The original drones broadcast a view only to operators on the ground. Now a drone could be piloted—and its live feed viewed and its missiles aimed—from anywhere in the world. The pilots could be insulated from the risks of combat. The U. Using computers to analyze data feeding continuously from drones, military and spy agencies isolated and tracked targets night and day.
Drone attacks and targeted killings serve these principles better than any use of force that can be imagined. While drones have triggered robust controversy, the technology can in principle greatly reduce the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths.
Like any new weapon system, drones pose difficult questions. Members of Congress, human rights lawyers and counterterrorism officials have asked exactly how intelligence and military officials make targeting decisions, how such attacks affect the way civilian populations feel toward the United States and how these attacks comport with international law.
Still, U. And I discovered, looking at the record—the open record, by the way—that the Air Force publicly began talking about, and preparing to arm, the Predator in May of I recently attended an event where an Air Force expert on remotely piloted aircraft suggested that the satellite signal simply goes from an Air Force base to the North Pole, back to the drone over in Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or wherever.
Drone : Werner? Whittle He is quite frankly one of the most brilliant people I have ever met in my entire life. Drone By writing this book, what are you hoping to contribute to the contemporary discussion of drones? Whittle I think that to understand the issues that the drone raises, you have to understand the technology. You have to understand where the technology came from and how it actually works. There are a lot misconceptions out there.
In fact, there are a lot of humans in the loop. And when it comes to targeted killings, to making the decision, these decisions go up to the President. Drone Where do you stand now on the question about the relationship between technology and policy? In The Way of the Knife , Mark Mazzetti argues that the CIA has essentially transformed from an intelligence organization into a paramilitary organization.
Do you think that has happened because of this technology, or is it a two-way road? Whittle The Predator had a great deal to do with it, and the technology is still outrunning policy. I know that a number of former CIA people, including some who played key roles in the history that I relate in the book, are not terribly comfortable with how things have evolved, nor with the frequency with which the CIA has used targeted killings.
The armed Predator was in part developed as a one-off way to try to kill Osama Bin Laden, to try to decapitate al-Qaeda. At the time, the CIA director, George Tenet, was extremely concerned about whether that was a wise course to take. In those succeeding months, events overtook policy in a major way, and have done so even more under the Obama administration. If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Drone The book ends in the early days of the war in Afghanistan.
If you could add a few chapters to the book that trace the thirteen years that have passed since then, what would you cover? Whittle The use of the Predator as a military weapon has spurred the military and the defense industry to do a great deal of research and development on new drones.
The day after he said that, the Air Force ordered all of its Predators to be armed, which had not been the plan before that — the armed Predator had always just been an experiment for the Air Force. The mission can be controlled through line-of-site data links or through Ku-band satellite links to produce continuous video. Video signals received in the ground control station are passed to the Trojan Spirit van for worldwide intelligence distribution or directly to operational users via a commercial global broadcast system.
Command users are able to task the payload operator in real-time for images or video on demand. The MQ-9A Block 5 can operate continuously for 27 hours at an altitude of up to 15,m 50,ft and speeds of approximately It can carry payloads weighing up to 1,kg 3,lb including kg lb of external stores. Additionally, the Block 5 variant incorporates a fault-tolerant flight control system and a triple redundant avionics system architecture.
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