Killer Drones Take The Place Of War

Involvement in ongoing protests at Hancock Air Base near Syracuse, where Reaper drones are remotely "piloted" over Afghanistan and Pakistan, forces one to clarify more precisely the objection to these weaponized ("killer") drones. A new children's book on Predator Drones explains their significance, "The US military is always looking for ways to reduce risks for soldiers and to keep pilots safe. This is why unmanned drones are important."[1] This seems reasonable, but consider that, due to overwhelming US air power superiority, there hasn't been a US Air Force plane lost in combat in nearly 40 years,[2] and so there is negligible difference in risk between piloting a drone aircraft and flying a fighter jet. Add to this the fact that killer (Predator or Reaper) drones are used most frequently in sovereign nations - Pakistan, Yemen, Libya - with which the US is neither at war nor has any official boots on the ground. So, there are no US soldiers to keep safe in these places. It seems that neither US pilots nor soldiers are made safer by most drone deployments. And still their use has skyrocketed.

What is different about this latest weapon of war that we oppose so strenuously? True, they are remotely controlled by a risk-free videogame mentality that makes killing easy, even fun, with the trigger as far away as our very backyard here in upstate New York. But anyone who has viewed the WikiLeaks footage of young helicopter gunship pilots picking off unarmed civilians, following orders issued in real time from afar, will recognize that this is not unique to drone pilots. Many of us cry out about the horrendous "collateral damage" of drones - the devastating civilian casualties and misidentified targets and technical disasters resulting in countless (because uncounted) innocent deaths. The targeted killing of al-Qaeda leader Baitullah Mehsud, for example, took 16 missile strikes over 14 months, with well over 200 mistaken deaths.

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