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.

The Threat From Below

Will the next attack on the United States come from submarines?

When I asked that question seven years ago, the model I had in mind was the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group infamous for naval suicide strikes. A Tiger supporter had recently been caught building a submersible vessel.

Last month, the Tigers were wiped out by the Sri Lankan military. But the technology they were developing, submersibles, has caught on. "U.S. law enforcement officials say that more than a third of the cocaine smuggled into the United States from Colombia travels in submersibles," the Washington Post reports. "U.S. officials and their Colombian counterparts have detected evidence of more than 115 submersible voyages since 2006," and "U.S. officials expect 70 or more to be launched this year."

Why submersibles? They're hard to detect and easy to sink. The Post explains:

Until recently, submariners caught by authorities could not be charged in the United States or Colombia if the cocaine was scuttled. "The vessels are built to sink. When they open the valves, tons of water come in, and in a minute, or a minute and a half, they sink," [a Colombian admiral] said. "There is no evidence, and what starts as a counterdrug operation becomes a rescue operation." ... "With no drugs found, we couldn't prosecute," said [an] assistant U.S. attorney. At least eight crews have been returned to Colombia after rescue, without being charged.

Is it expensive to sink your own sub? Not if you're a drug lord. Each sub costs about $1 million to produce. The crew gets $500,000 or less. A recent 6.4-ton payload of cocaine was worth more than $100 million. As a percentage of the gross, subs are so cheap that they're routinely scuttled anyway.

That's the genius of submersibility. Several months ago, during the Israeli invasion of Gaza, we explored the terrestrial underworld of the Gaza tunnels. The tunnelers were developing a three-dimensional way of thinking about land: While one side built walls and stationed soldiers above ground, the other side went down 60 feet and dug past those barriers.

The nautical underworld is even better. You don't have to dig. You just glide. Even the semisubmersible crafts built by the drug lords are low enough to evade radar. And underwater, you can do something else that can't be done on land: dump your contraband and let gravity take it beyond your enemy's reach. No evidence, no conviction.

To stop this tactic, Congress recently enacted the Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act of 2008, which declares that anyone operating "any submersible vessel or semi-submersible vessel that is without nationality ... with the intent to evade detection, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both."

Maybe that law will deter submarine drug commerce. But what about submarine terrorism? Ultimately, "U.S. officials fear that the rogue vessels could be used by terrorists intent on reaching the United States with deadly cargos," the Post reports. In fact, "Colombian officials say some former military personnel might be helping to design, construct and direct the vessels" used by the drug lords. If so, all that's needed is a financial lure from al-Qaida to build a vessel for a different mission.

It might not be a suicide mission, either. Drug submersible builders are "trying to develop a remote-controlled model," according to officials contacted by the Post. Two men were arrested last year, apparently while peddling this technology. No crew necessary. Just pack the radioactive bomb aboard your craft, slip it underwater, and hit any coastal target.

Think about that the next time you take off your shoes at an airport security gate. If we expect the next 9/11 attack to come from the sky, we may be looking the wrong way.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

War of the Worlds

The next battlefield in the evolution of warfare won't be in physical space. It'll be in cyberspace.

Today, President Obama will announce a civilian office to protect the nation's computer networks. Meanwhile, backstage, the U.S. military is preparing its own cyber-defense organization. If you haven't taken cyberwar seriously as a threat, it's time to start thinking about it. This morning's New York Times story is a good place to begin. Here are four points worth gleaning from it.

1. Cyberspace is a new dimension of battlespace. According to the story, U.S. officials now see

cyberspace as comparable to more traditional battlefields. "We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyberoperations, but we consider cyberspace a war-fighting domain," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battlefield, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment."

Wars used to be two-dimensional, confined to land and sea. Air power added a third dimension. Cyberspace adds a fourth. It has spatial properties, such as freedom of movement, but it isn't necessarily affected by events in physical space. I can invade your cyberspace and cripple your forces without controlling any other dimension of the war.

2. It defies national boundaries. As the Times notes,

the military debate over whether the Pentagon or the [National Security Agency] is best equipped to engage in offensive operations ... hinges on the question of how much control should be given to American spy agencies, since they are prohibited from acting on American soil. "It's the domestic spying problem writ large," one senior intelligence official said recently. "These attacks start in other countries, but they know no borders. So how do you fight them if you can't act both inside and outside the United States?"

Exactly. And this is just one of many puzzles created by the nonoverlap of cyberspace with physical space. How can defense and intelligence forces organized by nationality and territory patrol, hunt, and fight across computer networks that transcend such boundaries? We'll have to rethink the whole notion of domains.

3. It empowers nonstate actors. One major factor in the rise of terrorism over the last decade is the proliferation of physically destructive technology. Cyberspace multiplies that problem by allowing ubiquitous information technology to become destructive in a different way. It lowers the barriers to military entry, enabling mischief by individuals, small groups, and loose networks. According to the Times, our civilian cybersecurity office will be "responsible for coordinating private-sector and government defenses against the thousands of cyberattacks mounted against the United States—largely by hackers but sometimes by foreign governments—every day." Are the hackers less dangerous than the governments? Don't count on it. And they're certainly harder to pin down.

4. It facilitates economic destruction. The civilian office will report "to both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council" and will "protect systems that run the stock exchanges, clear global banking transactions and manage the air traffic control system," says the story. Why the focus on commerce and finance? Because that's how you bring a country to its knees in this century. It's one reason why the 9/11 terrorists targeted the World Trade Center.

To hit our financial system in physical space, al-Qaida had to get 19 guys through airport screening. And that was before we beefed up security at our airports and borders. But borders and screeners no longer protect us, because cyberspace dissolves distance.

In the old days, you needed physical reach to cripple your adversary's livelihood. It took an invasion or massive bombing to devastate his manufacturing base. An information economy enjoys no such buffer. It can be hit instantly through the computer networks that sustain it.

Over the last couple of months, we've talked about some of the incremental steps through which the physical and digital worlds are beginning to converge and blur. One is physical hyperlinks, which assign a digital incarnation to each physical object. A second is the integration of physical perception with 3-D digital maps. A third is the convergence of the phone and the Internet device with the universal remote.

Cyberwar is part of this revolution. We'd better wake up to it.

Torture School

The difference between SERE and the Bush interrogation program is the difference between S&M and rape. There is no consent. There are no mutually understood boundaries. There are no magic words. People who can't tell the difference between rape and S&M go to jail. What happens to people who can't tell the difference between torture and training?

More here.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

Jihadettes, Again

The female suicide bombers have struck again. And again. And again.

Yesterday morning, I wrote about a woman who blew herself up in Iraq last Thursday. The body count in that attack was eight. I don't remember what the count was in terms of how many women had done the deed this year.

Anyway, that number is already obsolete. By the end of the day, three more women had killed themselves. The body count in yesterday's attacks exceeds 60, with more than 200 others wounded. The Los Angeles Times reports:

According to U.S. Army figures, 27 suicide attacks this year have been carried out by women, compared with eight in all of 2007 ... A tally by The Times indicates that about a quarter of all suicide attacks this year in Iraq have been conducted by women.

Again, the Washington Post explains why women are delivering the bombs:

Wearing their flowing black garments, they can carry hidden explosives past most checkpoints because customs of modesty prevent male guards from frisking them. On Monday, four female suicide bombers in two Iraqi cities used this tactic to enter areas defended by hundreds of soldiers and police officers.

The New York Times adds:

Police officers interviewed at the scene said that the authorities had heard that six women would blow themselves up in the area. "We can't search women," complained Atheer Allawi, a police officer. "They are wearing abayas, and God knows what they can hide under them."

And again, Iraq failed to provide enough female security officers to do the job. The Associated Press reports:

Iraqi security forces had deployed about 200 women this week to search female pilgrims in Kazimiyah, but the attacks took place along the procession some six miles southeast of the shrine. There were too few women guards to search people in the procession itself.

The bombings will continue until we get the message: Stop treating women as though they're too meek to fight and kill. They're already killing. Search women. Deploy women.

Jihadettes

Another suicide bombing in Iraq last week. Another female perpetrator. The bomb "killed a pro-American Sunni militia leader, an Iraqi police captain, a local politician, and five other people," according to Friday's New York Times. Apparently, it's "at least the 16th time that a woman has donned a bomb and exploded herself in Diyala Province since last year."

Why women? The Times explains:

Wearing billowy, black head-to-toe garments, the female bombers have been able to conceal powerful explosives and slip into crowded areas too heavily guarded for a male suicide bomber to ease through undetected. While men often undergo physical searches, Islamic rules do not allow male security officers to pat down women.

How many more women have to blow themselves up before we get the message? Female suicide bombing is a logical extension of suicide bombing. Suicide bombing exploits your disbelief about what people will do. Female suicide bombing exploits your disbelief about what a particular group of people—women—will do. Your biases are no longer somebody else's problem. They're your problem. Look for Arab bombers, and terrorists will send an American-born Hispanic instead. Look for men, and they'll send a woman.

Actually, I don't like the way I wrote that. These women aren't just "sent" by somebody else. We've had enough socio-babble about how women commit such atrocities because they've been "marginalized" and "exploited" by men. It reminds me of the pro-life dogma that women shouldn't be prosecuted under abortion bans because the woman is just the abortionist's pawn. Spare these women your condescension. If you're going to make abortion a crime, charge the woman. If you're handling security where bombs are a threat, search everyone. And if you don't have enough female security officers to search the women, go hire some.

But this is just a Muslim problem, right? We Judeo-Christian Americans don't have these hang-ups, right? As the Washington Post noted two months ago:

In Afghanistan as well as Iraq, female soldiers are often tasked to work in all-male combat units -- not only for their skills but also for the culturally sensitive role of providing medical treatment for local women, as well as searching them and otherwise interacting with them.

But—oops!—the Post story is about Pfc. Monica Brown, who won

a Silver Star in March for repeatedly risking her life on April 25, 2007, to shield and treat her wounded comrades, displaying bravery and grit. She is the second woman since World War II to receive the nation's third-highest combat medal. Within a few days of her heroic acts, however, the Army pulled Brown out of the remote camp in Paktika province where she was serving with a cavalry unit -- because, her platoon commander said, Army restrictions on women in combat barred her from such missions.

Terrorism and Sexism

Now there's a new twist to the trend in Iraq: Many of the people blowing themselves up are women. According to Farhana Ali, a former U.S. adviser who presented data at a Washington conference yesterday, women executed 12 suicide attacks in Iraq during the first four months of this year. That's already more than the number of such attacks executed by women in Iraq over the previous five years.

In an interview with Agence France Presse, Ali blames this trend on male violence and the invasion, which she says has widowed many women and "marginalized" others. But then the AFP story gets to the really interesting point:

Ali warned that U.S. soldiers face a cultural barrier in detecting women bombers. "A marine officer coming back from Fallujah said to me: 'How are we supposed to detect these women if we are taught before we are deployed to not even look at them?'" she explained.

And here's Ali's solution: "If you want to gain entrance into female jihadi organisations, you need female case officers. You need female police officers. You need women in Iraqi law enforcement."

Suicide bombing has always exploited common disbelief about what people will do: You don't expect somebody to walk into a market and blow himself up. Nor do you expect him to take 20 or 30 civilians with him for no apparent reason. Why shouldn't this tactical exploitation of disbelief extend to sexism? You certainly don't expect somebody to blow herself up, much less kill a bunch of innocents.

This is one of the lessons terrorism will gradually teach us: Stereotyping is an exploitable security weakness. To overcome it, we'll have to overcome our sexism about women in the military and in law enforcement, as well as our sexism about women in crime and terrorism. If the moral faults of such stereotypes aren't enough to make you push them aside, do it for your country.