from Chapter 1

At the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner, President Bush joked about searching for weapons of mass destruction under Oval Office furniture, since they had never been found in Iraq. The joke backfired when parents who had lost their children fighting in Iraq said they found it offensive and tasteless. Senator John Kerry said Bush displayed a “stunningly cavalier” attitude toward the war and those fighting it.

Six years later, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama made his own not-so- funny joke about weapons and war. When the pop band Jonas Brothers was about to play to the packed room, Obama furrowed his brow and sent them a warning to keep away from his daughters. “Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You’ll never see it coming.”

For people in Pakistan, where American drones have been dropping their Hellfire missiles, Obama’s joke lost something in translation. According to Pakistani journalist Khawar Rizvi, few Pakistanis had ever heard of the Jonas Brothers or understood the reference to the President’s daughters. “But one thing we do know: There’s nothing funny about Predator drones,” said Rizvi.

That seemed to be the opinion of Faisal Shahzad, a thirty-year-old Pakistan-born resident of Bridgeport, Connecticut. On May 1, 2010, just one day after President Obama made his offensive drone joke, Shahzad tried to set off a car bomb in New York City’s Times Square. The would-be bomber had left his explosive-laden Nissan Pathfinder parked in the middle of the busiest intersection in New York City at the busiest time: 6:30 p.m. on a Saturday night. Luckily, the bomb failed to explode, and the authorities—tipped off by local t-shirt vendors—disarmed it before it caused any casualties. Questioned about his motives by the authorities, Shahzad talked about US drone attacks in Pakistan.

....The technology for flying remotely has existed for decades. Unmanned aerial vehicles were first tested by the military way back during World War I. In the 1930s the US, UK, and Germany, later joined by the USSR and others, all began to use drones for anti-aircraft targeting exercises. Unmanned crafts were used as guided missiles by the US military in World War II and the Korean War. It wasn’t until the Vietnam War that unmanned aircraft were used to gather intelligence.

Anyone who wants to build an unmanned aircraft can order the parts at a hobby shop and assemble them in their garage. In fact, the prototype for the most popular modern-day drone, the Predator, was built by Israeli aviation engineer Abraham Karem in his garage in southern California in the 1980s.

During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis developed a spy drone to try to get real-time, front-line intelligence, but these unmanned aircraft lasted very few hours in the air and kept crashing. Abraham Karem went to work with an Israeli defense contractor to improve the plane’s endurance, and then moved to southern California in 1980 to develop his own company to produce unmanned aircraft.

With grants from the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the CIA, Karem began building a new model at home in his three-car garage. In 1981 he unveiled what he called the Albatross, an unmanned plane that could stay in the air for up to fifty-six hours, and later a new version with a powerful flight control computer called the Gnat 750. But Karem was financially strapped and decided to sell his company to Hughes Aircraft, which then sold it to General Atomics, keeping Karem on as a consultant.

In 1993 system, adding the now characteristic bulbous nose to the fuselage. Thus the Predator drone was born and was used in the Balkan wars to gather information on refugee flows and Serbian air defenses. It was not until the 1999 NATO Kosovo campaign, however, that someone came up with the idea of equipping these planes with missiles, transforming them from spy planes into killer drones.

Today, drones are used for both lethal and non-lethal purposes. Outside the military, unmanned aircraft are being drafted for everything from tracking drug smugglers and monitoring the US– Mexico border to engaging in search operations after earthquakes and spraying pesticides on crops. But the military is the driving force behind drones.

The Israeli military has a long history of using drones to gather intelligence, as decoys, and for targeted killings. Their use of drones dates back to the occupation of the Sinai in the 1970s, and was further developed in the 1982 war in Lebanon and the ongoing conflicts in the Palestinian territories.

The Israeli unmanned aircraft pioneered in the late 1970s and 1980s were eventually integrated into the United States’ inventory. Impressed with Israel’s use of UAVs during military operations in Lebanon in 1982, then-Navy Secretary John Lehman decided to acquire UAV capability for the Navy. One of the UAVs purchased from Israel, the Pioneer, was used to gather intelligence during Desert Storm. According to a Congressional Research Report in 2003, “Following the Gulf War, military officials recognized the worth of UAVs, and the Air Force’s Predator became a UAV on a fast track, quickly adding new capabilities.” But it was the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks that led to an explosion in the US military’s use of drones and a host of other robotic weapons. The hundreds of billions of dollars that Congress allocated for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made the Pentagon flush with funds to buy up all manner of robotic weapons that military contractors from General Atomics to Northrop Grumman had been developing.

The various branches of the military filled their shopping carts with every robot they could find: tiny surveillance robots that can climb walls and stairs, snake-like robots that slither in the grass, unmanned tanks mounted with .50 caliber weapons, and ground robots to carry the soldiers’ heavy loads.

They snatched up every type of drone on the production lines and commissioned new ones. They bought the 38-inch-long Raven that is launched by simply throwing it into the air; the 27-footlong Predator with its Hellfire missiles, and later the more powerful Reaper version; the 40-footlong Global Hawk with sci-fi surveillance capabilities.

The Pentagon was ordering these machines faster than the companies could produce them. In 2000, the Pentagon had fewer than fifty aerial drones; ten years later, it had nearly 7,500. Most of these were mini-drones for battlefield surveillance, but they also had about 800 of the bigger drones, ranging in size from a private aircraft to a commercial jet. Then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the next generation of fighter jet, the F-35 that took decades to develop at a cost of more than $500 million each, would be the Pentagon’s last manned fighter aircraft. From 2002–2010, the Department of Defense’s unmanned aircraft inventory increased more than forty-fold. Even during the financial crisis that started brewing in 2007 and led to the slashing of government programs from nutrition supplements for pregnant women to maintenance of national parks, the Defense Department kept pouring buckets of money into drones. At the height of government deficit-reducing cuts in 2012, the US taxpayer was shelling out $3.9 billion for the procurement of unmanned aircraft, not counting the separate drone budgets for the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security.

Most military drones are still used for surveillance purposes. The photo sensors the UAVs carry have become increasingly powerful, allowing the on-the-ground pilots to watch individuals from an aircraft 30,000–60,000 feet up in the air. The infrared and ultraviolet imaging captures light outside the spectrum visible to the human eye. UV imaging is useful in space and for tracking rockets; IR imaging shows heat emitted by an object, making it ideal for identifying humans in the dark. It is worth noting here that manned aircraft use IR imaging and can use all the same sensors drones can.

One reason for the great demand in drones was that they graduated from simply tracking and monitoring targets to actually killing them. In Afghanistan, drones were credited for killing senior Al Qaeda and Taliban militants. In the Iraq invasion, they were used for everything from tracking supporters of Saddam Hussein to blowing up government agencies. In 2003, US Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley said, “We've moved from using UAVs primarily in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance roles before Operation Iraqi Freedom, to a true hunter-killer role.”

Another reason that drones were in such demand was the very nature of the Afghan and Iraqi wars. The US military had a hard time even finding its enemies, as many local fighters blended in among the civilian populations. Drones gave the military a way to conduct persistent surveillance and to strike quickly.

Armed drones are used in three ways. They supply air support when US ground troops attack or come under attack; they patrol the skies looking for suspicious activity and, if they find it, they attack; and they conduct targeted killings of suspected militants.

....Drones can also “go rogue,” meaning that the remote control is no longer communicating with the drone. In 2009, the US Air Force had to shoot down one of its drones in Afghanistan when it went rogue with a payload of weapons. In 2008, an Israeli-made drone used by Irish peacekeepers in Chad went rogue. After losing communication, it decided on its own to start heading back to Ireland, thousands of miles away, and crashed en route.

The Navy’s multi-million dollar drone has the unfortunate feature of starting to self-destruct if the pilot accidentally presses the spacebar on his keyboard. As Fox News reported, “An unmanned MQ-8B Fire Scout helicopter can launch by itself, fly by itself—and with a single slip, can nearly blow up by itself.” According to a June 24, 2011 report from the Defense Department, a Navy pilot operating an unmanned helicopter accidentally pressed the spacebar with a wire from his headset. The crisis was averted at the last minute, but the Navy’s MQ-8B has so many flaws that it failed ten of ten test missions at the Naval Air Station in southern Maryland. In fact, a glitch led one of the aircraft to fly uncontrolled from the station into restricted airspace near Washington, DC, before control was regained.