[Peace-discuss] Lie: Drones Are Not A Better Way Of War
David Johnson via Peace-discuss
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
Mon Jun 2 08:14:03 EDT 2014
Lie: Drones Are Not A Better Way Of War
1dronev
Resist! <http://www.popularresistance.org/category/resist/> Drones
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/drones/>, Wars and Militarism
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/wars-and-militarism/>
By Brian Terrell, www.vcnv.org
<http://vcnv.org/force-protection-alpha-in-effect>
June 1st, 2014
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Above photo: A victim of a drone attack in Pakistan. Daniel Berehulak/Getty
Force Protection Alpha in Effect.
On April 15, 2014, when the story broke on the world that the Central
Intelligence Agency's covert program of assassination by remotely
controlled drones is not distinct from the drone program of the U.S. Air
Force as we had been told, I was on the "Sacred Peace Walk," an event
sponsored each spring by the Nevada Desert Experience, a 70 mile trek
from Las Vegas to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. Creech Air Force Base is
along the way and we had already made plans for a protest there the next
morning. While the CIA's drone program is shrouded in secrecy, the Air
Force supposedly has been using drones strictly as a weapon for waging
war against combatants in recognized areas of conflict such as
Afghanistan and formerly in Iraq, under a chain of command that is
accountable to elected officials. Some who condemn the CIA's
assassinations by drones as illegal give a pass to or even laud the Air
Force use of drones as a more restrained way to fight war.
This distinction has now been exposed as a lie. In a new documentary
film released in Europe, "Drone," former Air Force drone operators,
veterans of a super-secret Squadron 17 at Creech Air Force Base in
Nevada, reveal that "it's always been the Air Force that flies" the
CIA's missions, "the CIA might be the customer, but the Air Force has
always flown it."
The fact that airmen at Creech are carrying out assassination missions
and extrajudicial executions far from declared zones of conflict on
orders from unknown and unnamable bureaucrats did not come as a
surprise. Neither was the news a "game changer" in regard to the actions
we had planned, although we quickly revised the indictment listing the
war crimes committed at Creech that some of us would attempt to deliver
to the base commander.
My arrest at Creech along with eight others on April 16 was a "return to
the scene of the crime" (the Air Force's crime, not mine) for me, as I
was among the "Creech 14" in April 2009, the first nonviolent direct
action against drones in the U.S. Creech was then one of only a few
sites from which drones were controlled by the U.S. and by the United
Kingdom, which has a wing of the Royal Air Force stationed there to fly
their own drones. Since then the use of armed drones has been
proliferating around the world and so has the number of drone operation
bases in communities around the U.S. My work with Voices for Creative
Nonviolence has brought me to the scenes of the crime in Afghanistan,
the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia and at the gates of drone
bases in New York, Iowa, Missouri and in England as well.
The latest revelation is but the exposure of one more lie, one more
layer of criminality and venality of this corrupt and dangerous program.
Over the years since April 2009, the promises of a new era of better war
through drone technology have been steadily unravelling, each of them
proving false. It is increasingly clear that rather than limiting the
scope of war, drones are expanding and proliferating it, killing more
civilians both on battlefields and far from them, endangering our
soldiers and the safety of our communities. Instead of keeping the
horrors of war at a safe distance, drones bring the war home in
unprecedented ways.
President Obama, in an address before the National Defense University
May 23, 2013, described this new technology as more precise and by
implication more humane than other weaponry: "By narrowly targeting our
action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide
among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in
the loss of innocent life." There is an understandable appeal to the
idea of a weapon that can discriminate between the good and the bad
people and limit regrettable "collateral damage." It is understandable
too, that a nation weary of sending its sons and daughters to fight on
battlefields far away, risking injury, death or the debilitating effects
of post-traumatic stress, might look to embrace a new method of war
whereby the warriors fights battles from safe distances. Thousands of
miles beyond the reach of the enemy, drone combatants often do not even
have to leave their hometowns and are able to return to homes and
families at the end of a shift.
In his National Defense University speech, the president contended that
"conventional airpower and missiles are far less precise than drones,
and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage." A few
weeks later a study published by the same National Defense University
refuted his claim. Drone strikes in Afghanistan, the study found, were
"an order of magnitude more likely to result in civilian casualties per
engagement." Despite the president's assurances to the contrary, drone
strikes cause immense "local outrage" in the countries where they
happen, turning America's allies into enemies. "What scares me about
drone strikes is how they are perceived around the world," said former
commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan General Stanley
McChrystal. "The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes
... is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are
hated on a visceral level, even by people who've never seen one or seen
the effects of one."
Former defense secretary Robert M. Gates also warns of the seductive
power and precision of armed drones that leads many to perceive war as a
"bloodless, painless and odorless" affair. "Remarkable advances in
precision munitions, sensors, information and satellite technology and
more can make us overly enamored with the ability of technology to
transform the traditional laws and limits of war. A button is pushed in
Nevada and seconds later a pickup truck explodes in Kandahar." Defense
experts and policy makers, Gates warns, have come to view drone warfare
as a "kind of video game or action movie. . . . In reality, war is
inevitably tragic, inefficient and uncertain." General Mike Hostage,
chief of the US Air Combat Command, claims that while weaponized drones
are useful in assassinations of terror suspects, they are impractical in
combat. "Predators and Reapers are useless in a contested environment,"
Hostage said.
Some enlisted personnel are also questioning the use of drones. Heather
Linebaugh, a drone operator for the US Air Force for three years says:
"Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial
Vehicle Predator and Reaper program -- aka drones -- I wish I could ask
them a few questions. I'd start with: 'How many women and children have
you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?' And: 'How many men have you
seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for
help while bleeding out from severed legs?' Or even more pointedly: 'How
many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan
because our ever-so-accurate UAVs were unable to detect an IED
[improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?'"
Distance from the battlefield does not isolate soldiers from
post-traumatic stress or the moral injury of war. Heather Linebaugh
speaks of two friends and colleagues who committed suicide and another
former drone operator, Brandon Bryant, said that his work had made him
into a "heartless sociopath." While drone pilots are at a greater
distance from their victims than other soldiers, he says, the video feed
they watch brings them closer: "Artillery doesn't see the results of
their actions. It's really more intimate for us, because we see everything."
The Air Force is relegating much of its drone operations to Air National
Guard units in various states, creating virtual war zones in local
communities. "In an F-16, your whole mission was to train to go to war,"
said a pilot of an Ohio Air Guard wing that made a conversion from
fighters to drones. "In this mission, we go to war every day." Foreign
postings of state National Guard units are usually made public, but
where in the world these citizen soldiers will be fighting from now on
will be shrouded in secrecy, hidden even from their families. Reason and
the rules of war both suggest that assassinations and acts of war on
sovereign nations carried on by local National Guard units will make
their communities into legitimate targets of war.
Drone warfare is based on the lie that war can be made more exact,
limited and humane through technology. Our civilian and military
authorities, proliferating drone attacks around the globe from more and
more American bases, are acting recklessly and in defiance of domestic
and international law. They are acting without regard for the safety and
well-being of our troops, of American civilians or of people in faraway
places who otherwise would mean us no harm. Rather than limiting war,
being an answer, drones perpetuate and multiply the horrors of war and
bring them home into our communities.
As our band of walkers approached Creech Air Force Base on the morning
of April 16, we were greeted by a large sign at the gate that read
"Force Protection Alpha in Effect," announcing that the base was in its
highest security alert. We were also met by an impressive contingent of
military police and sheriff's officers, heavily armed and some on
horseback, which easily exceeded in number our little band that left Las
Vegas on foot four days earlier. These public servants were clearly
responding to a perceived threat to public safety and so were we. Our
purposes were disjointed, though, in that we were at Creech in response
to a clear and present danger presented by the murderous crimes of
Squadron 17 somewhere in the depth of this desert outpost. The official
and ostensible law enforcement squad, on the other hand, was there in
response to the threat that a few unarmed citizens might step across an
arbitrary and ever shifting line on the pavement.
Brian at Creech AFB: Photo credit: John Amidon
Brian at Creech AFB: Photo credit: John Amidon
I write this on my way to Kansas City, where, this weekend, good and
faithful friends will go to nearby Whiteman Air Force Base to confront
the predator drones based there. A few days later, Voices for Creative
Nonviolence and friends will start walking from Boeing corporate
headquarters in Chicago (a major drone contractor) 160 miles to Battle
Creek, Michigan, where a National Guard unit is poised to begin
operating predator drones over far away skies. "Force Protection Alpha"
is truly "in Effect" and people in Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan as
well as communities in the U.S. and Europe are responding to the emergency.
Brian Terrell is a Co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and
lives on a Catholic Worker farm in Maloy, Iowa_
Related Posts:
* Drones Coming To NYPD?
<http://www.popularresistance.org/drones-coming-to-nypd/>May 21, 2014
* 'Fly Kites, Not Drones'
<http://www.popularresistance.org/fly-kites-not-drones/>April 14, 2014
* Anti-War Activists Confront Drones Advocate
<http://www.popularresistance.org/anti-war-activists-confront-drones-advocate/>February
14, 2014
* Three Clergy, Two Veteranss Arrested Protesting Drones at Beale
Air...
<http://www.popularresistance.org/three-clergy-two-veteranss-arrested-protesting-drones-at-beale-air-force-base/>March
6, 2014
* 7 Arrested Today At Drone Protest
<http://www.popularresistance.org/7-arrested-today-at-drone-protest/>April
11, 2014
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