Robot Drones May Have Vital Niche Applications

In a wide-ranging exclusive interview to the Website of the ECSSR, Dr. Austin Long (Assistant Professor, School of International and Public Affairs, Member of the Arnold A. Saltzman, Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University, US) covered issues of global geopolitics and^th Annual Conference on April 9-10, under the title: ‘The Future of Warfare in the 21^st Century.’

Dr. Austin Long

warfare, military contractors, robot drones and history of empires. The interview was conducted following Dr. Austin Long’s lecture titled — Asymmetrical Warfare and International Terrorism — delivered at the ECSSR’s 18Annual Conference on April 9-10, under the title: ‘The Future of Warfare in the 21^st Century.’

Following is the edited text of the interview:

Q1: Private Military Security Companies have come in for a lot of criticism over violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. These private contractors are meant to support the regular soldiers, then how is it that they are alleged to have caused so much violence?

Answer: Well there are some armed contractors, whose job is typically to protect. Now when one is protecting, it can either be very passive (the security personnel can say I will keep my gun holstered) or it can be very aggressive. For example, these security contractors can ask people to get out of the way of a convoy or a diplomat coming through and if the crowd does not move fast enough the security contractors may start shooting as it could be assumed that the people must be miscreants, otherwise they would have got out of the way. I think a lot of problems came with contractors who had that kind of attitude. I think that approach probably peaked in Iraq around 2005-06. The war then was escalating and spiraling out of control and there was not as much oversight of contractors as it should have been and I think since then the US has learnt a lot of lessons, it’s got a lot better in controlling contractors it uses for security. The other thing though, people don’t talk about it as much, is that Afghanistan itself has many of its indigenous private contractors. These are Afghan private military companies and this makes it really tough because no matter how much difficulty US government has in controlling its own contractors you can imagine the Afghans have even more so, and so President Karzai issued a decree to ban these private military contractors. The problem was that there are unintended consequences. Suddenly, all these guys who used these weapons became unemployed and that is not so good. A lot of them were protecting development contracts, like USAID used to hire them to protect a well. If you make them go away then who is going to protect the well. So then that well doesn’t get built. So I think there are a lot of issues related to the oversight but I do think in general it has gotten better, even if it’s not ideal.

Q2: It has been said that there are more regulations governing the cheese industry today than they are in place to regulate private contractors?

Answer: Maybe. But there are laws in place even if it is very hard to apply them. So you are in Afghanistan and you want to try a private military contractor. But if you try him in Afghanistan, it’s widely acknowledged that that judicial system is maybe not where you want it to be. If you try him in the US, it can be harder because you’d have to bring all the evidence and witnesses etc. to the United States. In some cases, it may be that the accused has broken Afghan laws but didn’t break US law. So one of the ways being currently tried to get around this is to make the contractors subject to the same law which the US military is subject to, what’s called the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). In that way, if you break the law in Afghanistan and if we can’t prove it in Afghanistan it doesn’t matter, we already have a code in place, we will try you in the United States. One such example was the soldier that last year killed 17 Afghans in Qandahar. So they are trying to bring contractors under the UCMJ.

Q3: In your panel discussions at the conference, it appeared you supported drone attacks in the Af-Pak region. This policy has created a lot of controversy as it impinges on issues of national sovereignty as well as the threat of ‘collateral damages,’ in other words the killing of innocents. How do you respond to such questions?

Answer: You see these operations are being conducted as there is some cooperation from host nations. Of course, Pakistan government does not want to come out and say we don’t let Americans come in and use drones on our population. But, the Pakistanis have benefited from drone attacks as well. One of the first drone attacks in Pakistan was against Nek Mohammed, who was a threat much more to Pakistan than the United States. On the other hand, the alternatives to these operations are also not good. I mean, we do not know how many people were killed in the Swat operations, we know millions were displaced. So, no matter how bad drone attacks have been they haven’t at least displaced millions of people. So, you have to look a little bit at what the alternative to drones are.

Q4: The thing is that now the drone technology is going to be fully automated. There is the danger of ‘killer drones’, who can make their own decisions in selecting their targets and eliminating them. How do you view such concerns?

Answer: I have been actually looking at the drone issue since before 9/11 and even then there was talk about trying to get the human out of the equation, because the human in the loop is a real point of weakness for the drones. You see, in a conventional remote controlled drone, you are reliant on satellite communications or direct radio. And that’s alright if you are operating in a very permissive environment, when nobody’s trying to fight the drone in the sky, such as in Afghanistan, etc. But what if you were trying to use drones against China or Russia, or such countries. They can jam those communications. China may even be able to shoot down the satellites if you are relying on satellite communications. Then your drones are not going to work. So if you want to use them more efficiently you want to take the human (controlling the drones) out of the equation. The problem is, as you have identified. You would have created a ‘killer robot’ that is going to make its own decisions. So there is a lot of debate on this issue.

However, I can think of niche applications for such drones. So when you have to use force against a country you would first want to get rid of its air defenses. At that time, you might consider using drones to only target its radars.  The drones won’t attack people, they won’t attack buildings, only when a specific frequency of radar hits it, will it attack the radar.

Q5: In your lecture at the conference you spoke about asymmetry of military might. It is interesting to note that in history, big civilizations were not brought down by rival civilizations but by uncivilized, barbaric forces. This is the biggest asymmetry. Perhaps, we can put the USSR versus Afghanistan in the same paradigm. Your views?

Answer: Historically this has been a big asymmetry. But if you look a lot of these societies, before they were attacked by the ‘uncivilized’ forces, they had considerably weakened internally. If you look at the Roman empire, for example, it had come a long way and weakened from within. One of the questions today is how well is the US doing internally and here again the evidence is mixed. There are a lot of people who contend that the US has passed its prime. They were saying this in 1980s also, when Japan was thought to overtake the world and that didn’t come true. On the other hand, we currently see the US facing economic problems, and even tensions between the Republicans and Democrats. I mean this is a real issue as the country has become polarized, these parties can’t seem to compromise on politics.

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Drones: Terminators With Gaming Console Joysticks!

By Dr. Adil Rasheed

Article Published on Website of the ECSSR (3 June 2013)

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, governments and militaries around the world faced a hideous enemy who could morph and blend into the landscape after carrying out asymmetric kamikaze and shoot-and-scoot attacks.

The difficulty in identifying, tracking down and taking out a terrorist required the development of a new and unconventional form of warfare, one which combined search and reconnaissance capabilities as well as the ability to shoot down and eliminate the threat with minimal risk of collateral damage and with few military casualties.

Inevitably, the solution came from cutting-edge technology, particularly the revolutionary innovations taking place in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), popularly known as drones.

This technology proved highly beneficial for militaries, as the large-scale, conventional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proved inadequate and very costly (both in terms of lives and money) in eradicating the threat of terrorism.


In contrast, drone warfare provided a more effective, less violent and highly cost-efficient alternative to conventional warfare and so it became the preferred option for the Obama administration in conducting the ongoing war against terrorism.

In fact, the technology has now become so ‘convenient’ that it is being frequently used in missions that are considered “too dull, dirty or dangerous” for manned aircraft. In fact, the game consoles wizards are fast replacing fighter pilots of old aircraft as operators of lightweight UAVs. Thus, the tendency to overuse drones in military operations has in itself raised a new set of legal and ethical issues for the technology.

Over 70 Countries Have Drones!

But before addressing some of the legal aspects, it would be important to gain a better understanding of drone technology and its rapid advancement. A drone can be defined as an aircraft which has no human pilot on board. Its flight is controlled either autonomously by computers or through remote control by a pilot situated in a distant location on land or in another vehicle.

Drones have become so popular and pervasive today that according to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, published in February 2012, at least 76 countries already have military unmanned aerial systems. The GAO report adds that the number of countries with drones has ‘nearly doubled’ in the span of seven years.

In fact some drones, particularly Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAVs), have now achieved worldwide fame that arguably matches the star status of some of the most advanced fighter jets and bombers of our times. The names of Predator (armed with Hellfire missiles), the Reaper and the surveillance aircraft, Global Hawk now bask in international limelight. However, militaries also use UAVs for a variety of other purposes and applications too such as reconnaissance, search and rescue, logistics, research and development applications, etc.

According to some military aviation experts, UAVs today even have the potential to eliminate the use of piloted aircraft in the not-so-distant future. More important, a new swarm of small and insect-like drones are joining the military fleet, adding a surprising twist to a rapidly unfolding hi-tech tale. For years, the US military (particularly its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA) has been working on developing ‘micro-air vehicles,’ i.e. ultra-small flying robots capable of performing surveillance in ‘dangerous’ territory.

The Drone Bugs

According to DARPA, these drone bugs have a wide variety of uses. For example, when fitted with chemical sensors, these insect drones can detect traces of explosives in suspected buildings and caves. Again, these insect-like drones can be equipped with small video cameras that could show whether a building is occupied and whether those inside are civilians or combatants. They could also be equipped with microphones to record sounds and conversations.

For example, the DelFly Micro, is “the smallest flying ornithopter carrying a camera in the world” and measures less than 10cms from one wingtip to another. Then there are the small kamikaze drones that can destroy enemy targets by crashing into them. The drone named ‘Switchblade’, developed by the US technology company AeroVironment, carries a video feed and can locate a hidden enemy like a sniper and kill him. A similar kamikaze drone, called the ‘Devil Killer,’ has been developed by South Korea. But the US military is taking a step further by using neuroscience technology to hack into insects’ bodies, whose movements are then controlled by micro-machines placed on them.

Another promising breakthrough is the control and coordination of a fleet of drones from one computer. It is claimed that a computer software called Ballista, built by the company DreamHammer’s, could enable a single operator to control many drones simultaneously by using an intuitive computer interface. Thus, the movement of several drones being controlled by this software and all of them do not have to be aerial vehicles, as some may be UAVs, while others could be unmanned wheeled rovers, watercraft or even submarines. Thus, one person at the controls could launch a full-scale offensive of drones through air, land and sea.

Drones in Commercial Airspace

Again, drones of all shapes and sizes are not only revolutionizing military technology, they are also about to change civilian lives. Their non-military applications are growing by the day, and they are already used in oil-gas-mineral exploration, search and rescue operations, detection and dousing of forest-fires, agricultural surveillance, commercial aerial surveillance, remote sensing, transportation of various kinds of payloads, etc. Even household drones will soon be available for cleaning and dusting the floor.

Last year, the US Congress passed a bill which requires the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to issue regulations on integrating drones into commercial airspace by September 2015. Thus, we are fast approaching the time when anyone, at least in the US, can buy a drone over the counter with a few hundred dollars. In the words of Peter W. Singer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the opening up of the US national airspace to commercial drones would do “what the Internet did to desktop computers.”

However, the commercialization of drone technology is currently facing three important impediments: safety, privacy and insurance. There are concerns that despite legal provisions mid-air collisions between manned aviation (airplanes and helicopters) and unmanned vehicles or even among UAVs could occur frequently. In addition, increased use of private drones (particularly small drones) could intrude upon individual space and violate privacy as drones could pry into homes or offices and transmit images and sounds in real time to their operators stationed far away. Again, insurance companies are reluctant to provide coverage for aerial drone accidents as these unmanned flying objects could fall and cause incalculable damage to people or properties below them.

Convenience to Kill!

However, it is the military uses of drone technology which has really stirred a hornet’s nest for its advocates. One of the pet peeves of peace activists and human rights campaigners that oppose the use of drones by the military stems from the very benefits the technology provides. It is said that because drones are cheap, highly effective, seemingly risk-free for their operators and are adept at minimizing civilian casualties, it is tempting governments and militaries to employ them more often. Many human rights activists charge that it is this convenience that has allowed US military to carry out hundreds of drone strikes on hapless human targets in Afghanistan, Northwest Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia and other regions of the world.

According to estimates by the New America Foundation, there have been 355 drone strikes in Pakistan and 66 in Yemen till date. In February of this year, US Senator Lindsey Graham estimated that about 4,700 people have been killed in America’s drone war, many of whom were innocent civilians. Again in February of this year, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism published its estimates of deaths caused by drone strike in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, which, it said, ranged between 3,072 and 4,756.

Again, many legal experts around the world are alarmed by the impunity with which drones allegedly breach international law, violate the sovereignty of nations and carry out extrajudicial killings. Concerns have also been expressed over the lack of transparency, oversight and regulation in these campaigns. Many civil rights advocates were outraged when the Obama administration publicly acknowledged for the first time that four US citizens have been killed in drone strikes since 2009 in Pakistan and Yemen.

Breach of International Sovereignty and the Human Cost!

US President Barack Obama recently addressed most of these concerns by signing a new “presidential policy guidance” on when the US can use drone strikes. On May 23, 2013, he made a groundbreaking speech and declared that he is now going to restrict the use of drone strikes.

He proposed the institution of special courts to decide on targeted assassination of terrorism suspects under new legal regulations to prevent any possible violations. He also said that drone attacks will now be carried out primarily by the US military rather than the CIA, and only after a new test has been passed to ensure that all other alternatives to avoid such strikes have been exhausted.

Human rights campaigners greeted this announcement but continued to have reservations. Many called on the US President to publish the new legal tests that have to be cleared before a drone strike is carried out, as the details of these tests have only been read by the US Congress.

Despite the various legal and ethical challenges attached to the use of drones, it is clear that this technology has now become so popular and widespread around the world that it would be difficult to stop its spread and growth. Therefore, the big test ahead lies for governments, militaries, legal institutions and human rights organizations to properly regulate the uses of this technology for the good of mankind. Like it or not, drones are here to stay or as Peter Singer puts it: “This is a powerful technology. No amount of hand-wringing is going to stop it.”

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