Drones Q and A - Death By Playstation

Recent Q and A hosted by NATO in Afghanistan about computer generated carnage. Afshin Rattansi for the real world. Lt. Col. Chris Gough for military cloud cookoo land:-

AR: “What about the psychology behind it all? It’s presumably very different from actually flying in an aircraft and dropping a bomb? What does it do to your men and women?”

GG: “Great question. What I’ve found through personal experience and I’ve been involved both in combat in manned aircraft and now in these remotely piloted aircraft is that I feel more connected with the ground fight than I ever did when I was flying over the top at 20,000 feet, the reason being that I am much involved in coordination and contact with those ground forces that are taking fire than I ever was in a F-16. Although, academically, it looks like you could make it sound like…

AR: “A computer game?” I interrupted, “Which is, after all, the usual charge?”

CG: “When you look at it from the outside, you could easily come to that conclusion but in fact it never occurs that way. There is an intense coordination with the ground. Through our training and the rigor of our exercising, we know that when I push the button, that I am taking life. So that is a very deliberate event and we always debrief and we always hold ourselves accountable to a very high standard and, like I said, the intense communication that we have with the ground party and the clearance authority – the authorizing agent of the strike – it comes together to create a much more tangible, much more real event, in my opinion, then I experienced when I was dropping bombs from F-16s.”

AR: ''Some U.S. personnel would certainly say it is definitely more tangible because retaliation is swift in Afghanistan where the U.S. is losing so many men and women. But what about government’s reactions to the use of UAV’s in the region. You know that politicians in Kabul and Islamabad don’t appreciate them?”

CG: “Well, on retaliation, it certainly is quick. We are fighting a violent enemy and they have a deep desire to fight us. Our ability to prosecute is really unique because it’s less significant when we take a strike. What we really want to do when we attack these terrorist networks is not to take down the guy with the rifle. You want to track him down to his boss and then want to find his boss, the jackpot guy and that’s the guy you want to roll up. We’re never going to win this war with a Hellfire strike and so on retaliation, sometimes it’s better not to take action. Sometimes it is better to sit and watch and investigate the patterns of life so that I can go back there and grab the jackpot agent.

“That leads to the second point – regarding the responses of governments in the region: unlike all the other weapons systems out there, I can control collateral damage to a much greater degree in this and I can minimize it and negate it because if I see a high-value individual – one of those jackpot guys – that I want to prosecute an attack on I’m not limited by gas. I’m not limited by the physiological constraints of the air crew. I’ll swap another air crew out. I’ll bring another plane out and have them run in there and get a new GCUS and I will stay with that individual until the time is right by my making. “

AR: “And what about mistakes?” I asked, “are there fewer now? Because hundreds of civilians have been killed in such strikes as well as hundreds of as you would put it, ‘the enemy’. “

It should be noted that exact figures are hard to come by which is why the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit to try to get the data on civilian casualties. U.S. federal agencies never answered a Freedom of Information Act request for an outline of the legal basis for the Predator drone program.

“What about people who you work with who cause collateral damage. How do they cope?” I added.

GG: “The argument that we have executed collateral damage – I dispute that, honestly I have never seen it during the course of my two..”

AR: “Wedding parties in Afghanistan?” I interjected.

CG: “I have seen those reports in the media but I have never actually seen that in the course of events in my unit. And what I will say is that -- and I have ample examples to bring forth -- we have been engaging the enemy with ‘friendlies’ taking heavy fire from advancing parties of insurgents and we’ve actually called off strikes because we have seen kids with the insurgents. And so that level of fidelity – that I can have someone whose whole job in life is to look at pixels on a screen and determine whether that is farm equipment or whether that is a piece of anti-aircraft artillery or see if that is a child or someone actually carrying and employing a weapon -- means I can make that call and I can isolate that event so that I don’t take a lethal action against those people. We’ve been able to minimize collateral damage to a degree that we have never experienced before in a combat environment. From my perspective, this is game-changing in nature, for many reasons and not least because in a counter-insurgency you need to win the hearts and minds of the people and the way you do that is to preserve what they hold dear which is mosques and schools and children and non-combatants and we do that with better than any other weapons system that’s ever been fielded. We do that.”

AR: “What about other countries which use these UAV’s?”

CG: “What I will say is that we know that this is proliferating and frankly it should be proliferating.”

Proliferating it certainly is. The White House is considering sending them to the Somalian government. Texas Governor Rick Perry wants them deployed on the border with Mexico. Pakistan is developing one. Israel is developing more and more of them. The ratio of civilian to military deaths in wars has been steadily rising and we can expect it to continue.

H/T to Counterpunch and Reality Zone.