THE BIG READ: Rise of the drones
IN Saskatchewan, Canada, early last month, emergency dispatchers took a 911 call from a man whose car had flipped over in freezing conditions in a remote corner of the province. The injured driver didn’t know his location and couldn’t direct emergency services, so the police dispatched a helicopter crew with night vision equipment to sweep the area.
After a fruitless search, the helicopter returned to base. In its place, the police sent out a Draganflyer drone with an infrared camera to the last recorded location of the man’s mobile phone GPS.
When it arrived in the area, the drone’s camera picked up three heat signatures, one of which turned out to be the injured man, who was curled in a ball at the base of a snowbank, completely unresponsive. The emergency services were sent out, the man was picked up and brought to hospital where he made a full recovery.
Afterwards, Canadian police hailed the incident as the first in which a drone actually saved a life. Without it, the rescue team would have had to wait until daylight to resume the search, by which time the man would quite likely have been dead.
Cut now to another remote hillside, this one in North Waziristan, a mountainous region in northwest Pakistan which president Obama has described as one of the most dangerous places on earth.
The remnants of both the Taliban and Al Qaeda are dug in deep in this inaccessible area, and the indigenous population of tribespeople are caught in the crossfire between the extremists and a US government who will not countenance a ground offensive. These people have an entirely different conception of the unmanned aerial vehicle.
Last September, Stanford and New York universities published a report entitled Living Under Drones — Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan. The report recounts the experience of a former New York Times journalist who was kidnapped by the Taliban for months in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Northwest Pakistan.
David Rohde described the fear the drones inspired in his captors and ordinary civilians: “The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.” He described the experience as “hell on earth”, and said that even in areas where strikes were less frequent, the people living there still feared for their lives.
It’s estimated that the US military has around 8,000 remotely piloted vehicles, or drones, in its arsenal. The ones with which both David Rohde and tribespeople of North Waziristan are most familiar are the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper. Both are armed with Hellfire missiles. Though they can be controlled as far away as in the US, it is also likely that remote attacks are being directed from bases closer to war zones.
Thus far in the war on terror, there have been two distinct drone programmes; one run by the military, and a second, more secretive campaign orchestrated by the CIA. Under the former, there were a little over 500 drone strikes in Afghanistan last year, up from almost 300 in 2011.
The CIA’s campaign is concentrated in the border regions of Pakistan — areas like North Waziristan — as well as in Somalia and Yemen. Though the detail of these missions is classified, independent groups have collected information on what the intelligence agency is up, estimating 350 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004 and 100 more between Yemen and Somalia. It is further estimated that 3,000 people have been killed by US drones since 2004. The group New American Foundation has suggested that more than one fifth of these have been civilians.
In his landmark foreign policy speech at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington DC last month, president Obama said that he and those in his chain of command were ‘haunted’ by those civilian deaths.
He has no plans to abandon the strategy. In fact, the Obama administration has overseen six times as many drone strikes as in the Bush era. In a wide ranging speech that invoked 200 years of US military history and ranged across the civil war, the cold war, Vietnam and the Berlin Wall, Mr Obama spelled out the reasons why drones will continue to be used.
Citing the bad blood that arose between Pakistan and the US following the mission which led to the death of Osama Bin Laden, the president said that operations of this nature “cannot be the norm”.
“But despite our strong preference for the detention and prosecution of terrorists, sometimes this approach is foreclosed. Al Qaeda and its affiliates try to gain a foothold in some of the most distant and unforgiving places on Earth. They take refuge in remote tribal regions. They hide in caves and walled compounds. They train in empty deserts and rugged mountains.”
As far as US military objectives are concerned, drones work.
The president went on: “Dozens of highly skilled al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers, and operatives have been taken off the battlefield. Plots have been disrupted that would have targeted international aviation, US transit systems, European cities and our troops in Afghanistan. Simply put, these strikes have saved lives.”
Last April, local press reported the death of Abu Ubaidah Abdullah Al Adam, the intelligence and internal security chief of al Qaeda, in a drone attack in North Waziristan. The man he replaced as intelligence chief, Mohammad Khalil Hasan Al Hakaymah, was killed in a US drone strike in the same area five years before.
The NDU speech was notable for the hand-wringing that it contained, and not just over civilian casualties. Obama talked about the risk of creating new enemies, about accountability, morality and the legality of using drones under US and international law.
All of which has prompted a policy shift in the use of drones. When he took office, Obama began briefing secretly Congress on drone strikes. These briefings have now been declassified “to facilitate transparency and debate on this issue.”
As part of that new openness, attorney general Eric Holder revealed the day before the president’s speech that four US citizens had been killed by drones. All were hit on foreign soil, in either Yemen or Pakistan, though curiously only one of the four, a militant cleric and chief of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Anwar al-Awlaki was ‘specifically targeted and killed.’
The other three Americans to die were Mr Awlaki’s teenage son Abdulrahman, Samir Khan, an American of Pakistani origin who died in Yemen, and Jude Kenan Mohammed from North Carolina, who was indicted on US terrorism charges in 2009.
Mr Obama also revealed that in the week leading up to his speech, he signed a presidential policy guidance which will act as a framework to govern the use of drones. He said that the rationale for strikes in the Afghan war theatre will be substantially reduced by the end of next year, when it’s envisaged the US will have pulled out of the area.
Under the new dispensation, drone strikes will only be used against ‘terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat’ to the US, and where there are ‘no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat’. Obama also asserted that before any strikes is authorised, there must be ‘near certainty’ that no civilians will be killed or injured.
As far as domestic politics is concerned, Obama’s scruples won’t count for much. For one thing, Americans don’t seem to care about the drone programme, and those that do, support it. In a Gallup poll conducted in March, 65% of Americans said they thought that the US government should use drones to launch airstrikes in other countries against suspected terrorists. However, only 14% were following the news closely, and 35% ‘somewhat closely’. All told, that’s in excess of 50% who have no interest in drones or who they hit.
Another poll a month earlier put the majority who favour the use of drones at 56%, and those who are opposed at 26%.
One notable finding in all of these polls is this. Hitting suspected terrorists overseas may be acceptable, but using armed drones at home is not. Keenly aware of national squeamishness over the use of drones in the US, Obama asserted that no president should deploy armed drones on home soil. The key term here is armed. While the media remains focused on the shell-shocked mountains of Pakistan, an entire industry is rapidly emerging domestically.
UK aerospace group Astrea has estimated that the commercial drone market could be worth over $60bn (€45bn) per annum by 2020. Last month, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International released a study which set the figure at $82bn in the US alone. Much of the data underlying these assumptions, the report’s authors admit, is conjectural. This is early days for the industry.
And much of that growth is, inevitably, concentrated in the defence industry.
The Predator and Reaper drones roll off an assembly line in General Atomics’ facility on the West Coast. You’ll also find defence giants Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman in California, along with a range of smaller drone makers.
Aerovironment, headquartered in Monrovia, California, supplies the Department of Defense with a range of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), including the Raven UAS, a surveillance drone which can be carried in a backpack and launched by throwing it into the air like a paper aeroplane.
It’s also a mark of how nascent the industry is that different sectors and jurisdictions have yet to settle on an acronym that will shed the ominous connotations of ‘drone’. You will hear a range of euphemisms, including unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). In Europe, the Commission favours the term RPAS, standing for Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems.
Beyond the weapons industry however, Reaper and Predator have a large family of cousins that are being put to far more benign use. A Frenchman, Marc-Alexandre Favier has come up with a flying shepherd, designed to assist farmers in tracking stock. Trialled in Shropshire in 2011, it proved particularly useful in identifying escaped and injured livestock.
Oregon State is currently testing two types of drones fitted with cameras for crop monitoring. One, Tetracam’s HawkEye is small, attaches to a parachute, has a propeller-driven system. Yamaha Motor meanwhile has developed the RMAX, a drone designed for a range of agricultural uses, including both seeding and spraying.
Following the Japanese earthquake the same year, a drone was used to survey the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant shortly after it suffered a partial meltdown.
As bushfires raged in Southern Australia earlier this year, researchers in the University of Melbourne’s Bushfire Cooperative Research Center proposed the use of drones in conjunction with their bushfire modeling systems to predict more accurately how fires will spread.
Drones are already being used in the US to monitor hurricanes. Last year, researchers acquired two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft, built by the aforementioned Northropp Gumman. Planes and satellites are only capable of staying airborne for ten hours. The Global Hawks, however, can fly for up to 30 hours at a time and are expected to provide far more comprehensive data during the hurricane season.
In Saudi Arabia, an electrical engineer at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology is researching drone applications to deal with the city’s flash flood problem. A combination of poor drainage and heavy rain over several days claimed the lives of 16 people in the desert state last month, while four years ago, more than 100 people lost their lives after just four hours of rain fell on Jeddah. Researchers believe that a ‘swarm’ of up to ten drones working together could provide a kind of early warning system for cities prone to these kinds of weather events. The drones could drop sensors into key locations during risk periods, then monitor their movements to build a picture of how and where flood waters will collect.
One of the main obstacles to the development of peacetime applications is the regulatory environment. As it stands, aviation authorities in most jurisdictions apply strict controls to the use of UAVs.
In the UK anyone who wants to fly a small drone must apply to the Civil Aviation Authority for permission. The aircraft must weigh less than 20kg, can’t fly higher than 122 metres, can’t be more than half a kilometre away from the operator and must remain within that operator’s line of sight throughout its flight.
European jurisdictions are largely leaving it to the commission to adapt the regulations for the emerging industry. Four years ago, the commission began a consultative process to investigate the economic impact of drone technologies. It’s a process that culminated with the publication of a staff paper last September: “Towards a European strategy for the development of civil applications of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS)”
One of the recommendations since initiated by the Commission was the publication of an RPAS Roadmap, setting out a strategy for integrating drone traffic into European airspace by 2016. The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), which advises the EU on aviation legislation, is working on pan-European legislation to cover the operation of systems which weigh 150kg or more.
Even if that happens on time, it will still mean that European regulations will lag those of our American cousins. Last year, Congress asked the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to create a plan for the safe integration of drones into national airspace by the end of 2015. The administration has predicted that there will be some 30,000 drones airborne in the US within five years of that deadline.
What will they all be doing?
Despite the range of civil applications routinely cited in industry papers, it is the drone’s surveillance capabilities that is generating the most coverage, in the US anyway.
Privacy advocates are particularly animated by the unsettling combination of drones and cameras. They point to the fact that Lockheed Martin has developed a drone which can be powered from the ground using laser, giving it nearly 50 hours of continuous flight. Any ambiguity around how this machine might be deployed is quickly cleared up by the name they’ve given it. The Stalker.
Last year, the US government’s Congressional Research Service released a report which revealed just how far domestic surveillance drones have come. It recorded that surveillance drones currently in use carry not alone high powered cameras, but also licence plate readers and the kind of thermal imaging capability that saved the stranded Canadian motorist.
The report pointed out that what they term ‘soft’ biometrics and facial recognition technologies are undergoing rapid development, and that we will see drones that can ‘recognise and track individuals based on attributes such as height, age, gender and skin colour’ in the very near future.
The American Civil Liberties Union has said law enforcement agencies are ‘greatly expanding’ their use of domestic drones for surveillance. In a release, they say, “Routine aerial surveillance would profoundly change the character of public life in America.
Rules must be put in place to ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of this new technology without bringing us closer to a surveillance society, in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded, and scrutinised by the government.”
The agency also says that drone manufacturers are also considering arming remote controlled aircraft with rubber bullets, tasers and teargas. Not Hellfire missiles, but not quite in the spirit of president Obama’s assertion that no president should use armed drones on US soil
As it stands, the Customs and Border Protection agency has been operating surveillance drones along the border since as far back as 2005. Police departments in Colorado, Florida and Texas have also be trialing surveillance drones — the latter with a view to policing traffic offences. Most of the stories that emerge from these experiments would suggest however that this is not a match made in heaven.
In Dec 2011, Sheriff Kelly Janke of Nelson County, North Dakota, armed with a search warrant, went looking for six missing cows on land owned by the Bossarts, a family of anti-government separatists. The sheriff was chased off the property by the Bossart boys, who were armed with rifles and shotguns. The sheriff’s response? Summon a a $154m MQ-9 Predator B drone — exactly the kind used in Pakistan — from nearby Grand Forks Air Force Base. The story of the Drone and the missing cows went around the world like wildfire.
It’s not just American authorities who are exploring the surveillance possibilities of unmanned aircraft. A border control project was launched in Spain in April that will see drones deployed over the southern Mediterranean in an attempt to provide the EU with what it calls “an operational and technical framework that increases situational awareness and improves the reaction capability of authorities surveying the external borders of the EU.”
The short-hand for this torturous formulation, CLOSEYE, sums up the aims of the project in more direct terms. According to project leaders, it’s all about public safety at sea, and, more particularly, thwarting illegal immigration.
Across the water in the UK, four constabularies have tested drones. Again, however, their experiences haven’t been particularly successful. Merseyside Police hailed their £13,000 helicopter drone as instrumental in a number of arrests. Then it crashed into the Mersey and was not replaced.
Despite the concerns of civil liberties advocates, there’s little evidence so far of anything other than a potential threat to privacy. In advance of the London Olympics last summer, it was widely reported that drones would patrol the skies during the games. There were, however, no reported sightings of any drones during that time.
The technology is freely available to everyone; you can buy a Parrot AR 2 Quadricopter on eBay for €300. Around half a metre square and featuring four rotors in sleek black casing, the drone is controlled using a Smartphone. It has a range of 165 feet and is equipped with a 720 pixel HD camera and can stream live video back to the controller.
Hobbyists meanwhile are building their own machines, which feature more powerful cameras, and a flight range that goes right to the limits of what the law will allow. One YouTube video that went viral last year featured a taxidermied cat called Orville, strapped to a quadricopter flown by Dutch artist Ben Jansen.
Another, unnamed hobbyist made himself extremely unpopular at a Dallas meat packing plant last year, when his flight session with a drone-mounted camera uncovered evidence that the plant was dumping pig’s blood in a local river.
The man had been operating his drone in an adjoining public space when he unwittingly shot the incriminating footage. When he saw what he had discovered, he passed the file to the Environmental Protection Agency who subsequently indicted the meat plant for pollution.
You would think that this evidence of UAVs serving the public good would have helped improve the image of drones, but no. The incident actually prompted the Texas legislature to pass a bill last month banning the private use of drones to take photos of individuals or property “with the intent to conduct surveillance.”
They take privacy seriously in Texas.
