- In Defense News, former Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force for International Affairs Bruce Lemkin argues that "the current discussion of so-called 'drones' and their employment [is] highly politicized, perversely, skewed and often grossly misinformed." Broadly summarized, Lemkin argues that their is no strategic or operational difference between drone strikes and a campaign of air strikes by manned aircraft, only a technological difference that actually makes drones more tactically efficient. Thus, critiques of the moral virtue and strategic utility (i.e. do the strikes kill more terrorists than they create) of drones are only valid if one is willing to make the same argument against a conventional air campaign. (And personally, I think Lemkin misses a key point by noting that, theoretically, the increased "linger time" that UAVs permit allows for greater discrimination in targeting, and hence less collateral damage in the form of non-combatant casualties than air or missile strikes).
- One sign of the effectiveness of the Drone War is the desperation of al-Qa'ida and the Taliban to counter it. Consequently, Reuters and the National Journal report that a new English-language, jihadi magazine set up by militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan called "Azan" has appealed to Muslims around the world to come up with technology to hack into or manipulate drones. "The Ummah is not short of brilliant minds," the magazine writes. "Any opinions, thoughts, ideas and practical implementations to defeat this drone technology must be communicated to us as early as possible because these would aid the Ummah greatly in its war against the Crusader-Zionist enemy."
Since "Azan" doesn't exactly have a mailing address or a home office that one can go to to pick up a check, winning entrants will have to accept their reward on credit -- specifically, fifty "companions" in the afterlife. While it is tempting to joke about this, crowd-sourcing military problems has proven effective in the past (i.e. U.S. company grade officers did this to disseminate COIN knowledge in Iraq and Afghanistan), and the U.S. military has long been concerned about the possibility of somebody remotely hacking drones and other delivery systems. Just last month at the Hack in the Box Conference in Amsterdam (great name, btw) a German computer security consultant claimed, and demonstrated, that he could hack into an airplane's control system using standard Android applications. (Of course, the FAA and other aviation experts immediately poured cold water on Hugo Teso's claims, but this is not to say that somebody could not find a workaround someday).
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| Chinese ANS-207 Drones on parade in 2009: Photo by Vincent Thian |
- Another sign of the Drone War's effectiveness is the number of countries seeking to obtain military UAV capabilities. As per Steve Coll's concern that I discussed last week, Defense News reports: "Chinese UAV Development Slowly Outpacing West," and the Associated Press warns "China Emerging as a New Force in Drone Warfare." This reporting confirms an earlier piece in Foreign Policy on the global proliferation of UAVs (with the AP piece arguably ripping off P.W. Singer's opening). Yet the phenomena Singer describes isn't really new. I remember participating in an Army wargame in 2010 in which it was assumed that the notional adversary would have an advanced UAV capability by the time period the scenario covered, roughly 2020.
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