Life and Death in Droneworld

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LIFE AND DEATH IN DRONEWORLDShaw / Review Essay

REVIEW ESSAY FOR CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES

Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt, Terminator Planet: The First History of DroneWarfare, 2001–2050. New York: Dispatch Books, 2012. 179 pp.

Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. New York: OR Books,2012. 241 pp.

Ian G.R. Shaw, The University of Glasgow

The word “zeitgeist”—meaning the cultural climate of an era—tends to be thrownaround loosely these days, but the word usefully captures the rise of the drone ingeopolitics today. Drones are officially called remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs) orunmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). They are “unmanned” because the “pilot” does notsit in the cockpit of the plane, but manipulates the vehicle from a control station thatcan be thousands of miles away. This is the case with the U.S. and U.K. drones usedin Afghanistan as part of “Operation Enduring Freedom.” The drone operatorregularly monitors live visual feed from the cameras and sensors housed beneath the

nose of the plane. Sitting in a distant cubicle, the operator interacts with the dronethrough a series of screens and joysticks—giving rise to the criticism that dronewarfare resembles a “video game.”

There are two separate drone programs run by the U.S. today, each with their ownlegal mandates, technologies, and geographies. First, there are the drones used inofficially declared battlefields such as Afghanistan, and overseen by the U.S. military.Second, there are the Predator drones that are overseen by the Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA) and flown outside of recognized theatres of war, such as thosesurveying Pakistan’s tribal areas (see Coll, 2004, 526-536 for information on theorigin of the CIA’s Predator program). Proponents argue that drones are capable of performing the “dull, dirty, and dangerous” endurance missions that do not require apilot in the cockpit, and therefore do not put American lives at risk. In a recent 2012

speech, John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s chief counterterrorism official,argued that drones are “ethical” and “wise” because they allow the U.S. to penetrategeographic areas troops are unable to traverse safely. He added that the technologyis very accurate at eliminating targets: “It’s this surgical precision—the ability, withlaser-like focus, to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al-Qa’ida terrorist whilelimiting damage to the tissue around it—that makes this counterterrorism tool soessential” (quoted in Council on Foreign Relations, 2012).

And yet, the “tissue” around the “cancer” that Brennan euphemistically refers to,continues to be damaged. In Pakistan, both the ruling government and the widerpublic are outraged that the CIA’s drones have persistently violated their nationalsovereignty for 8 years, and have killed many innocent civilians. According theBureau of Investigative Journalism (2012), there have been between 474 and 884Pakistani civilians killed by drone strikes inside of FATA. Under the Obamaadministration these strikes have accelerated, and now total over 340. Since theirinception, the CIA’s strikes have existed in a peculiar state of “secrecy”: everybodyknows about them; U.S. government officials frequently allude to their efficacy; andyet the specific details about the CIA’s program are kept outside of the courts andwider public oversight. Opponents argue that this secrecy is responsible for shoringup the power of the executive branch of the U.S. government at the expense of democracy and compliance with international laws of war, and has increasinglylowered the very threshold of going to war because no pilots are put at physical risk.As Peter Singer argues in a New York Times article entitled “Do Drones Undermine



Democracy?”:

The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don't have to sendsomeone's son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid thepolitical consequences of the condolence letter—and the impact that militarycasualties have on voters and on the news media—they no longer treat the

previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.

Unmanned aerial vehicles have now become the primary weapons of an increasinglyparamilitarized U.S. foreign policy. In the decade following the attacks of 11September 2001, CIA-operated drones, military drones, “Special Forces” drones, andeven U.S. State Department drones, now fly in the skies above Afghanistan, Iraq,Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. It is unprecedented in human history for a singlesuperpower to have this level of constant, instantaneous surveillance of such vastgeographic areas. Both of the books under review here provide a compelling set of critiques aimed directly at understanding this brave new “Droneworld.”

For readers of the popular website TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turseneed little introduction. The weekly “Tomgrams” (or articles) they write and oversee

editorially are billed as a “regular antidote to the mainstream media.” The dispatchesprovide opinion and information on issues ranging from the “war on terror” to thesocial effects of neoliberalism and climate change. Terminator Planet is the first bookfrom the pair. Each of the twelve chapters draws on articles posted earlier on the

TomDispatch website. What unites the entries is the authors’ analysis of the rise of remotely piloted planes and how they are rewiring the “American way of war.” ForEngelhardt, the U.S. is exercising its age-old “inalienable” right to act as judge, jury,and executioner on a planetary scale, attracting a storm of legal challenge andinternational condemnation. Often presented in pithy, polemical, if not downrightscathing language, the book’s critiques are engaging and sobering. A common tropethroughout the book, for example, is a comparison of U.S. drone warfare to theTerminator films starring actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzeneg-ger. The movie’s memorable “Hunter-Killer” robots, which searched for humansurvivors across a ravaged, skull-encrusted landscape, is a fictional dystopia thatEngelhardt finds irresistible for political satire. The future is now, and with it comes anew chapter in the history of assassination.

Unfortunately the book has no real structure to it, other than the chronological orderin which the articles were published. This is a problem, especially when the book’sunavoidable repetitiveness becomes obvious. Nonetheless, Turse and Engelhardtcover the main issues well. In one of their stand-out chapters—chap. 6, “America’sSecret Empire of Drone Bases”—Turse draws on original research to produce lists of the sixty or so drone bases that are integral to U.S. military and CIA drone operations.Outside of the many training facilities within the continental United States, the bases,which are often no more than small, stripped-down airfields called “lily pads,” areconcentrated in and around the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. Bases haverecently been constructed on the island nation of Seychelles, as well as in Ethiopia,Djibouti, and another in Saudi Arabia (“probably”). From these locations the CIA andSpecial Forces strike suspected al-Qaeda operatives in Somalia and Yemen. Lesserknown sites include bases in Italy, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar,Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. Additionally, in two related chapters, Turse reports on thewidespread crashes of Predator drones, which, for him, present a much-neededcorrective to the “awe” with which some journalists describe drones. Due to humanerror, climate, and technological failures, there have been over seventy“catastrophic” Air Force drone mishaps since 2000 (thirteen in 2011 alone); eachaircraft costs over $2 million.



Engelhardt hits his stride in chapters 9 (“Offshore Everywhere”) and 11 (“RemotelyPiloted War”). The first reports on changing U.S. military strategy with an emphasison smaller, mobile, technologically advanced units positioned outside of the MiddleEast. The combination of U.S. Special Forces—which number 60,000, in some 120nations—with Predator and Reaper drones is indicative of a new geopolitical strategy

to eliminate “whoever” “wherever,” with a small “footprint,” as the raid that killedOsama bin Laden in Pakistan illustrated. “From lily pads to aircraft carriers, advanceddrones to special operations teams, it’s offshore and into the shadows for U.S.military policy,” Engelhardt writes (120). In chapter 11, Engelhardt argues that dronewarfare represents the apex of an increased alienation, or detachment, between U.S.foreign violence and a concerned domestic citizenry that dates back to the 1973ending of the draft by President Richard M. Nixon. For Engelhardt, therefore, dronewarfare is remote, both literally and figuratively.

Two final themes round out the book. The first is the precedence given to the“future.” Modern drones are still quite basic technologies and need significant humaninvolvement. But the future hints toward increased autonomy, intelligence, high-definition surveillance, and cooperation between drones, as they work together in“swarms” that resemble groups of insects. Future scenarios for the employment of drones—lifted from the U.S. military’s Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, FY 2011–2036—are used as illustrations of the fertile brains at DARPA (DefenseAdvanced Research Projects Agency) and of the futures that DARPA and for-profitcompanies such as General Atomics might bring into reality. But, as Engelhardtreminds us, futuristic military technologies are never utopian solutions: from the“electronic battlefield” of Vietnam, to Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense initiative,to Donald Rumsfeld’s “netcentric” warfare, technology has been a perennial falseprophet, and, what’s more, a source of blowback. “Since we are incapable of thinkingof ourselves [the U.S.] as either predators or Predators, no less emotionless

Terminators, it becomes impossible for us that our air ‘war’ on terror is, in reality, amachine for creating what we call ‘terrorists’” (69).

Because Engelhardt and Turse have left the chapters in their book almost untouchedfrom the online articles, redundancy across the text is inevitable. Depending on howyou look at it, this repetition is either understandable or a sign of failed opportunitiesto add detail to the book’s polemics. What makes the book a success then can alsohold it back: Engelhardt’s clever barbs are eminently engaging, but ultimately beg formore analysis, especially in a book with a title that claims to be the first (modern)history of drone warfare. At its best, though, Terminator Planet , and the

TomDispatch.com website and authors behind it, remain go-to places for criticalcommentary on the science-fiction present we have woken up in.

Medea Benjamin’s book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control goes beyondTerminator Planet in a number of significant ways. While retaining much of the

journalistic bite Turse and Engelhardt exhibit, Drone Warfare is a much morepersonal document. Benjamin—a long-time antiwar activist and founder of Code Pink

—puts emotional flesh on the skeletal analysis provided in Terminator Planet : fromtales of horror in Pakistan’s tribal areas to stories of hope and activism in the book’sclosing chapters. By the close of the well-structured book, the reader has a clearoverview of the complex topographies of drone warfare: from detailed figures of themilitary-industrial complex that drives companies like General Atomics to spawnReaper after Reaper, to an excellent (if all-too-brief) introduction to the legality of drone warfare. The book excels at bringing to light some of the contradictions thatdefine drone warfare. Take, for example, the little-discussed fact that unmannedplanes need far more human input that manned planes—168 individuals are needed



to keep a Predator in the air for twenty-four hours. Such is the appetite for droneoperators that by 2011 the U.S. Air Force had converted seven Air National Guardsquadrons into intelligence units and was training an additional 2,000 analysts. Intotal, by the end of 2011 the Air Force had an estimated 1,100 drone pilots and 750sensor operators on active duty.

In an illuminating chapter on the military-industrial complex, Benjamin charts the riseof defense contractor General Atomics. In 1990 General Atomics purchased UAV, acompany established in the early 1980s by Israeli engineer Abraham Karem.Unhappy with the intelligence the CIA was getting in those days from satellites overBosnia, then CIA director James Woolsey sponsored Karem to develop a new type of spy plane capable of long endurance surveillance. In the late 1980s General Atomicsbuilt the Gnat-750 reconnaissance plane, a predecessor to the modern Predator. By2010 General Atomics, which employs 5,000 people at its facility in Poway, California,had sold more than $2.4 billion worth of equipment to the Pentagon, most of theincome coming from the sale of 430 Predator and Reaper drones. Benjamin explainsthat the relatively small company didn’t gain political capital overnight. Since 1998,General Atomics has spent $21 million lobbying members of Congress, according tothe Center for Responsive Politics. Lockheed Martin, creator of the aptly-namedHellfire missile (each of which costs $68,000), spent $142 million influencing the U.S.legislature between 1998 and 2011.

In the chapter “Pilots without a Cockpit,” Benjamin presents snapshots of the livesand opinions of drone pilots, who very often work mundane twelve-hour shifts. Oneoperator was quoted as saying: “I kept hoping somebody would pull out a rocketlauncher”, adding “At least [then] it would mean I was making good use of thePredator’s time and resources. Besides, blowing up things was much more interestingthan watching men sit around in the dark smoking cigarettes, dancing and holdinghands.” (p.98). Flipping her attention to the other side of what operators call “Death

TV,” Benjamin explores the lives of those people bombarded by Hellfires in Pakistan. These stories present the human cost of the “collateral damage” that is virtuallyinvisible in most accounts of drone warfare. Consider also the thousands of mainlyPashtun tribesmen that have been displaced from the tribal areas due to the dronestrikes—inflaming ethnic violence in Karachi (118) that estimates that over a millionPakistanis, mainly Pashtun tribesman, have been displaced from their tribal areasdue to the U.S. covert program of targeted assassinations—inflaming ethnic violencein Karachi. Indeed, Benjamin constantly highlights the “blowback” that trails dronewarfare like a shadow. The legal ramifications, in particular, are a source of worry forthe author. Drone warfare, which is illegal according to international norms, sets atroubling precedent. In the fallout from U.S.–born Anwar al-Awlaki’s assassination in

Yemen in 2011, many legal scholars cried Constitutional foul. Yet Obama’s top legaladviser, Attorney General Eric Holder, answered his critics in March 2012 by replyingthat due process does not guarantee judicial process. Benjamin finds in StephenColbert, the satirical figure from Comedy Central, the most humorous and depressingtake on this post-legal America: “Due process just means there is a process that youdo” (143).

Despite the grim nature of much of its contents, Benjamin’s book finishes on anencouraging note. The Obama administration wages drone warfare with seemingease—circumventing, for example, the War Powers Resolution (which mandatesCongressional approval for war) in its attacks against the Libyan government in 2011—but national and international resistance to drone warfare is beginning to grow. Inchapters entitled “The Activists Strike Back” and “Opposition to Drones Goes Global,”Benjamin describes the tactics activists are using to resist and delegitimize dronewarfare: from “die-ins” outside of military contractors to the arrest of fourteen



activists (the “Creech 14”) at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. While only in anembryonic stage, the anti-drone movement—as Benjamin shows—is displayingremarkable imagination. Benjamin herself plays an active role in the antiwar effortsshe describes and should be commended for producing this thoughtful and well-researched investigation into the very dark side of Droneworld. Her book isunflinching in its commitment to diplomatic and demilitarized solutions to the very

problems that drone warfare generates and exacerbates.

Beyond providing little-known information about this new way of warfare, both booksserve a unique function by connecting the dots; in Terminator Planet this manifestsitself most markedly in a series of compelling projections of likely geopolitical futures;and in Drone Warfare, Benjamin chronicles the mounting global opposition to thedrone army.

Historical Contextualization

What both books lack is a much-needed historical contextualization. In particular, thetribal areas of Pakistan emerge from a colonial geography1 that must be understoodalongside the CIA’s proxy war in the 1980s. Modern drone warfare, then, complete

with its technological visions of full-spectrum domination and swarms of autonomousfighters, remains fundamentally connected to a very human past.

The colonial history of Pakistan is important to the CIA’s program of targeted killings;it sets into motion a contemporary legal order that renders the residents of Pakistan’sFederally Administered Tribal Areas as outside of the law—and so devalues thehuman lives that are surveyed and killed. British engagement with the region beganin 1849 after Punjab was annexed, with FATA constructed as a frontier region by theBritish Raj; a type of buffer state created to ensure Britain did not rub shoulders withRussia. The Pashtuns were allowed theoretical autonomy, but the reality was thatthey were indirectly controlled by tribal leaders, as cemented in the Frontier CrimesRegulations (FCR) of 1901. Crafted by Lord Curzon, the legislation appointed a“political agent” for each of the agencies in FATA, who was invested with

considerable executive (and largely unaccountable) power. This situation did notchange after Pakistan gained independence in 1947; adopting the FCR and leavingthe constitutional status of FATA largely untouched. Article 247 of the 1973Constitution of Pakistan clearly spells out the extra-legality of FATA: clause 247.3states “no act of Parliament shall apply to any Federally Administered Tribal Area orto any part thereof, unless the President so directs.” This situation does show signs of changing, with developments allowing for political representation among the tribalarea’s residents. But the region’s extra-legality is compounded by another form of extra-legality that emerged in the region in the 1980s.

Beginning in the 1950s, Pakistan and the U.S. periodically formed alliances thatdirectly and indirectly enhanced the power of their intelligence agencies, the CIA andISI (Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate), which are uniquely enabled to conducttheir work in secret. Leaders of the two countries pursued joint goals that were oftenat odds with democratic ideals, creating small but extremely powerful “states withinstates” that lacked legislative and public oversight. In 2011 Admiral Mike Mullen,former chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused the ISI of nefarious activitiesoutside of Pakistan (e.g., sponsoring Taliban-linked militants). Mullen also chargedthat the Haqqani Network, a violent insurgent group allied with the Taliban, “acts asa veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.” But only twodecades earlier the Haqqani Network, along with the ISI, acted as a veritable arm of the CIA in Washington’s decade-long proxy war that saw millions of dollarschannelled to the Afghan mujahideen. This complicated geopolitical history2 informs



present- day drone warfare, particularly when it comes to understanding the splitbetween the public face of Pakistan’s government and its private actions. In a leakedcable from 23 August 20083 then prime minster Yousaf Raza Gilani was quoted assaying that he was not opposed to Predator strikes against targets in the tribal areas:“I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in theNational Assembly and then ignore it.” The relationship between the ISI and CIA

today appears “fractious,” particularly after a 2011 NATO airstrike that killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers, but the links remain in place.

One of the most significant revelations of recent months was the publication of astory in the New York Times entitled “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’sPrinciples and Will.” The article, which generated intense debate, discussed theweekly White House Situation Room meetings involving President Obama and his topsecurity officials. During their regular Tuesday meetings, the assembled officialscompile a kill list of targets designated for elimination. As the Times explains,

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war andtorture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “killlist,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls themacabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity fora drone strike at a top terrorist arises—but his family is with him—it is thepresident who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

It is precisely this executive “managerialism” that characterizes drone wars today: adiffuse “dronification of the political” where the conduct of targeted killings is definedby its bureaucratic style; where soldiers are replaced by civilians, analysts, andtargeters; where politicians in Situation Rooms replace generals on the battlefield;where war is no longer declared and has no foreseeable end; and where war is wagedby PowerPoint presentations in Washington, D.C., every Tuesday morning.

Swarms of books on drone warfare will no doubt be forthcoming, as writers scrambleto piece together our unmanned zeitgeist—one that in many ways has defined

Obama as commander-in-chief. The authors of both Terminator Planet and DroneWarfare are to be commended for presenting their arguments in such an accessiblestyle. The books are ideal starting points for those wishing to gain an insight into a“war” that shows no signs of abating.

References

Becker, Jo, and Scott Shane. 2012. Secret “kill list” proves a test of Obama’s principles and will. New York Times. Available at www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on- al-qaeda.html?

_r=1&pagewanted=all; accessed 17 September 2012. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. 2012. Covert war on terror.http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/; accessed 9 October 2012.Coll, Steve. 2004. Ghost wars: The secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001. London: Penguin Books.Council on Foreign Relations, 2012. Brennan's speech on counterterrorism. April 2012. Available at

http://www.cfr.org/counterterrorism/brennans-speech-counterterrorism-april-2012/p28100; accessed 9

October 2012 The Guardian, 2010. U.S. Embassy cables. Available at www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/167125; accessed 17 September 2012.Shaw, Ian. G. R. 2012. From baseworld to droneworld. Antipode. Available athttp://antipodefoundation.org/2012/08/14/intervention-from-baseworld-to-droneworld/#more-1753;accessed 1 October 2012.Shaw, Ian G. R., and Majed Akhter. 2012. The unbearable humanness of drone warfare in FATA, Pakistan. Antipode 44 (4): 1490–1509.Singer, Peter. 2012. Do drones undermine democracy?’ New York Times. Available at www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/opinion/sunday/do-drones-undermine-democracy.html?pagewanted= all&_r=0; accessed1 October 2012.

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