Attacking Iraq, from a Nev. computer
Unmanned Predators are piloted in US
NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. -- They helped take out the broadcast tower for Saddam Hussein's propaganda machine in Baghdad. They blew up a truck after inhabitants fired on American soldiers in Fallujah. When US Special Forces raided insurgent safehouses, they were the airborne lookouts.
They are the pilots of the Air Force's 15th and 17th Expeditionary Reconnaissance squadrons, but they aren't on the battlefield: Their planes are in the Middle East, but the pilots who fly them operate from a low-slung command center in the Nevada desert, closer to the Las Vegas strip than to Baghdad.
The squadron's pilots are the nation's first remote-control warriors, launching deadly attacks in Iraq at the push of a button or click of a computer mouse. Their weapon is the Predator, a high-tech, remote-controlled airplane.
For more than three years, the Air Force fleet of at least 80 Predators has performed missions once executed by attack helicopters or ground troops: scouting battlefields, tracking the enemy, and launching quick, precise strikes. Military officials say the program has saved the lives of countless US soldiers while hitting targets that manned aircraft couldn't get close enough to reach.
''It's a very, very big development in the history of warfare," said Michael O'Hanlon, a defense specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. ''When people write the history of weapons it will be one of the most interesting evolutions, the ability to find targets in real time."
But some analysts say the Predator poses ethical dilemmas about ''sanitized warfare." Predators are cheaper and less risky to fly than a fighter jet or helicopter, whose pilots can be shot down and killed. In the process, however, they make war appear bloodless from the American side.
And some military strategists worry that the modern, remote-control approach to warfare may undercut international legal norms designed to reduce the casualties of armed conflict, such as the level of certainty required when deciding who will be targeted.
''This is a serious laws-of-war problem," said Francis Anthony Boyle, a specialist on law and armed conflict at the University of Illinois College of Law. ''One of the big questions with the drones is whether they can discriminate civilian objects from military targets. It has to be able to make such distinctions to be legal."
The Predator has been involved in at least one case of mistaken identity, in 2001 when the CIA killed an Afghan shepherd who in height and weight resembled Osama bin Laden, at least as far as the agents monitoring the computers images could see.
A year later, the CIA used a Predator to kill a carload of suspected terrorists in Yemen, raising questions about whether such assassinations should be sanctioned by law.
The CIA declined to comment on the incidents, but the Air Force, which runs most Predator missions, insisted that it has never struck an illegitimate target. Orders come directly from commanders in the Middle East and must be approved by senior officers, they said.
''We have lawyers sitting right in the commander center," said Captain John Songer, a Predator pilot for two years, adding that great pains are taken to determine, for example, if ''that guy is smuggling rugs out of a truck is smuggling weapons."
And Songer and other Predator pilots said they get an excellent view of the battlefield from their multicolored video screens. Inside the command center at Nellis, a clock on the wall ticks off Iraqi time. The sounds of combat sometimes come over the communications net: soldiers shouting, taking and returning fire.
''You feel like you are in that country," said Captain Catherine Platt, who trains the crews to operate the craft's set of sensors. ''The rest of the world is shut out."
Songer said ''the feeling of anger you get is pretty powerful" when American troops are seen or heard taking fire from insurgents. Others speak of the ''adrenaline rush" in the room when the Predator destroys an enemy target.
The Air Force has three Predator reconaissance squadrons; two are based at Nellis, and the third is a training unit headquartered about 30 miles north in Indian Springs, Nev. Many pilots are too young for the 21-and-over clubs on the Vegas strip.
Their weapon is little more than a toy airplane in the Pentagon's multibillion-dollar arsenal: Its 115-horsepower engine was built for a snowmobile. It fits in a hanger not much larger than a two-car garage. A strong gust of wind can spell its demise. Two of the drones, which cost $4.5 million each, crashed in Iraq just in the past week.
But it has performed many high-profile missions, hovering above US troops at altitudes up to 10,000 feet in some of the most dangerous areas of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Predator was launched in 1995 as an unarmed reconnaissance aircraft, delivering information from battlefields in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq's no-fly zone to commanders hundreds of miles away.
After Sept. 11, 2001, the military outfitted the Predator with a pair of 100-pound Hellfire missiles. It's first major strike killed Mohammed Atef, military chief of Al Qaeda, in Afghanistan.
Now, on patrol along Iraq's highways and dirt roads, where hundreds of US troops have been killed and wounded since the US-led invasion two years ago, the aircraft is used to watch for insurgents planting bombs.
When the insurgents are spotted, Platt said matter-of-factly: ''They become targets."
Since late 2001, the wasplike planes have logged on more than 80,000 hours in the air over Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet they have not avoided controversy: Amnesty International and other human-rights groups condemned the killing of the carload of terrorist suspects in Yemen, saying it amounted to an unlawful assassination.
To skeptics such as Boyle, the military leadership and the CIA do not yet fully appreciate what a weapon such as the Predator means for international legal norms developed before the computer age that set a high standard for determining what is a legitimate military target.
''They are looking into artificial intelligence for weapons purposes and that raises very serious problems," said Boyle, referring to what many see as the next evolution: when computers can be programmed to launch attacks on their own.
O'Hanlon agreed the US military has entered a brave new world. ''We will have to revisit this every time we go further down this road of robotics and computers," he said. ''The question is not should a human only kill a human face to face, but . . . does war become so sanitized that it becomes easier and easier to go to war?"
For the Predator crews in Nevada, however, the main challenge is simply to remember they are not playing a video game when they step out of their air-conditioned office for a
''We have to impress upon them that they are not just shooting electrons," said Major Sam Morgan, a trainer of Predator pilots. ''They're killing people."
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com. 