The Kamikaze Drones and New tactics in Modern Warfare

"We've been thinking about this for a long time," Gersten says, and he reads me a quote from V-J Day, 1945, spoken by General Henry Arnold, who was taught to fly by the Wright brothers and commanded the Army Air Forces during World War II: "We have just won a war with a lot of heroes flying around in planes. The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all." Maybe Arnold didn't figure on so many wars in between, but technology is catching up with his vision. In 2001, ninety years after an airplane first dropped a bomb, a Predator launched a Hellfire missile in Afghanistan for the first time. The next year, a Predator fired a Stinger missile at an Iraqi MiG-25. The missile's heat seeker was thrown off by the MiG's missile, which destroyed the Predator, but still: A drone had been in a dogfight. If the Air Force ever again has an ace, the pilot will likely be parked in a chair in a windowless room in the desert outside Las Vegas.

The Air Force now has 138 Predators and 36 Reapers. The military's overall UAV inventory has swollen to seven thousand, from hand-launched Ravens to jet-powered Global Hawks, which can fly twelve miles high and monitor a swath the size of Kentucky in a day. And the revolution has just begun. Within the next twenty years, the Air Force envisions unmanned planes launching tiny missiles in hypertargeted strikes, swarms of bug-sized UAVs, and squadrons of networked unmanned fighters, bombers, and tankers, many of which will fly autonomously. And the enemy will have unmanned planes, too. More than forty countries currently fly them. In February, an American F-16 shot down an Iranian drone flying over Iraq. And Hezbollah has used them to spy on Israel and attack a ship during fighting in 2006. They can be built cheaply, with off-the-shelf software and hardware, a natural progression for insurgents who have been building increasingly sophisticated bombs.

As we wait for our Skynet future, unmanned planes have carved out a vital role fighting low-tech insurgencies. Since the planes can simply watch a target for hours, or days, it is more likely that bombs released from them will land on the right people. This summer the new U. S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, further restricted air strikes and ordered troops to withdraw from a fight in which they were being fired on from civilian areas — better to let enemy fighters slip away than risk alienating a village, or the whole country. This push to cut civilian casualties has only increased the military's reliance on UAVs. And next door in Pakistan, the U. S. has found few other effective tools for dealing with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. CIA Director Leon Panetta says UAVs are "the only game in town." It should be said that this kind of thinking substitutes a tactic, a piece of technology, for a strategy in Pakistan. But the remote missile strikes — there have been dozens this year — have killed many of the most-wanted Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders and scores of other fighters. They kill civilians, too, which riles the Pakistanis, but the American government has deemed that a bargain: It can methodically pick off people without risking American lives or the diplomatic headaches of a ground incursion or a captured pilot being paraded on the Internet.

Not many military operations show such lopsided results: big impact at low cost, with results disproportional to the sacrifice, which fuels the insatiable hunger for UAVs and makes waging war even more abstract for everyone at home. People care less about what their government does when they are not asked to contribute. In World War II, one in ten Americans served in the military, and the war dead totaled nearly half a million. Today, fewer than one in a hundred serve in the military, and as the machines take over and that flesh-and-blood burden shrinks even more, the citizenry will disengage more and more. But for commanders, the UAVs have been an unqualified good. Gersten had been on the job for a week when a Predator crashed while landing after a training flight at Creech. He stood on the runway and looked at the busted plane and felt relief. "I prepared my whole life to write a letter to someone's mom and dad or wife or kid about the loss of an aircraft," he says, "to tell them how sorry I was about the loss of a husband or father. And when the time came, I didn't have to do it."

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