guardian angels v. hell fire...

US to deploy drones to shore up border with Mexico

The United States currently has four drones patrolling the border with Mexico in Arizona and one in the northern border with Canada in the state of North Dakota, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Napolitano said the new aircraft are part of a reinforcement of border patrol efforts including one thousand additional agents and 60 investigators.

"Over the past 18 months, this administration has devoted more resources -- including manpower, technology and infrastructure -- to the Southwest border than at any point in America's history," she said.

Texas Governor Rick Perry had requested delivery of the planes, which the US used extensively in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In other words, a drone assassination campaign is morphing into the first full-scale drone war (and, as in all wars from the air, civilians are dying in unknown numbers).

If the temperature is again rising in Washington when it comes to these weapons, this time it’s a fever of enthusiasm for the spectacular future of drones (which the Air Force has plotted out to the year 2047), of a time when single pilots should be able to handle multiple drones in operations in the skies over some embattled land, and of a far more distant moment when those drones should be able to handle themselves, flying, fighting, and making key decisions about just who to take out without a human being having to intervene.

When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it. Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight.

Now it's the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized. It's the U.S. which is developing a 22-ton tail-less drone 20 times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It's the Pentagon which is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700% over the next decade.

Admittedly, there is a modest counter-narrative to all this enthusiasm for our robotic prowess, “precision,” and “valor.” It involves legal types like Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions. He recently issued a 29-page report criticizing Washington’s “ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.” Unless limits are put on such claims, and especially on the CIA’s drone war over Pakistan, he suggests, soon enough a plethora of states will follow in America’s footprints, attacking people in other lands “labeled as terrorists by one group or another.”

C) Murder by drone. The use of robot aircraft and target takeout by missile fire is modestly controversial in and of itself, perhaps, though the controversy seems to be counterweighted, at least in mainstream reportage, by the military’s enthusiasm for drones. When a potential target is an American who isn’t situated in either Iraq or Afghanistan, the controversy inches upward. I’m sorry, but I still haven’t gotten around on the concept of robot war or the insanity of stalking enemy prey with missiles, even if there was the least bit of precision in the process.

The fact that we often rely on preposterously bad intelligence and wind up killing large numbers of civilians with our missiles strikes me, quaintly, as wrong. And by "wrong" I mean insane, stupid, counterproductive, criminal — a means of murder guaranteed to inflame hatred toward us, complicate our "mission" and prolong the war. But then again, this is a war against evil, so we already know that it’s endless.

All of which brings me back to the New York Times and the helpful, informative sentence quoted above, which I unearthed in a recent Times Online "topics" piece on drones. Mostly the story is from a military point of view and reports on what seems to be the adolescent glee of intelligence and military brass over how disruptive robot air strikes are to enemy operations.

Toward the end of the story, statistics about collateral damage are cited from two sources. The New America Foundation estimated that, since 2006, drones have killed 500 militants and 250 civilians; the ratio was a little better in the Long War Journal, which estimated 885 dead militants, 94 dead civilians. Not cited, for some reason, was a Brookings Institution study, which found that for every militant killed by drones, 10 civilians are taken out. This is a heart-stopping ratio of cruelty that should instantly decommission all future robot assassination missions.