center for Defense Information. “People who are flying the drones are not on the battlefield. They are not in the plane, they are thousands of miles away and when they cause destruction they do not feel it.”
• Specialists say that for the drone operator, the whole operation recalls a video game. The question many ask is, if it is so easy and convenient, will it make the international powers tempted to wage more wars in the future?
• “If war is cheap, then why not why use it a bit more, especially against smaller countries, organizations that in other cases you would try to sit around the table with and talk it over?” said Wezeman.

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• The radar-evading drone that crash-landed over the weekend in Iran was on a  mission for the CIA,
• according to a senior U.S. official, raising fears that the aircraft's  sophisticated technology could be exploited by Tehran or shared with other  American rivals.
• The jet-powered, bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel drone is considered one of the most  advanced in the U.S. arsenal, with stealth technology and sophisticated computer  systems that enable it to penetrate deep into hostile territory without  detection.
• The aircraft's full abilities are a closely guarded secret, and the Pentagon has  not revealed its price tag, size or top speed. But it has acknowledged this: The  Sentinel may now be in Iranian hands.
• "It carries a variety of systems that wouldn't be much of a benefit to Iran, but  to its allies such as China and Russia, it's a potential gold mine," Singer said
• Although the Sentinel's capabilities remain largely classified, it is believed  to carry the latest in cutting-edge cameras and sensors that can "listen in" on  cellphone conversations as it soars miles above the ground or "smell" the air  and sniff out chemical plumes emanating from a potential underground nuclear  laboratory
• the Sentinel drone has been cloaked in tight secrecy by the U.S. government. But  now the drone that the Iranian military claims to have brought down for invading  its airspace might be made far more public than the Pentagon or Lockheed ever  intended.
• Another U.S. official with access to intelligence said that losing the Sentinel  is a major security breach.
• "It's bad - they'll have everything" in terms of the secret technology in the  aircraft, the official said. "And the Chinese or the Russians will have it too."
• He said it's difficult to believe that Iran could have brought down the aircraft  with electronic jamming or by taking the controls through a cyber attack as the  country claims it did

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