The United States’ Remote Controlled War

In order to kill Anuar el Aulaka, the United States used a remote controlled airplane from thousands of miles away. It’s about a drone, which literally means bumblebee. This name was given to some apparatuses that try to reproduce this insect’s ease of flight in order to increase the versatility and depth of North American planes. Actually, more than 7,000 drones have existed since 2001, but especially in the last two years, they have acted in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and, more recently, in Yemen and Libya. The majority of them are nine meters long, but there are some in action that are less than a meter long, and the newspaper The New York Times has recently informed that they are experimenting with models that are the size of a fly.

These artifacts, that in their most advanced versions could be active in less than a decade, will completely change the concept of war and espionage. They will give the United States the capacity to penetrate the most impregnable of places in a practically uncontainable way and will require a total rethinking of attack and defense systems in every county.

This isn’t science fiction. The revolution is already underway. Actually, the North American Air Force is training more specialists in flying planes without crews than traditional pilots for espionage or bombing missions. The drones were fundamental for finding the location of Osama bin Laden and for combating against insurgents in Afghanistan.

In the last four years, the United States has killed around 2,000 supposed terrorists in Pakistan with these planes. The drones have been used against Muamar el Gadhafi, and a version of something bigger than a plane without a pilot, the so called Global Hawk, is used to photograph North Korea and served to follow the evolution of the Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima.

The most well known of the drones is the Predator, the one that is used with the most frequency in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The majority of them are directed with a simple joystick by specialists seated in front of computer screens in the offices at the CIA. They are launched from North American bases in the Near East and return there after their missions without having anybody at those bases intervening in the process.

The smallest model, generally used by the Pentagon, called the Raven, is 90 centimeters long, is manually transported by soldiers and is generally used in order to obtain information about mountainous zones or zones with dangerous access before the ground troops penetrate them. Actually, a better, manual version of this model is in its test phase and this apparatus is capable of flying 15 miles per hour and successfully landing in an area as reduced in size as the top end of a pole. In models the size of a wasp, they are trying to reproduce the wings and the movements of this animal.

It isn’t difficult to forecast a future war directed from thousands of computers and in which the labor of the soldiers would be to arm and launch minuscule toys from hundred of miles away from the enemy. Among the experiments under way is an experiment that could allow computers to program the timing and movements of the drones, even without human intervention.

All of this technology has the risk, as Peter Singer, an expert in military robotics and author of the book Wired for War, affirms, of dehumanizing and reducing the human cost of wars, which can make wars more frequent. “Now add in a situation where Americans are mainly only risking their machines. The bar to war was already lowering. Now you take it all the way to the ground,” affirms Singer in an interview with Mother Jones.

The drones can change wars into something that that Singer calls “war porn,” a mere recording that if to which adequate music is added to will appear more like a video game than the tragic reality of death. Seen from this other point of view, technology is not responsible for human cruelty. All of the visualized wildness in World War I didn’t impede the outbreak of another world war 30 years later. For the rest of them, the accelerated development of drones can also, like other military technological advances, have civil applications.