Drones are in the air these days, in more ways than one. Some of the legal and moral issues surrounding their use, especially where US citizens are concerned, are real. But much of the rhetoric about drones themselves is fantasy.
Let’s start with the facts. The numbers of drones — unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs — in our military has certainly taken off. We had 60 in 2000; now, we have more than 6,000. And they range from unarmed ones, like the 40-foot-long Global Hawk and the tiny Raven (which carries a camera the size of a peanut), to the Hellfire-armed Predator that’s transformed the War on Terror into a deadly manhunt by remote control.
And it’s not just the military and the CIA using UAVs; domestic law enforcement deploys them for surveillance and other police duties. It’s a veritable technological revolution.
Part of that is because drones have stepped up from being high-flying reconnaissance robots to machines that search out and kill terrorists and anyone else in the room — with the operator thousands of miles away.
This has critics in a panic, especially on the left. New York Times columnist Bill Keller (the paper’s former editor) says drones are “propelling us to the day when we cede . . . lethal authority to software.” Some scholars question whether death-by-drone violates international law.
Radford University philosophy professor and Peace Studies guru Glen Martin has even written that drone technology is “attacking the heart of civilization itself,” while two authors opined in The Wall Street Journal that, with drones, “the West risks, however inadvertently, going down the same path” as Auschwitz.
This is nonsense.
Every new military technology (and drones aren’t that new; they’ve been around since Vietnam) seems to spark fears that man’s destructive powers have somehow crossed an irrevocable line. Back in 1139, Pope Innocent II declared the crossbow “hateful to God” and banned its use — which didn’t stop armies from using it or developing an even more lethal replacement, firearms. And who can forget the Cold War-era predictions of doom from nuclear weapons? Yet we’re still here.
It’s time to point out some basic truths about UAVs. First, no one suggests automating drones to kill without human control. Just the opposite: Quite apart from the risks involved, experts agree nothing is gained in terms of time or accuracy by letting the machine pull the trigger instead of a human operator.
Second, far from making war less civilized, drones are part of a trend of “smart” weapons that is steadily pushing war’s mortality rate downward. Critics claim that Predator raids in Pakistan and elsewhere have killed 176 children over the past eight years. Do they have any idea how many kids died from a single B-29 raid in World War II or Korea?
Nor should we ignore the number of Americans who’ve lost their lives hunting terrorists on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, versus the zero loss of Americans using drones.
Third, the military likes drones not because they’re super-weapons but because they’re:
* Cheap. For the price of a single F-22 Raptor fighter you can build 86 Predators.
* Easy to manufacture.
* Straightforward to fly and operate with a remote joystick.
* Reasonably stealthy — mostly because they’re relatively small.
They can also stay on duty far longer than a human pilot can: A Global Hawk can stay aloft for 35 hours straight.
But they’re also slow (the Global Hawk travels at the cruising speed of a typical World War II fighter) and relatively easy to shoot down. Against today’s conventional military aircraft, they’re as helpless as ants against an anteater.
Nor are their electronic controls immune from jamming or hacking. It won’t be long before terrorists and other hackers figure out how to disrupt their command and control, and even steer Predators back to attack their launch spot.
That means today’s drones aren’t the wave of the future — let alone the end of civilization. Militarily speaking, they’re like World War I biplanes, which many of them resemble. They’re merely stepping stones to UAVs that will project American air power at supersonic speeds — without a single pilot’s life at risk.
That’s still a long way off. But when it does come, we’ll no doubt hear the same apocalyptic pronouncements that we’re getting now — along with flights of nostalgia for “the good old days” of the Predator.
Arthur Herman’s latest book is “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War Two.”