War by remote control, how drones changed modern warfare

23:42The Lightning Bug was a small aircraft, so small that it would be attached to a much larger one. And once that was in the sky, the lightning bug would be deployed and split off from it. They were used to take pictures over enemy territory. And then the drones would swing back round and they would crash land almost. At a designated location in time, the drone shut off its engine and deployed a parachute system. And then they would be picked up by intelligence corps. and then that film would be taken back to US bases and it'd be processed and pieced together and then you would try and create a picture of where the enemy were.

24:24They were also used, quite interestingly, as almost wingmen to crewed aircraft, to bombers going in. They would fly off the wing of them to draw enemy fire. They would be like a deflective shield for aircraft. It would look like more aircraft were coming in and so it would hopefully protect the central aircraft going in and fulfilling its mission. They were disposable in the air in order to try and reduce the risk to American pilots' lives.

24:56The U.S. military believed the lightning bug drones saved American lives, and so they called it a success. The only problem was, initially, the lightning bugs had a short lifespan. They weren't particularly reliable. They would crash an awful lot and you would just lose drones. And that's why well over 1 ,000 of them were used during Vietnam because they just churned them out almost disposably to try and use them for those intelligence and surveillance gathering uses. While more than 200 drones were ultimately shot down, their use prevented the loss of at least that many reconnaissance crews and undoubtedly many more.

25:54The American Pronunciation Guide Presents «How to Pronounce Vietnam War» The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. It was a bloody and brutal conflict fought by a large number of drafted soldiers, meaning they had no choice but to go fight. And this meant many, many Americans had a loved one in Vietnam. The longer the war went on, the more people in the United States took to the streets to protest against it. Some 175 ,000 people from all walks of life, with differing ideologies and purposes, marched from the White House to the Capitol. Once again, like in World War I, there was public pressure on politicians and the military to end the war and bring American soldiers home.

26:59And the impacts of this protest movement would be felt in American politics for decades to come.

27:17Five months ago, Saddam Hussein started this cruel war against Kuwait. Tonight, the battle has been joined. In 1991, the United States went to war against Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. For the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, there was no draft. The U.S. military was all volunteer. And from the beginning, the American military was focused on keeping their own casualties as low as possible. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the tiny country that is a primary source of oil for much of the Western world. Saddam Hussein chooses to invade Kuwait because he wants to have the financial gain of the vast oil reserves in Kuwait.

28:05And so he goes into Kuwait thinking that America will not send in vast amounts of troops onto the ground to stop his military. They won't repeat the mistakes of Vietnam. He says that America is not the type of country that can take 10 ,000 casualties in one battle. In some ways, Saddam Hussein was right. What he does not realize, however, is that there has been vast advancements in technologies in the U.S., vast advancements in microcomputing, in the ability to achieve precision strike, in aircraft, in everything that you need to win a new, super-fast, high-tech war. By 1991, the U.S. military had an assortment of new technologies to conduct precision war.

28:55Laser-guided missiles, stealth aircraft, and better drones. Pilotless planes could fly higher, go farther than they ever had before, and had advanced computer software on board. And they were ready to use them. And it's at this point the drone becomes an incredibly useful surveillance and target acquisition tool. So it is able to then fly back and to tell U.S. targeters where Saddam's troops are. And then they can send in the ever more advanced cruise missiles And they can send in the precision bombing and the U.S. Air Force aircraft in to go and bomb those troops. And the U.S. dropped a lot of bombs, over 88 ,000 tons on Iraqi military and civilian infrastructure, killing thousands of people.

30:04It's here that you start to hear stories coming out that when Saddam's troops saw drones flying high above them, they knew that it meant certain death and certain destruction was coming.

30:20And so they tried to surrender to the drones in the sky. The live video feedback showed five Iraqi soldiers waving white flags as they surrendered to the drone. It's the first time in the history of warfare that you had a human try and surrender to a robot.

30:45During Operation Desert Storm, precision weapons seemed to do their job. The war only lasted about a month. There was no massive protest movement like Vietnam. And the U.S. military lost 143 soldiers, a relatively low number. And then something happened that would totally change the game. You start to see this coupling of the lethal targeting and the utility of the drone itself. And this continues. Now, drones became armed with missiles. The angel in the sky watching out for soldiers had now become the angel of death. The Air Force's Predator System, its unmanned reconnaissance and strike plane, hunts enemies covertly from the sky, attacks on commands received by satellite, and removes enemy leadership with precise geographic target information.

31:36And so you have the merging of the drone and the precision missile into one integrated system.

31:43James Rodgers:But it's good enough if we see a truck or an HVT, a high-value target, that we need to prosecute immediately that we would be able to at least scare them a lot. It's a precision asset, and it's very, very accurate.

31:59With this new weapon, some in the U.S. military believed they'd fulfilled the promise of the Kettering bug, the Norden bombsite, and the lightning bug. It was the culmination of generations of research and development. And it suddenly gave the U.S. high command a godlike ability to stalk enemies and kill them at a moment's notice.

32:23You do definitely get the sense that you are sort of a guardian angel. You're like an eye in the sky for them. You're sort of their third eye, if you will.

32:35When we come back, the drone wars begin.

32:56Hi, my name is Lindsay. I'm calling from unceded Duwamish territory, and you are listening to ThruLine from NCR. I love the show. I've been binging all of the episodes for probably two weeks now. the ones that I think I'm not going to be that interested in are always the ones that I end up being the most interested in and learning the most from. So thank you for all the work and labor and knowledge that you put out there. Bye. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Save now during the Summer Splash event at Whole Foods Market. Find great everyday prices on 365 65 brand ground beef for the grill and ice cream for dessert.

33:46Look for yellow sale signs on ready to cook beef or chicken kebabs to level up with savory marinades, spices and rubs and complete your cookout with cherry pie and new balsamic chicken salad from the prepared foods counter. Get summer splash savings now at Whole Foods Market. From Spider-Man to a new Steven Spielberg movie, we know the TV and movies you'll want to watch this summer. I'm excited about this film. I just know suspense, intrigue, aliens, and I'm like, all right, Spielberg, I'm in. Check out the summer guide from Pop Culture Happy Hour, listen on the NPR app, or wherever you get podcasts.

34:23Part 3. Death from Above. For the angel of death spread his wings on the blast, and breathed in the face of the foe as he passed. And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, and their hearts but once heaved and forever grew still.

34:57Lord Byron

35:13Good afternoon on my orders the United States military has begun strikes against al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan On October 7th, 2001, a plane glided in the sky over the city of Kandahar, Afghanistan.

35:38It looked down on Earth like a giant hawk circling its prey.

35:48But there was nothing alive inside it. No pilot. This was an MQ-1A Predator drone, controlled by operators thousands of miles away. It was a 27-foot war machine carrying Hellfire missiles, and it was looking for a target. It flew so high that it would have been virtually undetectable by anyone looking up at the night sky.

36:23Almost one month had passed since the U.S. was attacked on 9-11 by al-Qaeda, a terrorist group based in Afghanistan. The Taliban, the rulers of Afghanistan, were harboring al-Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, and it appeared they were in the crosshairs of the U.S. military. But on the ground on October 7th, the stillness of a Kandahar fall night would tell you nothing of the things that were to come. Yet.

37:19use limited numbers of special forces fighters and their allies to avoid a costly full-scale invasion, saving thousands of American lives.

37:39Mullah Omar sat in a building with no idea that a predator drone was above him, watching and waiting for the command to fire. U.S. military and intelligence staff were keeping tabs on him through a satellite feed from thousands of miles away. But what they were seeing wasn't some crystal clear image of the ground. Nothing even close to that. Back at that point, it's like viewing the world through a kind of grainy straw, I guess. You're looking through a straw at a small part of that country, focused in on what these people are doing. but you can't really tell. They're kind of just filling in the gaps.

38:19Even with this fill-in-the-gaps type of information, the U.S. military personnel still had to make a call. They had to decide where the drone should shoot its missile. They take the strike.

38:48But they end up blowing up a truck near to his compound, sends loads of smoke into the sky, loads of dust into the sky, and Mullah Omar escapes. Just think of the implications for that. What different war would we have had if a drone had taken out the head of the Taliban on the first day of the war in Afghanistan?

39:20The Predator drone strike missed its mark. Mullah Omar would live. And the U.S. ground invasion of Afghanistan would follow. But this wasn't seen as just a failure. No, in fact, the drone program continued. So this tells us that many of the military personnel in that room, the officers, drone operators, and intelligence experts, must have on some level realized that they just witnessed the beginning of a new era in warfare. I've spoken to a few of those who were in the room on that first strike. And they were in the room thousands of kilometers away, watching the video feed. This is that first case of remote warfare.

40:05And you can't escape feeling that that is a fundamental revolutionary change in war. It's that achievement of that long-standing U.S. Air Force ambition that goes back to U.S. air power thinkers all the way back in 1917. After that first failed strike against Mullah Omar, the Predator drone, the great technological breakthrough, would be used over and over by the CIA and U.S. military under President George W. Bush. We can talk to about 50-plus drone strikes during the Bush administration. There are some who feel like that if they attack us, that we may decide to leave prematurely. They don't understand what they're talking about if that's the case.

40:57Let me finish. There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on.

41:16In 2003, the U.S. invaded and occupied another country, IDOC. And as that war intensified, drones were used there too. And they continued to get more advanced. So the technology improves, of course. That is the nature of humanity. We improved technologies over time. We were ever more high tech. Drone communications got more reliable. The aircraft could fly longer and faster. And with every year, their impact on the war increased. Here's the key thing about a drone, I guess. If you have a piloted aircraft within a conflict, you have to send it from a base to fly over. It can take maybe 10 minutes to get there.

41:58It then has to fly, hit the target, turn around and go back. and it cannot linger because the longer it lingers, the more it is at risk of being shot down. With a drone, it flies high in the sky, almost unseen, and it just loiters. It can sit there above troops, above a key area where you know the Taliban are operating, and it can just wait until a target presents itself.

42:33like an eagle hovering over its prey looking for a field mouse on the ground and then when it sees it it can swoop in and it can strike and that's what a drone can do if you want to kill in war and you believe that that war is something that increases your national security then you want to be effective as possible and so the drone is an effective way to kill in that regard

43:00We've lost thousands of American lives, spent nearly a trillion dollars, alienated allies, neglected emerging threats, all in the cause of fighting a war for well over five years in a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks. When President Obama campaigned for office in 2008, the U.S. was embroiled in two wars, both very messy, that had caused the death of thousands of U.S. soldiers and thousands more Afghan and Iraqi civilians. Public support invariably faded as the body bags started to come home, as the improvised explosive device, the IED, started to make it so that you couldn't have troops on the ground.

43:43The infantry personnel couldn't trust the ground they were walking on. Well, it was at this point that President Obama was as elected, of course. He made a promise to the American people. He would withdraw them from the bad war in Iraq, and he would win the good war in Afghanistan. But over time, he would reduce that risk to American military lives, and he would make it so there would be less of a human footprint, an American military human footprint on the ground, because we no longer had the appetite for the war on terror. As a candidate for president, I pledge to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end for the sake of our national security and to strengthen American leadership around the world.

44:30But that leaves you with a dilemma, right? How do you continue to take on the global threats of terrorism, but without deploying your troops on the ground? Well, here is where the drone is a panacea, because it allows you to deploy force thousands of miles away with a minimal footprint. And this, of course, in turn, reduces the risk of the threat to life to American military personnel. But if you have a reduction of the amount of troops, or at least you're trying to reduce the amount of troops, then you want to fill that gap. And that gap for Obama, who becomes known as the drone president, is filled by the drone.

45:13And under the Obama administration, there is a real change in strategy. It starts off with what we call signature strikes. Now, signature strikes are based upon a predefined terrorist signature. And that signature can be based upon the gender of a target. And it could be based on how you define a terrorist, right? So, for example, they could be males of fighting age in regions where the Taliban are known to operate. What do you think the fighting age is? Oh, man. 15? 16? 14 years old and above is what we're talking about him.

46:01And again, it's hard to tell an age through the grainy image of a drone.

46:11And that, it's argued, leads to a confirmation bias. You think you're seeing a terrorist conducting terrorist activity and so you take the strike because it fills out all of your tick boxes. And so you've had vast amounts of mistakes that happen as a result of signature strikes. The aftermath of a drone strike in Pakistan's South Waziristan region in 2008. amongst the victims were numerous civilians. I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey and for a short period of time the mental tension and fear eases. In Yemen's rugged and barren countryside people live in constant fear.

46:57Fear of what they call the killer planes or drones. 18 male laborers including at least one young boy 14 year old Saleh Khan were killed by a U.S.

47:09James Rodgers:drone. As the drone war spread around the world to Somalia and to Yemen to those places that we don't really talk about because we don't know so much about the drone wars there but you do have weddings being hit with hellfire missiles from drones or funerals being hit. It was an astonishing bulletin today. Another public enemy taken out by the United States. The Al-Qaeda leader called the most dangerous man in the world, the American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. A lot of these strikes come with the commander-in-chief seal of approval. The Justice Department has acknowledged that four American citizens had been killed in drone strikes.

47:48Today, the president said only one of them was specifically targeted. New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki, a top al-Qaeda leader in Yemen. If you're killing a U.S. citizen, that's going to come straight from the commander-in-chief. Mr. Obama has deployed drones more aggressively than President Bush. For that, the president offered no apology. When was the last time in the history of American warfare the commander-in-chief was directing strikes on the battlefield? The decisions that we are making now will define the type of nation and world that we leave to our children. The Obama administration says it has killed more than 2 ,300 enemy combatants by counterterrorist strikes.

48:30But it acknowledged the harsh reality that the once-secret drone program may have been involved in anywhere from 64 to 116 civilian deaths since 2009 in areas outside active war zones. Despite all of the controversies surrounding the use of Predator drones, at a White House press center, President Obama still found a way to make a joke about it. The Jonas Brothers are here. They're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys don't get any ideas. I have two words for you. Predator drones. You will never see it coming.

49:20You think I'm joking?

49:25Some estimate that during the Obama administration, there were almost 1 ,900 drone strikes. The total number of civilian casualties during the Obama drone wars has never been definitively recorded, mostly because we're depending on news reports and NGOs. The U.S. government is resistant to providing that information, and often count anyone who is of fighting age as a combatant, whether or not they were carrying a weapon. The range for civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes are in the hundreds to a couple thousand. In a leaked Defense Department document provided by a whistleblower to the news outlet, The Intercept, it was reported that between 2012 and 2013, quote, U.S.

50:09special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. Well, thank you very much and good afternoon. As president, my highest and most solemn duty is the defense of our nation and its citizens. Last night of my direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless precision strike that killed the number one terrorist anywhere in the world, Qasem Soleimani. You look back to January 2020, and you look back to President Trump's drone strike on General Qasem Soleimani, who is a state representative of the Iranian state, one of the most high profile and high ranking military commanders of the Iranian state.

51:01That drone killed a state representative in a third-party country in Iraq without that country's permission. So the drone violated the sovereignty of Iraq. Qasem Soleimani was an Iranian military commander who'd been directing lethal attacks in Iraq for years. The U.S. had long blamed him for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and allies there. The precedent that is set here is that it is okay to kill representatives of a nation state by lethal drone strike in nations of a third party without their approval. What does that mean for the future of drone warfare? As a lot of hostile nations around the world are getting armed drones, will they start using them against representatives of the West when they're in Yemen or in Iraq?

51:56The US founds the United Nations along with the victorious allies after the Second World War. It's meant to be an upholder of international law. If we get to a point where the US is undermining the laws that it created itself, then how do we expect anyone else to abide by those international laws when it comes to drones?

52:17James Rodgers:Those international laws say that drones must only be used to target combatants and military objectives, and that all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid or minimize civilian harm. But as more and more countries are turning to drones for their warfare, civilian deaths continue to be an inevitable consequence. When we look to future war, we need to see that any future conflict is going to have a drone element. And so if you want to know what your country is doing in your name, then you need to understand drone warfare.

53:01James Rodgers:That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. ThruLine was created by me and Ramtin Adablui. This episode was produced by me and Ramtin and... Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane. Victor Ibeez. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguini. Irene Noguchi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkl. Thank you to Courtney Theofin, Casey Herman, and Farai Masika for their voiceover work. Also, thanks to Anya Grunman, Tamar Charney, Greg Myrie, Adriana Tapia, and Narenda Matariegos. Thanks also to Johannes Dergi, Liana Simstrom, Julia Redpath, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Gilly Moon.

53:46James Rodgers:Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.

54:22From Spider-Man to a new Steven Spielberg movie, we know the TV and movies you'll want to watch this summer. I'm excited about this film. I just know suspense, intrigue, aliens. And I'm like, all right, Spielberg, I'm in. Check out the summer guide from Pop Culture Happy Hour. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. This message comes from Avalara. What's it like running a business with Avalara? No thinking about tax and compliance. It's handled. Calculating, filing, validating accurately and audit defensively. Avalara. Agentic tax and compliance with confidence.