Sudden Justice

"We’re living in a time where drones are increasingly the weapon of choice , particularly if you have to get at people who are living in countries with which you’re not technically at war. America is not at war with Yemen, or Somalia, but they use drones there to kill people. That’s the first point about it. Secondly there is the whole question of whether these things could, potentially, become so sophisticated, they could act without much human involvement. In March 2020 what people are calling the first ‘lethal autonomous weapons system’—they’re called LAWS in the trade—was deployed. It was a Turkish manufactured killer drone, which was operating above General Haftar’s forces in Libya. It loitered around and then, without any human input, saw a convoy of troops or people, swooped down in kamikaze fashion and blew up. That’s the first instance anyone can think of where a drone was just programmed to look for certain types of targets, and found them. “Drones really will change the nature of warfare” The Turks make very good drones and are selling them all over the place at present. Poland has just bought some. It all interests me, as does the whole phenomenon of people sitting in a Portakabin in Nevada or New Mexico, dealing out death in Afghanistan . They’re just going to work in the morning. Apparently backache is the big problem. In fact, the last time I went to the O2 arms show in Docklands, I was very struck by a stand which had ergonomically designed seats for drone operators. We’ve reached a real nadir here, worrying about their backache, but they do long shifts. Apparently, psychologically, they get very, very interested in the lives of the people that they’ve got eyes on, that are under surveillance from reconnaissance drones. They say, ‘Oh, look, there’s that old woman with a cart of apples coming across that square. I wonder what she thinks, or is doing.’ You take an interest in the life of a tribal village, basically. And then comes the point where you have to zap somebody, and you just press a button. Within seconds, a hellfire missile will blow somebody to pieces—hopefully not entirely innocent people, although that regularly is the case. The idea that it’s somehow antiseptic is quite wrong, because you have to look at the aftermath. And if you see so much as a hand twitch, you send another missile in to make sure the person’s dead. Some of them do suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, even though they haven’t actually been near a battlefield. Yes. We’ve just seen the devastating effect in the latest bout of fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Armenian armour was just smashed into scrap metal by Turkish supplied drones. You can see the footage of it happening—these Turkish weapons, which Azerbaijan had bought, smashing up all this Russian supplied armour. It’s amazing. Drones really will change the nature of warfare. They’re a win-win weapon, because there are no casualties on your side. It’s not like losing a highly trained and expensive air force pilot, if a plane is shot down. There’s nothing to capture, no hostages. It just does its stuff. ISIS started to dabble in this area with hobby drones, which you can get from Amazon. There’s not that much difference between an Amazon drone and a military drone, especially the small ones. Ukraine has a lot of people with high technical competence and a very developed tech sector. Western Ukraine has become a big centre for CGI for the movies and some software development. It also has a large number of hobby-aircraft people. They’ve made all sorts of drones to attack Russian troops and rebel troops in eastern Ukraine. They’re pretty sophisticated. I think we’re going to see more and more of this, because they’re cheap as chips relative to a modern big weapon. There are also Predator and Reaper drones, which are not cheap— we’re talking $20-25 million, and then, say, $300,000 per hellfire missile. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a very good book. Chris Woods has really done his work on the legal aspects of it, on the psychological status pre-op because drone pilots are quite low-status compared to top gun Air Force pilots. A lowly drone guy just gets in his car and goes to work in a cabin with two other people. And then, at five or six o’clock, he knocks off and half an hour later it’s bath time for the kiddies. Until recently they refused to give them military decorations, no matter how many terrorists they’d killed. He’s very good on all of that. It’s a marvellous book."

"Drones actually have a very long history. They go back to World War Two, and even before, where very crude drones were used as target practice by Navy gunners. They were used in the Yom Kippur War [in 1973] by the Israelis, for surveillance. The same was true by the US in the Vietnam War. On the US side, surveillance drones really came into their own in the wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, as by then US satellites had enormous bandwidth capability and could transmit large amounts of data from drones to military headquarters in the US. Along with GPS technology, this enabled the use the drones to very precisely pinpoint the location of things that they were photographing. But you are right that 9/11 was a watershed. People had talked about weaponising drones but there had been strong resistance to it until then. In my book I quote a deputy administrator of the CIA saying “the gloves come off” after 9/11. That’s when the decision was made to weaponise drones. “The gloves came off after 9/11. That’s when the decision was made to weaponise drones.” I think of Chris Wood’s book as my encyclopaedia on drones. The book is a little dense, but it is densely packed with facts. He is a very meticulous reporter and it seems he has uncovered every imaginable written source that exists. Although he himself is clearly very anti-drone, he has managed to gain extraordinary access to people in the US military system and get on- and off-the-record interviews with them in which he learned an extraordinary amount about the way drones are used. I think anyone who writes about drones owes him an enormous debt of gratitude for the remarkable research that he’s done. He found out a lot about the Pakistani experience of drones, in particular lots of individual drone strikes that killed civilians by accident, and he reported it from both ends. The US military always wants to cover up its mistakes; it doesn’t need to own up to killing innocent civilians. So there have been a number of NGOs and journalists who have doggedly pursued the other side of the story. It is children and civilians who are also being killed by drone strikes, and Chris Woods has been at the forefront of uncovering that. The unknown unknowns. It is hard to know what you don’t know. Obama has a strong penchant for secrecy, and in a way drones have brought out the worst in Obama’s personality, because it is so easy to keep drone strikes secret. Until recently, the Obama administration was extraordinarily secretive about drone strikes. I mention in the first paragraph of my book that Leon Panetta, the former head of the CIA, when writing his memoir, was not allowed to talk about the existence of drone strikes. The military censors took it out of his memoir, which is bizarre and ridiculous, as the media were constantly reporting drone strikes but he wasn’t allowed to confirm that they existed. In the last year or so, the Obama administration has tried to be a little bit more transparent. It has released some of the legal thinking that it claims legitimated the killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki, the American citizen in Yemen. Just three weeks ago it released the results of an audit that they have been conducting for a several months, and they claim to give a fairly definitive accounting of the number of civilians killed by accident by American drones. But I noticed that all the media that I read couldn’t report on it with a straight face. The statistics were condemned as inaccurate almost as soon as they were released. So we know that drone strikes exist, but we know very little about individual drone strikes. We may read a short paragraph in the middle of the Washington Post that yesterday a drone strike in Yemen killed such and such insurgents, allegedly, but you don’t hear the other side of the story from Yemen. A lot of it is left in darkness."