The American Interest Online | 7.16.12
By Alan W. Dowd
It seems that each week
brings with it another news item about some jaw-dropping development in drone
technology. Take, for example, the recent report in Britain’s Guardian newspaper that scientists at
Northrop Grumman and Sandia National Laboratories are working on plans for nuclear-powered drones capable of loitering over target areas for months at
a time. Reuters reports that the U.S. and Britain are collaborating on a
program that would enable one pilot to command “up to five armed drones.”
Next-generation drones could be empowered to identify and attack targets
autonomously. In short, we are witnessing the transformation of warfare before
our very eyes. This isn’t the first revolution in warfare, of course. But it
may be one of the most profound—and it is certainly among the most rapid.
Although drone strikes in
Pakistan get most of our attention, the drone war arguably began a couple
decades ago—and a couple thousand miles away from Pakistan.
During America’s first war in
Iraq, in 1991, U.S. warships used drones—back then, they were called “remotely
piloted vehicles”—to track enemy movements and to aid in targeting. But sailors
aboard the USS Missouri found another
use for their drones. Rather than face the business end of the Missouri’s big guns, Iraqi soldiers surrendered
to the Missouri’s drones—by the
dozens. The Baltimore Sun reported it
this way at the time: “It had to be a military first,” the newspaper concluded,
“an Iraqi soldier spinning around and around with his hands in the air trying
to attract the attention of the pilot of a small plane flying above
him. Only it wasn’t a plane. It was a pilotless drone.”
The drone had evolved from playing a passive role in gathering intelligence and
identifying targets to being an active player in what was happening in the
trenches—and more accurately, saving lives in the trenches.
Drones closed the circle in Yemen a
decade later, when the CIA converted a Predator drone designed for surveillance
and reconnaissance into a ground-attack warplane. Retrofitted with Hellfire
missiles, the killer drone targeted and eliminated the mastermind of the USS Cole attack. The unmanned combat aerial
vehicle (UCAV) was born. The drone had evolved yet again.
Ten years after that first foray into drone warfare—and more than 20 years
after drones made first contact with the battlefield—U.S. military and
political leaders have embraced drones as their weapon of choice in the
post-9/11 campaign of campaigns. Consider the drone’s impressive record and rapid
rise in recent years: Swarms of drones have eviscerated al Qaeda’s leadership
and thinned the Taliban’s ranks in the AfPak theater; UCAVs struck the convoy carrying Moammar Qaddafi; a stealthy reconnaissance drone kept vigil over Osama bin Laden’s compound ahead of the raid by SEAL Team 6; and a UCAV eliminated
al Qaeda’s Anwar al-Awlaki. As Defense Secretary Leon Panetta famously put it during
his stint as CIA director, drones are “the only game in town in terms of
confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership.”
Yet these headlines tell only
a tiny part of the larger story of how drones are rapidly dislodging manned aircraft from the central role they have played
in war-fighting since World War II—and thus revolutionizing how the United
States defends itself and targets its enemies. Taken together, the following fragments
form a mosaic of that revolution:
- In the past
decade, the U.S. drone fleet has swelled from 50 planes to 7,500, though the
vast majority of these drones are not UCAVs. Wired magazine notes that
the military owns only 161 Predators and Reapers, which are known for
ground-attack operations. Still, drones represent 31
percent of the Pentagon’s air armada, and the Pentagon’s plan is to double the drone fleet by 2020, while the size of the manned
bomber force plateaus and the manned fighter force shrinks. The fleet of
combat-class drones is expected to grow to 650 by 2021, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports. In fact, Congress is on record as wanting
drones to comprise “one-third of U.S. military operational
deep strike aircraft,” CRS notes. Accordingly,
spending on drones has exploded from $667 million in 2001 to $3.9 billion in
2012, the CRS report adds.
- There has been a 1,200-percent increase in combat air patrols by
drones since 2005. In fact, CRS matter-of-factly notes that a Predator
engaged in air-to-air combat with an Iraqi MiG in 2003. The drone didn’t
survive the engagement. Of course, the Predator wasn’t built for such a
mission. One gets the sense that 20th-century warplanes will be
no match for the Predator’s faster, stronger, smarter and meaner cousins,
which will soon leap from the drawing board to the skies. Indeed, next-generation
drones are being fashioned to conduct air-superiority missions, midair
refueling and jamming, as well as their current surveillance,
reconnaissance and ground-attack missions. In
short, America’s unmanned air force will be “expected to take on every
type of mission currently flown by manned aircraft,” as CRS concludes.
- Already, the
Predator’s younger brother, the Reaper, has been developed and deployed with weaponry
grafted into its systems. Instead of just two Hellfire missiles, the Reaper has
14 and flies higher and faster than the Predator. Some versions of the Reaper
are equipped with the ominously named “Gorgon Stare.” As Air Force Times explains, if 12 different targets scatter from a
building in 12 different directions, “Gorgon Stare could dedicate one angle to
each.”The Navy will soon
deploy a carrier-borne UCAV, the X-47B. And the Air Force wants
America’s next-generation bomber, the Long Range Strike bomber, to be
“optionally manned.”
- The Air Force
concedes that growth in demand for UCAVs has made relying on “experienced pilots” to fly
drones “unsustainable.” Hence, the Air Force is training more pilots to fly drones than fighter and
bomber pilots combined.
- In his book “War Made New,” Max
Boot notes that UCAVs equipped with “target-recognition systems” and
“autonomous attack systems” are on the horizon. Under a mode of operation
known as “self-learning autonomy,” drones could be empowered to identify
and attack targets based on predetermined conditions.
- A new drone known as the “Global Observer” flies some 12.3 miles
above the earth, enabling it to scan “an area larger than Afghanistan at a
single glance,” as The Los Angeles
Times reports.
- The CIA has built an airbase in
the Middle East for the sole purpose of launching UCAVs against al Qaeda
cells in Yemen, further underscoring Panetta’s assertion that drones are
“the only game in town.”
Before he left his post as
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen wistfully remarked, “There are those that see the JSF [F-35
Joint Strike Fighter] as the last manned fighter—or fighter-bomber or jet—and
I’m one that’s inclined to believe that…We’re at a real time of transition here
in terms of the future of aviation.”
It remains to be
seen whether U.S military and political leaders—and the people who entrust
America’s security to them—are prepared for this transition.
Faced with a similar
revolutionary moment in 1931, then-Major George Patton dismissed “those who now proclaim that the airplane should be the sole means of waging
future wars...This notion is absurd...The airplane is here to stay. It is a
great arm, but it has no more replaced all others than did gunpowder.”
UCAVs may be here to stay,
but they won’t become the sole means of warfare. They won’t replace
war-fighters. And they certainly won’t make war less likely. In fact, given
that UCAVs remove their remote-control pilots from the dangers of war, they may
make war too easy to wage. Drone warfare, after all, is war not only at a safe
remove, but at the safest remove. That lack of risk is fueling this drone revolution—and opening the way to uncharted territory.