War by remote control, how drones changed modern warfare

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When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently spoke to the Senate Armed Services Committee, he talked about the massive amounts of money the US military wants to dedicate to its drone program. You're looking at fifty four billion dollars in the FY twenty seven budget dedicated to drone dominance.

Drone dominance isn't just a buzzword. It's the Defense Department initiative to scale up its drone program, and the money being requested has been called, quote, the largest single commitment to autonomous warfare in history. In other words, drone AI. Drones have reshaped warfare and given all kinds of countries a powerful weapon. President Trump attended the dignified transfer of the remains of the first Americans killed in the war.

On the day after the US and Israel launched war against Iran, an Iranian drone made it past air defenses in Kuwait. striking a US command center at a civilian port. Six army reservists killed by an Iranian drone strike. Kuwait. They were the first US casualties in the war. Since then. Thousands of drone strikes have been launched throughout the Middle East. And it's catching the US off guard. The Pentagon has begun a huge push to buy hundreds of thousands of small attack drones.

They were once the domain of major militaries, but they are now spreading rapidly. They are cheap, efficient, and easy to dispatch. now the fastest growing sector in the Ukrainian economy. Russia, which was already using AI to automate how its drones pick targets, now has begun experimenting with fully autonomous systems.

Even in the war between Ukraine and Russia, drones have allowed a much smaller, less powerful country to defend against a superior one. Although most of the hundreds of thousands of drone strikes have come from Russia. In some places, a nightly occurrence, Ukraine has been able to strike back with accuracy and increased cadence. True. drones are responsible for about three quarters of that war's casualties. Drones are also being used in civil wars in Myanmar and Sudan.

Yeah. This year there's been a surge in attacks. And while many drones never reach their destinations, intercepted by intricate defense systems, those that do can demolish anything from a single soldier to entire bridges and beyond. And the ability to be more precise than, say, carpet bombing, plays into a larger narrative that many politicians on all sides sell to us. That somehow technology can make war less ugly, less costly, and more distant. This is what war historian James Rogers calls.

War by remote control. And that remoteness isn't just in the technology, but it's also in our minds as well, because no one's going to write a letter to the family of a of a drone if it gets shot down. It is a robot in the sky. That is the point. It has zero risk of taking a drone out to American military lives. Now, of course, it has lots of risks to civilians within that theater of conflict, but it means that you have that public disconnect and that democratic disconnect.

to the conflict of which you're involved in and what you're waging. As more and more countries embrace this war by remote control, we have to confront some difficult questions. What is the cost of distance? How does it change the way we as a society think about killing? And what happens when precision attacks go wrong? So on this episode of Through Line from NPR, we're exploring the past, present, and future of drone warfare. Because one thing is clear, this is just the beginning.

This is... Corey in Corvallis, Oregon, and you're listening to Through Line from NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get wise. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE dot com. Ts and Cs apply. Hey, it's Latif from Radio Lab. With each episode.

You think, how did I live this long and not know that? Radio Lab. Adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen wherever you get podcasts. Hey, run here. We want to try something new on the show, and we need your help. Have you ever had a question about something in the news or wondered why something is the way it is? Anything from big geopolitical things like how Russia's Vladimir Putin came to power,

to everyday quirky things like how did astrology make such a strong comeback? We already have an episode about both, by the way, if you really are wondering. We would love to hear your questions. Send them to us at thruline at npr dot org or call eight seven two five eight eight eight eight zero five and leave a voicemail. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. And thanks.

Part 1. Destroy everything. On a cold, cloudy day in December of nineteen oh three on the outer banks of North Carolina. Two brothers made history. The world's first airplane, created by Orville Wright and his brother Wilbur, is about to take flight. Here at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, this primitive kite made aviation history.

Wilbur Wright had tried and failed to pilot their newly invented flying machine just a few days earlier. So on this next attempt, his brother Orville geared up, braved the wind, and climbed into the flyer. With this first catapulted takeoff, man's age-old dream of flight became a reality. The invention of aviation would change the world forever. It would change travel, it would change trade, and it would change war. Thank you. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war.

Four. into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts. For democracy. On April 2nd, 1917, less than 15 years after the Wright brothers took that first flight, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to formally enter World War I. peoples I shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself. Fast free.

And so you have hundreds of thousands of American troops who are deployed onto the bloodiest battlefields of Europe, into those entrenched, muddy, bloody places. The trenches were cold and damp and dirty, full of rats and lice, infections and disease. These dugouts were places full of nightmares. Not dreams. and you have a vast amount of casualties. Over 100,000 US soldiers died and almost twice as many were wounded.

And as this generation comes home, this lost generation, as it's often called, you have mass public outcry, you have protests in the streets. Why is it that America is sending its troops, its best, its brightest, its youngest, its sons, over abroad to like these foreign wars. There wasn't the public appetite for this. This is James Rogers. He's a war historian who's written several books about drones, including Drones What Everyone Needs to Know. And

There's a a branch of the military, a fledgling branch of the military, that starts to listen to this public outcry. And this is the US Army Air Service. The American people made it clear that they weren't gonna stand for so many casualties, and so the military responded, not by deciding to fight fewer wars, but how to fight wars with fewer deaths. a novel pursuit of how to fight ethically. And this brand new branch of the military, the air service, Well, planes could help.

They're like, well If we don't want to send our troops on the ground into these trench warfare battlefields, then maybe air power can provide us with an alternative. And they come up with this idea of instead of going through the enemy, you go over the enemy. Over the enemy with planes and bomb specific targets that were crucial to the enemy war effort. Maybe weapons depots or industrial sites.

And actually they ended up using the term precision bombing doctrine. So this term precision goes all the way back to nineteen seventeen. And here's how it worked. You fly over the enemy, you bomb their ammunition factories. You bomb their oil refineries, you bomb the places they make tanks, you bomb the places they make rubber, you bomb these things that weaken their ability to fight on the battlefield. And that means that when you eventually do send troops in to face the enemy,

you won't have that entrenched bloody muddy warfare where it's a stalemate for years on end because the enemy has nothing to fight with. So you move through and you move through swiftly to victory because air power allowed you to do it. Because World War I sparked a public outcry over the hundreds of thousands of American dead and wounded, the pressure was on politicians to figure out a way to avoid this from ever happening again. And they saw precision bombing. As the golden ticket.

And so quite a lot of money then goes into developing technologies that will allow this to happen. Money that funded the first iteration of the drone. although it was perhaps more accurately known as the aerial torpedo, and this was the Kettering bug. The kettering bug. And this was invented by somebody called Charles Kettering, who was responsible for inventing all sorts of strange things, and it was a partner project with someone called H.H. Arnold.

H.H. Arnold, one of the first ever military personnel who was taught to fly by some of the only people who knew how to fly. The Wright brothers Like this is how early we're talking here. This is fledgling air power. I mean the planes have only just taken off the ground, and now we're already thinking how to use them and how to bomb, and how to bomb in more of an ethical way, I suppose, if if you can call it that.

So 1917 is when Charles Kettering developed this first drone prototype, or aerial torpedo, and, as many male inventors like to do, named it after himself the Kettering Bug. And what made this plane so drone like? There was no pilot? It was about the size of a a a normal single engine plane. It was set on rails. It had a asperry gyroscope to keep it stable in the air. It had a motor.

And so it would take off in the air off these rails, it would fly straight as the crow flies, and then once that motor had spun its certain amount of revolutions, it would shut up. Because technically then that would be when it was above the target. At that moment the wings would fold up against the body of the plane. And then it would swoop down on its enemy, on its prey, like an eagle. And it was automated. Right? Yeah. Wow. It was as high tech as you could get in nineteen seventeen, eighteen.

Which turns out wasn't high tech enough. The bug had some bugs. It was a complete flop. In reality it was worse than useless. It would flail around in the sky and it would even sometimes turn back on its on its own people who were testing it. So it was really unpredictable. That almost doesn't matter in what we're talking about, because what matters is the intention behind it. And the intention there was to separate the human from the practice of killing.

To separate American troops from having to be sacrificed in war and to be put at risk in the By deploying robots, remote systems, systems that could be sent off to go and kill the enemy without putting American service personnel at risk. And that was the birth of this idea. The kettering bug was revolutionary, but at the same time, a failure. The idea of a plane without a pilot that shed its wings and turned into a torpedo that could hit a precise target. We're learned.

They learned that they had to use piloted aircraft to do the bombing because you needed the pilot to guide the aircraft. That in order to be precise, you still needed a human being to make the call. You needed a person behind the robot. And what they did actually was they invented uh a thing called the Norden bomb site. And this was by a uh an engineer called Carl Norden.

Right in time for the US to use this technology in World War II. The Norden bomb site wasn't a But was basically an early analog computer that helped the pilot drop bombs with more precision. You could put in You could uh altitude, the velocity, and it would compute when you should drop the bomb. And so when you were over the enemy cities and you had your target, it would tell the bombardier when they needed to release the bomb.

Strategically, this was important. In the past, hitting targets was so unlikely that you had to fly tons of planes overhead over and over and over again and drop bombs over and over and over again in order to finally hit the intended target. This obviously wastes free. Manpower, weapons, and causes massive civilian deaths. The Norden bombsite allowed you to, for the first time, somewhat successfully hit your target with just a few, or sometimes even just one, plane.

So there's a strategic element to it there, but there's also that moral element. I remember reading through the archives, and it's said explicitly to avoid the enemy populace and their livelihoods. So you can stick to striking a weapons factory without obliterating the neighborhood next door. Yeah. Now of course there are blurred grey lines there, but that's the ambition. of American bombing strategy through the early years of the war.

This is in stark contrast to the strategy of their allies in Britain. and enemies in Germany. Their air strategies were almost the opposite, to bomb the morale of the enemy. bomb their cities into submission. Carpet bombing you could call it. Destroy everything in order to destroy something. If Yeah. include especially civilians, because if you bomb the morale of a population then you will Force those civilians to go to their political leaders and say, stop this war. That's the theory behind it.

I mean you think of a Hamburg, you think of a Dresden, the firebombing of these places, you think of the destruction of London during the Blitz, of Coventry, of Hull, of Grimsby, of Plymouth. I mean they are destroying each city systematically one by one by one in order to destroy the will of those publics. The face of London shame. Historic landmarks disappear. Night after night, London. was left a sea of fire.

Britain's Winston Churchill tried to convince the US to follow suit, telling them they needed to go big to win the war. In order to destroy something you have to destroy everything. And by the end of the war. The US gave in. And so you have this twist, this turn towards area bombing, carpet bombing, which you see in places like Tokyo. Super forts on Saipan. A task force of B-29s. Their noses point towards Japan. Their shining bellies are filled with bombs for Tokyo.

A hundred and eighty thousand dead in one night with a firebombing of Tokyo. The Nakajima aircraft plant is the main target. The irony of this shift in strategy is that when the US decided that it needed to destroy something in order to destroy everything, like the firebombing of Tokyo. to create maximum destruction. They use the technology invented to do the exact opposite, the Norton bomb site.

And so this precision technology with its moral and ethical intentions behind it was turned to unintended extremes. You know, when it comes down to the the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, What what bomb site are they using to make sure that the bombs are dropped in the place they want to? Well it's it's it's the Northern bomb site. The bomb was finally released. Exactly at the designated hour. and the explosion occurred as a fire.

It's madness. Why are you thinking about precision when it comes to nuclear bombs? Well, for maximum impact. To make sure that these expensive weapons are successful in their first test on an enemy. The original intentions behind the creation of precision bombing was to save lives. But people discovered as precisely as these weapons could save lives, they could take them. Yeah, exactly. I mean some of the most heinous things in the history of humanity have happened with the best intention.

When we come back, precision gets an upgrade. Hi, this is Margaret from San Francisco and you're listening to Through Line from NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get wise. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and Cs apply. Hey, it's Latte from Radio Lab. Our goal with each episode

Think, how did I live this long and not know that? Radio Lab. Adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen wherever you get podcasts.

Part two White Flags. After World War II, the United States military continued to experiment with both precision bombing and with pilotless spy planes. In every war, they tried something new, but it wouldn't be until the Vietnam War that they started to find some success with the drone.

When you think of Vietnam you don't really think of precision, do you? There's not much precision in napalm, and there's not much precision in these vast conscripted wars in which thousands of US troops are sent into this battle. I can't say that I'm scared to death, but I'm scared. I mean, after a while y you know it's gonna come. You can't do nothing about it. And you just look to God.

Yeah. There's one side where precision missiles continue to be developed, and there's another side where drones continue to be tentatively developed. Some of the most remarkable contributions to aerial reconnaissance during the Vietnam War came from an unusual assortment of remotely piloted vehicles. And those remotely piloted vehicles, those drones flying high above the thick rainforest canopies of Vietnam became known as The lightning book.

The Ryan Fireby drone, otherwise known as the Lightning Bug. The lightning bug was a small aircraft, so small that it would be attached to a much larger one, and once that was in the sky, the lightning bug would be deployed and split off from it. They would use the to take pictures over enemy territory. And then the drones would swing back round and they would crash land almost. At a designated location in time, the drone shut off its engine and deployed a parachute system.

And then they would be picked up by intelligence corps, and then that film would be taken back to US bases and it'd be processed and pieced together, and then you would try and create a picture of where the They were also used quite interestingly as as almost wingmen to crew aircraft, to bombers going in. Uh they would fly off the wing of them to draw enemy fire. They would be like a deflective shield for aircraft. It would look like more aircraft were coming in.

And so it would hopefully protect the central aircraft going in and fulfilling its mission. They were disposable in the air in order to try and reduce the risk to American pilots' lives. The US military believed the lightning bug drones saved American lives, and so they called it a success. The only problem was, initially, the lightning bugs had a short lifetime.

They weren't particularly reliable. They would uh they would crash an awful lot and you would just y lose drones and that's why Um, you know, well over a thousand of them were used during during Vietnam because they just churned them out almost disposably to try and use them for those intelligence and surveillance gathering um uh uses. While more than 200 drones were ultimately shot down, their use prevented the loss of at least that many reconnaissance crews, and undoubtedly many more.

Just got one. Block waste too slow. No! No! No! No! No! During the Vietnam War, thousands of American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese people died. And the time has come for America to hear the truth. about this tragic war. It was a bloody and brutal conflict fought by a large number of drafted soldiers, meaning they had no choice but to go fight.

And this meant many, many Americans had a loved one in Vietnam. The longer the war went on, the more people in the United States took to the streets to protest against. Some 175,000 people from all walks of life with differing ideologies and purposes marched from the White House to the Capitol. Once again, like in World War I, there was public pressure on politicians and the military to end the war and bring American soldiers home.

And the impacts of this protest movement would be felt in American politics for decades to come. The whole world is watching! Five months ago, Saddam Hussein started this cruel war against Kuwait. Tonight, the battle has been joined. In nineteen ninety one, the United States went to war against Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. For the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, there was no draft. The US military was all volunteer.

And from the beginning, the American military was focused on keeping their own casualties as low as possible. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the tiny country that is a primary source of oil for much of the Western world. Saddam Hussein chooses to invade Kuwait. Because he wants to have the financial gain of the vast oil reserves in Kuwait. And so he goes into Kuwait thinking that America not send in vast amounts of troops onto the ground

Stop his military. They won't repeat the mistakes of the He says that America is not the type of country that can take different casualties in one battle. In some ways, Saddam Hussein was right. What he does not realise, however, is that there is no Vast advancements in technologies in the US, vast advancements in microcomputing, in the ability to achieve precision strike in aircraft. everything that you need to win a new super fast high-tech war.

By nineteen ninety one, the US military had an assortment of new technologies to conduct precision war. laser guided missiles, stealth aircraft, and better drones. Pilotless planes could fly higher, go farther than they ever had before, and had advanced computer software on board. And they were ready to use them. It's at this point.

So it is able to then fly back and to tell um US targeters where Saddam's troops are and then they can send in the ever more advanced And they can send in um the precision bombing and the first time. US Air Force aircraft in to go and bomb those troops. And the US dropped a lot of bombs, over 88,000 tons on Iraqi military and civilian infrastructure, killing thousands of people.

It's here that you start to hear stories coming out that when Saddam's troops saw drones flying high above them, they knew that it meant certain death and certain destruction was coming. And so they try to surrender to the drones in the sky. The live video feedback showed five Iraqi soldiers waving white flags as they surrendered to the drone. It's the first time in the history of warfare. that you had a human try and surrender to a robot.

During Operation Desert Storm, precision weapons seemed to do their job. The war only lasted about a month. There was no massive protest movement like Vietnam. And the U.S. military lost 143 soldiers, a relatively low number. And then something happened that would totally change the game. you start to see this coupling of the lethal targeting and the utility of the drone itself. And this continues. Now drones became armed with missiles.

The angel in the sky watching out for soldiers had now become the angel of death. The Air Force's Predator System, its unmanned reconnaissance and strike plane, hunts enemies covertly from the sky, attacks on commands received by And remember. Geographic. Epic targeting. And so you have the merging of the drone and the precision missile into one integrated system.

But It's good enough if we see a truck or an H V T a high value target that we need to prosecute immediately that we would be able to A lot. It's a precision asset and it's very very accurate. With this new weapon. Some in the US military believed they'd fulfilled the promise of the Kettering bug, the Norden bombsite, and the Lightning Bug. It was the culmination of generations of research and development, and it suddenly gave the U.S. High Command a godlike ability.

ability to stalk enemies and kill them at a moment's notice. You do definitely get the sense that you are sort of a guardian angel. You're like an eye in the sky for When we come back, the drone wars begin. Hi, my name is Lindsay. I'm calling from unceded Duwamish territory and you are listening to Throughline from NCR. I love the show. I've been binging all of the episodes. Probably two weeks now.

The ones that I think I'm not gonna be that interested in are always the ones that I end up being the most interested in and learning the most strum. So thank you for all the work and labor and knowledge that you put out there. Bye. This message comes from WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get wise. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE dot com. Ts and Cs apply.

Hey, it's Latif from Radio Lab. Think, how did I live this long and not know that? Radio Lab. Adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen wherever you get podcasts. Part three. DEATH From above. For the angel of death spread his wings on the blast and breathed in the face of the foe as he passed. And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, and their hearts but once heaved and forever grew still. Lord. Byron.

Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. On October 7th, 2001, a plane glided in the sky over the city of Kandahar, Afghanistan. It looked down on Earth like a giant hawk circling its prey. But there was nothing alive inside it. No pilot. This was an MQ-1A predator drone controlled by operators thousands of miles away. It was a Seven foot.

carrying hellfire missiles, and it was looking for a target. It flew so high that it would have been virtually undetectable by anyone looking up at the night sky. Almost one month had passed since the US was attacked on nine eleven by Al Qaeda, a terrorist group based in Afghanistan. The Taliban, the rulers of Afghanistan, were harboring Al Qaeda's leader Osama bin Laden, and it appeared they were in the crosshairs of the US military.

But on the ground on October 7th, the stillness of a Kandahar fall night would tell you nothing of the things that were to come. Yet. The target for the Predator drone was a man named Mullah Omar. He was the leader of the Taliban government. The US military thought maybe if we take him out, the Taliban will fall apart. This was it.

This is what the drone was built to do. Use precision bombing to take out the leader of the enemy and use limited numbers of special forces fighters and their allies to avoid a costly full-scale invasion, saving thousands of American lives. Mullah Omar sat in a building with no idea that a predator drone was above him, watching and waiting for the command to fire.

US military and intelligence staff were keeping tabs on him through a satellite feed from thousands of miles away. But what they were seeing wasn't some crystal clear image of the ground. Nothing even close to that. Back at that point it's like viewing the world through a kind of grainy straw, I guess. You're looking through a straw at a small part of that country, um, focused in on what these people are doing, but you you can't really tell. You're kind of just filling in the gaps.

Even with this fill in the gaps type of information, the US military personnel still had to make a call. They had to decide where the drone should shoot its missile. They take the strike. But they end up blowing up a truck near to his compound, sends loads of smoke into the sky, loads of dust into the sky, and Mullah Omar escapes. Just think of the implications for that.

What different war would we have had if a drone had taken out the head of the Taliban on the first day of the war in Afghanistan?

Amen. The Predator drone strike missed its mark. Mullah Omar would live, and the US ground invasion of Afghanistan would follow. But this wasn't seen as just a failure. No, in fact the drone program continued. So this tells us that many of the military personnel in that room, the officers, drone operators, and intelligence experts, must have on some level realized that they just witnessed the beginning of a new era in warfare.

You know, I I I've spoken to a few of those who were in the room on that first strike. And they they were in the room thousands of kilometres away, watching the video feed. This is that first case of remote warfare, and you can't escape feeling that that is a fundamental revolutionary change in war. It's that achievement of that long and US Air Force ambition. Back to US air power thinkers all the way back in 1917.

After that first failed strike against Mullah Omar, the Predator Drone, the great technological breakthrough, would be used over and over by the same Нюс милітариан до президент Буш. We can talk to about fifty plus drone strikes during the Bush administration. There are some who feel like that uh if they Attack us. that we may decide to leave prematurely. They don't understand what they're talking about if that's the case. Let me finish.

Um there are some who uh feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on. In 2003, the U.S. invaded and occupied another country, Edoc. And as that war intensified, drones were used there too. And they continue to get more advanced. So the technology um improves, of course. That is the nature of humanity. We improve technologies over time. We are ever more high-tech.

Drone communications got more reliable. The aircraft could fly longer and faster. And with every year, their impact on the war increased. Here's the key thing about a drone, I guess. If you have a piloted aircraft within a conflict, you have to send it from a base to fly over it. It can take maybe ten minutes to get there. It then has to fly, hit the target, turn around and go back. And it cannot linger.

Because the longer it lingers, the more it is at risk of being shot down. With a drone, it flies high in the sky, almost unseen, and it just loiters. It can sit there above troops, above a key area where you know the Taliban are operating, and it can just wait until a target presents itself. Right. Like a eagle hovering over its prey, looking for a field mouse on the ground, and then when it sees it, it can swoop in and it can strike.

kill in war and you believe that that war is something that increases your national security, then you want to be effective as possible. And so the drone is an effective way to kill in that regard. We've lost thousands of American lives, spent nearly a trillion dollars. Alienated allies, neglected emerging threats, all in the cause of fighting a war for well over five years in a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks.

When President Obama campaigned for office in 2008, the U.S. was embroiled in two wars, both very messy, that had caused the death of thousands of U.S. soldiers and thousands more Afghan and Iraqi civilians. Public support invariably faded. As the body bags started to come home, as the improvised explosive device, the IED started to make it so that you couldn't have troops on the The infantry personnel couldn't trust the ground they were walking on.

Well it's at it was at this point that President Obama was uh as elected, of course. He made a promise to the American people. He would withdraw them from the bad war in Iraq, and he would win the good war in Afghanistan. But over time he would risk to American military lives, and he would make it so there would be less of a human footprint. An American military at the appetite for the war on terror.

As a candidate for president, I pledge to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end for the sake of our national security and to strengthen American leadership around the world. But that leaves you with a dilemma, right? How do you continue to take on the global threats of terrorism, but without deploying Your troops on the ground. Well, here is where the drone is a panacea, because it allows you to deploy force thousands of miles away.

And this of course in turn reduces the risk of The threat to life to American military personnel. You want to fill that gap. for Obama, who becomes known as the drone president, is is filled by the by the drone. And under the Obama administration, there is a real change in strategy. It starts off with what we call signature strike. Now signature strikes are based upon a predefined terrorist signature.

And that signature can be based upon the gender of a target, and it could be based on how you define a terrorist. So for example, they could be males of fighting age in regions where the Taliban are known to operate. What do you think the fighting age is? Oh man. Fifteen? Sixteen? At fourteen years old and above, is what we're talking about him. And again it's hard to tell. through the grainy image of a drone. And that it's argued leads to a confirmation by

You think you're seeing a terrorist conducting terrorist activity, and so you take the strike because it fills out all of your tick boxes. And so you've had amounts of mistakes that happen as a result of signature strikes. The aftermath of a drone strike in Pakistan's South Waziristan region in 2008. Amongst the victims were numerous civilians. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray. And for a short period of time, the mental tension and fear eases.

In Yemen's rugged and barren countryside, people live in constant fear. Fear of what they call the killer planes or drones. Eighteen male laborers, including at least one young boy, 14-year-old Saleh Khan, were killed by a US drone. As the drone war spread around the world to Somalia and the To those places that we don't really talk about because we don't know so much about the drone wars there, but you do have weddings being hit with hellfire missiles from drones, or funerals being hit.

It was an astonishing bulletin today. Another public enemy taken out by the United States. The Al-Qaeda leader called the most dangerous man in the world, the American citizen Anwar Al-Alaki. With the of approval. had been killed in drone strikes. said only one of them was specifically targeted. Al Qaeda leader in Yemen. If you're killing a US citizen, that's gonna come straight from the Commander in Chief.

deployed drones more aggressively than President Bush. For that, the president offered no apology.

When was the last time in the history of a strikes on the battlefield. The decisions making now will define the type of nation and world that we leave to our children. The Obama administration says it has killed more than 2,300 enemy combatants by counter-terror strike. But it acknowledged the harsh reality that the once secret drone program may have been involved in anywhere from 64 to 116 civilian deaths since 2009 in areas outside active war zones.

Despite all of the controversies surrounding the use of predator drones, at a White House press center, President Obama still found a way to make a joke about it. Jonas brothers are here. They're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But uh boys don't get any ideas. I have two words for you. You will never see it coming. You think I'm joking? Some estimate that during the Obama administration there were almost nineteen hundred drone strikes.

The total number of civilian casualties during the Obama-drone wars has never been definitively recorded, mostly because we're depending on news reports and NGOs. The US government is resistant to providing that information, and often count anyone who is of fighting age as a combatant, whether or not they were carrying a weapon. The range for civilian casualties.

US drone strikes are in the hundreds to a couple thousand. In a leaked Defense Department document provided by a whistleblower to the news outlet, the Intercept, it was reported that between twenty twelve and twenty thirteen. US Special Operations airstrikes killed more than two hundred people. Those only three. were the intended targets. Well thank you very much and good afternoon.

As President, my highest and most solemn duty is the defense of our nation and its citizens. Last night at my direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless precision strike that killed the number one terrorist anywhere in the world. Qasem Soleimani You look back to January twenty twenty and you look back to President Trump's drone strike.

on General Qasim Soleimani, who is a state representative of the Iranian state, one of the most high profile and high-ranking military commanders of the Iranian state. That drone killed a state representative in a third party country in Iraq without that country's permission. So the drone violated the sovereignty of Iraq.

Khasim Soleimani was an Iranian military commander who'd been directing lethal attacks in Iraq for years. The US had long blamed him for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and allies there. The precedent that is set here is that it is okay to kill representatives of a nation state by lethal drone strike in nations of a third party without their approval. What does that mean for the future of drone warfare?

As a lot of hostile nations around the world are getting armed drones, will they start using them against representatives of the West when they're in in Yemen or in Iraq? The US founds the United Nations along with the victorious allies after the Second World War. It's meant to be an upholder of international law. If we get to a point where the US is undermining the laws that it created itself, then how do we expect anyone else to abide by those international laws when it comes to drones?

Those international laws say that drones must only be used to target combatants and military objectives, and that all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid or minimize civilian harm. But as more and more countries are turning to drones for their warfare, civilian deaths continue to be an inevitable consequence.

When we look to future war, we need to see that any future conflict is going to have a drone element. And so if you want to know what your country is doing, is doing in your name, then you need to understand drone warfare. That's it for this week's show. Through Line was created by me and Ramtin Ada Blue. And Lawrence. Lane Kaplan Levinson. Perfect. Dirt Ebez. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda I read. Noguchi Fact checking for the separate.

Casey Herman and Farai Masika for their voiceover work. Also, thanks to Anya Grunman, Tamar Charney, Greg Myri, Adriana Tapia, and Miranda Matzeriegos. Thanks also to Johannes Dirgi, Liana Sarga. Julia Redpath, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Gilly Moon. Music for this episode was composed by Romteen and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvie Show Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.

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