[Peace-discuss] Nick Turse on drones (from TomDispatch via Mother Jones)

[Stuart Levy]

I think this is the article Rohn mentioned at yesterday's AWARE meeting.

Nick Turse looks at the US military drone program, drawing on ~70 Air 
Force incident reports of catastrophic drone mishaps since 2000. The 
article, originally in TomDispatch and republished in Mother Jones:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/01/future-robot-warfare-drones-crashing

"The aerial disasters described draw attention not only to the technical 
limitations of drone warfare, but to larger conceptual flaws inherent in 
such operations."

[...]

"Over the last decade, the United States has increasingly turned to 
drones in an effort to win its wars. The Air Force investigation files 
examined by TomDispatch suggest a more extensive use of drones in Iraq 
than has previously been reported. But in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, 
America's preeminent wonder weapon failed to bring the US mission 
anywhere close to victory. Effective as the spearhead of a program to 
cripple al-Qaeda in Pakistan, drone warfare in that country's tribal 
borderlands has also alienated almost the entire population of 190 
million. In other words, an estimated 2,000 suspected or identified 
guerrillas (as well as untold numbers of civilians) died."

[...]
> In addition, drone warfare seems to be creating a sinister system of 
> embedded economic incentives that may lead to increasing casualty 
> figures on the ground. "In some targeting programs, staffers have 
> review quotas—that is, they must review a certain number of possible 
> targets per given length of time," The Atlantic's Joshua Foust 
> recently wrote of the private contractors involved in the process. 
> "Because they are contractors," he explains, "their continued 
> employment depends on their ability to satisfy the stated performance 
> metrics. So they have a financial incentive to make life-or-death 
> decisions about possible kill targets just to stay employed. This 
> should be an intolerable situation, but because the system lacks 
> transparency or outside review it is almost impossible to monitor or 
> alter."