Under Barack Obama, the frequency of drone strikes on terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas has risen tenfold, from one every 40 days during George Bush’s presidency to one every four. John Brennan, Mr Obama’s counter-terrorism chief, has made it clear that as America draws down its forces in Afghanistan over the next three years, there will be no let up in drone strikes, which, he claims, are partly responsible for al-Qaeda being “on the ropes”. The grim Reaper’s ability to loiter for up to 24 hours, minutely observe human activity from five miles above while transmitting “full motion video” to its controllers and strike with pinpoint accuracy has made it the essential weapon in America’s “long war”.
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Not all the arguments favour UAS, though. Advocates of continuing investment in manned aircraft point out that current drones depend on two-way satellite communications. If the datalink is broken the remote pilot will lose direct control of the aircraft, which then has to rely on pre-loaded software and GPS guidance. For routine missions that may be all right, but for missions requiring constant oversight, the vulnerability to electronic jamming or a direct attack on a communications satellite is an Achilles heel. Datalinks can also go down without help from an enemy.
A related problem afflicting today’s drones is the slight delay between the remote pilot sending an instruction to the aircraft and its response (known as latency). In contrast, a pilot in the cockpit can react instantly to a threat and take evasive action. Drones operating over Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia are fairly safe: the enemy is powerless to hurt them. But when Predators were first introduced in Bosnia, there was high rate of attrition because the Serbs had a large number of Soviet-era surface-to-air-missiles. Another problem is that UAS have not been cleared to share civil airspace over America and Europe by air-traffic controllers. The Federal Aviation Authority began trials in 2010, but it will not be easy to dispel fears that if a pilot were temporarily to lose control of a UAS, it might smash into a passenger airliner in shared airspace.
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The ethical problems do not end there. There may be nothing in the laws of war saying combatants must be willing to put themselves in harm’s way, but some find creepy the idea of a UAS pilot stationed in Nevada driving home for supper with the family a few hours after surgically killing dozens of people in Pakistan. The peculiar detachment of drone warfare has given people close to the receiving end of drone attacks some success in depicting America’s use of them as the cowardly action of a bully sheltering behind superior technology. Looking farther ahead, there are fears that UAS and other robotised killing machines will so lower the political threshold for fighting that an essential element of restraint will be removed. Robert E. Lee said “it is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would grow too fond of it.” Drones might make leaders fonder of war.
http://www.economist.com/node/21531433?du
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