War from afar: How the Pentagon fell in love with drones

[unhappycamper]

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/08/war_from_afar_how_the_pentagon_fell_in_love_with_drones/?source=newsletter



Unmanned aerial vehicles and smart bombs are the quintessential weapons of our age. And not just for Americans

War from afar: How the Pentagon fell in love with drones
Patrick Coffey
Excerpted from "American Arsenal:"

~snip~

After 9/11, with the availability of smart bombs and UAVs, the Weinberger- Powell doctrine is effectively obsolete. Military force is often the first choice for the United States, supplanting diplomacy or other efforts. America is supposedly not at war in Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, but Air Force drones strike there regularly. Because there is no risk to the pilots, there is little public scrutiny. And the CIA operates its own drones, with no public scrutiny at all. Legal and ethical questions remain unanswered: Should a Predator attack on a known terrorist in his car be considered an act of war or an assassination? What about terrorists who are American citizens? Who decides on legitimate targets?

At present, the United States has a technological lead in both smart bombs and UAVs. Historically, however, no nation has been able to maintain a weapons monopoly indefinitely—the American monopoly of the atomic bomb lasted only four years, and its monopoly of the hydrogen bomb less than that. Once other nations begin to use drones routinely, America may have to rethink its position on cross-border anti-terrorist attacks. What, for example, would the United States say about Russian UAV attacks on Chechen rebels in the mountains of neighboring Georgia, or a drone attack that the Chinese considered launching against a drug lord in Burma?

China has offered its drones for sale at an air show, and other countries have doubtless produced them as well. Export controls are unlikely to be effective in controlling proliferation. The United States sells UAVs and smart bombs to its allies, and the weapons are lost on the battlefield. Reverse-engineering the hardware of captured weapons would be relatively simple, although re-creating the firmware, which is certainly encrypted, would be more difficult. (The Iranians, however, claim they decrypted the video of a crashed American drone.) But America’s enemies have competent programmers and hackers, and digital espionage requires nothing more than access to the right computer.

Iran and North Korea waste their time trying to make seventy-year-old nuclear weapons and fifty-year old ICBMs. They are repeating Saddam Hussein’s mistake—developing weapons that oppose the United States symmetrically. Tanks and airplanes failed Hussein, but Iraqi insurgents have used suicide bombers and IEDs, decidedly asymmetric weapons, far more effectively against coalition forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan. A better R&D strategy for America’s enemies would be to develop robotic IEDs that combine off-the-shelf technologies—an explosive-stuffed model airplane guided by GPS, for example, or an IED built using a radio- controlled car with a video camera in its nose. The next arms race has only just begun.

[bemildred]

1. Yes. They will regret getting involved with this cyber-warfare and drone-war bullshit.

A much bigger can of worms than they have yet considered. Our military has a long-standing fascination with technology as a magic fixer for its military inadequacies, and to spook the natives with. But it aways bites them in the ass eventually.