Military Stats Reveal Epicenter of U.S. Drone War
* By Noah Shachtman
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/author/noah_shachtman/> Email Author
<mailto:noah.shachtman_at_gmail.com>
* November 9, 2012 |
Forget Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and all the other secret little warzones.
The real center of the U.S. drone campaign is in plain sight - on the hot
and open battlefield of Afghanistan.
The American military has launched 333 drone strikes this year in
Afghanistan. That’s not only the highest total ever, according to U.S. Air
Force statistics. It’s essentially the same number of robotic attacks in
Pakistan <
http://apps.washingtonpost.com/foreign/drones/> since the CIA-led
campaign there began nearly eight years ago. In the last 30 days, there have
been three reported strikes in Yemen. In Afghanistan, that’s just an
average day’s worth of remotely piloted attacks. And the increased strikes
come as the rest of the war in Afghanistan is slowing down.
The secret drone campaigns have drawn the most scrutiny because of the
legal, geopolitical, and ethical questions they raise. But it’s worth
remembering that the rise of the flying robots is largely occurring in the
open, on an acknowledged battlefield where the targets are largely
unquestioned and the attending issues aren’t nearly as fraught.
“The difference between the Afghan operation and the ones operations in
Pakistan and elsewhere come down to the fundamental differences between open
military campaigns and covert campaigns run by the intelligence community.
It shapes everything from the level of transparency to the command and
control to the rules of engagements to the process and consequences if an
air strike goes wrong,” e-mails Peter W. Singer, who runs the Brookings
Institution’s 21st Century Defense Initiative. (Full disclosure: I have a
non-resident fellowship there.) “This is why the military side has been far
less controversial, and thus why many have pushed for it to play a greater
role as the strikes slowly morphed from isolated, covert events into a
regularized air war.”
The military has 61 Predator and Reaper “
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/02/air-force-drones/> combat air
patrols,” each with three or four robotic planes. The CIA’s inventory is
believed to be just a fraction of that: 30 to 35 drones total, although
there is thought to be some overlap between the military and intelligence
agency fleets. The Washington Post reported last month that the CIA is
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-seeks-to-expand-d
rone-fleet-officials-say/2012/10/18/01149a8c-1949-11e2-bd10-5ff056538b7c_sto
ry.html> looking for another 10 drones as the unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs) become
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/four-more-drones-obama/> more and
more central to the agency’s worldwide counterterror campaign.
In Pakistan, those drones are flown with a wink and a nod, to avoid the
perception of violating national sovereignty. In Yemen, the robots go after
men just because they
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/04/joe-schmoe-drones/> fit a profile
of what the U.S. believes a terrorist to be. In both countries, people are
considered legitimate targets if they happen to be male and young and in the
wrong place at the wrong time. The White House keeps a “ <
http://www.wired.
com/dangerroom/2012/10/disposition-matrix/> matrix” on who merits robotic
death. Congress (outside of the intelligence committees) largely learns
about the programs through the papers.
None of these statements is true about the drone war in Afghanistan, where
strikes are ordered by a local commander,
<
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_end_air_war/> overseen by military
lawyers, conducted with the (
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/no-let-up-for-afghan-air-war-despit
e-karzais-threat/> sometimes reluctant) blessing of the Kabul government,
and used almost entirely to help troops under fire. The UAVs aren’t flown
to dodge issues of sovereignty or to avoid traditional military assets.
They’re used because they work better - staying in the sky longer than
traditional aircraft and employing more advanced sensors to make sure the
targets they hit are legit.
The U.S. military is now launching more drone strikes - an average of 33 per
month - than at any moment in the 11 years of the Afghan conflict. It’s a
major escalation from just last year, when the monthly average was 24.5. And
it’s happening while the rest of the American war effort is winding down:
There are 34,000 fewer American troops than there were in early 2011; U.S.
casualties are down 40 percent from 2010′s toll; militant attacks are off
by about a quarter; civilian deaths have declined a bit from their awful
peak.
Even the air war is shrinking. Overall surveillance sorties are down, from
an average of 3,183 per month last year to 2,954 in 2012. (Drones flew 860
of those sorties in 2011, and now fly 761 per month today.) Missions in
which U.S. aircraft fire their weapons have declined, too. That used to
happen 450 times per month on average in 2011. This year, the monthly total
dropped to 360.
In other words, drone strikes in Afghanistan now make up about 9 percent of
the overall total of aerial attacks. Last year, it was a little more than 5
percent. The UAVs are growing in importance while the rest of the military
campaign is receding.
“The numbers are yet another powerful data point illustrating the fact that
unmanned systems are here and they are here to stay. They show their growing
use, even as overall air strikes go down,” e-mails Singer, who
<
https://twitter.com/peterwsinger/status/261126842336034816> first noticed
the drone strike increase.
When Barack Obama began his first term in the White House, many in his
administration pushed for keeping the number of troops in Afghanistan
relatively small while boosting the number of drone strikes. At the time,
Obama decided to go in a different direction. But now, as he gets set for
the start of his second term, the president appears ready to embrace his
internal critics, and leave Afghanistan to the robots.
<
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2012/11/afcent_rpa_stats.jpg>
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2012/11/afcent_rpa_stats-660x51
0.jpg
Figures on the air war in Afghanistan, supplied by the U.S. military.
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Received on Fri Nov 09 2012 - 17:38:25 EST
