Pete Willows Word count: about 830 Revised: October 23, 2012 willows@aucegypt.

edu

The Smart of War

An Ostentatious Bird The unmanned aircraft program used by the United States (the aircraft are called drones) is controversial. And this is not just because they are monitoring sovereign airspace, and launching Hellfire missiles into nations like Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that kill incidental civilians their inclusion in domestic duties in the US engenders worries at home over government invasion of personal liberty. Americans dont want to see drones hovering over their schools, playgrounds and shopping malls. But the US Department of Homeland Security has already been using them to monitor domestic borders for seven years. The drone program is in its infancy, with some analysts expecting to see 30,000 drones in the skies by 2020. Comparing the drone attacks and surveillance mission numbers of the George W. Bush administration with the Obama administration would be misleading for one thing, the technology is significantly further developed and more available today. One Predator Drone uses more bandwidth today, than the entire US Army used in the first Gulf War. For another thing, Bushs policy was reliant on a boots on the ground theory of security that means what it implies, which is soldiers in foreign lands with a clear mission to go get the bad guys with tanks, guns and traditional military aircraft. But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from mission creep the American public has lost interest in large scale troop mobilizations overseas. The nation-building rhetoric that ushered in the Obama administration is no longer in use. Now, Obama can kill from a clinical distance, with little or no home casualties, and too, ever the law professor, Obama is presently conducting remote-controlled warfare in a nebulous, if

not undefined legal arena. At least one US-born militant, the Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed in a drone strike, which raises questions of Americans killing Americans overseas, whom have not been extended the common courtesy of basic US Constitutional rights, rights which are the very fabric of the United States. And the Wars Drone On The United States Air Force is currently training more drone pilots, than they train fighter pilots and bomber pilots combined. And then there is the tandem drone program, marshaled by the Central Intelligence Agency, who does not issue numbers, and neither confirms nor discusses attacks and surveillance operations. Nor do they disclose their budget publically their drone operations are conducted in Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan as far as you know. The Predator Drone may be flown by satellite link, but the aircraft has to take off and land under the supervision of a pilot from a ground station. The pilots sit in padded chairs inside sprawling operation complexes that are located in upstate suburban New York, Nevada and Colorado. These drone pilots do not return to a military base after a traditional military mission with their adrenaline in full bloom, to talk through their mission with their buddies rather, they instead get into their family car and drive back home through the peaceful suburbs of their environs to pick up their kids from soccer practice. The conflicting lives they live takes its toll on them psychologically, and to what extent they experience post-traumatic stress disorder remains to be seen. These pilots spend a typical shift of 6 hours a day, watching close up, the lives of the militants they are tracking the pilots watch the militants playing with their kids, and talking with their wives in the vegetable souqs over a period of months. And then the kill order comes. This is much more personal than releasing a payload of bombs at 20,000 feet on a target they merely see flashing on their cockpit radar screen. The Conference of the Birds

Drone programs require continued logistical and operational development; especially so, in comparative data analysis thousands of drones in the air, some of which remain in the air for forty hours at a time, record massive amounts of video surveillance. The numbers are staggering (estimated at over 10,000 hours of video per month), and with current projections for expansion, those numbers will increase exponentially. The US military went to the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, and the RAND people turned to reality TV producers the reality TV people also have to view and sort through thousands of hours of video, to determine whats relevant. There is software available to assist in processing the images. But the dynamics of war and assisted regime change have taken a new tack arming persistent rebels, while hoping they win and stay friendly is a big gamble. NATOs custodial role in Libyas removal of Gaddafi may have seemed all rather neat and clean for western nations, but now those results are unclear. Currently, the world sits back and watches Syria descend into the systemic slaughter of civil war, as Beijing and Moscow refuse to back the recommended intervention plans of London, Paris and Washington. And all the while, drones continue to hover in fog and filth of air. The rising of birds in their flight is the sign of an ambuscade. -Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Pete Willows is a contributing writer to The Egyptian Gazette and its weekly edition, The Egyptian Mail. He lives and works in Cairo. He can be reached at willows@aucegypt.edu