Obama Administration's Drone Death Figures Don't Add Up

By Justin Elliot, cross-posted from ProPublica

Last month, a “senior administration official” said the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under President Obama is in the “single digits.” But last year “U.S. officials” said drones in Pakistan killed about 30 civilians in just a yearlong stretch under Obama.

Both claims can’t be true.

A centerpiece of President Obama’s national security strategy, drones strikes in Pakistan are credited by the administration with crippling Al Qaeda but criticized by human rights groups and others for being conducted in secret and killing civilians. The underlying facts are often in dispute and claims about how many people died and who they were vary widely.

So we decided to narrow it down to just one issue: have the administration’s own claims been consistent?

We collected claims by the administration about deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan and compared each one not to local reports but rather to other administration claims. The numbers sometimes do not add up. (Check out our interactive graphic to explore the claims.)

Even setting aside the discrepancy between official and outside estimates of civilian deaths, our analysis shows that the administration’s own figures quoted over the years raise questions about their credibility.

There have been 307 American drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, according to a New America Foundation count. Just 44 occurred during the Bush administration. President Obama has greatly expanded the use of drones to attack suspected members of Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, and other groups in Pakistan’s remote northwest region.

Obama officials generally do not comment by name on the drone strikes in Pakistan, but they frequently talk about it to reporters (including us) on condition of anonymity. Often those anonymously sourced comments have come in response to outside tallies of civilian deaths from drone attacks, which are generally much higher than the administration’s own figures.


The outright contradiction we noted above comes from two claims made about a year apart:

* April 22, 2011 McClatchy reports that U.S. officials claim “about 30” civilians died in the year between August 2009 and August 2010.

* May 29, 2012 The New York Times reports that, according to a senior Obama administration official, the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under president Obama is in the “single digits.”

As we also show in our interactive graphic, other anonymous administration claims about civilian deaths are possible but imply conclusions that seem improbable.

Consider:

* April 26, 2010 The Washington Post quotes an “internal CIA accounting” saying that “just over 20 civilians” have been killed by drones in Pakistan since January 2009.

* Aug. 11, 2011 The New York Times reports that CIA officers claim zero civilians were killed since May 2010

* Aug. 12, 2011 CNN quoted a U.S. official saying there were 50 civilians killed over the years in drone strikes in Pakistan.

If this set of claims is assumed to be accurate, it suggests that the majority of the 50 total civilian deaths occurred during the Bush administration — when the drone program was still in its infancy. As we’ve noted, in the entire Bush administration, there were 44 strikes. In the Obama administration through Aug. 12, 2011, there were 222. So according to this set of claims more civilians died in just 44 strikes under Bush than did in 222 strikes under Obama. (Again, the graphic is helpful to assess the administration assertions.)

Consider also these three claims, which imply two lengthy periods when zero or almost zero civilians were killed in drone strikes:

* September 10, 2010 Newsweek quotes a government estimate that “about 30” civilians were killed since the beginning of 2008.

* April 22, 2011 McClatchy reports that U.S. officials claim “about 30” civilians died in the year between August 2009 and August 2010.

* July 15, 2011 Reuters quotes a source familiar with the drone program as saying “about 30” civilians were killed since July 2008.

It’s possible that all these claims are true. But if they are, it implies that the government believes there were zero or almost zero civilian deaths between the beginning of 2008 and August 2009, and then again zero deaths between August 2010 and July 2011. Those periods comprise a total of 182 strikes.

The administration has rejected in the strongest terms outside claims of a high civilian toll from the drone attacks.

Those outside estimates also vary widely. A count by Bill Roggio, editor of the website the Long War Journal, which bases its estimates on news reports, puts the number of civilian killed in Pakistan at 138. The New America Foundation estimates that, based on press reports, between 293 and 471 civilians have been killed in the attacks. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which draws on a wider array of sources including researchers and lawyers in Pakistan, puts the number of civilians killed at between 482 and 832. The authors of the various estimates all emphasize that their counts are imperfect.

There are likely multiple reasons for the varying counts of civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan. The attacks are executed remotely in often inaccessible regions. And there’s the question of who U.S. officials are counting as civilians. A story last month in the New York Times reported that President Obama adopted a policy that “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.”

There are also ongoing debates in the humanitarian law community about who the U.S. may legitimately target with drone strikes and how the CIA is applying the principle of proportionality — which holds that attacks that might cause civilian deaths must be proportional to the level of military advantage anticipated.

In a rare public comment on drone strikes, President Obama told an online town hall in January that the drones had not caused “a huge number of civilian casualties.”

When giving their own figures on civilian deaths, administration officials are often countering local reports. In March 2011, for example, Pakistanis including the country’s army chief accused a U.S. drone strike of hitting a peaceful meeting of tribal elders, killing around 40 people. An unnamed U.S. official rejected the accusations, telling the AP: "There's every indication that this was a group of terrorists, not a charity car wash in the Pakistani hinterlands."

Unnamed U.S. officials told the Los Angeles Times last year that “they are confident they know who has been killed because they watch each strike on video and gather intelligence in the aftermath, observing funerals for the dead and eavesdropping on conversations about the strikes.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said during a visit to Pakistan this month that there should be investigation of killings of civilians by drones and that victims should be compensated. The U.S. has given compensation to victims of airstrikes in Afghanistan but there are no reports of victims of drone strikes in Pakistan being compensated.

Since the various administration statements over the years were almost all quoted anonymously, it’s impossible to go back to the officials in question to ask them about contradictions.

Asked about the apparent contradictions, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told ProPublica: “[W]e simply do not comment on alleged drone strikes.”

I'm Just A Kill List . . .

Tom Tomorrow's latest: Schoolhouse Rock, the sequel:

Click here for the link to the full comic.

They Call It Terror Tuesday

Vast Left Conspiracy

A distressing front page article in the New York Times yesterday, entitled "Secret Kill List" Tests Obama's Principles And Will, describes how Obama has placed himself “at the helm of a top-secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, for which the capture part has become largely theoretical.”  Or, as Glenn Greenwald put it, "an actual presidential-led death panel (as always in American media parlance, “Terrorist” means: individuals alleged by the U.S. Government — with no evidence, transparency or due process — to be Terrorists)."

Specifically, as Greenwald continues, "Obama himself 'insisted on approving every new name on an expanding ‘kill list,’ poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre ‘baseball cards’ of an unconventional war.'  In total secrecy — with no transparency or oversight of any kind — he then selects who will live and who will die."

David Swanson has more:

Obama is depicted as "keeping the tether short" by personally deciding on each and every drone kill. And yet, despite this personal care and attention, Obama has dramatically increased drone kills. The New York Times writes that Obama's role of "personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda" is "without precedent in presidential history." This is either because whatever the "shadow war with Al Qaeda" is has been created by Obama, or it's because Bush let subordinate(s) oversee it. This meaningless claim immediately follows bragging about how many of Obama's advisers the New York Times interviewed in order to produce it, and yet somehow the underwhelmed reader is still left to simply guess what is supposed to be meant. Presumably it is that Obama has created a new form of murder.

In fact, Obama has created drone wars, and an insider picture of how he runs them is found at the end of the article:

"Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government's sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects' biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die. This secret 'nominations' process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia's Shabab militia."

How do Obama's principles and will manifest themselves in this "due process" as he bestows it upon his victims? Well, according to the New York Times, he kills "without hand-wringing" and calls the decision to kill a U.S. citizen "an easy one." (Killing the same man's teenage son is so easy it goes unmentioned.) Obama is "a realist," who is "never carried away" by any campaign promises he may have made. He shrewdly maneuvers to keep in place Bush's powers of rendition, detention, and war . . . .

The Obama Administration is no doubt thrilled with the Times piece as illustrating the President's toughness in the fight against the terrorists.  But I find it chilling how we have come to accept from Obama programs and policies that would have been (and were) harshly condemned when conducted by Bush-Cheney.  As Greenwald writes today, we now see "how rapidly true extremism becomes normalized."

The key difference between Obama and his predecessor is not the policy but the personality.  While we could not contemplate that Bush-Cheney would carefully balance national security and human rights, Obama, the former-constitutional law professor, can surely be trusted to take a principled and prudent approach with the awesome powers bestowed upon the "commander in chief" in the never-ending war on terror. 

Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial editor at the Times correctly worries about this "just trust me" approach to targeted killings:

 If Mr. Obama wants to authorize every drone strike, fine—but even the president requires oversight (remember checks and balances?) which he won’t allow. The administration refuses to accept judicial review (from a FISA-style court, say) prior to a strike directed at an American citizen, and won’t deign to release the legal documents written to justify the targeted killing program. The Times and the ACLU have both sued to force disclosure of these documents. No luck yet.

Apologists for the president’s “just trust me” approach to targeted killings emphasize that the program is highly successful and claim that the drone strikes are extraordinarily precise. John Brennan, the president’s counter-terrorism adviser, said in a recent speech that not a single non-combatant had been killed in a year of drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And today’s Times article quoted a senior administration official who said that civilian deaths were in the “single digits.”

But it turns out that even this hey-it’s-better-than-carpet-bombing justification is rather flimsy. The Times article says “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties …It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
The logic, such as it is, is that people who hang around places where Qaeda operatives hang around must be up to no good. That’s the sort of approach that led to the false imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis, including the ones tortured at Abu Ghraib.

As Rosenthal concludes, " Mr. Obama used to denounce that kind of thinking."  So did we.

Meet Droney, The Friendly Surveillance Drone

Tom Tomorrow

The drone industry is launching, so to speak, a public relations campaign.  As reported, the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the industry's trade group, has hired a public relations firm to counter what it perceives as negative media coverage and to focus on safety and public benefits of domestic drones.

Tom Tomorrow takes it from there.  (Click on the "Tom Tomorrow" caption for a link to the full comic or, as always, you can click on the "Read Tom Tomorrow" badge on the right side of the blog.)

Targeted Killings And The Death Of Due Process

Attorney General Eric Holder's speech on Monday sought to explain and justify our government's policy of secretly targeting American citizens for assassination:

Given the nature of how terrorists act and where they tend to hide, it may not always be feasible to capture a United States citizen terrorist who presents an imminent threat of violent attack. In that case, our government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force.

 Charlie Savage wrote in The New York Times that "it was notable for the nation’s top law enforcement official to declare that it is constitutional for the government to kill citizens without any judicial review under certain circumstances."   Notable indeed.

Holder rejected the notion that "the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces.”  He contended that "'due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security."  According to Holder, "the Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

I better go polish off my old law books because I sure don't remember that distinction when I was in law school.  How can Holder seriously argue that a citizen of this country can be killed as long as the government thinks he or she is a threat and the President gives approval in secrecy -- without charging them with a crime, notifying them of the government's case or providing any opportunity to defend themselves?

Eric Holder says, "this is an indicator of our times, not a departure from our laws and our values."  I agree instead with Charles Pierce, who says, this "is a monumental pile of crap that should embarrass every Democrat who ever said an unkind word about John Yoo. This policy is a vast departure from our laws and an interplanetary probe away from our values."

The ACLU, which has doggedly but unsuccessfully, so far, attempted to get information about the targeted killing program from the Justice Department and CIA through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit (click here for petition urging release of secret memos), had this to say about Holder's speech:

While the speech is a gesture towards additional transparency, it is ultimately a defense of the government’s chillingly broad claimed authority to conduct targeted killings of civilians, including American citizens, far from any battlefield without judicial review or public scrutiny.  Few things are as dangerous to American liberty as the proposition that the government should be able to kill citizens anywhere in the world on the basis of legal standards and evidence that are never submitted to a court, either before or after the fact.

With all the deserved condemnation heaped on the Bush Administration for its expansion of Executive branch powers in the service of the War on Terror, its warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition, it is striking how muted the criticism is of Obama.  As Glenn Greenwald writes:

How can anyone who vocally decried Bush’s mere eavesdropping and detention powers without judicial review possibly justify Obama’s executions without judicial review? How can the former (far more mild powers) have been such an assault on Everything We Stand For while the latter is a tolerable and acceptable assertion of war powers?"

It is hard to disagree with Greenwald's assessment "that the same Party and political faction that endlessly shrieked about Bush’s eavesdropping and detention programs now tolerate Obama’s execution program is one of the most extreme and craven acts of dishonesty we’ve seen in quite some time."

And, as the ACLU points out, "anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power."

What would President Romney do?

The Global War On Terror: From Liberation To Assassination

By Andrew Bacevich, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

With the United States now well into the second decade of what the Pentagon has styled an “era of persistent conflict,” the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism (unofficial acronym WFKATGWOT) appears increasingly fragmented and diffuse.  Without achieving victory, yet unwilling to acknowledge failure, the United States military has withdrawn from Iraq.  It is trying to leave Afghanistan, where events seem equally unlikely to yield a happy outcome.

Elsewhere -- in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, for example -- U.S. forces are busily opening up new fronts.  Published reports that the United States is establishing “a constellation of secret drone bases” in or near the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula suggest that the scope of operations will only widen further.  In a front-page story, the New York Times described plans for “thickening” the global presence of U.S. special operations forces.  Rushed Navy plans to convert an aging amphibious landing ship into an “afloat forward staging base” -- a mobile launch platform for either commando raids or minesweeping operations in the Persian Gulf -- only reinforces the point.

Yet as some fronts close down and others open up, the war’s narrative has become increasingly difficult to discern.  How much farther until we reach the WFKATGWOT’s equivalent of Berlin?  What exactly is the WFKATGWOT’s equivalent of Berlin?  In fact, is there a storyline here at all?

Viewed close-up, the “war” appears to have lost form and shape.  Yet by taking a couple of steps back, important patterns begin to appear.  What follows is a preliminary attempt to score the WFKATGWOT, dividing the conflict into a bout of three rounds.  Although there may be several additional rounds still to come, here’s what we’ve suffered through thus far.

The Rumsfeld Era

Round 1: Liberation.  More than any other figure -- more than any general, even more than the president himself -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dominated the war’s early stages.  Appearing for a time to be a larger-than-life figure -- the “Secretary at War” in the eyes of an adoring (if fickle) neocon fan club -- Rumsfeld dedicated himself to the proposition that, in battle, speed holds the key to victory.  He threw his considerable weight behind a high-tech American version of blitzkrieg.  U.S. forces, he regularly insisted, were smarter and more agile than any adversary.  To employ them in ways that took advantage of those qualities was to guarantee victory.  The journalistic term adopted to describe this concept was “shock and awe.”

No one believed more passionately in “shock and awe” than Rumsfeld himself.  The design of Operation Enduring Freedom, launched in October 2001, and of Operation Iraqi Freedom, begun in March 2003, reflected this belief.  In each instance, the campaign got off to a promising start, with U.S. troops landing some swift and impressive blows.  In neither case, however, were they able to finish off their opponent or even, in reality, sort out just who their opponent might be.  Unfortunately for Rumsfeld, the “terrorists” refused to play by his rulebook and U.S. forces proved to be less smart and agile than their technological edge -- and their public relations machine -- suggested would be the case.  Indeed, when harassed by minor insurgencies and scattered bands of jihadis, they proved surprisingly slow to figure out what hit them.

In Afghanistan, Rumsfeld let victory slip through his grasp.  In Iraq, his mismanagement of the campaign brought the United States face-to-face with outright defeat.  Rumsfeld’s boss had hoped to liberate (and, of course, dominate) the Islamic world through a series of short, quick thrusts.  What Bush got instead were two different versions of a long, hard slog.  By the end of 2006, “shock and awe” was kaput.  Trailing well behind the rest of the country and its armed forces, the president eventually lost confidence in his defense secretary’s approach.  As a result, Rumsfeld lost his job.  Round one came to an end, the Americans, rather embarrassingly, having lost it on points.

The Petraeus Era

Round 2: Pacification.  Enter General David Petraeus.  More than any other figure, in or out of uniform, Petraeus dominated the WFKATGWOT’s second phase.  Round two opened with lowered expectations.  Gone was the heady talk of liberation.  Gone, too, were predictions of lightning victories.  The United States was now willing to settle for much less while still claiming success.
Petraeus offered a formula for restoring a semblance of order to countries reduced to chaos as a result of round one.  Order might permit the United States to extricate itself while maintaining some semblance of having met its policy objectives.  This became the operative definition of victory.

The formal name for the formula that Petraeus devised was counterinsurgency, or COIN.  Rather than trying to defeat the enemy, COIN sought to facilitate the emergence of a viable and stable nation-state.  This was the stated aim of the “surge” in Iraq ordered by President George W. Bush at the end of 2006.

With Petraeus presiding, violence in that country did decline precipitously. Whether the relationship was causal or coincidental remains the subject of controversy.  Still, Petraeus’s apparent success persuaded some observers that counterinsurgency on a global scale -- GCOIN, they called it -- should now form the basis for U.S. national security strategy.  Here, they argued, was an approach that could definitively extract the United States from the WFKATGWOT, while offering victory of a sort.  Rather than employing “shock and awe” to liberate the Islamic world, U.S. forces would apply counterinsurgency doctrine to pacify it.

The task of demonstrating the validity of COIN beyond Iraq fell to General Stanley McChrystal, appointed with much fanfare in 2009 to command U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.  Press reports celebrated McChrystal as another Petraeus, the ideal candidate to replicate the achievements already credited to “King David.”

McChrystal’s ascendency came at a moment when a cult of generalship gripped Washington.  Rather than technology being the determinant of success as Rumsfeld had believed, the key was to put the right guy in charge and then let him run with things.  Political figures on both sides of the aisle fell all over themselves declaring McChrystal the right guy for Afghanistan.  Pundits of all stripes joined the chorus.

Once installed in Kabul, the general surveyed the situation and, to no one’s surprise, announced that “success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign.”  Implementing that campaign would necessitate an Afghan “surge” mirroring the one that had seemingly turned Iraq around.  In December 2009, albeit with little evident enthusiasm, President Barack Obama acceded to his commander’s request (or ultimatum).  The U.S. troop commitment to Afghanistan rapidly increased.

Here things began to come undone.  Progress toward reducing the insurgency or improving the capacity of Afghan security forces was -- by even the most generous evaluation -- negligible.

McChrystal made promises -- like meeting basic Afghan needs with “government in a box, ready to roll in” -- that he proved utterly incapable of keeping.  Relations with the government of President Hamid Karzai remained strained.  Those with neighboring Pakistan, not good to begin with, only worsened.  Both governments expressed deep resentment at what they viewed as high-handed American behavior that killed or maimed noncombatants with disturbing frequency.

To make matters worse, despite all the hype, McChrystal turned out to be miscast -- manifestly the wrong guy for the job.  Notably, he proved unable to grasp the need for projecting even some pretence of respect for the principle of civilian control back in Washington.  By the summer of 2010, he was out -- and Petraeus was back in.

In Washington (if not in Kabul), Petraeus’s oversized reputation quelled the sense that with McChrystal’s flame-out Afghanistan might be a lost cause.  Surely, the most celebrated soldier of his generation would repeat his Iraq magic, affirming his own greatness and the continued viability of COIN.

Alas, this was not to be.  Conditions in Afghanistan during Petraeus’s tenure in command improved -- if that’s even the word -- only modestly.  The ongoing war met just about anyone’s definition of a quagmire.  With considerable understatement, a 2011 National Intelligence Estimate called it a “stalemate.” Soon, talk of a “comprehensive counterinsurgency” faded.  With the bar defining success slipping ever lower, passing off the fight to Afghan security forces and hightailing it for home became the publicly announced war aim.

That job remained unfinished when Petraeus himself headed for home, leaving the army to become CIA director.  Although Petraeus was still held in high esteem, his departure from active duty left the cult of generalship looking more than a little the worse for wear.  By the time General John Allen succeeded Petraeus -- thereby became the eighth U.S. officer appointed to preside over the ongoing Afghan War -- no one believed that simply putting the right guy in charge was going to produce magic.  On that inclusive note, round two of the WFKATGWOT ended.

The Vickers Era

Round 3: Assassination.  Unlike Donald Rumsfeld or David Petraeus, Michael Vickers has not achieved celebrity status.  Yet more than anyone else in or out of uniform, Vickers, who carries the title Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, deserves recognition as the emblematic figure of the WFKATGWOT’s round three.  His low-key, low-profile persona meshes perfectly with this latest evolution in the war’s character.  Few people outside of Washington know who he is, which is fitting indeed since he presides over a war that few people outside of Washington are paying much attention to any longer.

With the retirement of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Vickers is the senior remaining holdover from George W. Bush’s Pentagon.  His background is nothing if not eclectic.  He previously served in U.S. Army Special Forces and as a CIA operative.  In that guise, he played a leading role in supporting the Afghan mujahedeen in their war against Soviet occupiers in the 1980s.  Subsequently, he worked in a Washington think tank and earned a PhD in strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University (dissertation title: “The Structure of Military Revolutions”).

Even during the Bush era, Vickers never subscribed to expectations that the United States could liberate or pacify the Islamic world.  His preferred approach to the WFKATGWOT has been simplicity itself. “I just want to kill those guys,” he says -- “those guys” referring to members of al-Qaeda. Kill the people who want to kill Americans and don’t stop until they are all dead: this defines the Vickers strategy, which over the course of the Obama presidency has supplanted COIN as the latest variant of U.S. strategy.

The Vickers approach means acting aggressively to eliminate would-be killers wherever they might be found, employing whatever means are necessary.  Vickers “tends to think like a gangster,” one admirer comments. “He can understand trends then change the rules of the game so they are advantageous for your side.”

Round three of the WFKATGWOT is all about bending, breaking, and reinventing rules in ways thought to be advantageous to the United States.  Much as COIN supplanted “shock and awe,” a broad-gauged program of targeted assassination has now displaced COIN as the prevailing expression of the American way of war.

The United States is finished with the business of sending large land armies to invade and occupy countries on the Eurasian mainland.  Robert Gates, when still Secretary of Defense, made the definitive statement on that subject.  The United States is now in the business of using missile-armed drones and special operations forces to eliminate anyone (not excluding U.S. citizens) the president of the United States decides has become an intolerable annoyance.  Under President Obama, such attacks have proliferated.

This is America’s new MO.  Paraphrasing a warning issued by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Washington Post dispatch succinctly summarized what it implied: “The United States reserved the right to attack anyone who it determined posed a direct threat to U.S. national security, anywhere in the world.”

Furthermore, acting on behalf of the United States, the president exercises this supposed right without warning, without regard to claims of national sovereignty, without Congressional authorization, and without consulting anyone other than Michael Vickers and a few other members of the national security apparatus.  The role allotted to the American people is to applaud, if and when notified that a successful assassination has occurred.  And applaud we do, for example, when a daring raid by members in SEAL Team Six secretly enter Pakistan to dispatch Osama bin Laden with two neatly placed kill shots.  Vengeance long deferred making it unnecessary to consider what second-order political complications might ensue.


How round three will end is difficult to forecast.  The best we can say is that it’s unlikely to end anytime soon or particularly well.  As Israel has discovered, once targeted assassination becomes your policy, the list of targets has a way of growing ever longer.

So what tentative judgments can we offer regarding the ongoing WFKATGWOT?  Operationally, a war launched by the conventionally minded has progressively fallen under the purview of those who inhabit what Dick Cheney once called “the dark side,” with implications that few seem willing to explore.  Strategically, a war informed at the outset by utopian expectations continues today with no concretely stated expectations whatsoever, the forward momentum of events displacing serious consideration of purpose.  Politically, a war that once occupied center stage in national politics has now slipped to the periphery, the American people moving on to other concerns and entertainments, with legal and moral questions raised by the war left dangling in midair.

Is this progress?

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.  A TomDispatch regular, he is the author most recently of Washington Rules: The American Path to Permanent War and the editor of the new book The Short American Century: A Postmortem, just out from Harvard University Press.

The Pentagon's Afghan Basing Plans For Prisons, Drones And Black Ops

By Nick Turse, cross-posted by Tom Dispatch

In late December, the lot was just a big blank: a few burgundy metal shipping containers sitting in an expanse of crushed eggshell-colored gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence.  The American military in Afghanistan doesn’t want to talk about it, but one day soon, it will be a new hub for the American drone war in the Greater Middle East.

Next year, that empty lot will be a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war, brightly lit and filled with powerful computers kept in climate-controlled comfort in a country where most of the population has no access to electricity.  It will boast almost 7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large “processing, exploitation, and dissemination” operations center -- and, of course, it will be built with American tax dollars.

Nor is it an anomaly.  Despite all the talk of drawdowns and withdrawals, there has been a years-long building boom in Afghanistan that shows little sign of abating.  In early 2010, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had nearly 400 bases in Afghanistan.  Today, Lieutenant Lauren Rago of ISAF public affairs tells TomDispatch, the number tops 450.

The hush-hush, high-tech, super-secure facility at the massive air base in Kandahar is just one of many building projects the U.S. military currently has planned or underway in Afghanistan.  While some U.S. bases are indeed closing up shop or being transferred to the Afghan government, and there’s talk of combat operations slowing or ending next year, as well as a withdrawal of American combat forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the U.S. military is still preparing for a much longer haul at mega-bases like Kandahar and Bagram airfields. The same is true even of some smaller camps, forward operating bases (FOBs), and combat outposts (COPs) scattered through the country’s backlands.  “Bagram is going through a significant transition during the next year to two years,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Gerdes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Bagram Office recently told Freedom Builder, a Corps of Engineers publication.  “We’re transitioning... into a long-term, five-year, 10-year vision for the base.”

Whether the U.S. military will still be in Afghanistan in five or 10 years remains to be seen, but steps are currently being taken to make that possible.  U.S. military publications, plans and schematics, contracting documents, and other official data examined by TomDispatch catalog hundreds of construction projects worth billions of dollars slated to begin, continue, or conclude in 2012.

While many of these efforts are geared toward structures for Afghan forces or civilian institutions, a considerable number involve U.S. facilities, some of the most significant being dedicated to the ascendant forms of American warfare: drone operations and missions by elite special operations units.  The available plans for most of these projects suggest durability.  “The structures that are going in are concrete and mortar, rather than plywood and tent skins,” says Gerdes. As of last December, his office was involved in 30 Afghan construction projects for U.S. or international coalition partners worth almost $427 million.


The Big Base Build-Up

Recently, the New York Times reported that President Obama is likely to approve a plan to shift much of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan to special operations forces.  These elite troops would then conduct kill/capture missions and train local troops well beyond 2014.  Recent building efforts in the country bear this out.

A major project at Bagram Air Base, for instance, involves the construction of a special operations forces complex, a clandestine base within a base that will afford America’s black ops troops secrecy and near-absolute autonomy from other U.S. and coalition forces.  Begun in 2010, the $29 million project is slated to be completed this May and join roughly 90 locations around the country where troops from Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan have been stationed.

Elsewhere on Bagram, tens of millions of dollars are being spent on projects that are less sexy but no less integral to the war effort, like paving dirt roads and upgrading drainage systems on the mega-base.  In January, the U.S. military awarded a $7 million contract to a Turkish construction company to build a 24,000-square-foot command-and-control facility.  Plans are also in the works for a new operations center to support tactical fighter jet missions, a new flight-line fire station, as well as more lighting and other improvements to support the American air war.

Last month, Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered that the U.S.-run prison at Bagram be transferred to Afghan control.  By the end of January, the U.S. had issued a $36 million contract for the construction, within a year, of a new prison on the base.  While details are sparse, plans for the detention center indicate a thoroughly modern, high-security facility complete with guard towers, advanced surveillance systems, administrative facilities, and the capacity to house about 2,000 prisoners.   

At Kandahar Air Field, that new intelligence facility for the drone war will be joined by a similarly-sized structure devoted to administrative operations and maintenance tasks associated with robotic aerial missions.  It will be able to accommodate as many as 180 personnel at a time.  With an estimated combined price tag of up to $5 million, both buildings will be integral to Air Force and possibly CIA operations involving both the MQ-1 Predator drone and its more advanced and more heavily-armed progeny, the MQ-9 Reaper.

The military is keeping information about these drone facilities under extraordinarily tight wraps.  They refused to answer questions about whether, for instance, the construction of these new centers for robotic warfare are in any way related to the loss of Shamsi Air Base in neighboring Pakistan as a drone operations center, or if they signal efforts to increase the tempo of drone missions in the years ahead. The International Joint Command’s chief of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) operations, aware that such questions were to be posed, backed out of a planned interview with TomDispatch.

“Unfortunately our ISR chief here in the International Joint Command is going to be unable to address your questions,” Lieutenant Ryan Welsh of ISAF Joint Command Media Outreach explained by email just days before the scheduled interview. He also made it clear that any question involving drone operations in Pakistan was off limits. “The issues that you raise are outside the scope under which the IJC operates, therefore we are unable to facilitate this interview request.”

Whether the construction at Kandahar is designed to free up facilities elsewhere for CIA drone operations across the border in Pakistan or is related only to missions within Afghanistan, it strongly suggests a ramping up of unmanned operations.  It is, however, just one facet of the ongoing construction at the air field.  This month, a $26 million project to build 11 new structures devoted to tactical vehicle maintenance at Kandahar is scheduled for completion.  With two large buildings for upkeep and repairs, one devoted strictly to fixing tires, another to painting vehicles, as well as an industrial-sized car wash, and administrative and storage facilities, the big base’s building boom shows no sign of flickering out.

Construction and Reconstruction

This year, at Herat Air Base in the province of the same name bordering Turkmenistan and Iran, the U.S. is slated to begin a multimillion-dollar project to enhance its special forces’ air operations.  Plans are in the works to expand apron space -- where aircraft can be parked, serviced, and loaded or unloaded -- for helicopters and airplanes, as well as to build new taxiways and aircraft shelters.

That project is just one of nearly 130, cumulatively valued at about $1.5 billion, slated to be carried out in Herat, Helmand, and Kandahar provinces this year, according to Army Corps of Engineers documents examined by TomDispatch.  These also include efforts at Camp Tombstone and Camp Dwyer, both in Helmand Province as well as Kandahar’s FOB Hadrian and FOB Wilson.  The U.S. military also recently awarded a contract for more air field apron space at a base in Kunduz, a new secure entrance and new roads for FOB Delaram II, and new utilities and roads at FOB Shank, while the Marines recently built a new chapel at Camp Bastion.

Seven years ago, Forward Operating Base Sweeney, located a mile up in a mountain range in Zabul Province, was a well-outfitted, if remote, American base.  After U.S. troops abandoned it, however, the base fell into disrepair.  Last month, American troops returned in force and began rebuilding the outpost, constructing everything from new troop housing to a new storage facility.  “We built a lot of buildings, we put up a lot of tents, we filled a lot of sandbags, and we increased our force protection significantly,” Captain Joe Mickley, commanding officer of the soldiers taking up residence at the base, told a military reporter.

Decommission and Deconstruction

Hesco barriers are, in essence, big bags of dirt.  Up to seven feet tall, made of canvas and heavy gauge wire mesh, they form protective walls around U.S. outposts all over Afghanistan.  They’ll take the worst of sniper rounds, rifle-propelled grenades, even mortar shells, but one thing can absolutely wreck them -- the Marines’ 9th Engineer Support Battalion.

At the beginning of December, the 9th Engineers were building bases and filling up Hescos in Helmand Province.  By the end of the month, they were tearing others down.

Wielding pickaxes, shovels, bolt-cutters, powerful rescue saws, and front-end loaders, they have begun “demilitarizing” bases, cutting countless Hescos -- which cost $700 or more a pop -- into heaps of jagged scrap metal and bulldozing berms in advance of the announced American withdrawal from Afghanistan.  At Firebase Saenz, for example, Marines were bathed in a sea of crimson sparks as they sawed their way through the metal mesh and let the dirt spill out, leaving a country already haunted by the ghosts of British and Russian bases with yet another defunct foreign outpost.  After Saenz, it was on to another patrol base slated for destruction.

Not all rural outposts are being torn down, however.  Some are being handed over to the Afghan Army or police.  And new facilities are now being built for the indigenous forces at an increasing rate.  “If current projections remain accurate, we will award 18 contracts in February,” Bonnie Perry, the head of contracting for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Afghanistan Engineering District-South, told military reporter Karla Marshall.  “Next quarter we expect that awards will remain high, with the largest number of contract awards occurring in May.”  One of the projects underway is a large base near Herat, which will include barracks, dining facilities, office space, and other amenities for Afghan commandos.

Tell Me How This Ends

No one should be surprised that the U.S. military is building up and tearing down bases at the same time, nor that much of the new construction is going on at mega-bases, while small outposts in the countryside are being abandoned.  This is exactly what you would expect of an occupation force looking to scale back its “footprint” and end major combat operations while maintaining an on-going presence in Afghanistan.  Given the U.S. military’s projected retreat to its giant bases and an increased reliance on kill/capture black-ops as well as unmanned air missions, it’s also no surprise that its signature projects for 2012 include a new special operations forces compound, clandestine drone facilities, and a brand new military prison.

There’s little doubt Bagram Air Base will exist in five or 10 years.  Just who will be occupying it is, however, less clear.  After all, in Iraq, the Obama administration negotiated for some way to station a significant military force -- 10,000 or more troops -- there beyond a withdrawal date that had been set in stone for years.  While a token number of U.S. troops and a highly militarized State Department contingent remain there, the Iraqi government largely thwarted the American efforts -- and now, even the State Department presence is being halved.

It’s less likely this will be the case in Afghanistan, but it remains possible.  Still, it’s clear that the military is building in that country as if an enduring American presence were a given.  Whatever the outcome, vestiges of the current base-building boom will endure and become part of America’s Afghan legacy.

On Bagram’s grounds stands a distinctive structure called the “Crow’s Nest.”  It’s an old control tower built by the Soviets to coordinate their military operations in Afghanistan.  That foreign force left the country in 1989.  The Soviet Union itself departed from the planet less than three years later.  The tower remains.

America’s new prison in Bagram will undoubtedly remain, too.  Just who the jailers will be and who will be locked inside five years or 10 years from now is, of course, unknown.  But given the history -- marked by torture and deaths -- of the appalling treatment of inmates at Bagram and, more generally, of the brutality toward prisoners by all parties to the conflict over the years, in no scenario are the results likely to be pretty.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com.  An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. 

ACLU Sues To Obtain Info On Targeted Killings

I've previously written about last September's drone attack in Yemen that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric tied to Al Qaeda.  (See, e.g., International Execution.)  Samir Kahn, also a U.S. citizen, was reportedly killed in the same attack.  Two weeks later, al-Alwaki's 16-year old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki,  was killed elsewhere in Yemen

Last week, the ACLU filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act after the government refused to release records on the factual and legal bases for using drones to target United States citizens for assassination overseas.

From the ACLU's website:

Our government’s deliberate and premeditated killing of American terrorism suspects raises profound questions that ought to be the subject of public debate. Unfortunately the Obama administration has released very little information about the practice — its official position is that the targeted killing program is a state secret — and some of the information it has released has been misleading.

The New York Times recently filed a similar suit that seeks the legal memos on which the targeted killing program is based.   But, the ACLU's suit goes further, seeking, in addition "the government’s evidentiary basis for strikes that killed three Americans in Yemen in the fall of 2011. We’re also seeking information about the process by which the administration adds Americans to secret government “'kill lists.'”

The Department of Justice, Department of Defense and the CIA have refused to provide any records in response to the ACLU's FOIA requests, and won't even confirm that any records responsive to the requests even exist.  As the ACLU states, "essentially, these agencies are saying the targeted killing program is so secret that they can’t even acknowledge that it exists."

This is outrageous given that the President and Secretary of Defense Panetta (most recently on 60 Minutes) each have publicly acknowledged the existence of the program and have defended, if not boasted of, its use.  As the ACLU argues, this self-serving and highly selective attitude towards disclosure and transparency is unacceptable:

Officials cannot be allowed to release bits of information about the targeted killing program when they think it will bolster their position, but refuse even to confirm the existence of a targeted killing program when organizations like the ACLU or journalists file FOIA requests in the service of real transparency and accountability.

Droning On And On And On

On Saturday, as Glenn Greenwald reports, "in Somalia, the U.S. fired missiles from a drone and killed the 27-year-old Lebanon-born, ex-British citizen Bilal el-Berjawi. His wife had given birth 24 hours earlier and the speculation is that the U.S. located him when his wife called to give him the news." 
Clearly, we are cranking up our drone operations, a targeted assassination program which often goes awry.  (Tom Engelhardt points out that according to he London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have, over the years, killed at least 168 children.)  Adam Weinstein at Mother Jones reports that the Pentagon will announce today that to meet new budget constraints it will be slashing Army troop levels by 80,000 soldiers, or 14 percent of the force, while expanding bases for drones.   Legality and morality aside, as Nick Turse argues below, drones are counterproductive tools of war.  Turse points to 70 drone mishaps which "draw attention not only to the technical limitations of drone warfare, but to larger conceptual flaws inherent in such operations." 

The Crash and Burn Future of Robot Warfare
What 70 Downed Drones Tell Us About the New American Way of War
 
By Nick Turse, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

American fighter jets screamed over the Iraqi countryside heading for the MQ-1 Predator drone, while its crew in California stood by helplessly.  What had begun as an ordinary reconnaissance mission was now taking a ruinous turn.  In an instant, the jets attacked and then it was all over.  The Predator, one of the Air Force’s workhorse hunter/killer robots, had been obliterated.

An account of the spectacular end of that nearly $4 million drone in November 2007 is contained in a collection of Air Force accident investigation documents recently examined by TomDispatch.  They catalog more than 70 catastrophic Air Force drone mishaps since 2000, each resulting in the loss of an aircraft or property damage of $2 million or more.

These official reports, some obtained by TomDispatch through the Freedom of Information Act, offer new insights into a largely covert, yet highly touted war-fighting, assassination, and spy program involving armed robots that are significantly less reliable than previously acknowledged.  These planes, the latest wonder weapons in the U.S. military arsenal, are tested, launched, and piloted from a shadowy network of more than 60 bases spread around the globe, often in support of elite teams of special operations forces.  Collectively, the Air Force documents offer a remarkable portrait of modern drone warfare, one rarely found in a decade of generally triumphalist or awestruck press accounts that seldom mention the limitations of drones, much less their mission failures.

The aerial disasters described draw attention not only to the technical limitations of drone warfare, but to larger conceptual flaws inherent in such operations.  Launched and landed by aircrews close to battlefields in places like Afghanistan, the drones are controlled during missions by pilots and sensor operators -- often multiple teams over many hours -- from bases in places like Nevada and North Dakota.  They are sometimes also monitored by “screeners” from private security contractors at stateside bases like Hurlburt Field in Florida.  (A recent McClatchy report revealed that it takes nearly 170 people to keep a single Predator in the air for 24 hours.)


In other words, drone missions, like the robots themselves, have many moving parts and much, it turns out, can and does go wrong.  In that November 2007 Predator incident in Iraq, for instance, an electronic failure caused the robotic aircraft to engage its self-destruct mechanism and crash, after which U.S. jets destroyed the wreckage to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.  In other cases, drones -- officially known as remotely piloted aircraft, or RPAs -- broke down, escaped human control and oversight, or self-destructed for reasons ranging from pilot error and bad weather to mechanical failure in Afghanistan, Djibouti, the Gulf of Aden, Iraq, Kuwait, and various other unspecified or classified foreign locations, as well as in the United States.

In 2001, Air Force Predator drones flew 7,500 hours.  By the close of last year, that number topped 70,000.  As the tempo of robotic air operations has steadily increased, crashes have, not surprisingly, become more frequent.  In 2001, just two Air Force drones were destroyed in accidents.  In 2008, eight drones fell from the sky.  Last year, the number reached 13.  (Accident rates are, however, dropping according to an Air Force report relying on figures from 2009.)

Keep in mind that the 70-plus accidents recorded in those Air Force documents represent only drone crashes investigated by the Air Force under a rigid set of rules. Many other drone mishaps have not been included in the Air Force statistics.  Examples include a haywire MQ-9 Reaper drone that had to be shot out of the Afghan skies by a fighter jet in 2009, a remotely-operated Navy helicopter that went down in Libya last June, an unmanned aerial vehicle whose camera was reportedly taken by Afghan insurgents after a crash in August 2011, an advanced RQ-170 Sentinel lost during a spy mission in Iran last December, and the recent crash of an MQ-9 Reaper in the Seychelles Islands.

You Don’t Need a Weatherman... Or Do You?

How missions are carried out -- and sometimes fail -- is apparent from the declassified reports, including one provided to TomDispatch by the Air Force detailing a June 2011 crash.  Late that month, a Predator drone took off from Jalalabad Air Base in Afghanistan to carry out a surveillance mission in support of ground forces.  Piloted by a member of the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing out of Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, the robotic craft ran into rough weather, causing the pilot to ask for permission to abandon the troops below.

His commander never had a chance to respond.  Lacking weather avoidance equipment found on more sophisticated aircraft or on-board sensors to clue the pilot in to rapidly deteriorating weather conditions, and with a sandstorm interfering with ground radar, “severe weather effects” overtook the Predator.  In an instant, the satellite link between pilot and plane was severed.  When it momentarily flickered back to life, the crew could see that the drone was in an extreme nosedive.  They then lost the datalink for a second and final time.  A few minutes later, troops on the ground radioed in to say that the $4 million drone had crashed near them.

A month earlier, a Predator drone took off from the tiny African nation of Djibouti in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, which includes operations in Afghanistan as well as Yemen, Djibouti, and Somalia, among other nations.  According to documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, about eight hours into the flight, the mission crew noticed a slow oil leak.  Ten hours later, they handed the drone off to a local aircrew whose assignment was to land it at Djibouti’s Ambouli Airport, a joint civilian/military facility adjacent to Camp Lemonier, a U.S. base in the country.

That mission crew -- both the pilot and sensor operator -- had been deployed from Creech Air Force
Base in Nevada and had logged a combined 1,700 hours flying Predators.  They were considered “experienced” by the Air Force.  On this day, however, the electronic sensors that measure their drone’s altitude were inaccurate, while low clouds and high humidity affected its infrared sensors and set the stage for disaster.

An investigation eventually found that, had the crew performed proper instrument cross-checks, they would have noticed a 300-400 foot discrepancy in their altitude.  Instead, only when the RPA broke through the clouds did the sensor operator realize just how close to the ground it was.  Six seconds later, the drone crashed to earth, destroying itself and one of its Hellfire missiles.

Storms, clouds, humidity, and human error aren’t the only natural dangers for drones.  In a November 2008 incident, a mission crew at Kandahar Air Field launched a Predator on a windy day.  Just five minutes into the flight, with the aircraft still above the sprawling American mega-base, the pilot realized that the plane had already deviated from its intended course.  To get it back on track, he initiated a turn that -- due to the aggressive nature of the maneuver, wind conditions, drone design, and the unbalanced weight of a missile on just one wing -- sent the plane into a roll. Despite the pilot's best efforts, the craft entered a tailspin, crashed on the base, and burst into flames.

Going Rogue

On occasion, RPAs have simply escaped from human control.  Over the course of eight hours on a late February day in 2009, for example, five different crews passed off the controls of a Predator drone, one to the next, as it flew over Iraq.  Suddenly, without warning, the last of them, members of the North Dakota Air National Guard at Hector International Airport in Fargo, lost communication with the plane.  At that point no one -- not the pilot, nor the sensor operator, nor a local mission crew -- knew where the drone was or what it was doing.  Neither transmitting nor receiving data or commands, it had, in effect, gone rogue.  Only later was it determined that a datalink failure had triggered the drone’s self-destruct mechanism, sending it into an unrecoverable tailspin and crash within 10 minutes of escaping human control.

In November 2009, a Predator launched from Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan lost touch with its human handlers 20 minutes after takeoff and simply disappeared.  When the mission crew was unable to raise the drone, datalink specialists were brought in but failed to find the errant plane.  Meanwhile, air traffic controllers, who had lost the plane on radar, could not even locate its transponder signal.  Numerous efforts to make contact failed.  Two days later, at the moment the drone would have run out of fuel, the Air Force declared the Predator “lost.”  It took eight days for its wreckage to be located.

Crash Course

In mid-August 2004, while drone operations in the Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility were running at high tempo, a Predator mission crew began hearing a cascade of warning alarms indicating engine and alternator failure, as well as a possible engine fire.  When the sensor operator used his camera to scan the aircraft, it didn’t take long to spot the problem.  Its tail had burst into flames.  Shortly afterward, it became uncontrollable and crashed.

In January 2007, a Predator drone was flying somewhere in the CENTCOM region (above one of 20 countries in the Greater Middle East).  About 14 hours into a 20-hour mission, the aircraft began to falter.  For 15 minutes its engine was failing, but the information it was sending back remained within normal parameters, so the mission crew failed to notice.  Only at the last minute did they become aware that their drone was dying.  As an investigation later determined, an expanding crack in the drone’s crankshaft caused the engine to seize up.  The pilot put the aircraft into a glide toward an unpopulated area.  Higher headquarters then directed that he should intentionally crash it, since a rapid reaction force would not be able to reach it quickly and it was carrying two Hellfire missiles as well as unspecified “classified equipment.”  Days later, its remains were recovered.

The Crash and Burn Future of Robot Warfare

In spite of all the technical limitations of remote-controlled war spelled out in the Air Force investigation files, the U.S. is doubling down on drones.  Under the president’s new military strategy, the Air Force is projected to see its share of the budgetary pie rise and flying robots are expected to be a major part of that expansion.

Already, counting the Army’s thousands of tiny drones, one in three military aircraft -- close to 7,500 machines -- are robots.  According to official figures provided to TomDispatch, roughly 285 of them are Air Force Predator, Reaper, or Global Hawk drones.  The Air Force's arsenal also includes more advanced Sentinels, Avengers, and other classified unmanned aircraft.  A report published by the Congressional Budget Office last year, revealed that “the Department of Defense plans to purchase about 730 new medium-sized and large unmanned aircraft systems” during the next 10 years.

Over the last decade, the United States has increasingly turned to drones in an effort to win its wars.  The Air Force investigation files examined by TomDispatch suggest a more extensive use of drones in Iraq than has previously been reported.  But in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, America’s preeminent wonder weapon failed to bring the U.S. mission anywhere close to victory.  Effective as the spearhead of a program to cripple al-Qaeda in Pakistan, drone warfare in that country’s tribal borderlands has also alienated almost the entire population of 190 million.  In other words, an estimated 2,000 suspected or identified guerrillas (as well as untold numbers of civilians) died.  The populace of a key American ally grew ever more hostile and no one knows how many new militants in search of revenge the drone strikes may have created, though the numbers are believed to be significant.

Despite a decade of technological, tactical, and strategic refinements and improvements, Air Force and allied CIA personnel watching computer monitors in distant locations have continually failed to discriminate between armed combatants and innocent civilians and, as a result, the judge-jury-executioner drone assassination program is widely considered to have run afoul of international law.

In addition, drone warfare seems to be creating a sinister system of embedded economic incentives that may lead to increasing casualty figures on the ground.  “In some targeting programs, staffers have review quotas -- that is, they must review a certain number of possible targets per given length of time,” The Atlantic’s Joshua Foust recently wrote of the private contractors involved in the process.  “Because they are contractors,” he explains, “their continued employment depends on their ability to satisfy the stated performance metrics. So they have a financial incentive to make life-or-death decisions about possible kill targets just to stay employed. This should be an intolerable situation, but because the system lacks transparency or outside review it is almost impossible to monitor or alter.”

As flight hours rise year by year, these stark drawbacks are compounded by a series of technical glitches and vulnerabilities that are ever more regularly coming to light.  These include: Iraqi insurgents hacking drone video feeds, a virulent computer virus infecting the Air Force’s unmanned fleet, large percentages of drone pilots suffering from "high operational stress," a friendly fire incident in which drone operators killed two U.S. military personnel, increasing numbers of crashes, and the possibility of an Iranian drone-hijacking, as well as those more than 70 catastrophic mishaps detailed in Air Force accident investigation documents.

Over the last decade, a more-is-better mentality has led to increased numbers of drones, drone bases, drone pilots, and drone victims, but not much else.  Drones may be effective in terms of generating body counts, but they appear to be even more successful in generating animosity and creating enemies.

The Air Force’s accident reports are replete with evidence of the flaws inherent in drone technology, and there can be little doubt that, in the future, ever more will come to light.  A decade’s worth of futility suggests that drone warfare itself may already be crashing and burning, yet it seems destined that the skies will fill with drones and that the future will bring more of the same.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com.  An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. This article is the fifth in his new series on the changing face of American empire, which is being underwritten by Lannan Foundation.