Drone Watch

Technologies that could unleash a generation of lethal weapons systems requiring little or no human interaction are being funded by the Ministry of Defence, according to a new report.

The development of autonomous military systems – dubbed “killer robots” by campaigners opposed to them – is deeply contentious. Earlier this year, Google withdrew from the Pentagon’s Project Maven, which uses machine learning to analyse video feeds from drones, after ethical objections from the tech giant’s staff.

The government insists it “does not possess fully autonomous weapons and has no intention of developing them”. But, since 2015, the UK has declined to support proposals put forward at the UN to ban them. Now, using government data, Freedom of Information requests and open-source information, a year-long investigation reveals that the MoD and defence contractors are funding dozens of artificial intelligence programmes for use in conflict. [....]

The government appears to concede that the development of autonomous weapons systems is inevitable. [....] The Ministry of Defence has claimed that unmanned aircraft “will eventually have the ability to independently locate and attack mobile targets, with appropriate proportionality and discrimination, but probably not much before 2030.”

What’s an autonomous drone? Autonomous drones decide where to fly ‘without direct human input’. Self-flying drones can fly without a human piloting them on the ground in real time, but have pre-programmed flight paths. Here’s a video about a project that uses non-weaponised self-flying drones to create 3D images of cities to help protect infrastructure from natural disasters.

Do autonomous weapons – “killer robots” that decide who to kill without any human control – already exist? Not entirely, although reports like this one suggest that it’s a priority for many militaries and may become fully realised sooner rather than later. You can read an interview here with a UN expert who works on some of the ethical questions and potential legislation related to autonomous weaponry.

In our control room, y’know, they had a picture of September 11th, of the second plane hitting the building, just to try to make you pissed off about it all over again before you go do your job. “These guys have to die, these guys deserve to die – and you’ve gotta go make it happen.”

An Israeli drone strike has killed three Palestinian teenagers near the border fence between Gaza and Israel, as tensions reached breaking point following a tense weekend of cross border fire.

The Gaza health ministry said the boys, whose bodies were found 200 metres from the fence on Sunday, were aged just 13 and 14 years old.

The Israeli military said the trio they “were apparently involved in placing an improvised explosive device" near the border in the southern part of the enclave.

On Monday Aisha Abu Dhabi, mother of 14-year-old Abdel-Hamid, who was one of the three boys killed, denied the accusations, and said he had “nothing to do with the resistance". The funerals for the slain teenagers were held in central Gaza on Monday. 

Qureshi remembered thinking to himself in his hospital bed during the anxiety of his month-long blindness: “What did I do for which I was punished so badly? What did my family do? Why did it happen to me?”

The available evidence suggests the strike was an error. Reporter Daniel Klaidman’s book about Obama’s drone strikes, Kill or Capture, claims that the first January 2009 strike had gone “terribly wrong”, with the targeted Taliban member never having been on the premises. A leaked Pakistani government document records “9 civilians” being killed in a drone strike on 23 January 2009, an apparent reference to the one on Qureshi’s home; an unredacted version seen by the Guardian names his village and his dead uncle.

On Saturday, Muhammad Nasir Ziad al-Rifi, 13, succumbed to his injuries from a 21 August 2014 drone strike that killed his father, twin brother and five other members of his family – most of them children.

Around 550 children were among the approximately 2,220 Palestinians fatally injured during that offensive. At least 164 of those children died as a result of Israeli drone strikes, according to Defense for Children International Palestine.

What is Israel’s drone policy? Israel does not officially confirm any of its drone strikes, so it’s difficult to know what the country’s strategy is for drone use. A February 2018 report by the New York Times, however, revealed that Israel has carried out over 100 covert strikes against ISIS in Egypt, with the Egyptian president’s permission. In Palestine, we’ve seen extensive use of small drones for crowd control and surveillance. Israel is also a leading exporter and manufacturer of military drones.

How does this affect Palestine? Israel uses occupied territory like Gaza to test new aerial technology, like the tear gas drones that started appearing over demonstrations in March 2018. Over the past year, the Israeli military has also enlisted amateur drone racers to target homemade incendiary kites in Gaza. You can watch protestors shooting down small IDF drones with slingshots here. Drone use against Palestinian protestors is still in force – on 28 October 2018, three Palestinian teenagers died from a drone strike.

What’s next? Drone use in Gaza is at the forefront of legal challenges to Israel’s ‘open-fire’ policies, which have resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries this year. Read about the legal challenge coming from the 2014 deaths of four Palestinian children via drone strike here.

The morning after Obama won the election, I woke sober and lucid / Pictured him building a drone in his bedroom out of day-old campaign signs / And sending it across the ocean covered in I-Voted stickers / These are our love letters to Pakistan: hovering packages, delivering death.

Drone Watch is a new blog dedicated to keeping you up to date with drone strikes and aerial warfare.

With the 2016 election and the lengthening of the so-called War on Terror, drone warfare has slipped from mainstream news coverage and public consciousness. Drone Watch aims to fill that gap with concise, understandable, up-to-date news and commentary about a technology that’s shaped the conflicts we’ve grown up with.

On our blog, you’ll find:

Historical context about aerial warfare, covert war, and ‘counterterrorism’

Tips and tricks for reading the news

Personal stories and insight from journalists, survivors, and experts

Opportunities to ask questions and write content

Accessible resources and informed reporting

Weekly news round-ups about drones

Drones have been part of warfare since the 19th century, arguably, when the Austrians used pilotless hot-air balloons to bomb Venice.

Development of pilotless flying machines such as those operated today began almost as soon as the Wright brothers demonstrated powered flight with the first remote control planes developed during the First World War.

Unmanned technology advanced in the interwar period. The term drone itself started to be used at this time, after the UK developed the Queen Bee, a bi-plane converted to be controlled by radio from the ground.

Like many military drones at that time, the Queen Bee was a remote controlled target for anti-aircraft gunners to use for target practice. Others, including the infamous Nazi V1 “Doodlebug,” were still essentially guided bombs - primitive versions of today’s cruise missiles.

By the late 1950s however the US and others found they could use unmanned, remotely piloted aircraft as spy planes. Radio-controlled and fitted with film cameras, the small drones flew over China and North Vietnam gathering imagery intelligence but not risking the lives of pilots, or the diplomatic fallout of US airmen being captured by Communists.

Drones were still only a niche technology during the Cold War. They were unreliable, small yet expensive, and pilots had to be within range of their analogue radio signals, often having to fly their drones while sat in a nearby manned aircraft.

They were overshadowed by globe spanning satellite networks and much sexier, supersonic manned spy planes, such as the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird, which were much more in tune with the white scarf bravado of Air Force pilots.

The genesis of the drones orbiting today’s battlefields came in three key technological leaps.

First came the work of an Israeli aviation genius who in the 1970s started to develop aircraft with glider-like properties. Incredibly long, thin wings that could hold the plane aloft at altitude for hours on end, more than 24 hours flight.

This endurance is a fundamental reason why today’s armed drones, such as the General Atomics Reaper drone, are so in vogue. The key is keeping the pilots on the ground: the drones are lighter than manned aircraft and they don’t have to land when they get tired, they just swap seats with a fresh crew.

Their ability to loiter proved invaluable in the 1990s, during the escalating conflict in the former Yugoslavia. There was a dearth of good intelligence about Serbian tank and troop movements. US supersonic jets were struggling to spot the Serbian forces in the thick Balkan forests but the drones could stay on station for 24 hours at a time, kept their unblinking eye on their targets.

Combining this loitering with the second crucial advance, the use of transmitters to send the footage straight back to battlefield commanders, is credited with convincing Nato generals they needed to start bombing the Serbs again, so hastening the signing Dayton peace accords.

The US has since taken those Balkan systems further. The signal to control them, and the returning video footage, are now transmitted through satellite networks, not radio waves. In 2000 the US took the final leap forward when the Air Force and CIA became the first to successfully fit drones with missiles, as part of a failed CIA attempt to kill Osama bin Laden.

These satellite controlled hunter-killer drones allow pilots to control their aircraft from half a world away and it allows generals, spies and politicians to watch the war they are waging on the other side of the world, live on TV from anywhere in the world.

America’s drones started life as spy planes and were augmented to become assassination weapons. And they have been used in at least seven countries to fulfill exactly those roles, throughout Washington’s 15 year, ongoing war on terror. They have been hoovering up information, feeding the military’s insatiable demand for battlefield intelligence, and finding and killing terrorists and insurgents.

The US drone war massively expanded under President Barack Obama. Responding to evolving militant threats and the greater availability of remote piloting technology, Obama ordered ten times more counter-terror strikes than his predecessor George W Bush over the course of his term.

It is not just that Obama has put more of a certain type of aircraft in the skies. The low-footprint nature of drone strikes – which can be carried out without having personnel in the country being hit – made it politically easier for the US to mount operations in countries with which it was not technically at war. Hundreds of strikes have been carried out in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, carried out by the highly secretive Central Intelligence Agency and Joint Special Operations Command at the Pentagon.