Chris Cole
As writers and analysts for one of the military’s key journals - Jane’s Intelligence Review - Ann Rogers and John Hill have respectable military credentials. Nevertheless much of the analysis in this important and engaging overview of the drone wars could easily grace the pages of Peace News.
Chapter by chapter the book investigates the key aspects of the use of armed drones, including tracing their history, the effect on military doctrine, ethical…
This book offers important insights into US covert military operations over the past decade. While US drone strikes tend to get the headlines, behind the scenes – and perhaps even more lethal – is the work of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) on which much of this book is focused.
In the first 100 pages, Scahill traces the rise of the neocon movement back to Watergate, and…
This collection of academic essays is edited by Bradley Jay Strawser, a philosophy professor at the US navy postgraduate school in California. Interviewed last year by the Guardian, Strawser was quoted as saying that, as far unmanned drones are concerned: ‘It’s all upside. There’s no downside. Both ethically and normatively, there’s a tremendous value.’
Like most collections of essays, some are better than others. In ‘Just War Theory and Remote Military Technology: A Primer…
As if the peace movement hasn’t enough on its plate already, the military-industrial complex invents a new and easier way to wage war: the unmanned drone.
For the busy activist trying to grapple with the growing development of the drone wars, what’s needed is a well-written, easy-to-read book, coming from a committed nonviolent perspective, that lays out the issues in an accessible but not simplistic way. Thankfully, long-…
The RAF reported recently that the 200th British drone strike had taken place in Afghanistan. In October, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) reported that the 300th CIA drone strike in Pakistan had just taken place, while amidst the frenzy of reporting around the death of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi , the Pentagon revealed that the US had carried out 145 drones strikes in Libya.
But statistics do not tell the whole story. Occasionally we are given glimpses into the human…
Over the summer, the inaugural “UK-France Industry Day” was held in central London. Although innocent sounding, this was the first meeting between the UK and French military industry following the signing of a new “defence” treaty last November. A key element of this new military co-operation between France and the UK is the proposed development of a new combat drone. While it is still at the preliminary stage, BAE Systems’ decision to tie up with French firm Dassault to jointly offer the “…
Drones may be “the perfect weapons for a war weary nation on a tight budget” as one journalist wrote recently, but reported civilian casualties from drone strikes continue to rise. For the first time the British ministry of defence (MoD) has admitted that one of its drone strikes killed Afghan civilians in March 2011. The deaths of the unnamed Afghans was revealed by an anonymous correspondent from the UK’s permanent joint headquarters (PJHQ) at RAF Northwood in reply to one of my Freedom of…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, are aircraft either controlled by “pilots” from the ground or, increasingly, autonomously following a pre-programmed mission. While there are dozens of different types of drones, they basically fall into two categories: those that are used for reconnaissance and surveillance purposes; and those that are armed with missiles and bombs.
The use of drones has grown quickly in recent years because unlike piloted aircraft they can…
As we saw in the last issue, drones are the hot new weapons of the 21st century. While drones have been around for decades, mostly as small, short-range and unreliable surveillance planes, a convergence of technological factors in the last decade have taken them to the forefront of the arms race.
With the rapid emergence of sophisticated drones in the last few years, Britain was caught flat-footed without a capable domestic drone system. The response was two-fold. Firstly,…
Over the past month Libya has been added to the list of countries subjected to drone strikes by US and British forces, joining Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Iraq. Unfortunately, the list of countries facing these kind of remote attacks is only likely to grow as US military procurement plans, released this month, show that the Pentagon is planning to double its arsenal of large military drones over the next decade.
In Pakistan, anger at the continuing CIA drone strikes continues to…
On 13 May, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced it is forming a second RAF drones squadron to be based at RAF Waddington, Lincs. RAF pilots will then control the UK’s armed Reaper drones that fly in Afghanistan from Waddington rather than the Creech US air force (USAF) base in Nevada. Defence secretary, Liam Fox noted that this followed the doubling of the UK’s Reaper capability to ten aircraft, an increased investment of £135m in drone warfare.
A recent article by two senior MoD…
At the end of March, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) published a 100-page document to “inform and prompt wider debate” on the use of military unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), commonly known as drones. The UK Approach to Unmanned Aircraft Systems examines technological and scientific issues related to current and future use of armed and unarmed drones and also sets out, for the first time, what the MoD sees as the legal, moral and ethical issues that arise from using such systems. The document…
The basic argument of this book, originally written 18 months before 9/11, was that the “traditional” method of political control through the projection of military power, which Rogers dubbed “the control paradigm” would not work in an increasingly fragile and unpredictable world. He argued that a model of security based on a military security would simply fail as it did not address the growing socio-economic divide nor the rising environmental crisis, but merely attempted to keep a lid on…
I very much enjoyed reading this book, although its title is something of a misnomer, as it is mostly a history of war resistance and anti-war thought. Another slight irritant is the amount of pages devoted to events within the US, compared to the rest of the world. But that is more than enough criticism, for this is an excellent little book.
Starting with a review of anti-war thought within the main religions - and arguing strongly that each was fundamentally anti-violence and anti-…
Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on “extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions”, submitted a strongly-worded report to the UN human rights council on 4 June, calling for an end to CIA drone strikes.
Alston wrote: “because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield, and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audiofeed, there is a risk of developing a ‘Playstation’ mentality to killing.” He added: “A lack of disclosure…
