The Increasing Threat of Weaponized Drones

Machines that can make their own decisions – called autonomous systems – raise ethical concerns, especially as it is now possible for anyone with computer experience and the right tools to build drones that can be weaponized.

Autonomous drones have been caught dropping explosives on U.S. troops, shutting down airports, and employed in assassination attempts. Azerbaijan recently used its Turkish Bayraktar TB2 unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) to great effect in its conflict with Armenia. A United Nations report says that deadly drone "hunted down" a human target without being instructed to do so. 

The autonomous systems being developed make staging such attacks easier and more devastating. The attraction to those who would kill political enemies is the drone's agility and the targeted attack. Kim Jong Un is thought to have assassinated his half brother with VX nerve agent in 2017. A year later, there was evidence that Russia may have used a Novichok chemical agent in England, in a failed assassination attempt of a former Russian spy and his daughter. The U.S. intelligence community linked the Russian government to the attempted assassination of Russian dissident Aleksei Navalny in 2020 with a Novichok agent.

Natasha Bajema, the director of the Converging Risks Lab at the Council on Strategic Risks, in Washington, D.C., has written, "Technologists and engineers who work on drones need to be aware when they develop applications that might be weaponized and exploited for deadly effect. And policymakers and military strategists need to be equally vigilant in defending against a highly agile new threat that, while its use has, gratefully, been limited to date, its potential for danger will continue to increase as commercial, off-the-shelf drone technologies mature and proliferate."

Related reading: Notre Dame-IBM Launch Tech Ethics Lab; Robotics researchers have a duty to prevent autonomous weapons; To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their strengths

NSA Snooping Strains US-Pakistan Relations

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has sought explanation from the United States over reports that its citizens have been a major target of intelligence surveillance and asked the latter to respect the privacy of its citizens.
The apprehensions were conveyed to US Chargé d’Affaires Richard Hoagland by senior Foreign Office officials at a recent meeting.

“We have taken up the matter with the US to ascertain veracity of the news and obtain facts of the matter. We are awaiting their response,” Foreign Office spokesman Aizaz Chaudhry said at the weekly briefing on Thursday.

A Guardian report earlier this week claimed that information obtained from the US National Security Agency’s data-mapping tool ‘Boundless Informant’ had shown that Pakistan was second among the countries most subjected to US intelligence surveillance with almost 13.5 billion reports in just one month — March.

`Boundless Informant’ catalogues the volume of intelligence being collected from different countries. Most of the intelligence has been gathered from computer and telephone networks. The tool, however, did not detail what intelligence had been collected by the NSA.

The country subject to more intense watch was Iran where 14 billion reports were obtained during the same period.

A senior official told Dawn that the Foreign Office, though unsure about the authenticity of the leak, was concerned about the intelligence, if any, being used against the Pakistanis living in the US and about violation of their privacy. The official said Pakistan considered the intelligence scam to be an internal matter of the United States.

Washington is facing growing international pressure to explain the previously undisclosed surveillance programme identified in the documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as ‘Prism’.

The disclosure is also likely to complicate relations with the US as the new government tries to build a working relationship with Washington.

Pakistani intelligence agencies, a source said, were particularly upset over the revelation about the intensity of the surveillance.

When US Secretary of State John Kerry visits Pakistan this month, he will be confronted with tough questions over drone war and the paranoid snooping programme.

Mr Kerry is due in Islamabad either on June 25 or 26.

The new government has taken a hard line on the drone attacks which have always been resented by Pakistan.

“There is an across-the-board political consensus with regard to Pakistan’s position on the issue of drone strikes. ...this matter is receiving priority attention of the government,” the FO spokesman said.

Source: Pakistan Dawn

State Dept: Drones Killed 4 US Citizens

The Obama administration Wednesday for the first time acknowledged killing four U.S. citizens in “counterterrorism operations” abroad.

The deaths of three of the Americans — Anwar al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son Abd al-Rahman Anwar al-Awlaki, and Samir Khan, all of whom were killed in drone strikes in Yemen in 2011 — had been previously reported. The death of the fourth, Jude Kennan Mohammad, a Florida native apparently killed in Pakistan, had not been.

Read it all here.

Related reading: Game of Drones; Obama's Drone Legacy; Americans Protest Drone Strikes in Pakistan

Game of Drones

Matt Hardy

With boots on the ground being costly politically, economically and diplomatically, it seems that week after week, drones are the most important front line weapon against Washington’s opponents in the War on Terror.

In a recent column I looked at the evolution of autonomous aircraft and their current status as the long arm of American foreign policy. The strike carried out last week by a US drone on Libyan-born al-Qaeda depyty Abu Yahya al-Libi in northern Pakistan is a case in point. The action was, according to America’s Defense Secretary Leon Panetta “about our sovereignty”.

By that, Panetta means that popping a Hellfire missile into the mouth of a cave inWaziristan is a means of safe-guarding American interests back in Cleveland. Well, assuming you get the right guy and the act doesn’t alienate so many more locals that you create a never-ending stream of new recruits.

But is it fair enough if one country is flying a robot plane through the airspace of another country and using it to deliberately kill a citizen of a third state? The morality and legality of targeted killings I will leave to those more experienced in the laws of sovereignty and ethics. I would, though, like to know two things:

1) Who decides who is guilty enough to make it on to a death warrant for Obama to sign?

2) How many “number twos” can one organisation have? It seems that we’re always nailing another “al-Qaeda number two” or “trusted lieutenant”. That’s one flat organisational chart.

Warfare on the cheap

Aside from those questions it is worth examining the phenomenon of drones (or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) in terms of why they are used, and what bonuses and costs they have politically. For using drones as a weapon of choice against terrorist cells is at the same time a precision tool and a blunt instrument.

The big tactical attraction with the robot aircraft is, in football terms, their “hang time”. A Predator UAV can stay aloft for up to 24 hours. They don’t sleep, don’t eat, don’t get stressed out, can see in the dark and after that 24 hour stint they’ll be ready to do another shift straight as soon as the fuel tank is topped up. And if something goes wrong and they end up as a pile of debris scattered over an acre of Afghan hillside, nobody needs to send them home in a flag-draped coffin. At just $4 million a pop, Predators are huge value for money.

Given the nature of the terrain where America is hunting terrorists, drones are an easy solution compared to inserting troops and much more cost efficient than using conventional fighter-bomber aircraft. You can have a drone circling a patch of turf day and night, just waiting for a target of opportunity or a particular individual to pop their head up.

Then it’s up to the controllers back at base to give the nod and fire the missile and … BANG! Instant job opportunity for a new al-Qaeda number two.

Strategic killing

In strategic terms, drones are a good way of continuing a war while everybody can pretend it’s not happening. Having a few battalions of Marines sitting in Pakistan or Yemen would be politically difficult, both for America and the “host” country.

And it’s bad for the Marines too when they keep getting their legs blown off by IEDs whilst fruitlessly chasing shepherds around the mountainsides.

Drones mean that politicians can say, “We’ve brought the boys back home,” while still making sure there are some positive bad-guy killing stories in tomorrow’s Washington Post. President Obama has been a bigger user of drones than his predecessor for precisely this reason.

Collateral damage

But this robotic presence is still a presence. And it’s here we find the drawback of this arms-length warfare: drones kill people. Sometimes, not the right people either. Naturally, figures vary, but drone strikes in Pakistan alone have been linked to up to 800 civilian deaths. Sadly that sort of figure is just a drop in the ocean considering the body counts that occur monthly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but one has the sense that using a drone to carry out these sort of killings makes it all the more remote from our minds.

However this sort of collateral damage is not remote from the considerations of Pakistanis. The apparent impunity with which America operates its unmanned aircraft over their skies has incensed the government in Islamabad. Especially when Leon Panetta tells them to shut the hell up because this is all about American sovereignty. The Pakistanis also see the drone attacks as counterproductive, creating opposition and resentment that plays into the hands of the terrorist groups.

Kill the bad guy, save his family

We know that these criticisms of the drone campaign must have some grounds because even the CIA is getting squeamish. This has seen the development of a “Lite n'Easy” model Hellfire missile – one with a smaller warhead. The idea is that firing one into the Hilux the bad guy is riding in won’t wipe out the whole of the wedding convoy he’s travelling with. Going to the trouble of inventing this solution is an indication that targeted killing from unmanned aircraft is considered a long-term plan.

Whatever the outcome of the American elections this year it’s a fairly safe bet that drones won’t be voted out. And as long as al-Qaeda keeps that sprawling hierarchy there will be plenty more targets for these graphically-named birds of prey to pursue.

Mat Hardy is a Lecturer in Middle East Studies for Deakin University, in Geelong, Australia. Mat Hardy does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations. This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Obama's Drone Strike Legacy

The Washington Post asks if drone strikes will become Obama's Guantanamo?

The Obama administration’s increasing use of unmanned drone strikes to kill terror suspects is widely opposed around the world, according to a Pew Research Center survey on the U.S. image abroad.

In 17 out of 21 countries surveyed, more than half of the people disapproved of U.S. drone attacks targeting extremist leaders and groups in nations such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, Pew said Wednesday.

But in the United States, a majority, or 62 per cent, approved the drone campaign.

“There remains a widespread perception that the U.S. acts unilaterally and does not consider the interests of other countries,” the study authors said, especially in predominantly Muslim nations, where American anti-terrorism efforts are “still widely unpopular.”

The White House declined to comment on the report. The Obama administration considers drone strikes one of its most effective tools to combat al-Qaeda — preferable to conventional war because the strikes produce fewer American casualties and meant to be more palatable abroad because the use of drones keeps U.S. troops on the ground to a minimum.

“In order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives, the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones,” White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan said in April in a detailed and wide-ranging defence of the policy. He said targets are chosen by weighing whether there is a way to capture the person against how much of a threat the person presents to Americans.

The global drone campaign under President Barack Obama has killed a number of high-value leaders, arguably more than any other method including more than a decade of special operations raids inside Afghanistan. A strike in Pakistan this month killed al-Qaeda’s most recent second in command, Abu Yahya al-Libi.

Read it all here.


Jim Kouri reports:

On Sunday, Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani accused Obama of ordering unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, strikes in his country to boost his political image, according to an Israeli security source who monitors Islamic nations.

More than a few political commentators and counterterrorism analysts on Sunday morning's television news shows spoke of President Barack Obama's abysmal week dealing with a lethargic economy, accusations of intelligence leaks and misstatements that provided ammunition for his opponents. But the criticisms didn't end there. Prime Minister Gilani's stated that Barack Obama is "using drone strikes in Pakistani tribal regions for political motives."

The Prime Minister's verbal assault came a day after President Obama allegedly ordered a "sharp increase" in drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas aimed at killing members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

"The United States is into the election year and Obama's decision has been aimed at gaining political mileage," Pakistani Prime Minister said during a press conference.

The U.S. officials were quoted as responding that Obama's decision to increase drone attacks reflected the "mounting U.S. frustration with Pakistan over a growing list of disputes."

But Gilani said that dialogue is going on with the United States regarding a supply line issue in light of the recommendations of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security, which continues to demand an apology from the United States over the killing of 24 soldiers in November during a drone strike.

"The Pakistanis want what Obama gives to others at the drop of a hat -- an apology. But the problem is Obama usually apologizes for the actions of other people and the past [Bush] administration. He apologizes on behalf of the American people or for American policies from previous administrations. Have you ever heard him apologize for something he did or he ordered done?" asks political strategist Mike Baker.

"Who is the more moral person? A man like Bush who believes in using military force? Or a man like Obama, who is against the use of military force -- unless he lied all those years -- but uses it to score political points so he can continue his true agenda? Which is the fundamental transformation of America," Baker noted.

On Thursday, the U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stated in Kabul that the United States was running out of patience with Pakistan. He alleged that the country was being used as a safe haven by terrorists from neighboring Afghanistan.



Related reading:  US Pays Bounties on Leading Somali Terrorists