Angry Planet - Are drone strikes working if Paris attacks can still happen?

Episode Date: November 24, 2015

Predator and Reaper drones hang in the sky above Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq and Syria. Mostly they observe, search for targets – and occasionally they unleash Hellfire missiles. Targets may be large gatherings of suspicious figures, convoys or training camps. They can also be private houses, and sometimes they turn out to be weddings. The theory behind strikes is not mass destruction, but to find militant leaders and kill them, as surgically as possible. But how effective have those efforts been? And who’s making the call on when to take a shot?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. They called it the drone papers, but in the documents they provided, drones are actually only a small part of the operations that they uncovered. In Djibouti, there were more manned. aircraft than drones.

U.S. drones fly slowly across the skies above nations around the world, looking for warning signs or searching for targets, and sometimes firing hellfire missiles. It's a tactic that's been in place for years now, but how effective is it if militants can still strike in the heart of Paris? On this week's War College, we'll explore what we know about the program and how well it works. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields.

Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters' opinion editor, Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt with War is Boring. Today we're speaking with Joseph Trevethic of War is Boring about drones and targeted killing. As of this recording, two rules. really interesting leaks occurred, both involving CIA director John Brennan. The first, less interesting one is that a teenager hacked his old AOL account and leaked some draft copies of stuff that really accomplished little other than confirming some things we already knew about

torture and doxing his relatives. The other more interesting thing is that the intercept acquired from a source within America's intelligence apparatus, a lot of documents about drones and how America's drone war works. They call it the drone papers, and we've spent the past week kind of going through those, and we're going to talk about that today. Joe, I was going to kind of kick it over to you

and ask what you thought of the drone papers and kind of what your takeaway from them was. Firstly, it seemed pretty clear that they named them the drone papers to evoke the same vibe of the Pentagon Papers, which sort of blew the lid off of how the U.S. government was presenting the war in Vietnam and how the U.S. government had been suggesting that there was a lot more winning to be had in Vietnam and that they actually didn't really believe that inside the halls of the Pentagon. And that was a major revelation. drone papers in many ways confirm a lot of what people who investigate this have known, thought they knew, believed to have known about what's going on. And in my opinion, the most interesting thing was that drones are actually only a small part of the operations that they uncovered. They called it the drone papers, but in the documents they provided in Djibouti at the one acknowledged American base in Africa, there were more manned aircraft than drones based in Djibouti during the time frame covered in those reports, including both manned spy planes and manned strike aircraft to carry

out the strikes against these so-called high-value individuals, or however you'd like to phrase that. Right, Joe, you're talking about, I think, what they refer to in the papers as the tyranny of distance. Is that correct? So this is this idea that we use drone. people assume we use drones to collect intelligence on high-value individuals and then carry out these strikes. One of the things we learned is Joe's saying from the papers is that because drones take so long to get to those high-value individuals,

there's often a lot of other intelligence work that goes into confirming these targets. Is that correct? Well, and that we need to be able to, you know, at least the U.S. government, you know, under its current policies, feels that it needs to be able to act on that intelligence quickly. and flying an F-15E strike eagle from Djibouti takes a lot shorter amount of time than making sure you have a drone on station with the right weapons where you need it to be. And so you can call those planes in much quicker than you could call on a drone. I mean, drones are relatively slow. You know, their benefit is being able to hang out over one particular area for a protracted period of time,

not necessarily being able to brace back and forth between particular areas with any kind of speed. I just remember from one of our early, early podcast talking about drones that actually a number of them are prop-driven. I mean, really not the same as a Mach 2 aircraft. No, not at all. And without nearly the kind of weapons capability of these larger airplanes either. Another thing I wanted to talk about was the language that's used. The drone papers make a big to-do kind of of the language that the Pentagon uses when it talks. talks about drone strikes.

And so I'm talking about things like jackpot for when a drone strike is successful. Enemies killed in action. And it was my understanding, Joe, you can correct me if I'm wrong, that enemies killed an action within the context of what the drone papers are talking about are not always necessarily actually enemies. Well, they're not necessarily the enemies that we are targeting.

And I think that was an important thing to that has been reported on a significant bit before independently, but this sort of confirms this general belief that we're not always hitting the intended targets. And we then assume, based on whatever the other additional intelligence we have, is that those people are still enemies. So, at least as far as the military is concerned, it's a watch. And then they still get registered as enemies killed in action, but in terms of being the exact target of the strike, you know, the person who they've been supposedly following and tracking for weeks on end, after, I believe they said the maximum length of building an intelligence profile on a target

was something absurd, like 22 years, and that was the maximum. The mean was significantly shorter than that. But, I mean, you know, tracking these people for a really long amount of time, and then launching a strike about where you think they might be, and not necessarily hitting that person, but assuming, well, they're still terrorists anyway, so, you know, it's not a big deal. So that sounds like essentially, if you were doing policing, it would be arresting an entire neighborhood

on the assumption that there were bad people living in it. I think it's more equivalent to kicking down the door of a supposed drug den and arresting everybody in there and saying, well, you're all drug dealers because you have, to be in this building at the same time. You know, it's a, and oddly enough, that does happen in policing. And so I think maybe there's a, there's a consistent issue in, in the policy. You know, a lot of people want to debate the legality of the policy.

I'm personally of the view that it's not necessarily illegal, but the efficacy of this policy, I think is definitely something that, that's worthy of debate for sure. Right. I mean, and I guess it's also, I mean, there's just in, in total fairness, it's possible that the people who they're killing are, in fact, all bad guys, right? I mean, I'm not talking about the children with the people who have been classified as collateral damage, but... Well, that's sort of the thing, right? I mean, they could all be bad guys.

They could be, you know, just by standards. They could be not. War is Boring actually obtained a spreadsheet of civilian casualty allegations during the bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria. And what we found from that ourselves was that a lot of the allegations of civilian casualties were dismissed as non-credible just because there wasn't enough information

to suggest one way or the other. And so the Pentagon made the determination that, you know, using what is essentially a legal definition, you know, basically a burden of proof. There's no burden of proof that those people are innocence or that they were killed or that, you know, this incident happened or what have you. And so basically it's not a problem. But again, it's, you know, that's insufficient information. That's not necessarily the truth. It's a burden of proof there rather than the actual facts.

This kind of goes to something that you and I were talking about, Joe, a little bit before. The reliance on certain kinds of intelligence when conducting these drone strikes and the gaps and the faults in those methods of intelligence. And could you speak to that a little bit? Yes, signals intelligence. What we saw in the drone papers is something that's been increasingly coming out, even before the Snowden Revelations, but the Snowden Revelations sort of helped, you know,

add more detail to this. Basically that signals intelligence, i.e. scooping up radio chatter, phone calls, things like this, has been the primary means of identifying the top. targets at the end of the, sort of at the end of the so-called kill chain. You know, we spend years developing these profiles on these people, right? But then we actually need to go out and find them, and we do this by tapping their cell phones. And often the target is not necessarily the individual, but the SIM card and their identified cell phone.

Right. I mean, that's the thing you're locking on to. I mean, most people, these days, you can go on YouTube and watch strike footage. and that's what drones are seeing. That's what manned spy planes are seeing when it comes to full motion video. And you're not doing facial recognition based on that video. Even at the highest fidelity that we probably don't see. You know, and this is, again, another thing that we talked about in our podcast earlier on drones, was that the fidelity in that equipment is just not high enough to, you can tell it's a person. And, you know, you could probably know that that person's holding the cell phone, you know,

the terrorist cell phone. And so you fire a missile essentially at the cell phone. And well, that's, you know, and then you find out later whether the person holding it was the guy you want or not. They call these strikes against the cell phones when they are successful touchdowns, by the way. Yeah, I mean, I would say, though, military lingo, no matter what, it's like, I mean, you can always fault them for it, but it's never not kind of obscene. I mean, it's a business of killing people. you're you're absolutely right you're absolutely right i mean i'd you know terminate with extreme prejudice that was one of my favorites from from vietnam right well people can't win in this i mean you know

people were also you know calling out the euphemism of referring to these as finishing actions you know it's it's i believe that the language is people either complain that it's uh it's too euphemistic or it's too sort of uh jingoistic you know there's there's no there's no suitable middle ground. And then if you just started talking about killing people, people would be like, oh my God, you're killing people. It's like, well, this is a business, unfortunately, of killing people. And that's why it's so important to discuss the policy behind doing it. There have been previous reports of exactly how the decision is made of who to kill, when to kill, where to kill them, right? But the intercept sort of got into it in greater depth. I mean, can you sort of describe the change? Yeah, there's one

very good slide in one of the briefings that the intercept obtained that has the complete sort of it's got like 12 steps so there's a there's a whole food chain matt you want to actually yeah i'm actually looking at that slide right now or kind of the intercept's um interpretation of that slide uh so it starts with jes uh joc task force is watching the target i want to i want to just jump in there right right there and say that it's not i i have been unable to verify that this is a this is a J-Soc Task Force. I think J-Soc is like, you know, every armored vehicle is a tank. Every time you see something, you don't know it's the Joint Special Operations Command.

The task force nomenclature and the fact that the bulk of the aircraft are actually maintained by the Air Force, you know, the whole thing seems, you know, and there's like Navy components out and see it. It seems like it's a Pentagon task force. This seems like a whole sort of, you know, J-Soc may be maintaining the hit-list, list, you know, the all-magical hit list of people to look for in cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency or something like that. But I thought that the intercept, you know, continued in doing what they love to do and just, you know, everything, everything is a drone, everything is J-Soc. And I think it's important just to point out that there's a task force,

but we don't know what it is. Someone is watching the target. Their information gets fed up to CENTCOM commander, it's currently General James Mattis, which gets gets fed up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which gets fed up to the Secretary of Defense. And from there goes to something called the Principles Committee, which is made up of the president's, essentially his closest advisors. And then they put the information in front of President Obama, and then he signs off on the strike. And it's important to note that he doesn't sign off on each individual strike, but instead gives them a 60-day window in which to conduct the operation. Can you explain sort of the difference there?

I mean, so it's like they can, is that they can try multiple times in that 60 days or something? The suggestion from the briefings is that they, yes, they can because one of the, one of the examples that's in one of the briefings is an instance where they failed to locate the guy and then had to try, they had to basically come around again a few days later and do it again. Right. And if they fall out of that 60-day window, they do have to do the entire intelligence chain again if they want to strike the same target. That really does sound like we're, I mean, all of that responsibility for, and we're talking about individuals, right? I mean, that are being targeted. However many people end up getting killed in a strike, I mean, the idea is that they're going after specific individuals. but some of the most powerful people in the United States are actually making these decisions.

I mean, there's a process. It's not a judicial process, but it's just so interesting that you're talking about, you know, people who you see on TV all the time, right? Who are actually, I mean, this is part of their job is going through the list and actually checking off the box. Is that about right? Or at least their staff. I mean, it clearly has to go through their offices. You know, somebody has to claim to have seen it.

And it's, I think another thing that's important to note is that most of the information that was leaked to the intercept that constitutes the drone papers is about two years old. I think the, I think the newest document they have is from 2013. That does not necessarily mean that all this, that everything that they talk about is now out of fashion. Oh, definitely not, yeah. But I think that that's just kind of a little caveat that's important to put in there. That was another interesting thing is that in one of the briefings, there were citations for Pentagon study reports on killing these so-called high-value individuals as old as 2008.

It's being cited in these reports, again, looking at the pitfalls and the efficacy of the program. So, I mean, they've really been trying to figure out if it's working or not. Because, I mean, that was in the briefings. I mean, there were significant numbers of finishing actions every day in places like Afghanistan during the reporting periods. And it's, I think it was something like an average of six strikes against high-value individuals every day in Afghanistan during the reporting period in the briefing. So.

Okay, that's a neat transition into what I think we should talk about now, and what we've already touched on a little bit, is do these targeted killings work? Is this an efficient and effective means of conducting war? There definitely seems to be a never-ending stream of high-value individuals. It does make, you know, I wrote a piece on this for Wars Boring earlier in the week before we recorded this, And that was sort of my conclusion is that there seems to be a lot of high value individuals. And one has to wonder, then, does that mean that it's working if they just fill those ranks in, like the next day? We kill a lot of number two's is sort of my favorite phrase.

Being number two sucks. Yeah, that's true. That is what gets reported all over the place. They've killed, yeah. or the guy who's number two in charge of social media for ISIS. He was a very high-ranking member. Although I do actually, I think in case of ISIS, I think they actually got the social media guy.

And, yeah, but it is, it's a good question just in general because it's also not a new policy. I mean, it may be a new way of going and getting people. But on the other hand, the Israelis, for example, I mean, that's one of that, it's almost like we learned that tactic from them. And they used it against Palestinians. I don't know how effectively,

but I mean, I think they think it's effective. Well, I think it's a warfighting tactic. I mean, you're applying a traditional warfighting tactic to a situation that may not be traditional war fighting because really, when you blow up a command center in a conventional war, what are you doing? You're attempting to kill those leaders inside. you are attempting to neutralize the ability of your enemy to command and control their forces in the field.

You are attempting to prevent them from waging their war by knocking out their senior leadership. I mean, you know, from when sharpshooters first appeared on the battlefield, knocking out senior leadership is not a new thing. But it may work in a tactical sense. you know, it probably was very effective during the Civil War when you were picking off generals and other senior people commanding troops right there on the front lines and everything would break down and nobody knew it was going on anymore. Right, but you were also fighting a conventional war at the same time. And so I think my thought is that this is politically expedient. There's a low political cost in America for conducting operations this way. but without other more conventional types of warfare, it feels ineffective.

Well, and there just aren't any other targets, which sort of brings up again, you know, when you go into battle against the conventional military, you know, maybe you can blow up their supply lines or you can blow up all their vehicles and you can convince them that waging war just isn't going to work and they will surrender in the rest of it. But when you come down to sort of nebulous terrorist groups, who don't really have anything. And, you know, Islamic State is seizing territory.

Islamic State is trying to operate like a functional government, but they're still not doing that just yet. And so is the plan then to kill them all? That's sort of, that's often where I get sort of confused, because, I mean, if you're, if, if you have decided that the personnel is the only asset that is, that is reasonable to strike, then unless they just decide to roll over and die one day, I mean, the plan is to kill them. That's interesting.

I actually really hadn't thought about it that way, but I know that the preferred hasn't worked very well against ISIS, which is, I mean, they had hoped that by bringing in bombers, they'd take care of all their tanks or, you know, be able to get large masses of people together in one place and blow them up. And I guess what you're saying makes a lot of sense in that the air war, they haven't been able to carry it out that way. Everybody just disappears into the hillside or the countryside. If you remember in the first couple of months of the air war, there was a pretty never-ending stream of blowing up captured Humvees especially. And blowing up captured armor and artillery. And then that dropped off when those targets dried up.

And then when you started seeing, I mean, if you read, the reports these days, the reports are ISIL fighting position, ISIL building is one I've seen, it just says ISIL building is the target. A motorcycle, a ISIL motorcycle was a target, a ISIL rocket-propelled grenade was a target. I mean, these are amazingly minor targets when it gets down to it. you know, vague and minor targets. And it just really makes you wonder, it's like, well, if you can't rely on the Iraqi military to then go in and recapture those areas,

what is left for the coalition to do from the air? I mean, because there's just going to, there is a lack of large, sensible targets to bomb after a certain point. You know, John Pike of Global Security.org used to always joke about, you know, you get into situations where all that's left to do is bounce, the rubble. And that's not really a useful expenditure of your energy. That's why you see actually even by the end of last year, there were reports coming out that the coalition over Iraq and Syria, they were flying X number of missions, but they were only dropping ordinance on 25% of those sorties. They would fly out, but only in a quarter of the instances, would they actually

fire a missile or drop a bomb just because there just wasn't anything else to do. Yeah, there wasn't actually a target to hit with it, so they didn't waste the bombs. I mean, considering the fact that bombs costs tens of thousands of dollars, I think that makes a lot of sense. But that sort of brings us back, I mean, it really is then a circular argument. Because what makes sense to do? Well, it makes sense to try to target high-value individuals, right? If you can't bomb a base or hardware or anything like that, then maybe the, then you know, Maybe you go with surveillance drones coming up with lists.

I agree. I mean, you know, you sort of come around to, you can see where this line of thinking comes from for sure. Because, you know, this is what you've got. And if you're going with a traditional military theory of trying to find that's, you know, the, what we pull out of Klauswitz is the center of gravity. the thing you have to hit for them to give up, well, you know, maybe leaders are the thing to do. You know, maybe killing these leaders is the thing to do. I think, though, when the force is so ideologically backed, that I feel that that becomes the center of gravity,

and I don't know how to knock that center of gravity out, and I'm not sure that high-value individuals is the way to go about doing it. I think that's the difficult question, and I think it's one that we've, for, you know, Basically, we've decided to not try and answer that complicated question and instead decided that maybe if we just kill enough of these leaders that we'll get to the breaking point rather than, you know what I mean, because there's a pittance of money spent on, you know,

what is broadly, I think, referred to still as countering violent extremism. You know, I forget exactly what the euphemism in Pentagon speak is for this these days, But it involves, you know, running Arabic language websites and local language websites to provide, you know, news. You know, it's white propaganda. You know, it supports the official government lines in places like Iraq and in North Africa, you know, the many countries in North Africa in these places, you know. And so there's, there are programs like that. But, I mean, we're talking, you know, millions rather than billions of dollars. I wrote a story about it not that long ago for Reuters we were talking about, or I think it was something I actually, I'm pretty sure I edited it.

So I apologize to the writer. But looking at that exact thing, I mean, it's so hard to do it in any way that's not a better word for it, cool. You know, when the State Department does videos, which it does, it has an anti-Islamic propaganda branch that's supposed to come up with these videos. It has a few million dollars to do it. And yeah, it's a small amount of money, but I mean, you know, these are not exactly, this video productions are not that high quality. And it just, it looks like, you know, don't do drugs, you know, just say no. It looks like, you know, stop smoking. Especially when compared with the stuff that Islamic State puts out, it's just the, the quality

and the engagement is just not there. That's because that's all they do. They're social media guys. They're fine-tuned. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's an unequal battlefield there, too, I think. Once again, we've managed to talk ourselves. Yeah, we've come up.

Talk ourselves into depression? Yeah, I mean, I don't want to pretend that I have a good solution any of this either. You know, if anybody wants to accuse me of not offering an answer, then, after criticizing basically everything, Well, it's because I don't. It is a hard question, and I give credit to anybody who's ever tried to solve it. It's not a simple issue. No, I think I will just have to leave it there, but I want to say thanks to Joe. And Matt, do you want to say a few words to the kind people out there?

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