Tag: Targeted Killing

MoD unit seeks hunter-killer tech for UK drones

Chris Cole
CDE presentation on ISTAR requirements (click to download)

The Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) is a bit like the Ministry of Defence’s very own Dragon Den.  It bills itself as “the  first point of contact for anyone with a disruptive technology, new process or innovation that has a potential defence application”.   In other words if any boffin  / entrepeneur / small company out there thinks that have an idea or design for a new weapons system for example they get steered towards the CDE and if its good enough, they get funding.

Over the past couple of years the CDE has begun to host events to try to nudge inventors, academics and small companies to undertake research into particular technologies or areas with specific aims in mind.   Earlier this month the CDE held a day long seminar at Cardiff University entitled  ‘The Military Challenge for Science and Technology’.   The programme for the day stated the event “was split with a morning session looking, in general, at the opportunities for new science and technology to impact on military capability and an afternoon session presenting two current calls for research proposals in the areas of ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) and Sensors.”

A presentation from the morning session – giving an over view of the work is available here

The afternoon session was much more focused and of particular interest was the call for equipment and sensors that can undertake “automatic (assisted) target recognition of vehicles and people” (slide 22) and the “assisted detection and recognition of people and gestures in urban scenarios” (slide 25).  In a scenario envisaged earlier in the presentation, the companies are told to assume “High Value Target list agreed and maintained” and that the “TOI [Target of Interest] trigger is of sufficient priority to enable priority asset tracking” (slide 6). Click the above images to download the full presentation.

The individual recognition sensors that the MoD are interested in developing should be able to be mounted on mobile platforms (presumably such as drones)  need to be able to combine “face, gait and shape features”  and “identify individuals or reacquire targets from their known signature.” Bizarrely the presentation also seem to suggest  that “X-box ‘kinect’ sensors” may be useful for this work.   Video games warfare indeed!    The MoD’s deadline for responses from industry is very short –  closing date for proposals/bids to fill this need is September 27 with a demonstration event set for February 2012.

See also Nick Hopkins Guardian article ‘Updated drones to pinpoint targets sought by MoD’

The idiocy of drone strikes

Chris Cole

An unnamed military source confirmed to the Washington Post yesterday that last week’s airstrike in Somalia was carried out by a US drone. While there have been previous reports of drone strikes in Somalia, as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports, this is the first time that such a strike has been confirmed.

The drone strike was aimed at members of al-Shabab group which the US alleges is building close ties with al-Qaeda.  A ‘senior US military official’ told the Post that “they have become somewhat emboldened of late, and, as a result, we have become more focused on inhibiting their activities.”

‘Inhibiting the activities of groups which have become emboldened’ is a fine euphemism for a drone strike – and one that we may hear more often due to the new counter terrorism strategy that was revealed by the White House this week.

Unveiling the new strategy, John Brennan, counter terrorism advisor to President Obama, stated (while heroically keeping a straight face) that “Al Qaeda seeks to bleed us financially by drawing us into long, costly wars that also inflame anti-American sentiment.”   Cleverly avoiding this trick (!) the US will instead, as the LA Times put it:

 “pursue a war in the shadows, one relying heavily on missile strikes from unmanned aerial drones, raids by elite special operations troops, and training of local forces to pursue terrorists.” 

When challenged about whether targeted killing was appropriate, Brennan, a former CIA officer went on to argue that in the past year, “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”  However, as even the LA Times itself pointed out, it was just last month that two US servicemen were mistakenly killed by a US drone strike. Tactfully the LA Times suggested that Mr Brennan must mean drone strikes in Pakistan.  However even if Brenan’s claim is limited to drone strikes in Pakistan, it is extremely difficult to square with the myriad of civilian casualty reports from there.

The Pakistani lawyer, Mirza Shahzad Akbar, who is suing the CIA on behalf of civilian victims of drone strikes, was refused entry into the US this month to take part in a human rights conference at Colombia Law School.

Mr Akbar wrote in the Guardian this week that

“If seeking justice through the law – instead of violence – is the reason for banning my travel, then mine is another story of how government measures in the name of “national security” have gone too far…  Why would the US government want to prevent me from discussing these cases at Columbia law school? Perhaps, it is because our legal challenge disrupts the narrative of “precision strikes” against “high-value targets” as an unqualified success against terrorism, at minimal cost to civilian life.”

Trying to prevent angry Pakistanis from using lawful means to pursue claims against the CIA for drone strikes instead of turning to violence seems to be purely idiotic.  Clive Stafford Smith, renown lawyer and founder of Reprieve, the organisations supporting Mr Akbar and other layers in Pakistan, took this theme up  in a short interview with Newsweek  when asked for his opinion on US drone strikes:

“Drones are idiotic. When you fire a drone, the odds are you’re wrong when you identify someone as a terrorist. Our experience in Guantanamo is that the Americans get it wrong more than two thirds of the time. The second thing the Americans have to do when they fire a drone is to identify where [the target is in real time]. The chances of getting that right are slim to none. The third thing they’ve got to get right is hit the right place. When you add these things together, the odds that they’re going to hit the right person are very small. The odds that they’re going to kill innocent people, really annoy people in Pakistan, and provoke people to hate them are very, very high. So not only is it immoral, it’s very stupid.”

Unfortunately, pointing out the stupidity of a particular policy to the military never seems to be enough.  Thankfully more and more people are beginning to take action to stop the idiocy of drone strikes.

Drones, targeted killing and international law

Chris Cole

I’ve spent the past few days in Berlin at a conference organised by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and Amnesty International looking at how, ten years after 9/11, counter terrorism is impacting on everyday life around the globe.

One of the key strands of the event focused on the growing use of drones for targeted killing and I presented a short paper on Britain’s use of armed drones in Afghanistan.  Many of the participants told me that they had not appreciated how involved the UK had become in the ‘drone wars’.

I really appreciated the opportunity to discuss in formal and informal ways various aspects of the issue with legal experts and scholars from both Europe and the United States.  A good number of contacts were made which will no doubt give rise to future work.

(L-R) Wolfgang Neskovic (German MP), Ben Wizner (ACLU), Ben Hayes (Statewatch), Sarah Knuckey (NYU Law School), Chris Rogers (OSI)

On the main day of the conference itself a panel of four excellent speakers addressed the issue of drones and targeted killing.   An audio recording of their presentations together with questions and responses is available here.  For anyone interested in this issue I would highly recommend giving it a listen.

Thanks to Gavin Sullivan and everyone at ECCHR for the invite.

Focus on drones and targeted killing at forthcoming human rights conference

Chris Cole

The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and Amnesty International are hosting a conference entitled TEN YEARS AFTER 9/11  in Berlin on June 29 to map how the ‘war on terror’ is shaping new areas of our everyday lives and identify the challenges ahead for those fighting for human rights and social justice across the security field.

While the whole event, looks interesting, one particular panel at the conference, will explore the issue of drones and targeted killing with an excellent line up of contributors and they will also be posting articles relevant to the issue on the conference website.

The organisers will also be audio streaming the conference live to allow all those interested in these issues to join the discussion, regardless of where they are.  They will also be gathering questions from online listeners, who can submit questions or comments either via email or as a comment post on their website.

Doubling the Drones

Chris Cole

The rise of the drone seems to know no bounds.  Just months after David Cameron’s pledge to double the UK’s Reaper drone fleet, the latest US military aircraft procurement plan shows that the Pentagon is also planning to double number of large US military drones over the next decade.

According to the document “the number of platforms in this category — RQ-4 Global Hawk-class, MQ-9 Reaper, and MQ-1 Predator-class unmanned aircraft systems — will grow from approximately 340 in FY 2012 to approximately 650 in FY 2021.”  Danger Room reports that

 “the U.S. aerospace industry is scrambling to meet the Pentagon’s huge appetite for unmanned planes.  In the last two years, no fewer than three new killer drones have begun flight testing. Boeing’s X-45C , Northrop’s X-47B and General Atomics’ Avenger are all vying for new Air Force and Navy contracts. Northrop and Boeing also recently unveiled new, high-flying, long-endurance spy ‘bots”.

It’s not only the major military corporation working on drones.  Many smaller companies are also working to develop small, weaponised drones such as the Arcturus T-20 UAV.  And, of course, it is not only the US and UK developing new drones with China recently testing a new unmanned helicopter, the V750.

Meanwhile drone strikes continue in Pakistan.  A drone strike on a compound on Friday 3rd June killed nine people allegedly including  Ilyas Kashmiri, a key al Qaeda operative in Pakistan.  However Kasmiri was previously announced to have been killed in a US drone strike in 2009 and the Long War Journal has raised serious doubts about the announcement of his death this time.  On Monday 6th June three separate drone strikes in North Waziristan in one day killed between 19 and 24 people.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported this week that “fissures have opened within the Obama administration over the drone program targeting militants in Pakistan.”   However it seems that while “a slowdown in drone strikes was debated  [at] a meeting on Thursday…. CIA Director Leon Panetta made the case for maintaining the current program.”   The WSJ report continues that the result of the meeting was “a decision to continue the program as is for now.”   Hardly, a fissure then.

An excellent Channel Four Dispatches documentary this week looked at the targeted killing programme in Afghanistan and Pakistan being undertaken by the US military using special forces and drones.  It can be viewed here:  America’s Secret Killers