Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars

Lethality without accountability.

Military drones signify an evolution in air warfare. By 2010 there were more drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined. Historically, the first military use of drones was for surveillance only, and prototype surveillance drones were used in the Bosnian conflict. When the Air Force mission changed from attacking fixed targets to counter-terrorism, that is, when “the bad guy” could move between the time of being identified by drone and being attacked, drones started to carry bombs and missiles.

What else is different in being killed by a US military drone? One difference is that fewer American lives are put at risk. Another is, having a sniper with an 8000-mile range bullet, the president doesn’t have to go to Congress for ground troops, and as such doesn’t have to be open to Congress and the American people.

Though many questions have been raised about the use of drones in war, few answers will be found in Sudden Justice. The author provides publicly known details of military drones and quotes from individuals who work support or conduct drone strikes, but there is little to be said on policy, as drone warfare is conducted under an official cloak of secrecy.

As of publication date, an estimated 400 armed MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers have been manufactured by General Atomics. Abe Karem, the inventor of the predecessor of the modern drone first worked for Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI), then moved to California and started his own firm that went bankrupt in 1990 but was bought by General Atomics.

The US Government Accounting Agency (GAO) places the development and purchase of drones to date at  $12.4 billion. By 2013, 284 model MQ-1 Predators had been manufactured. With a top speed of 85 MPH, the Predator can stay airborne for 24 hours. Predators have flown 1.5 million flight hours and participated in 60,000 combat missions. The Predator is being replaced by the MQ-9 Reaper. Twice the Predator’s size and with a top speed 200 MPH, the Reaper can stay aloft 18 hours. There were more than 38,000 MQ-9 Reaper flights in Afghanistan by 2011.

At its peak, the US was able to field more than 60 simultaneous missions in a 24-hour period over a half-dozen countries. Drones are remotely operated across eight airbases across the US, controlled through access to high-speed data networks and computers. The “end customer” can be linked by audio and video might feed to the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon. And “on rare occasions, senior officials all the way up to the President might even be watching.”

Currently only three US organizations have access to drones: the US Air Force, the US Army Special Forces, and the CIA; the US Navy drone forces are still under development. For the President, directing the CIA has advantages over the regular Armed Services. The CIA follows different (i.e. looser) rules with respect to what constitutes legal “targeted” killing (i.e. assassination), and as such the use of drones has become an assassination tool for the president.

Given the security of a mission, the drone pilot may not know the details and have to take direction from a remote commander, and possibly military lawyers. When the CIA is directing Air Force operations, Air Force crews have been told to not look at their monitors. The author separates President Bush’s policies from President Obama’s and notes that President Obama has authorized eight times more targeted killing operations than his predecessor.

The pragmatics of world politics indicates that any nation that feels wronged or at risk might choose to either go to the world court or go outside the law to protect itself. The belief that world courts don’t work is part of the rationale for nations to conduct coups and assassinations.

Prior to September 11, the US had humanitarian concerns with respect to targeted killing. The US noted that Israel, in targeted killing of Palestinians by drone, “fails to discriminate between terrorism and protest.” After September 11, the rules changed and US began to adopt the same kind of policy.

Most of the controversies in drone are over questions of law. Does the US have the right to kill its own citizens without trial? Does the US have the right to kill individuals in foreign countries that the US is not officially at war against, when uninvited and unconsulted? There is no legal basis for targeted killing and at least one targeted killing was of a U.S. citizen, violating the US Constitution. Does the US have the right to accidentally kill untargeted civilians?

Outside of war zones, drone strikes can be equated to acts of terrorism, and drone strikes have become a recruiting tool for America’s enemies. The political repercussions of these questions could make high-level international agreements with the US difficult for other nations, however America carries so much weight in the world that many countries conveniently ignore the legality of the US targeted killing program.

The author provides the reader the rationale of the Executive branch in conducting targeted attacks. The American President’s authority to kill outside of declared war is enabled by secret law (intended to prevent law-breakers from “gaming the system” to attack without concerns of legal reprisal) that prevents opposition by those who have the authority to judge those laws. The secret law created by the president is hidden from Congress and federal judges, who choose to not cross the president on issues of secret law (even if that law encroaches on their own powers). Congressional oversight began eight years after the targeted killing program started, and when Congress did get involved, Congress became a booster of the program.

The concern over providing a cover of legality of extra-judicial killing appears to be less a concern over future prosecution in international court than US prosecution in reprisal by the next US administration, disregarding the fact that no standing president has ever “gone after” a past president. Here an astute reader may see correspondence between providing legal cover for assassination with providing legal cover for the torture of prisoners. That is, the legal cover is intended for the governments’ official agents, or what the author calls “minions.”

The infrastructure that supports drone strikes is immense, bureaucratic and highly secretive, supported by 3000 aircrew in theater, 3000 operators in the US, and 5000 intelligence analysts.

The “target deployment process” depends on asset managers, collection managers, liaisons from intelligence agencies, and safety observers. Data modeling is used to estimate the probability of the number of deaths from a drone attack.  The output of the model is called “bugsplat” by Air Force personnel, as in “show me the bugsplat.” 

Almost every targeted strike kills non-targeted civilians, and presumably multiple scenarios are run to reduce civilian deaths, though there may be intentional disregard of casualties when there are limited opportunities to strike. The US military has recently been arguing that minimizing bugsplat is not a customary requirement in the international law of warfare.

There’s a section on alternative methods of targeting other than by visual means, methods include using cell phones as target beacons (geolocation). Other methods of targeting include the use of spies or double agents to plant tracking devices on targets. As a consequence, senior terrorists and militants have reduced or stopped their use of electronic communications.

When targeted killing is referred to as a “signature strike” this indicates that killing is based on the target’s behavior and not on the target’s identity. The behavior patterns selected for “signature strikes” by drone are secret. The rules for what constitutes a “legal” kill by the military (by drone or otherwise) are detailed yet filled with loopholes. An example is given of a prisoner held in custody by the UK military who could not “legally” be killed while in custody, but neither could he “legally” be held. Once released, i.e. as soon as the prisoner was let outside the gates, he became fair game.

In determining who is a combatant versus a non-combatant, any military aged male by default, is a combatant. In Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves concerning the US war in Vietnam, the enemy called the Viet Cong (VC) were indistinguishable from the general Vietnamese population. Signature strikes in Vietnam were justified by American soldiers as “if you ran, you were VC.”

There is a difference between precision and accuracy. One drone pilot said he was unable to distinguish a rifle from a shovel. Another said, “You never knew who you’re killing because you never see a face. . . . What we’re looking at are shadows and silhouettes. Just because some remote guy in a chair says ‘Yep, that’s him’ . . . There’s no way to confirm that. . . . How the hell can you know?” and former Deputy US Secretary of State, Richard Armitage is quoted, “I would read these accounts. ‘12 insurgents killed. 15!’ You don’t know that. You don’t know that. They could be insurgents, they could be cooks.”

NS Commanding General Stanley McChrystal is quoted in July 2009 saying, “We’re going to lose the fucking war if we don’t stop killing civilians.” A number of drone pilots have exhibited symptoms of PTSD, while for others video footage bad guys getting killed is passed around as “pred porn.”

The author notes, “While officials were generally quick to claim credit for the killing of senor militant and terrorist leaders, silence invariably surrounds the deaths of civilians,” and in response the UN has recently started separately tracking civilian deaths from drones. Data indicates civilian deaths are more likely to occur from drone than from manned aircraft, and more than one senior US official is quoted as not being convinced drone attacks made sense politically or militarily. There is a wide gap between US and non-government assessments of civilian casualties; the author claims that no one trusts the CIA’s public estimates.

Across the Mid East and North Africa, drone strikes seem like “whack-a-mole.” The war zones for drones between 2001 and today have been varied, depending on year and local politics, and as such the author’s narrative is confusing and a timeline organized by country and context would have been helpful.

The author provides statistics on drone kills by nationality and region. The 2400 killed by drone since 2002 include citizens of 34 nations, of which 40 were westerners; of those 40 almost half remain a mystery. The majority of US drone strike kills were of Pakistanis, Afghans, and Yemenis involved in local or regional insurgent activities. Of the majority of deaths, none were direct threats to the US.

After a suicide bomber in 2009 killed a number of CIA agents at an outpost in Afghanistan, the CIA apparently gave up on trying to avoid the targeting of non-combatants with their drone strikes, conducting 20 drone strikes in 60 days in what the author calls “tit-for-tat” war. Tit-for-tat lasted to May 2010 when a homemade car bomb was found and defused in NYC, which lead to an unofficial three-year ceasefire between the US and the Pakistani Taliban.

Another “tit-for-tat” war occurred between the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as well. First, the CIA station chief was “outed” in a lawsuit in Pakistan and forced to flee the country. Then Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor in Pakistan shot and killed two ISI agents and was jailed. “A US consulate car sent to aid Davis ran over and killed a cyclist before itself fleeing.” The ISI then leaked the names of 55 alleged CIA and JSOC operatives, resulting in demonstrations and riots, which forced the alleged operatives to flee. It was not until a $2.3 million settlement was paid by Washington on behalf of victims’ families that Davis was released. The day after Davis’ release, the CIA carried out another drone strike, killing 40 civilians.

The continued killing of non-combatants by drone has degraded Pakistani’s tolerance of America, to the point where in 2005 a US Seal team had to turn back from a raid after being fired on by Pakistani troops. In an opinion poll conducted in in Pakistan in 2012, three out of four Pakistanis consider the US to be an enemy. Four journalists were killed in Pakistan between 2003 and 2013, and while investigating drone strikes in Pakistan, the author was threatened by a US intelligence official.

Keeping the responsibility for civilian deaths in perspective, the Pakistani Air Force also inflicts heavy civilian casualties during counter-insurgency operations, and just as often in numbers greater than caused by drone strikes. An excerpt quoted from one report covering a counter-insurgency operation states, “In the ensuing fight, whole areas of South Waziristan were simply flattened . . . years later, the Taliban has not returned in any number, nor too has most of the local population . . .” A senior officer joked, “We’re presently in the safest place in Pakistan.”

Somalia is considered a “failed state” and as such, the CIA can operate how it wishes, without media or local government presence. Yemen by 2011 has had 500 to 1400 deaths, mostly by drone, and of these at least 120 were civilian non-combatants. Since publication Yemen has since fallen into full-fledged civil war.

The author provides details of publically acknowledged accidental strikes on civilians. These strikes have killed tribal elders and children, and in one instance hit a bus filled with shoppers returning from market. There have also been claims of the US deliberately targeting first-responders to earlier drone strikes, though proof is hard to come by. The author notes that it is a war crime to target medical personnel.

A change in “bugsplat” rules appears to have taken place between 2012 and 2013. In 2012, of the 220 who were killed in 200 CIA drone strikes the Bureau of Investigative Journalists (BIJ) confirmed 13 to have been non-combatants. While for 2013, and first nine months of 2014, no non-combatants were killed. (Sudden Justice was published after the acknowledged unintentional death by drone of American hostages in January 2015.)

Though Sudden Justice can’t be said to be disorganized, it is not quite organized enough, making the narrative at times difficult to follow. To sum up, Sudden Justice was written perhaps a little too soon and perhaps a little too close (given what few are known) to allow a reader to get a grasp of the big picture, though in this humble reviewer’s opinion the big picture may be no more than the consequence of having of a tool making it easy to kill without consequence makes that tool more likely to be used. For those who want to further research drone strikes, terrorism, and law, readers are encouraged to Google the papers of law professor Gregory S. McNeal.