Drones Over America

The buzzing of drones can be stress-inducing, especially when one knows their capabilities.

I was once at the U.S. Army command center in Iraq, and I observed the large monitors that presented the world through the eyes of drones and radar. If insurgents fired a mortar, the Americans knew the precise firing position of the mortar and could also see the location through their drones, before destroying the enemy with a push of a button

Given my experience in Iraq, when I found myself in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon on the other side of the fence, the buzzing of the Israeli drones overhead kept me up at night. One day, I was in an orange grove in Gaza, when suddenly — about one hundred meters away — someone fired off a Kassam, a primitive homemade rocket. The rocket flew wildly into the air, as if it was drunk. Luckily, it did not turn back at any point and land near me. The more dangerous bit was the buzzing of the drones in the sky and the visible observation balloons in the distance. It was at that time that I thought about the operator on the other end and his button.

What to do? If you start running away and the drones and the balloons see that, your chances of survival will be reduced dramatically. However, standing in place is suicide. It’s a classic case of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The dilemma surrounding drones isn’t always as mundane as with the drones in Gaza. For example, the Americans are currently embroiled in a debate over how drones have changed the rules and nature of war. The Founding Fathers framed the Constitution so that the president would have to ask Congress for a declaration of war. It was seen as perfectly reasonable that the decision to put men into harm’s way would be achieved though the people’s representatives.

The founders of the U.S. did not foresee that, in 2012, a president would be able to lead a war through the use of flying robots. The CIA has been flying over Pakistan for years, combating and killing with machines instead of soldiers. In Libya, American drones scouted and marked targets for British and French warplanes.

President Obama did not ask anyone for permission to lead these conflicts. In fact, he has stated that he did not see the conflicts as wars. He argued that since no U.S. soldiers ever set foot on Libyan soil, no soldiers were put in harm’s way. Peter Singer, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, recently challenged that rationale in an article in The New York Times. He argued that the danger drones posed to American lives might be more significant than it appears. After all, Faisal Shahzad, who attempted the thwarted Times Square bombing, was motivated to carry out that attack as a result of the drone wars in the Middle East.

The debate over drones has taken on a whole new meaning for regular Americans. It was recently announced that the Federal Aviation Administration must open the American airspace to commercial drones by 2015 and must develop procedural safety guidelines for the operation of such vehicles. Farmers will be able to use them to spray their crops, and police will be able to track suspects more easily. However, defenders of civil liberties are spreading scary narratives in which ordinary citizens are spied on by the government without cause and where paparazzi use drones to harass celebrities.

It looks like Americans will soon have to replace their “Beware of Dog” sign with one that reads “We Shoot at Airborne Intruders,” and they will have to get used to the incessant humming of those aerial vehicles. From a technological standpoint, this scenario is viable right now. Thanks to demand driven by military and intelligence services, drones are getting better, smaller and cheaper every year. The best models cost millions, but the low end models, which can be controlled via an iPhone, cost just a couple hundred dollars. A government group, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has created an artificial “hummingbird” that weighs 19 grams and can remain silently suspended over a target for up to eight minutes. In three years, drones will be even smaller and more effective. All that is left to decide is at what altitude a citizen will be allowed to shoot the pesky things down