Drone warfare

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: Drone warfare

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. In this week’s edition, we’re looking at the technology that’s transforming warfare and raising disturbing ethical questions. Pilotless drones, which can hover for hours and attack with deadly precision, have already changed the course of conflicts in Ethiopia and Nagorno-Karabakh. And they may well play an important role if there’s a war in Ukraine. But at the same time, there’s growing debate in the United States about the number of civilian deaths caused by these weapons. My guest this week is Ulrike Franke of the European Council of (sic) Foreign Relations, who’s a specialist on drone warfare. So is armed conflict about to change and with it, international politics?

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The United States has been using drones as a crucial part of its armoury for more than a decade. Back in 2013, President Barack Obama made the case for drone warfare.

Barack Obama
Simply put, these strikes have saved lives. Moreover, America’s actions are legal. We were attacked on 9/11.

Gideon Rachman
In the Trump era, the rules surrounding drone strikes were loosened with dramatic effect.

News report
Breaking news from the Middle East, where a US drone strike killed one of Iran’s most powerful military leaders overnight. The targeted killing of Major General Qassem Soleimani inside Iraq is a dramatic escalation in the confrontation between the US and Iran.

Gideon Rachman
But more recently, another US drone strike which went tragically wrong, has been in the news. This was a Sky News report during the last days of the war in Afghanistan last summer.

News report
As a US drone destroyed a vehicle that Americans say had been carrying suicide bombers, a tragedy that darkens and complicates the withdrawal from Afghanistan even further.

Gideon Rachman
A recent New York Times investigation suggested that this was far from an isolated incident. After examining declassified documents and visiting over 100 casualty sites, the paper concluded that civilians have become the regular collateral casualties of a way of war gone badly wrong. But the United States no longer has anything like a monopoly on the use of drones in warfare. They’ve been used effectively by the Ethiopian army in its conflict with Tigrayan rebels, and the technology has become so widespread that non-state actors are also getting in on the act. These days, the appearance of a drone over a public space can cause a security alert or a panic. But as Ulrike Franke explained to me, that wasn’t always the case.

Ulrike Franke
There is a great picture. It dates back from, I think, at least 10 years ago or so. And you see Angela Merkel and the then German defence minister and a few more people sitting at a panel discussion, right? And there’s a drone coming in and kind of hovering next to them. And you see Angela Merkel kind of smiling in a rather amused way and the defence minister being not so happy about this. But what’s interesting here is that this was a drone flown by the Pirate Party at that point, and they wanted to protest the acquisition of German drones for the Bundeswher. But I keep thinking that this picture really wouldn’t happen. Today it would look very differently because if today a random rogue drone just showed up next to an event with the German chancellor, I think they would shut it down immediately, and the secret service would storm in and evacuate everyone because we now realise what a big danger this could be. So we’ve already seen quite a big change in that regard over the last few years.

Gideon Rachman
You’ve been studying drones and their possible impact on warfare for a long time. Do you think we’ve now got to the stage when we’re actually seeing drones effectively decide conflicts and really change the nature of wars that are being fought right now?

Ulrike Franke
It’s not so much that drones are changing the nature of war as some have claimed, but indeed they are now present in military operations around the world, and they are becoming really impactful, if not decisive, especially in military confrontations between smaller states. And I think that’s something that people hadn’t really been thinking about so much at the beginning. You know, everyone was focussed on countries such as the US in particular, but also Israel, using drones for targeted killings and so-called signature strikes outside of official battle spaces. But we hadn’t necessarily been thinking so much about smaller countries getting drones and using them against each others in, you know, so-called smaller wars. And I’m, of course, thinking of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia or also more recently in Ethiopia. But yeah, you can see how drones have really boosted the airborne power of smaller military actors.

Gideon Rachman
Tell us a bit more about those two conflicts. What happened in Nagorno-Karabakh and what, as far as we know, happened in Ethiopia?

Ulrike Franke
Yeah. So in Nagorno-Karabakh, we had this war, I think, 44 days between Azerbaijan and Armenia. And Azerbaijan for the last few years has been investing quite heavily in its military capabilities, including buying both drones, armed and unarmed, and what we call loitering munitions so these so-called kamikaze drones, these drones that you bring up in the air and then they loiter for a while and dive into their targets and explode with the target. Azerbaijan used these systems against Armenia and Armenian troops with quite a lot of success. And some media outlets called this the first drone war. I wouldn’t go so far because we have seen drones in conflicts before that, but it was a confrontation where these systems were quite impactful. And also importantly, Azerbaijan doesn’t build its own drones or not in any kind of meaningful way. The systems that they use, they got from Turkey and from Israel. And more recently in Ethiopia basically you have the government forces that have gotten armed drones, I think primarily from Turkey but also Chinese systems that they got through the United Arab Emirates, if I’m not mistaken. And they’ve now used those. And here, the armed drones seem to have had quite an important impact. And you know, these are conflicts far away from the western mindset. The west isn’t involved so again, it really shows how only a few years ago drones were really this military means that the west was mainly using, and now they’re all over the place and being produced by other actors and being exported to more or less globally, and any actor who wants drones and wants armed drones is pretty much able to get them and use them.

Gideon Rachman
The examples in Ethiopia and Nagorno-Karabakh involve governments using drones, but there’s also been quite a dramatic example recently of an attack on the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, which seems to be by non-state actors. So what happened there, and what conclusions can we draw?

Ulrike Franke
Yes, I mean, this actually started already quite a long time ago. I mean, Hizbollah used drones back in 2006, I think, and they got it from Iran. But now we’re indeed seeing groups, Isis in particular but also others, arming themselves with drones. And some of those are commercial systems that you will pretty much buy off Amazon and then change them, arm them and modify them for them to become military systems. And they’re using these to attack individuals. We’ve seen an alleged attack on the Venezuelan president. We’ve seen more recently an attack on the Iraqi prime minister; it’s a bit unclear where that came from. In the UAE we had an attack by non-state forces. So I think this is part of the general, the further proliferation that now goes beyond state actors. And it just means that a lot of countries are now really thinking very hard how to fight drones and trying to come up with good ways of bringing down enemy drones, and so far, I should add, no country has really figured out how to defend themselves against that. And I think we’ll see much more of these kind of David-against-Goliath attacks so that, I worry, will become a more common reality in the years to come.

Gideon Rachman
And why are they so effective?

Ulrike Franke
First of all, if you are a small country or indeed a non-state actor, drones allow you all of a sudden to have a very substantial airborne capability. And smaller states have air forces, but they may have a limited amount of aircraft and an especially, you know, kind of fighter jets. Then drones can stay in the air for a very long time. I mean, you know, I’m massively generalising because there’s so many different systems and drones really range from, you know, the system that looks like a toy helicopter and takes off from the palm of your hand to a system that is almost as big as a commercial airliner and stays in the air for, you know, 48 hours. But you know, generally speaking, drones can stay in the air for a long time so they give you a very long time of surveillance, which is, militarily speaking, extremely useful. Then they can be armed, and they can be armed with smaller missiles so not necessarily the kind of big bombs that other aircraft may be carrying but smaller missiles with smaller, explosive heads. And so you can carry out these rather precise strikes. And of course, you’re not putting anyone from your side into harm’s way because there’s no pilot in the cockpit. The pilots are elsewhere.

Gideon Rachman
And presumably they’re much cheaper as well so like an F-35 is incredibly expensive, but a drone would be, as you say, they come in all sorts of varieties and sizes, but would relatively speaking, be easier, cheaper to get. And therefore, I suppose that’s why smaller states are able to use them so effectively.

Ulrike Franke
Yes, exactly. Broadly speaking, especially if you compare them to the big-man fighter jets, which are indeed incredibly expensive, drones are cheap and much easier to come by. And again, there are very different types of drones so you don’t even need as sophisticated systems as, say the US Reaper. The Turkish drones that have proliferated quite a bit recently, I mean, they’re good from what we know, but they aren’t as powerful and as high tech as other systems, but yeah, to put it bluntly, they do their job. They’re battle-tested. They’re R&D cheap. They come with very few strings attached as well. So all of this means that a lot of actors that couldn’t get comparable capabilities with manned systems now get them with drones.

Gideon Rachman
So that adds a certain kind of interest to the visit by the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Ukraine in the middle of the Russia-Ukraine crisis, where there was explicit agreements to supply Ukraine with drones. How potentially significant was that move?

Ulrike Franke
Ukraine is already flying Turkish-made armed drones. We’re primarily talking about the Bayraktar TB2, and Turkey actually has built up a pretty impressive drone industry over the last few years and really has been exporting them almost worldwide. So, you know, from Nigeria to Morocco to Poland to Ukraine, what we now hear is that Ukraine is getting more armed drones from Turkey, and there seems to be a deal that Turkey will produce some of the drones in Ukraine. I think part of the engines are supposed to come from Ukraine, something like that. Will that be decisive? I mean, similarly to the weapons deliveries to Ukraine that we’re talking about at the moment, none of these systems will make it so that Ukraine is all of a sudden a military power on par with Russia. I mean, there’s a size difference here that everyone has to acknowledge, of course, but these armed drones are useful. They definitely contribute to building up Ukraine’s military capabilities.

Gideon Rachman
All this proliferation that we’re discussing is happening at a time when it seems to me the debate about drones in America is becoming much more troubled and concerned that these weapons that seem to offer precision and lower casualties are now getting a second look. There was the New York Times report, that I’m sure you read, where they went over many classified papers, and I think paid a hundred visits to places where there’ve been drone strikes. And their conclusion was that civilians have become the regular collateral casualties of a way of war gone badly wrong. What did you think of that conclusion? Is it true?

Ulrike Franke
There has been a really interesting development in US thinking about drones, and here we’re really talking 20 years or at least, you know, 10 years of discussion, let’s say, but 20 years of use. So the US Predator drone was armed in 2001, just before 9/11 by the way, not after, not as a result. But of course after 9/11 and the war on terror, the US used armed drones very extensively all over the world but especially in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and there were different waves, there were different periods of US drone use in these areas dependent on the context and the policy. There were important policy changes under President Barack Obama.

Gideon Rachman
Did Obama tighten the policy or loosen it?

Ulrike Franke
Tighten. So drones more or less came about under President Bush, but there were only few systems that the US had. I think in 2001, the US had something like 13 Predator drones, right? And we’re up to tens of thousands if you count everything. But it was mainly under Obama that US drone policy really developed, and he was the one who oversaw these targeted killings and so-called signature strikes. So there were hundreds of strike under his guidance, and he at one point did indeed change the policy because it became obvious that there were too many strikes, but most importantly too many civilian casualties caused by these strikes. And so he changed the policy, tightened it, and indeed, the civilian casualties went down. I mean, all of this is based on analysis that is not perfect, but broadly speaking, I think what I’m saying is correct and the scholarship supports this. And so then Donald Trump came to power, and he loosened these policies again, although there weren’t that many strikes under his leadership. And when Biden came to power, and this is something that we actually overlook a little bit in the current discussion, he actually put a moratorium on the strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. And I’m not 100 per cent sure whether there were non strikes whatsoever since he came to power, but there are an extremely small number because he basically put all of this back under White House-level of authorisation, which made these strikes harder to carry out and were supposed to reduce civilian casualties.

Gideon Rachman
And yet a lot of the debate, as I understand it now in Washington, is precisely because of a drone strike that happened in the Biden years, in the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, a kind of tragedy where they thought they were going after a member of Isis, and they appear pretty certainly to have hit a family, killed, I think, seven children. Has that changed the debate?

Ulrike Franke
Yes, absolutely. And this is a really important strike. So here we are talking about the drone strike on the 29th of August in Afghanistan, so in an area where the US was at war. However, indeed was withdrawing. So we’re really talking the last few days of the US in Afghanistan, and there was this strike that was supposed to hit a suspected Isis militant, who the US forces thought was about to attack the airport of the crowds at the airports. We all remember the images coming out of Kabul at the time, and afterwards it turned out that, yeah indeed, this person was not at all affiliated with Isis. Ten people died, seven of which were children, I think, I have the same information as you do. And the New York Times in particular carried a really important investigation into the strike and showed how well the US military really screwed up here. There seems to have been a lot of confirmation bias where the people in charge just thought that everything they saw confirmed what they were thinking. It was an absolute tragedy. It’s particularly problematic, if you like, for the whole argument that drone strikes can be very precise because from what we know, the drone actually followed this person for eight hours before it struck. So it wasn’t an incident where they weren’t quite sure what they (sic) doing, and it was a mistake in that sense. So they really used the drone’s surveillance capabilities to follow this person and still got it incredibly wrong. And there has been an examination of this strike, but no one has been held responsible, and I think the US military kind of put it under the fog of war and things like that. But this has definitely led to more interest by US policymakers in US drone policy. There was a letter from congressional Democrats to President Biden kind of urging him to overhaul the counter-terrorism strategy and to change the target criteria for drone strikes. So there’s more of an interest in this now, and it may lead to a further tightening of US drone policy rules.

Gideon Rachman
But I think one thing we can probably assume, though, is that while policy may be changed, drones are not gonna be withdrawn from the battlefield. If anything, it sounds like they’re going to become even more important, both for the US and for countries all over the world.

Ulrike Franke
President Biden, in particular when withdrawing from Afghanistan, actually said that yes, they’re withdrawing the troops, but they’re keeping this over-the-horizon capability, and this very much refers to aerial capabilities and a lot of this will be drone capabilities because of the endurance and things like that. So no, military drones are definitely not going away. We will see them more and more on the battlefield. I think we’re gonna see more non-state actor use as well, and we already are. So I think now we actually need to talk a lot more about anti-drone capabilities, which is a huge area of research. And we need to look into how drones are developing technologically because we’re still talking about the kind of remotely-controlled Reaper-Predator drone systems, which of course have gotten kind of better and more sophisticated over time but remain broadly the same. But at the same time, we have an important technological development towards more autonomy and artificial intelligence and things like that, and that may be the next very important step and potentially game changer.

Gideon Rachman
To spell that out, what that means is that rather than being somebody sitting in a bunker somewhere in Nevada watching the footage and controlling the drone, which already makes some people uncomfortable, it’s actually the drone itself making decisions.

Ulrike Franke
Yes, I’m always uncomfortable with formulations such as, you know, the drone besides by itself, things like that, but but yes, I mean, broadly speaking, of course. What we’re currently seeing is that we’re having much more use of artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence-supported autonomy in military systems. This is by no means limited to drones. It’s just that we often talk about this in the context of drones because they were and they are among the very first systems where this really comes to pass. And this has just to do with the fact that they are unmanned, ie remotely-piloted to begin with so it’s kind of easier to go a step further here. But what we’re seeing indeed is a development of more systems that have higher level of autonomy. So you may need fewer pilots because right now, the bigger drone systems they aren’t piloted by one person, they’re piloted by teams, at least three quite often, and then you have, you know, a crew around them as well. So AI-enabled autonomy helps to have fewer people pilot a drone. It allows you to have several drones working together. The famous drone swarms, that would be one use of AI-enabled autonomy in warfare as well. So we have this development and there are several systems that are being tested that will be more autonomous. And indeed, you know, we were talking earlier about these so-called loitering munitions, these Kamikaze drones. It’s primarily Israeli systems at this point, also a few Turkish ones, but they’re also US systems. So this is also proliferating, and these systems are already one step more autonomous than the remotely-piloted systems, right? Because they are put in the sky and being told, you know, if you detect the following system, for example, if you detect a radar, you go and attack it and destroy it. And while you can tell the system, you know, if you find a radar, ask me before you destroy it whether this is the right target. But you can already basically tell them, you know, if you find your target, go and destroy without asking me again. So that’s already a pretty high level of, if not autonomy, at least automation. And that is right, dare I would say, making a lot of people uncomfortable, and I think we’re going further down this path every day.

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Gideon Rachman
That was Ulrike Franke of the European Council on Foreign Relations ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening, and please join me again next week.

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