Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Hide and Seek

This week, the U.S. Army announced its "Top Ten Greatest Inventions of 2008." It's pretty clear what the Army is most excited about: the ability to see and kill the enemy from where you aren't.

Guerrillas and terrorists already have this ability, in the form of improvised explosive devices. They also have two other advantages: the element of surprise (through indigenous deployment) and fewer compunctions about collateral fatalities. To counteract these advantages, the Army needs the ability to scout and fire from places where soldiers aren't vulnerable to attack. That's what this year's celebrated innovations deliver.

First on the Army's list is the XM153 Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station:

Capable of being mounted on a variety of vehicles, this system provides the capability to remotely aim and fire a suite of crew-served weapons from either a stationary platform or while on the move, using the system power of the host vehicle. The system affords increased Soldier protection since the gunner is not exposed. It enhances target acquisition, identification, and engagement capabilities for non-turreted light armored vehicles; and also situational awareness during both day and night conditions using day and thermal cameras.

As you can see from these photos (PDF), the system turns a nonturreted vehicle into a turreted vehicle, except that the gunner doesn't have to be near the turret. He can "remotely aim and fire" any of its weapons. And he doesn't need night-vision equipment; the gun's thermal camera does that for him.

Next on the list:

The Projectile Detection Cueing 4-Corner System is a low cost acoustic gunfire detection system capable of detecting and locating the origin of incoming gunfire events. The Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station Lightning is a lightweight common remotely operated weapon station capable of supporting small arms weapons. ... The operator can monitor, control, and command both PDCue and CROWS Lightning from a single user interface. The integrated system increases Soldier effectiveness in detecting and locating enemy sniper positions, and provides the Soldier the ability to automatically move remote weapon stations to the detected sniper threat.

This works with the CROWS system above: From wherever you hunker down with the user interface, you can acoustically trace the location (PDF) of anyone firing nearby and send your "remote weapon station" to take him out.

Further down:

The Enhanced Mobile Rapid Aerostat Initial Deployment Vehicle system combines multiple intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities onto a single, integrated platform. ... The system gives remote operating units the ability to quickly employ the system's combined capabilities to detect imminent attacks and take the appropriate actions to defeat enemy forces.

An aerostat is a buoyant aircraft. You can get a pretty good idea of the concept from these Raytheon photos (PDF): You float artificial eyes up into the sky, locate the enemy from there, and kill him.

And finally:

The One System Remote Video Terminal A-kit is an innovative modular video and data system that enables Soldiers to remotely receive near-real-time surveillance image and geospatial data directly from tactical unmanned aerial vehicles and manned platforms.

This AAI brochure (PDF) illustrates the basic technology: From wherever you are with your portable screen, you tap into a nearby drone and scout the whole area without poking your head out.

The overall pattern of these innovations is a gradual correction of guerrilla and terrorist advantages. We can't ambush, fire, and bomb as freely as the enemy can. We're much more vulnerable, emotionally and politically, to casualties among our fighters. We need the ability to hunt bombers and snipers patiently and precisely, without killing civilians or exposing our soldiers to easy attack. Step by step, technology is making that fantasy real.

Bombs, Innovation, and Afghanistan

In today's New York Times, James Dao reports that Afghan IEDs

are becoming more common and more sophisticated with each week, American military officers say. This year, bomb attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan have spiked to an all-time high, with 465 in May alone, more than double the number in the same month two years before. At least 46 American troops have been killed by I.E.D.'s this year, putting 2009 on track to set a record in the eight-year war. ... At the current rate, I.E.D. attacks on Afghan forces could reach 6,000 this year, up from 81 in 2003, an American military official said.

At least three of the lessons we drew from Iraq seem to apply in Afghanistan. First, IEDs enable insurgents to strike with a level of precision that would be impossible from a distance. Second, IEDs can be assembled from inexpensive, readily available components, such as fertilizer, artillery shells, and cell phones. Third, instead of risking human lives, you can hunt or disable IEDs with dogs or robots. The bomber isn't risking his life. Why risk yours?

Afghan insurgents are exploiting the same cheap technology that worked in Iraq. According to Dao, "The bombs are often made with fertilizer and diesel fuel, but some use mortar shells or old mines that litter the countryside. Some bombs are set off when vehicles pass over pressure plates. Others require remote control, like a cellphone. Still others detonate with a button or a wire touched to a battery." Likewise, we're using familiar detection methods: dogs, robots, and drones.

So what has changed? One difference is a lower level of technology in Afghanistan. Sometimes this works to the insurgents' advantage:

With few paved roads, Afghanistan is even more fertile territory for I.E.D.'s. than Iraq, where hard pavement often forced insurgents to leave bombs in the open. Not so in Afghanistan, where it is relatively easy to bury a device in a dirt road and cover the tracks.

But it can also make them vulnerable. U.S. officials tell Dao that IED deployment networks connect top layers of "financiers, logistical experts, bomb designers and trainers" with lower layers of "bomb planters, often villagers or nomadic herdsmen paid $10 or less to dig holes and serve as spotters." The weak link is the top layer. In Afghanistan, there may be fewer people with the expertise to run such networks than there were in Iraq.

To get the key players, you have to operate like a crime scene investigator. Dao reports:

Like a police forensic unit and a bomb squad rolled into one, Lieutenant Brown's 25-member team not only disarms I.E.D.'s but also scours sites—more than 50 this year—for telltale signatures of a bomb. Soil samples, electrical parts, fingerprints and photographs are sent for analysis, and detailed reports are compiled in a central database.

This is one of the main questions being tested in Afghanistan: Can forensic investigation and a pooled database unravel IED networks? Can high-tech police work catch the experts and organizers instead of settling for the suckers who plant the bombs? IEDs, like drones, are an evolving story of measures and countermeasures, technologies of destruction and technologies of detection. We don't know how the story will turn out. But we know which weapon will prevail. It won't be a device. It will be a process, a talent, and an attitude: innovation.

War as a Game

We've talked a lot in this blog about what happens when war, through remote-controlled drones, becomes more like a video game. But what happens when a video game becomes more like war?

Six Days in Fallujah, an interactive product being developed by Atomic Games, raises that question. Jamin Brophy-Warren explained the project in last week's Wall Street Journal:

The company sees it as a new kind of documentary. "For us, games are not just toys. If you look at how music, television and films have made sense of the complex issues of their times, it makes sense to do that with videogames," Mr. Tamte [Atomic's president] says. ... "Six Days," which uses actual events as its backdrop, is billed as having far deeper roots in reality and will be the first major game released about the ongoing war in Iraq. "We replicate a specific and accurate timeline—we mean six days literally," says Mr. Tamte. ... Atomic is working with more than three dozen soldiers who were in Fallujah, consulting thousands of photographs (some of which were mailed on memory cards from Camp Fallujah), and looking at classified satellite imagery to ensure that the game's appearance is faithful to the actual location.

The project's developers call it a "game-amentary." It sounds educational. But then a different kind of reality—commercial interest—intrudes on the documentary spin:

"Six Days" lacks one notable aspect of documentary: commentary. ... [T]hose involved in the new game said they didn't want to push a particular viewpoint and certainly weren't taking a stance on the morality of the invasion. "We're not trying to make social commentary. We're not pro-war. We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience," says Anthony Crouts, vice-president of marketing for Konami, the game's publisher. "At the end of the day, it's just a game."

Unless you think the battle of Fallujah was entertaining in real life, you can't make a video product about it that's both documentary and "just a game." Maybe someday, somebody will produce an interactive replica of the Iraq war. This doesn't sound like it.

Heaven’s Wrath

Big news from Pakistan: The government there is becoming a partner in our remote-controlled assassination campaign. Here's the deal: They'll let us kill our enemies on their soil if we'll use the same drones to kill their enemies, too.

Officially, Pakistan continues to object to the drone strikes. We just hit two more targets yesterday, prompting Pakistan's Foreign Office to declare that "these attacks are counterproductive and we hope that as a result of the policy review in Washington, we would have some positive outcome."

That's a pretty funny protest, since today's Wall Street Journal brings this news:

U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials are drawing up a fresh list of terrorist targets for Predator drone strikes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, part of a U.S. review of the drone program, according to officials involved. Pakistani officials are seeking to broaden the scope of the program to target extremists who have carried out attacks against Pakistanis, a move they say could win domestic support. ...

Already, the campaign has apparently stepped up attacks on the network of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who is believed to be behind the 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was [current President] Zardari's wife. In the fourth of a series of recent attacks targeting Mr. Mehsud's network, a drone attack Wednesday killed at least eight militants along the Pakistan-Afghan border, according to two Pakistani officials. The intensified campaign could help win domestic support for the strikes because it shows that the drone attacks are targeting direct threats to Pakistan, said a Pakistani official.

To put it crudely, we seem to be renting out the drones. Since President Obama took office, the drones have been slaughtering Mehsud's fighters. Apparently, we're doing this to satisfy Zardari's government. And it's not clear whether the satisfaction is political or personal. Do the hits on Mehsud really generate "domestic support" for the drone strikes? Does the average Pakistani conclude that the CIA's killing machines aren't so bad after all? Or does the "domestic support" consist of Zardari? Are we buying his support by sending our drones to avenge his wife's death?

It's almost Shakespearean. But since we're in the 21st century instead of the 16th, we seal our pact with the king by sending machines, not human assassins, to bring heaven's wrath on the warlord who slew his beloved. And this time, the wrath really does come from heaven. Put yourself in Zardari's shoes. You're being offered the chance to destroy your enemy with a power unknown to history's greatest kings and generals: a bloodless, all-seeing airborne hunting party. Would you refuse?

And if you were Obama, would you refuse to wield this power? No way. According to the Journal, Obama has "concluded that the drones have been an effective weapon," and his aides are now "examining ways to reduce the time it takes between identifying a target and when the Predators fire—now less than 45 minutes." And in a curious coincidence, the U.S. also just announced a $5 million reward for "information leading to the arrest or location of Mehsud" and another warlord.

Something tells me there won't be an arrest. Location will be enough.

Drones Are for Sissies

From time to time, Human Nature checks in on the man-vs.-machine war experiment that's going on halfway around the world in Pakistan. It's like a video game, except real people are being killed. Al-Qaida and the Taliban are fielding human fighters. The United States is fielding remote-controlled unmanned aircraft armed with missiles. American generals and defense planners are watching this war to find out how much an unmanned force can accomplish. The less blood we have to risk and shed, particularly against an enemy who thrives on body bags and terror, the safer we'll be at home and abroad.

So, who's winning: the jihadis or the joysticks? Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times brings us a fresh update. Here's an analysis of his report and other stories filed in the last week, explaining the most important developments and why they matter.

1. How many strikes and kills? Since Aug. 31, there have been 38 Predator strikes, killing 9 "senior" al-Qaida leaders and many lower-level fighters. And that's not counting conventional airstrikes based on hot intelligence from the drones.

2. Why the increase? We stopped asking Pakistan for permission before striking. This has three effects: Strikes don't get vetoed, they don't get delayed till the intelligence (e.g., about who's in the compound) is cold, and the targets don't get tipped off by friends in the Pakistani government.

3. Where do the drones fly from? This has been a politically explosive question lately. Miller says the CIA Predators "take off and land at military airstrips in Pakistan."

4. Can they see through walls? Not literally, but in effect, yes. They're "outfitted with additional intelligence gear that has enabled the CIA to confirm the identities of targets even when they are inside buildings and can't be seen through the Predator's lens." If true, this is a huge development. It means the men have nowhere to hide from the machines.

5. Do the joystick pilots understand real combat? I've raised this question before, on the theory that killing real people from a faraway drone console can look too much like a video game. The CIA is mum about its people. But Christopher Drew of the New York Times reports that the Air Force "has begun training officers as drone pilots who have had little or no experience flying conventional planes."

6. Why is Pakistan tolerating the strikes? "Because the CIA has expanded its targeting to include militant groups that threaten the government," Miller reports. To that extent, the machines have become Pakistan's allies. If true, this is another big development. The Pakistan war experiment isn't just technological. It's political. It's a test of whether the drones can inflict military damage without triggering too much anti-Americanism. By buying off the host government with hits on its enemies, we're buying time to keep hitting our own enemies there. Politically, it's hard to imagine a manned U.S. force getting away with what the drones have done.

7. What are the drones' psychological effects? Among other things, the Pakistan experiment is testing how a war waged by machines affects the morale of their human adversaries. U.S. officials tell Miller that the militants, hounded and pounded by the drones, "have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust." One official says that al-Qaida operatives are "wondering who's next," that they're "hunting down people who they think are responsible" for exposing them to the drones, and that "people are showing up dead or disappearing." Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times adds that in northwest Pakistan, "[s]ome locals have given up drinking Lipton tea, out of a growing conviction that the [CIA] is using the tea bags as homing beacons for its pilotless planes."

On the other hand, Mazzetti reports many Pakistanis think that the drones "reveal the fears of Americans to take casualties"—that we're "sending robots to do a man's job." He cites P.W. Singer's book Wired for War, in which Muslim insurgents "said that America's reliance on drone weapons is a sign that the United States is afraid to sacrifice troops in combat."

I'm not buying this. I'm not buying the U.S. spin that the drones are reducing al-Qaida to fratricide. And I'm sure not buying this jihadi propaganda about the glory of sacrifice. Sacrifice is for suckers. Even terrorists know that. That's why, as Drew reports, our ostensibly cowardly drone operators are watching this:

On a recent day, at 1:15 p.m. in Tucson—1:15 the next morning in Afghanistan—a pilot and sensor operator were staring at gray-toned video from the Predator's infrared camera. ... The crew was scanning a road, looking for ... signs of anyone planting improvised explosive devices or lying in wait for a convoy. ... "We spend 70 to 80 percent of our time doing this, just scanning roads," said the pilot. ...

In short, our people are hiding behind lethal gizmos watching your people plant lethal gizmos and hide. Your people don't intend to be there when the bombs go off any more than ours do. So if we're sissies, so are you.

8. Obama's plans? "Because of its success, the Obama administration is set to continue the accelerated campaign," Miller reports. The New York Times' David Singer and Eric Schmitt add that Obama is thinking of extending the strikes deeper into Pakistan:

The extensive missile strikes being carried out by [CIA]-operated drones have until now been limited to the tribal areas. ... But some American officials say the missile strikes in the tribal areas have forced some leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda to flee south toward Quetta, making them more vulnerable. In separate reports, groups led by both Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of American forces in the region, and Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, a top White House official on Afghanistan, have recommended expanding American operations outside the tribal areas if Pakistan cannot root out the strengthening insurgency.

Broadening the war in Pakistan is hugely dangerous. But if we do it, the safest force to send in isn't the Marines, Green Berets, or stealth fighters. It's the drones.

Iran's Drones

What's more unsettling than U.S. military planes flying over Iraq with nobody inside them?

Iranian military planes doing the same thing.

Last Thursday, Danger Room reported that according to its sources, American planes had shot down an Iranian drone in Iraqi airspace. Yesterday, the United States confirmed it. We and our friends are no longer the only nations flying remote-controlled vehicles over other countries. Instead of looking down on the enemy through the eyes of unmanned aircraft, our military personnel will increasingly find themselves on the wrong end of the camera—and eventually the missile.

The United States claims that the Iranian drone shot down on Feb. 25 spent more than an hour in Iraqi airspace and was "well inside Iraqi territory." Depending on whom you believe, it was 10, 12, 25, or 80 miles inside Iraq. One theory is that the drone was spying on a camp full of Iranian dissidents (or, to put it less nicely, terrorists). Another is that it was looking for routes to smuggle weapons into Iraq. It was unarmed and relatively unsophisticated, with a range of 90 miles (which means it almost certainly didn't go 80 miles into Iraq) and an altitude limit of 14,000 feet.

The incident raises at least three questions. First: How many other drones does Iran have, and what can they do? According to Danger Room:

In 2007, Iran said it built a drone with a range of 420 miles. In February, Iran's deputy defense minister claimed its latest UAV could now fly as far as 600 miles. ... Iran often exaggerates what its weapons can do. But, if this drone really can stay in the air for for that long, the Washington Times notes, "it could soar over every U.S. military installation, diplomatic mission or country of interest in the Middle East."

Today's Los Angeles Times adds:

Iran has been developing unmanned aviation technologies, displaying drone aircraft during military parades and incorporating them into war games along its eastern and western borders in recent years. In December, Iran said it had developed a new generation of "spy drones" that provide real-time surveillance over enemy terrain. And last month an Iranian air force officer told media Iran had created drones with a range of 1,200 miles.

The distance from Iran to Tel Aviv is about 600 miles.

Second: Who else has drones? We know, for example, that Israel, Georgia, and Pakistan have them. Iran's ability to produce them means that Iranian-affiliated miscreants will be deploying them, too. Danger Room notes:

Iran has supplied Hezbollah, the Lebanese terror group, with both models [its Ababil and Misrad drones]. Misrad drones flew reconnaissance missions in both November 2004 and April 2005. Then, in 2006, during Hezbollah's war with Israel, the group operated both Misrads and Ababils over Israel's skies. At least one was shot down by Israeli fighter jets.

Third: How will the proliferation of drones affect future wars? The emerging ability of our adversaries to do to us what we've been doing to them—invade, spy, and eventually kill without risking any personnel—is a huge problem. The number of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan since President Obama took office is now up to six, with a casualty count exceeding 100. Imagine somebody doing that to us.

On the other hand, nobody died in the Feb. 25 incident. According to the U.S. military, before firing, our forces confirmed that "no collateral damage would result from a shoot-down." In fact, we knew more than that. We knew we wouldn't be killing any military personnel, either, since the drone's pilot was in Iran. That made it easier to shoot down the drone without triggering a political confrontation and blowing up diplomatic efforts with Iran. It's been three weeks since the incident, and Iran still hasn't mentioned it in public. If tomorrow's spy aircraft can be shot down without spilling blood and starting wars, that's not such a bad thing.

Drones and Spies

How are humans and unmanned vehicles getting along in our experimental robot proxy war in Pakistan? Pretty well. Yesterday's New York Times revealed more about collaborations between U.S. drones and Pakistani ground forces. A few highlights:

1. Pakistanis on the ground are spotting targets for the drones.

"The intelligence sharing has really improved in the past few months," said Talat Masood, a retired army general. ... Intelligence from Pakistani informants has been used to bolster the accuracy of missile strikes from remotely piloted Predator and Reaper aircraft against the militants in the tribal areas, officials from both countries say. More than 30 attacks by the aircraft have been conducted since last August, most of them after President Zardari took office in September. A senior American military official said that 9 of 20 senior Qaeda and Taliban commanders in Pakistan had been killed by those strikes.

2. The drones are tracking targets for Pakistanis on the ground.

The C.I.A. helped [Pakistani] commandos track the Saudi militant linked to Al Qaeda, Zabi al-Taifi, for more than a week before the Pakistani forces surrounded his safe house in the Khyber Agency. The Pakistanis seized him, along with seven Pakistani and Afghan insurgents, in a dawn raid on Jan. 22, with a remotely piloted C.I.A. plane hovering overhead and personnel from the C.I.A. and Pakistan's main spy service closely monitoring the mission, a senior Pakistani officer involved in the operation said.

3. Pakistan is tracking the drones. Its agents know their whereabouts in real time.

In addition, a small team of Pakistani air defense controllers working in the United States Embassy in Islamabad ensures that Pakistani F-16 fighter-bombers conducting missions against militants in the tribal areas do not mistakenly hit remotely piloted American aircraft flying in the same area or a small number of C.I.A. operatives on the ground, a second senior Pakistani officer said.

4. Reliance on drones is protecting American but not Pakistani troops. This is the chief strategic problem exposed by the war. We can hit the enemy from an unmanned aerial vehicle with impunity. But the enemy can retaliate against our ally on the ground, thereby putting pressure on the alliance. According to the Times, "Pakistani Army officers say the American strikes draw retaliation against Pakistani troops in the tribal areas, whose convoys and bases are bombed or attacked with rockets after each United States missile strike."

Human Nature's interest in the Pakistan conflict is all about its experimental lessons in unmanned warfare. Toward that end, two of the key factors to watch are 1) the ability of manned and unmanned forces to work together and 2) the enemy's ability to punish manned forces for damage inflicted by unmanned forces. We'll keep watching both.

Spying With Google Earth

The picture, taken from directly overhead, shows an airfield in Pakistan. It looks like a video frame from one of the American killer drones that have been hunting Taliban and al-Qaida fighters there. But that can't be: The drones are right there in the frame, sitting on the ground. So who took the picture?

A plain old commercial satellite, apparently. The image was freely available on Google Earth until Wednesday ...

More here.

Present Without Leave

The boss of the Pakistani Taliban likes to train his fighters at a big house in the mountainous region near Afghanistan. Or perhaps I should say, he used to. Reuters has called the house "fortress-like." If U.S. troops had tried to storm it, the militants inside might have repelled or killed them. But the Americans never showed up in person. Instead, on Saturday, they sent an unmanned aerial vehicle, which fired a missile into the compound, killing around 30 enemy insurgents. So much for fortresses.

Then, today, American drones struck another Pakistani Taliban hideout. The initial casualty count at the second compound is even higher. And that's before all the bodies are pulled from the rubble. 

Even by the lowest casualty estimates, these are the two most lethal strikes of the monthslong robot proxy war we've been waging in Pakistan. For those of you keeping score, the number of drone strikes since July is now running into the 30s, and the body count has passed 250, including eight or more senior al-Qaida officers.

The military advantage of sending drones instead of soldiers is that we can blow away fortresses and adversaries while keeping our troops out of harm's way. But there's a political advantage, too: If we don't set foot on Pakistani soil, Pakistan's government doesn't have to explain to its people why it's tolerating an American occupation.

That's why the official U.S. and Pakistani response to reporters' questions about the massacre at the Taliban compound is silence. The CIA, which operates our Predator drones in Pakistan, isn't talking. Neither is our embassy in Islamabad. Neither is the Pakistani government. Nothing to see here, folks. No American boots on the ground. Move along.

But—oops!—it turns out that we do have people on the ground in Pakistan. And they're managing the drones. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., spilled the beans at a Senate hearing on Thursday. Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times explains what happened:

Feinstein expressed surprise over Pakistani opposition to the campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Islamic extremist targets along Pakistan's northwestern border. "As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base," she said. ... [F]ormer U.S. intelligence officials ... confirmed that Feinstein's account was accurate. ... As chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Feinstein is privy to classified details of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.

It didn't take long for Feinstein's slip to hit the Pakistani press. And it was news to most Pakistanis, who, like the rest of us, have assumed all along that the drones flew over the border from Afghanistan.

Predators may be unmanned, but they're hardly unsupervised. In addition to being remotely piloted, they're locally prepped and serviced. In military parlance, they're unmanned "systems," and the systems include on-site crews. If the Predators are operating from a base in Pakistan, then we have personnel at that base to tend and help launch them.

Who are these personnel? Miller reports that in recent years, the CIA "has deployed as many as 200 people" to Pakistan, working "alongside other U.S. operatives who specialize in electronic communications and spy satellites." If the CIA operates the Predators and the Predators take off from Pakistan, then ... well, it's pretty obvious. And this defeats much of the political advantage of using drones in the first place. It puts our forces squarely on Pakistani soil.

Why the agency bases its drones in Pakistan instead of just flying them over the border from Afghanistan baffles me. But a senator blurting out this secret at a public hearing? That doesn't surprise me at all. Unmanned vehicles are getting smarter and less error-prone all the time, but human beings are as fallible and foolish as ever. Maybe now that we've learned how to keep pilots out of harm's way, we can do the same for politicians.

Obama's Drones

New president, same war.

Saturday's Washington Post brings the latest report from Pakistan:

Two remote U.S. missile strikes that killed at least 20 people at suspected terrorist hideouts in northwestern Pakistan yesterday offered the first tangible sign of President Obama's commitment to sustained military pressure on the terrorist groups there. ... It remained unclear yesterday whether Obama personally authorized the strike or was involved in its final planning, but military officials have previously said the White House is routinely briefed about such attacks in advance. At his daily White House briefing, press secretary Robert Gibbs declined to answer questions about the strikes, saying, "I'm not going to get into these matters."

Why is Obama sticking with Bush's drone war? Because it's doing its job, grimly and quietly. Reuters has the body count:

The United States carried out about 30 attacks on suspected militants with missiles fired by pilotless drones in 2008, according to a Reuters tally, more than half after the beginning of September. The attacks killed more than 220 people, including foreign militants, according to a tally of reports from Pakistani intelligence agents, district government officials and residents.

That's roughly equal to the body count from the first day of Israel's December assault on Gaza. But the outcry is nowhere near as loud. In fact, the Post notes,

The Pakistani government, which has loudly protested some earlier strikes, was quiet yesterday. In September, U.S. and Pakistani officials reached a tacit agreement to allow such attacks to continue without Pakistani involvement, according to senior officials in both countries.

Pakistan finally piped up today, meekly expressing its "sincere hope that the United States will review its policy and adopt a more holistic and integrated approach."

Why the comparative silence? Because the drones aren't human -- technically, U.S. forces aren't in Pakistan -- and because they pick off their targets a few at a time, not in a massive blitz. They can hover, study, track, and wait for hot intelligence from the ground. That's one reason why they're killing a high ratio of bad guys to civilians.

Regional and intelligence experts say the strikes have improved in precision and have hit several top insurgent commanders in recent months. The notable change in tempo and reported accuracy could be partly attributed to a growing sense of urgency inside the Bush White House as the progress in the seven-year long war in Afghanistan stalled during the waning days of the administration. Samina Ahmed, director of the International Crisis Group in Pakistan, attributes some of the change to increased cooperation between the United States and Pakistan. "Given the fact that the past few strikes have actually gotten their targets with minimal or no civilian casualties, there is obviously better cooperation between the U.S. military and Pakistan," Ahmed said.

Remember, Israel's worst mass killings of civilians in Gaza happened when Israeli forces returned fire. But a drone doesn't need to return fire. It can listen, watch, and wait until it has the bad guys in its sights with few civilians in the way.

If I'm a new U.S. president who needs to hunt, kill, and deter terrorists without invading or occupying countries, this is the kind of war I want.

Closing the Gaza Tunnels

Gaza is riddled with tunnels. Some are for smuggling; others are for transporting weapons; others are for hiding or ambushing Israeli troops. The crucial passageways—400 to 600, by recent estimates—run from Gaza to Egypt, circumventing the closed border. That's how Hamas gets parts and material for the missiles it fires into Israel. Any deal to end the current fighting has to include "an effective blockading" of that border, "with supervision and follow-ups," according to Israel's prime minister. To stop the war—and to keep it stopped—you have to figure out how to stop the tunnels.

But how? Here are some of the options.

More here.

Bush on “Over-the-Wall” Drones

I went to see President Bush's farewell chat with the American Enterprise Institute yesterday. It was an unusually frank conversation: He actually admitted mistakes. In fact, he wandered so far off-message that when he was asked about defense spending, he started talking about specific weapons systems, and pretty soon he said this:

Our soldiers are carrying unbelievably new technologies, using Predators to use over-the-wall intelligence to be able to have better battlefield awareness.

Over-the-wall intelligence? I've searched DefenseLink, and I don't see that term or anything like it. I do, however, see "through-the-wall surveillance," associated with the Air Force Research Laboratory. And the last time I checked, walls tended to be associated with roofs. So one way or another, the Predators have to see through something.

Is Bush possibly blabbing about the technology cryptically described by Bob Woodward and others? The ability of U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles to identify and track human targets "even when they are inside buildings"? If so, the convergence sketched here two months ago—unmanned vehicles that can see through walls—is indeed upon us.

By the way, as of this week's hit in North Waziristan, the number of U.S.  drone missile strikes in Pakistan this year is approaching 30, and the body count is over 200.

Drones Over Dakota

Good news for U.S. national security! We're finally flying surveillance drones over the treacherous border ... between us and Canada.

You're kidding me, right? William Arkin and Peter Feaver of the Washington Post have the same question I do: Why are we posting drones in North Dakota when we need them in Pakistan?

This weekend's national coverage of the first drone's arrival (courtesy of the AP and NYT) didn't really explain. So I moseyed over to the Grand Forks Herald (before I saw the same link at Danger Room, I swear) to see what I could find.

Answer: Pork. Here's the Herald:

At 2:28 p.m. Saturday, the unmanned aircraft touched down at the Grand Forks Air Force Base ... The Saturday landing's significance is about the new mission of the base, which has lost planes and people in large numbers in recent years. The Unmanned Aircraft System mission allows the base to continue, although in a reduced capacity. [Base commander Col. John] Michel said the base will be home to more than 20 UAVs in a few years. The Air Force portion of the 20 will be six Global Hawks, a bigger and higher-flying version of the Predator, by early 2011. "Our manpower will be shored up by 843 people by those Global Hawks," Michel said. "The UAS is the fastest growing part of the (Air Force) business."

How's that for irony? Drones, a technology we're fast-tracking and fast-deploying in the name of replacing personnel, are becoming a jobs program. Though I guess that's consistent with the current economic meltdown and the new emphasis on finding work for people instead of the other way around.

Among other things, it raises the question: What's the future of Air Force bases? How many will fly old-fashioned manned aircraft? How many will be more like NASA's mission-control facilities? That's one of the nice things about drones: You can operate them from anywhere. Which means we should be able to create drone-operation jobs in North Dakota while flying the drones over Pakistan, Afghanistan, or India, not Canada.

Armed Robotry

I've been meaning to get back to this Cornelia Dean piece from last week's NYT Science Times. It's about one of my favorite topics: military robots. Except it confounds some of my assumptions, which makes it all the more worth thinking about.

First off: The "killing machines" I keep writing about are just drones. They're fully controlled (except for malfunctions and weather) by human pilots. Dean is talking about something way more unnerving: machines that make their own killing decisions. I had assumed that for safety reasons, this kind of technology was still confined to the computer equivalent of drawing boards. Wrong. Army software contractor Ronald Arkin tells Dean that armed mechanical border guards are already on the job in Israel and South Korea. Here in the United States, the Army is paying Arkin and others to explore, among other things, how to design such robots to "operate within the bounds imposed by the warfighter." In other words, before we give them guns, we'd better figure out how to keep them from screwing up royally or turning on us.

What's really interesting about Arkin is that he directly contradicts my paranoid prejudice. It's not the armed robots I should worry about. It's the armed humans. Dean summarizes his argument:

In a report to the Army last year, Dr. Arkin described some of the potential benefits of autonomous fighting robots. For one thing, they can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built without anger or recklessness, Dr. Arkin wrote, and they can be made invulnerable to what he called "the psychological problem of ‘scenario fulfillment,' " which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas.

His report drew on a 2006 survey by the surgeon general of the Army, which found that fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents. More than one-third said torture was acceptable under some conditions, and fewer than half said they would report a colleague for unethical battlefield behavior. Troops who were stressed, angry, anxious or mourning lost colleagues or who had handled dead bodies were more likely to say they had mistreated civilian noncombatants, the survey said.

That makes sense: In war, emotion is more hindrance than help. Same goes for my previous speculation that pilots will become more brutal as they're insulated from physical risk. Arkin's data suggest that in fact, exposure to physical risk makes troops more aggressive, not less. Again, the theory makes sense: You shoot first and ask questions later when failure to shoot jeopardizes your safety. Take the ego out of it—make you a robot instead of a person—and the self-protective instinct to shoot first disappears.

That leaves the problem of ethics. Hormones, mirror neurons, socialization, and love, among other things, make most people reluctant to kill one another. Robots lack these inputs. Will they be ruthless? Arkin's answer, as related by Dean, is that "because rules like the Geneva Conventions are based on humane principles, building them into the machine's mental architecture endows it with a kind of empathy."

Well, I wouldn't go that far. It's not empathy, exactly. But maybe empathy isn't so hot as a guide to behavior in combat. Maybe one lesson of the Army's Iraq survey is that empathy too easily morphs into tribalism. Maybe mechanical soldiers programmed with ethical rules, like the machines of I, Robot, are more likely to behave decently.

But then comes the hitch: What happens when the grainy realities of war defy the simplicity of the robot's program? What happens when the hard part isn't restraining yourself from firing on civilians, but distinguishing them from enemy forces in the first place? That's where Arkin's dream bogs down. He admits it would be hard for robots to recognize physical changes that entail moral changes, such as an enemy fighter with a wound or a white flag. And that's basic stuff compared to the multiplying subtleties of modern counterinsurgency. It's not as though al-Qaida hands out uniforms. Is the guy with the backpack a student or a terrorist? Is the woman across the street chubby or wearing a belt full of explosives?

Here's my preliminary take on Arkin's idea: He's right that we can and should substitute robots for humans in some lethal jobs. Where the categories are clear and cold reason is crucial, let the robots do the guarding and killing. But don't give the early generations of robots any jobs that require nuanced judgments about who's a bad guy and who isn't. And be prepared for the bad guys to learn the loopholes in the robots' algorithms. If the robots respect white flags, the terrorists will use white flags. If the robots presume women are civilians, the terrorists will use women. That's what terrorists do: They study our habits and exploit them. It's a human skill. And it will take humans, not robots, to defeat them.

Droneheads

Several of you have implied in the Fray that I'm obsessed with drones. This is really quite unfair. If you want to see true obsession, visit Wired's military blog, Danger Room, where you can read more than 300 posts about unmanned aerial vehicles, or unmanned aerial systems, or whatever the hell the Pentagon (or is it the CIA?) is calling them now. The DR crew doesn't just follow the drone war in Pakistan from afar, as I do. They go straight to the Pakistani press.

Take a quick stroll through their recent archive and you'll see that they're way ahead of me in tracking the revolution. For example: Pakistan already has spy (not killer) drones. The Russians are buying drones ... from Israel. Iraq wants drones, too.

I could spend all day at that blog. But that might be a tad, you know, obsessive.

Eyes and Ears

A week ago, when we last checked in on the drone war in Pakistan, the news wasn't good. Insurgents had bombed a Pakistani hotel and a security checkpoint, apparently in retaliation for drone strikes on them. The Pakistani government, in turn, was asking the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, to call off the drones. Petraeus said he'd listen. It looked as though the United States might buckle.

Then Petraeus went to Afghanistan and praised the drones. "It is hugely important that three of 20 extremist leaders have been killed in recent months," he told the AP. And on Friday, the Pakistanis got their answer. A drone attack killed another dozen suspected militants at a Taliban commanders' house.

The machines have now racked up more than 100 kills in Pakistan since August. Petraeus has been lobbied, and Barack Obama has been elected, but the drone strikes go on.

How is Pakistan greeting this aggression? Is it threatening to fight? Hardly. Yesterday the country's president told the AP, "We feel that the strikes are an intrusion on our sovereignty, which are not appreciated by the people at large, and the first aspect of this war is to win the hearts and mind of the people."

"Feel"? "Not appreciated"? It's hard to come up with weaker language than that. The real message seems to be: Do what you must, but try not to give us political trouble.

From that standpoint, drones are a lot less harmful than the alternatives. The biggest popular anti-American protests in Pakistan recently were triggered not by drones but by a U.S. ground incursion. Likewise, in Afghanistan, recent politically incendiary mass killings of civilians have been inflicted (accidentally) by human operators on the scene. Yes, the drones have killed some Pakistani civilians. But not nearly as many, it appears, as Pakistani forces have killed in their own clumsy campaign against the insurgents.

Why do the drones have a better record of minimizing mistakes? For one thing, they don't have to make quick decisions. They can hover, watch, and wait. The intelligence they collect can be sifted and weighed by multiple supervisors before reaching a decision to fire. And in Pakistan, they seem to have an additional asset: human sources on the ground. The Washington Post explains:

Brig. Gen. Mahmood Shah, former longtime head of [Pakistani] government security in the tribal areas, said the missile attacks have become noticeably more precise, leading some to believe that local tribesmen in the border areas are supplying the U.S. military with better information about targets. Shah said rumors about so-called U.S. spies among the tribes have fed paranoia about the possibility that signaling devices have been deployed in area villages. Tribesmen have lately made a habit of sweeping the areas around their homes for such devices, he said. "They're not sitting outside in their compounds anymore because they are afraid that they will be struck by these missiles," Shah said.

All this time, I've been looking for technological answers to the mystery of the drones' precision, their increasing ability to find the bad guys. But maybe the answer isn't machines. Maybe it's people.

And if it's people, then the bad guys don't have to fight the machines. They can do what they already know how to do: kill some people and intimidate the rest. That seems to be what they're trying. A day after Friday's drone strike, Agence France-Presse reported:

Taliban militants killed two Afghan men Saturday in Pakistan's restive tribal belt after accusing them of spying for US-led forces. ... The executions were the latest in a string of similar killings and come a day after a suspected US drone fired missiles and destroyed an Al-Qaeda sanctuary in North Waziristan, killing 14. ... Executions routinely follow suspected US missile strikes against militant targets in Pakistan, which officials say are often conducted on intelligence provided by paid local informants.

According to the AP, the two bodies were thrown onto a road, each pinned with a note that said, "See the fate of this man. He was an American spy."

Were the men really spies? If so, were they scouting targets for the drones? I don't know. But for the last three months, somebody's been doing a heck of a job finding the bad guys in northwest Pakistan. Maybe, as U.S. military sources have let on, it's the drones themselves. Or maybe that's the cover story for what's still the world's greatest enemy-detection device: the human being.

Robot Proxy War Update

I can't keep up with the drone war in Pakistan.

This morning, I posted a piece on the evolution of the Pakistan border conflict into the world's first robot proxy war. There have been so many drone strikes along that border in the last four weeks that when I linked to the reports on all of them, it felt like-pardon the reverse metaphor-overkill.

Now it turns out I missed one. The machines' body count is now 20 higher, thanks to a strike last night. It's the 19th drone attack since August. According to an update this morning on the New York Times Web site, the strike occurred 20 miles inside Pakistan and took out two Taliban commanders who have launched raids on U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

How good are the drones? According to the Times, one of the targeted commanders "was believed to have been visiting the compound ... to pay his respects to the families of those killed in an American drone strike on Friday" in a different location. The machines find and kill you, and then, when your boss shows up somewhere else to console your relatives, the machines are waiting for him there, too.

Down the road, we should all be scared of what this technology can do. But for now, I'm enjoying our ability to find and kill these guys without putting boots on the ground.

Now, about those other 18 casualties ...

Evolving Predators

Is this technology for real? If so, what is it? Since the government isn't telling, I poked around a bit and asked readers for ideas.

Here are some possible leads. First, Slate reader mark_925 flags a list posted Friday on Aviation Week's Ares blog. The list includes several technologies that have improved U.S. efficiency at hunting and killing adversaries in Iraq. They include:

1. Communications intercept sensors "so sensitive that they can pick up the low-power emissions of handheld cell phones."
2. A targeting system called NCCT, which "instantaneously links the intelligence taken from several aircraft, ships or UAVs at once to locate, identify and target electronic emissions, including communications, and associate them with air, ground and sea radar targets."
3. An "IDM communications module" that links communications signals to visible sources, such as cars.
4. Software that facilitates "change detection" from spy aircraft.
5. Helmet sights that immediately translate a physically viewed object into spatial coordinates that enable fast targeting and destruction.

Second: Walter Pincus of the Washington Post flags an article in the U.S. military journal Joint Force Quarterly, written by the general who, as of today, is replacing David Petraeus as commander of multinational forces in Iraq. It credits the upturn in Iraq in part to a "surge of ... full motion video (FMV) assets." Early in the war, "Commanders were rarely allocated more than an hour of FMV a week," says the article. "Since 2003-2004, FMV within the corps has increased tenfold. ... Today, the corps can count on daily support from at least 12 FMV systems," and each brigade combat team "has an organic tactical UAV platoon that provides 18 hours of FMV coverage a day." Drones are dramatically improving military performance, not by doing the killing themselves, but by providing instant, on-demand customized intelligence to ground forces.

Third: Pincus reports that last week, a Senate subcommittee appropriated $750 million for "intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance initiatives." This compounds a $1.3 billion shift of money to ISR programs, approved by the Pentagon in July. According to Defense News, the programs include:

1. "$262.6 million to buy digital data links for Raven UAVs, data links and laser designators for Hunter unmanned aircraft, and various improvements for other unmanned aircraft."
2. "$168.5 million to buy eight Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance airborne systems, including with $52 million for three new Constant Hawk airborne surveillance and target acquisition systems."
3. "$17 million to extend a contract for Scan Eagle UAV services, $15 million to buy a new Northrop Grumman-made Global Hawk UAV and associated gear and services, $26 million to purchase four Boeing-made Scan Eagles."
4. Imaging systems and "sensor packages" for the Air Force.

So there are some possible clues to the recent turnaround in Iraq and the more recent escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan: more UAV deployment and video, faster integration of UAV data into ground operations, more acute communications sensors, and instant targeting data on visible objects. Some combination of these technologies might account for the key breakthrough attributed to the devices now being deployed to Afghanistan: nonvisual identification and tracking of targets. Or not.

Over to you, Danger Room.

Terminator 2: Attack of the Drones

Speaking of Terminators: The drone war over Pakistan is escalating.

Boom. Sept. 4: Seven people killed in a strike on Chaar Kehl, near the Afghan border.

Boom. Sept. 5: Six to 12 more killed in a hit on Al Must.

Boom. Sept. 8: 23 dead and at least 18 wounded in a five-missile barrage on Daande Darpkhel.

Boom. Sept. 12: Twelve more dead in an attack on Tole Khel.

That's about 50 fatalities in four strikes in a single week, all at the hands of unmanned vehicles. An impressive warning from the bloodless killers of tomorrow. Even before the hit on Tole Khel, the Washington Post reported, "The number of Hellfire missile attacks by Predators in Pakistan has more than tripled, with 11 strikes reported by Pakistani officials this year compared with three in 2007." According to the Wall Street Journal, "One official in Afghanistan estimated that drone usage in Pakistan has doubled since the summer, and he said missiles are now being fired at Pakistani targets virtually every day."

Why the increase? Media reports from the ground and military sources indicate several factors: 1) Pakistan isn't really helping, so we've taken the killing into our own hands. 2) We don't want to literally use our own hands, since our ground forces might be captured. So, where possible, we're using drones instead. 3) Drone attacks cause less friction with Pakistan than ground incursions do, since U.S. personnel are never at the scene. 4) We're sick of our troops being picked off in Afghanistan, so we're using drones to even the score. 5) We're relying more on drones to spy in Pakistan because we've failed to develop informants on the ground. 6) Or maybe we're getting better ground intelligence, which is giving us more hot targets to shoot at.

The most intriguing factor, however, seems to be an upgrade in drone technology. In Friday's Los Angeles Times, Greg Miller and Julian Barnes report that Predator drones "above the tribal belt along Afghanistan's eastern border" are now "equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems." The new systems permit

the tracking of human targets even when they are inside buildings or otherwise hidden from Predator surveillance cameras. Equally important, officials said, the systems have significantly speeded up decisions on when to strike. The technology gives remote pilots a means beyond images from the Predator's lens of confirming a target's identity and precise location. ... The technology allows suspects to be identified quickly. "All I have to do is point the sensor at him," said a military officer familiar with the system, "and a missile can be off the rail in seconds." The devices are roughly the size of an automobile battery, but are heavy enough that outfitted Predators in some cases carry only one Hellfire missile instead of two.

Tracking invisible targets? Nonvisual identification? Miller and Barnes don't explain how the system works. All they disclose is that it "was developed as part of a special project within the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology." But if U.S. drone managers are willing to shed 50 percent of their missiles to make room for these target trackers, they must be pretty valuable.

The arrival of these devices in Afghanistan is only half the story. The other half is where they're coming from. They've been "instrumental in crippling the insurgency in Iraq," according to Miller and Barnes:

A military official familiar with the systems said they had a profound effect, both militarily and psychologically, on the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq. "It is like they are living with a red dot on their head," said a former U.S. military official familiar with the technology who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity because it has been secret. ... Officials said introduction of the devices coincided with the 2007 U.S. troop buildup in Iraq, and was an important, but hitherto unknown, factor in the subsequent drop in violence in that country.

How much of the credit we've given to the troop surge in Iraq actually belongs to these devices? Are they working some similar magic now in Afghanistan and Pakistan? And, if so, what the heck are they? I don't know, and the U.S. government doesn't want to tell us, but I'll keep looking for answers with my primitive human eyes. In the meantime, if you've got any good intel on them, let's hear it.

Offed With Your Head

The Human Nature article on Slate's cover today is about a military drone-piloting system that looks like a video game but kills real people. You control it with joysticks and buttons. The company that developed it, Raytheon, sees it as a logical progression for recruits who come into the military knowing how to play games like Doom and Halo.

The question is: Will the transition be too smooth? Will these young pilots, reclining comfortably in their "virtual cockpits" in Nevada as their drones fly over Iraq, feel as though they're playing a game?

Now imagine taking this merger of games and killing one step further. Imagine controlling the drone directly with your mind. Imagine firing the missile just by thinking it.

Imagination is a dangerous thing. It can already fire weapons in video games. Here's the report from this weekend's Sunday Telegraph:

British scientists are turning the vision into reality with a device that allows objects to be manipulated with brain waves. The prototype ... can already be used to play simple computer games. By imagining a movement, the wearer of the hat-shaped device can tell the computer to move an object around a screen or a robot around a room. ...
The development came as the video games maker Nintendo disclosed that it wanted to build on the success of the motion-sensitive technology used in the best-selling console, the Wii, by developing games that can be controlled by thought.
To pick up the signal from the brain, the scientists use a cap fitted with electrodes that detect changes in the electrical activity produced by the neurons. When a person wearing the cap imagines a particular action, such as moving a hand, it produces a distinct pattern of signals that a computer learns to recognise.

While Nintendo works on deploying this technology, two other companies are already there, according to the New York Times:

Put on the headset, made by Emotiv Systems in San Francisco, and when a giant boulder blocks the path in a game you are playing, you can levitate it—not by something as crude as a keystroke, but just by concentrating on raising it, said Tan Le, Emotiv's president. The headset captures electrical signals when you concentrate; then the computer processes these signals and pairs a screen action with them ... Emotiv plans to have its noninvasive, wireless EPOC headset ($299) on sale in time for Christmas, Ms. Le said. ... So far, [Emotiv's R&D manager] said, all 200 testers of the headset had indeed been able to move on-screen objects mentally.
Another headset, the Neural Impulse Actuator ($169), just released by the OCZ Technology Group in Sunnyvale, Calif., has three sensors in a headband that pick up electrical activity primarily from muscles and convert it into commands ... Players of shooting games, for instance, may use eye movement to trigger a shot, shaving milliseconds off of their response time and sparing their hands.

Scientific American has more on how the Emotiv headset reads your mind.

So now we're looking at two mergers: mind-controlled action with video games, and video games with killing. Firing weapons with your mind used to be imaginary. Now, like so many imagined things, it's becoming real.