What Happens When Everyone Else Starts Using Drones?

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/10/what-happens-when-everyone-else-starts-using-drones/43492/

The country is growing accustomed to debate about the use of drone aircraft in military surveillance and strikes. Should the U.S., as it has under President Barack Obama, be leaning more heavily on the use of the remote-controlled airplanes to hunt and kill terrorists — including American citizens?

In The New York Times this weekend, Scott Shane points to another debate about drones, one that is inevitable as other countries hurry to catch up to America in their development of the weapons. What should the U.S. do when another country starts to use drones the way it has in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere?

Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.

“Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”

The challenge could be faced along any number of restive borders (in Kashmir, or in northern Mexico) or against breakaway elements within a country (the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province, in China, perhaps, or in Chechnya). And the United States won't be able to say much in protest without sounding hypocritical. “The problem is that we’re creating an international norm,” Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh tells Shane. The U.S. position is that it can strike across borders to kill terrorists — Anwar al-Awlaki, for instance — when they are even suspected of planning attacks. How could this country now tell other military powers they can't do the same. So far, the only other country to have made a strike outside the Afghanistan war zone, where British drones are active, is Israel, which used an unmanned vehicle to attack suspected militants in Gaza.

[HereSince1628]

1. Clearly, the Drone Wars

Heads up, Jedi!

[So Shall Us]

12. Ack! Beat me to it!

;P

[ProgressiveProfessor]

2. Already happening...

and you end up with counter drone warfare based mostly on EW and ELINT. Also already happening. Sooner or later we or others will start losing Predator class drones due to that. Then the fun will really start.

[wtmusic]

3. More worried about hummingbird-sized drones in development

which can fly through a window and kill. Recipe for New World Order:

1 megalomaniac
Several million tiny drones
Access to DARPA database
GPS

Shake, stir.

[customerserviceguy]

4. I would imagine that they're pretty hard to get hold of

for the purposes of copying or whatever. I would imagine that the technology is not as cheap or ubiquitous as the cell phones that are used to arm IED's. It would take a pretty sophisticated society to divert enough resources for this, and the rogue societies that are able to do this right now are pretty much focused on getting nuclear bombs instead.

That's not to say that it cannot happen. But if it did, we'd probably do what we did when Japan sent over floating bombs that rode the jet stream, then dumped fire on our Northwest forests. We analyzed the composition of the sand in the ballast weights, figured out where the factory making the bombs was, and blew it to holy hell.

[pscot]

8. Copy? We're probably having them built in Chinese factories

I'm sure the Israelis are building their own. There will soon be drones surveilling the Canadian and Mexican borders and it won't be long before Homeland Security is offering funding grants so your local sheriff can stock up. Think Joe Arpaio with a drone airwing. We're in shit up to our necks and the waves are rising.

[customerserviceguy]

10. Ah, that's where you're wrong

We do keep our defense spending, as much as is practically possible, in the US. That's why the Pentagon budget is so popular, it's big enough to sprinkle at least a few million in every Congressional district. I even worked for a semiconductor factory that got defense work, they didn't even want the job shipped over to our Taiwanese parent company.

Yes, I'm certain the Israelis are building their own. But they're not likely to use them against us, or let them fall into terrorist hands.

[chill_wind]

14. At least 40 other countries have begun to build or buy— see post # 13

[JayhawkSD]

22. Oh yes, we thought that way in 1950, too.

The atomic bomb was too complex for anyone to copy. We had a monopoly on that technology because no one else was technologically advanced enough to build one.

[bemildred]

23. Persistent delusions of superiority, is what it is.

Otherwise knows as "American Exceptionalism". It's not just wrong, it's dangerous.

[leveymg]

5. Retaliation and Escalation, till increasingly sophisticated forms of assasination become a norm

Spiral of violence and war won't stop until the real PTB start to be targeted by Hellfire missiles fired at them behind the curtain.

[bemildred]

6. More "security theater", very expensive, nasty, and still unable to enforce much of anything. nt

[RC]

7. How can not anyone see this escalating till we start losing parts of our cities.

How much explosives can you pack into a small 2 or 4 person small remote control private plane? Cheap compared to what our military is spending on drones.

[BobbyBoring]

9. I also wonder what happens

When other countries start preemptive strikes on countries they deem "Hostile" or "A threat".

[Prometheus Bound]

11. Well, of course, that would be terrorism.

Same goes for bombs and stuff. When we kill people with them it is all good. When the other side uses them it is terrorism.

[chill_wind]

13. For less than $50,000 "a few amateurs could shut down Manhattan."

At least 40 other countries—from Belarus and Georgia to India, Pakistan, and Russia—have begun to build, buy, and deploy unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, showcasing their efforts at international weapons expos ranging from the premier Paris Air Show to smaller events in Singapore and Bahrain. In the last six months alone, Iran has begun production on a pair of weapons-ready surveillance drones, while China has debuted the Pterodactyl and Sour Dragon, rivals to America's Predator and Global Hawk. All told, two thirds of worldwide investment in unmanned planes in 2010 will be spent by countries other than the United States.

Defending Against Drones
Feb 25, 2010 4:28 PM EST
How our new favorite weapon in the war on terror could soon be turned against us.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/02/25/defending-against-drones.html

Singer is director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution and the author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.

He has lots of commentary in this topic here:

http://www.brookings.edu/experts/singerp.aspx

[pscot]

17. No one could have imagined.....

Anyone capable of building electronic components for Boeing could probably gin up something that could fly into a highrise and explode with great effect.

[KoKo]

19. Drone Wars of WWIII!

Ugh.

[Bill USA]

15. have you ever heard of the Terminator movies??

[Demeter]

16. Considering how Cheap Peace is

and how much more profitable, to do anything but Peace is to cheat your people.

[KoKo]

18. My hope is that everyone finds a way to "disrupt" these killing machines

where a person in a room somewhere far away...pulls a trigger but never sees the blood guts and dismemberment of these killing machines. They have NO INVOLVMENT. Cold Blooded Killers who never see their prey...just a target on a screen. Collect their salary and go home and someone "high fives them:" MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! They never hear the cries of death or the bereavement of the family and kin of their target. They are removed from it all. It's just another "kill target" ...nothing to see there...move along.

New Wars fought from a room in some country by a gamer who pulls the trigger but on a "remote machine."

I hope a way is found to disrupt them.

[blkmusclmachine]

20. 1984

cubed.

[chill_wind]

21. MQ-9 Reapers, upstate New York

Unmanned drones to fly in Fort Drum airspace, over Lake Ontario, Adirondacks
October 06, 2011
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2011/10/unmanned_drones_to_fly_in_fort.html


"The air guard unit is based at Hancock Field, but it may take several years before the FAA gives the unit a green light to operate the Reaper in civilian air space around Hancock and the rest of Central New York, he said."