All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea.
They will be fought in space or possibly on top of a very tall mountain.
In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots.
And as you go forth today, remember always your duty is clear to build and maintain those robots.
Thank you.
All right, that was the Simpsons about 12, 13 years ahead of their time there, I think.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line is Nick Terse.
He is associate editor of TomDispatch.com, and he's the author, editor of several books, including the just-published Terminator Planet, the First History of Drone Warfare, 2001 through 2050.
Right on.
Welcome back to the show, Nick.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I'm very happy that you're here.
A Drone Eat Drone World is the article at TomDispatch.com.
Also, of course, under Tom's name at AntiWar.com/Englehart.
A Drone Eat Drone World with its roadmap in tatters, the Pentagon detours to Terminator Planet.
And wow, it really is just like that, huh?
They're going to go ahead, not just are they going to fill our skies, and I guess everybody on Earth's skies with these things.
They're going to give the robots themselves the decision-making authority on who they kill.
Well, Scott, that's the idea, at least in the Pentagon's fantasy land.
I'm not sure that we're going to see that anytime soon, but if you look at this roadmap that the Pentagon put together earlier this year, it's certainly what they had in mind.
They paint a very vivid picture of drones, dogfighting on their own offshore off the coast of Africa in the 2030s.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, isn't it, how whenever they imagine the future, these Pentagon guys, it's always Africa they're fighting over.
Like, there's, I think, a Navy SEAL, like, join up and be a Navy special forces guy commercial, where they're in boats in some kind of jungle, but where are they?
It's not the Mekong Delta, and it doesn't seem, I don't know, it felt like Africa, not South America, and not Southeast Asia to me.
And they're dressed in slightly futuristic gear, right?
Not like way over the top futuristic gear, but the commercial, it makes it look like it's a few years from now.
Anyway, yeah, well, and I mean, the future is now because, you know, more and more there are operations going on in Africa.
We have a drone war being run out of Djibouti and Ethiopia, and off the coast of Africa and in the Indian Ocean.
There's, you know, a full military CIA campaign that's been run out of Somalia, secret prisons, helicopter attacks, no operations.
Well, you know, it's interesting that, you know, we don't have the Iraq invasion 2003 style model of war, and relatively speaking, you know, tactically, anyway, I think they probably, to some degree, at the Pentagon, at the White House, think, you know, believe their own nonsense, that this is using the scalpel, not the bludgeon.
But they have so many scalpels, and they're so plentiful and cheap that they can just go ahead and deploy them wherever they want.
If they want to pick a fight with Boko Haram, then they will.
Why not?
It's, you know, compared to what it took to bring down Saddam Hussein or something like that, flying drones over, you know, northeastern Nigeria is pennies on the dollar.
Yes, they certainly seem to think that this is the future of warfare, and it's a way to fight wars on the cheap, and to, you know, keep Americans out of harm's way.
This is certainly their roadmap for the future.
Whether or not it'll actually work, it's another story.
You know, they've been touting drone warfare now for the last 10 years, but the more and more you look at it and you really examine it, the less and less viable it seems to be.
I mean, we've been told that these are wonder weapons.
In reality, you're looking at something that's an overgrown model airplane still, flown by guys in the U.S., either at Langley or out in the southwest, places like Creech Air Force Base.
And they're still looking through a grainy camera.
Their targeting still isn't where the Pentagon has claimed it's been.
And these drones, they break down at an astounding rate.
They're also extremely vulnerable to countermeasures.
It's one thing to fight Pakistani militants without any kind of anti-aircraft fire, try to bring this into any kind of sophisticated fight.
It's going to be a different story.
We even saw that in Libya, where one of the Navy's futuristic robot copters was shot down last year.
Well, but then again, back to, you know, compare it to the F-22 or something like that.
They could churn out how many of these things for the cost of a F-22 or F-35.
You know, they can afford to lose them and they can afford to, you know, spread war.
Like you're saying, they go, oh, this is how we keep our troops out of war and whatever.
But they can just spread war to all corners of the globe.
You know, they can just have war everywhere.
Why not, you know, fight the penguins down in Antarctica, fight everything?
Well, I mean, it's going that way.
You have...
And I don't think the whole remote control brain thing where they choose on their own who to kill and who not to kill, not just in a dogfight situation, but ground targets too, because didn't they have an article in the Washington Post or something about how really the same criteria that they use for the signature strike, right?
Somebody's cell phone, you know, it's basically the computer is telling a CIA guy that this guy must be guilty in the first place, right?
Well, it's just that same program.
You just put it on the drone and the drone says, hey, this guy, you know, has this guy's cell phone number and lives in this other guy's neighborhood and whatever.
And so he fulfills the qualifications of he follows the signature of being a terrorist.
So let's kill him.
And then it makes the decision to kill him.
I mean, that's not even the future either, right?
That's that could be going on this minute.
Yeah, it certainly is.
I mean, the more we learn about these drone programs, the more you realize that the targeting procedures that we've been told repeatedly, that there are, you know, there are fail safes in place and that these are done under very strict rules.
You find out that things like, you know, signature or pattern of life, as they call it, you know, they track a cell phone, they see how someone is acting.
They may not even know this person's name, but they say, well, you know, he's palling around with terrorists or something like that.
And and that's sufficient to, you know, to warrant lethal action.
And it's an extremely slippery slope.
Yeah.
Palling around.
Isn't that a great one?
That's like person of interest.
They just made that one up, I think, for Stephen Hatfield.
And now they just use it all the time.
There's a brand new category of guilty person.
I didn't have to worry about before, but now I guess we do.
And, you know, I saw a thing the other night for the local Fox affiliate.
And it was and, you know, the APD here in Austin, Texas, they were some of the first.
They are, I think, the first ones to use them on a drug bust.
One of these drones.
And just the other day, they had a promo for a local news special coming out about military level awesomeness of drones that we now have for so that the police can protect you better tonight at 10, whatever.
And there was no question about the greatness of this.
There's no question about, you know, the advance in technology for the police means your life is improved.
Just simple as that.
Those are the same thing.
That's it shouldn't even have to be two sentences to them, you know, to keep you safe.
You and your little kids coming up tonight at 10 on Fox.
All right.
I'm sorry for talking so much.
I swear to God, I'm gonna let Nick Turst talk when we get back from this break.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And on the line is Nick Turst from TomDispatch.com, alternate and author and editor of many books.
The latest is Terminator Planet, the first history of drone warfare 2001 through 2050, which that's a hell of a way to do history in reverse like that.
But I guess I could see it.
It's well, you make the point in the article pretty well here, pretty thoroughly that the fantasies of Pentagon planners for what these drones can be one day are still, you know, far from being achieved.
They're not capable as jet fighters or anything like that.
They're really they're good for bombing Afghans because Afghans can't shoot back at them at all.
But if they were if we were actually in a war, they're really not good for much.
They could be taken out quite easily by any state that had, you know, an anti-aircraft system of one kind or another, right?
Yeah, that's true.
And they're, they're even susceptible to very, you know, very weak technologies, things like lasers or dazzlers.
They can blind and damage the sensors on these things.
And very simple jammers can disrupt the global positioning systems on these drones.
And any number of types of cyber attacks and jamming methods can be used to hijack or take down these drones.
Right now, they're up against forces that don't have this type of technology, but there's plenty of it around in the world.
And I think it's only a matter of time before we start seeing it deployed against these rather weak weapons.
Yeah, well, and like I was talking about before the break, there's two things here.
One is an endless list of excuses for them, right?
Somebody's kid is missing.
What are you going to do?
Not fly a drone with an infrared sensor on it to go out looking for the kid?
If you can, are you kidding?
You have to.
So done, right?
All thresholds about, whoa, are we sure we don't might not want to implement that technology around here are gone as soon as one kid goes missing, right?
Right out the door.
And then secondly, I guess, to me, what's most important is the cost.
When so many of these, I mean, they're not all Reaper drones, right?
There's a lot of different ones.
And we could have a situation where, you know, everybody, you know, a major metropolitan police department has dozens and dozens and dozens of these things.
And why not fly them all the time?
Pay a beat cop to sit on his fat ass and fly remote control helicopter around or whatever.
And it could really change the way we live here to the way Fallujans live in Fallujah pretty quick, you know?
Yeah, that's true.
I mean, it seems that we're going that route, that we'll be having drones overhead, you know, on a regular basis in the very near future.
And there's a lot of, you know, as you said, there's a lot of different, you know, problems that will come with that.
One of them is, I think, the economics of it.
You know, there are currently nine Reapers that are used for U.S. border security.
These are unarmed, but it's the same type that they used in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, also known as the Predator B.
And those that are used domestically in the U.S. over the borders here, they're being worked on and down for maintenance one hour for every hour that they're in the air.
And the more drones you have, if you have to repair, you know, one hour for every hour that these drones are lost, it's going to be a very expensive proposition going forward.
Right.
Like always, we have to just count on the inability of the state to implement their worst plans against us.
That it just can't be done, at least yet, for now, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
It's the one saving grace.
Oh, man.
Well, now here's the other thing, too.
Who was it on the show yesterday?
Was it Patrick?
It wasn't Patrick Coburn.
Somebody said something smart.
I'd like to quote him correctly if I could.
I think it was Robert Naiman.
Yeah, it was Robert Naiman on the show mentioned that now, I guess there must be some survey.
Maybe you know exactly what he was referring to, that the drone war is now above torture on the list of reasons why terrorists say they hate and want to attack the United States.
And of course, both of those are from, you know, since the war on terrorism began are now the two top, you know, two major parts of it are the two top reasons why they hate us and want to keep fighting us.
But this is really changing not just how we live here or very soon will.
It's changing very quickly, I think, how the other, what, six and a half billion people in the world perceive us.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
You know, if you look at the latest polling that's been done in Pakistan, you find that, you know, 97% of the population there are against drone strikes.
It's almost, you know, inconceivable for any polling to get 97% of agreement on anything.
But this is, I mean, it's extremely galvanizing.
You know, we had an exceptionally low public opinion of the U.S. and Pakistan during the Bush years due to things like torture.
But, you know, the Obama administration has found a method by which they can drive those levels lower and, you know, engender more hatred against America.
You know, it's amazing.
Really, we've gotten off so lucky.
You look at Faisal Shahzad is the only terrorist out of Pakistan in this whole time.
And thank God he was a spectacular failure there in his attempt to blow up Times Square.
But he could have killed a lot of people if you just use your imagination a little bit.
And just think of Pakistan and Iraq and all these other countries and Yemen.
And how many people in the world hate America as much as those 9-11 hijackers did back then, now, you know what I mean?
Yeah, and as these military interventions are proliferating around the world, you're just, you know, engendering more and more hatred, spreading it out all across the planet.
We've had drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen, Somalia, Iraq.
There was even one a couple months back in the Philippines.
So there's all these places in the world where people are living with the reality of having a drone buzzing overhead that could, you know, kill them or their family members at any moment.
And, you know, we know what that, you know, what that makes people feel.
Yeah, it's certainly a dangerous prospect.
Yeah, terror.
That's the word for it.
And in fact, you may have seen this.
It was a piece in the Washington Post, say, I don't know, half a year ago or so, Nick, where the whole first half of the article, of course, was about poor Boo-Hoo, little Israel is helpless and they're always being attacked.
So they have to do this.
But then when you get to the second half of the article, it's about what it's like to be a Gazan and particularly in terms of having drones, armed drones, many of them flying overhead all the time.
And just knowing everyone, knowing their kids, knowing everyone, just spending their entire day knowing that any time they go outside and show the top of their head toward the sky, they might just get blown up.
And it's horrifying, man.
In fact, it's amazing to me that it got into the Washington Post.
Maybe the editors only read the first half and said, go ahead.
I don't know.
But it's I don't want to live like that.
It's scary, man.
It's horrible.
It's a it's a nightmarish thing.
It's like some dystopian novel, you know, some science fiction warning about what you might do.
Like you're saying, like Terminator here, where it's suicide.
We're doing it to ourselves, turning our our own society into this, you know?
Yeah, I mean, this is this is the dystopian future that the movies told us about 20, 30 years ago.
And and now, you know, for a tremendous number of people on this planet, it's a reality.
There really are robots in the skies above hunting and killing people.
There's there's neighbors, their family members.
Yeah, it really is.
At least, you know, I guess we're saying for a sort of part 1984, but it's part Brazil, too.
And so, you know, central services can't quite, you know, get the full enslavement thing going, you know, which is nice.
But it's still very problematic for the people live in the 1984 end of it.
But so, you know, I don't know.
I mentioned name and he was on the show saying, you know what, when it came out about this kill list and how whoever they killed, they pretend that those people were all militants unless somebody has solid proof.
Otherwise, which, of course, they don't bother trying to get that this is something that people can really seize on to oppose the drone war and to get ahold of their congressman and make sure that their congressman all sign on to this letter that some of them have already started and make a big deal about this and get this on TV and show that a lot of people don't want America to wage a drone war around the world or here either.
And what do you think about that?
I think it's worth fighting.
I think it's even possible to do something about it, Nick.
Well, you know, there's I guess there's always there's always some hope.
But, you know, to be completely realistic, I think that, you know, drones have been sold to the people in this country.
It's such a astoundingly effective way that it's going to be tough to combat that.
We've heard, you know, some really powerful propaganda for the last 10 years.
So it's going to take a lot of doing if we're going to fight against the coming drone war.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time.
I really appreciate your part in it.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
I appreciate being on.
That's Nick Turser, everytimedispatch.com.
