War by remote control, how drones changed modern warfare

Drones are swarming battlefields in Ukraine, Iran, and beyond. Drone warfare is cheap, efficient, autonomous — and changing warfare forever. Today on the show, the past, present and future of battle by remote control. This episode originally published in 2021 and has been updated. GUEST: James Rodgers, war historian and author of several books about drones, including Drones: What Everyone Needs to Know To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:16Speaker 01

  When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently spoke to the Senate Armed Services Committee, he talked about the massive amounts of money the US military wants to dedicate to its drone program.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  You're looking at $54 billion in the FY27 budget dedicated to drone dominance.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Drone dominance isn't just a buzzword. It's the Defense Department initiative to scale up its drone program. And the money being requested has been called, quote, "the largest single commitment to autonomous warfare in history." In other words, drone AI.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Drones have reshaped warfare and given all kinds of countries a powerful weapon.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  President Trump attended the dignified transfer of the remains of the first Americans killed in the war.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  On the day after the US and Israel launched war against Iran, an Iranian drone made it past air defenses in Kuwait, striking a US command center at a civilian port.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Six Army reservists killed by an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  They were the first US casualties in the war. Since then, thousands of drone strikes have been launched throughout the Middle East.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  And it's catching the US off guard.

• 1:33Speaker 05

  The Pentagon has begun a huge push by hundreds of thousands of small attack drones.

• 1:38Speaker 06

  They were once the domain of major militaries, but they are now spreading rapidly.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  They are cheap, efficient, and easy to dispatch.

• 1:46Speaker 07

  Now the fastest-growing sector in the Ukrainian economy.

• 1:50Speaker 05

  Russia, which was already using AI to automate how its drones pick targets, now has begun experimenting with fully autonomous systems.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Even in the war between Ukraine and Russia, drones have allowed a much smaller, less powerful country to defend against a superior one. Although most of the hundreds of thousands of drone strikes have come from Russia, in some places, a nightly occurrence. Ukraine has been able to strike back with accuracy and increased cadence.

• 2:19Speaker 05

  Drones are responsible for about three quarters of that war's casualties.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Drones are also being used in civil wars in Myanmar and Sudan.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  This year, there's been a surge in attacks.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  And while many drones never reach their destinations, intercepted by intricate defense systems, those that do can demolish anything from a single soldier to entire bridges and beyond. And the ability to be more precise than, say, carpet bombing plays into a larger narrative that many politicians on all sides sell to us, that somehow, technology can make war less ugly, less costly, and more distant. This is what war historian James Rodgers calls- War by remote control.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  And that remoteness isn't just in the technology, but it's also in our minds as well. Because no one's going to write a letter to the family of a drone if it gets shot down. It is a robot in the sky. That is the point. It has zero risk of taking a drone out to American military lives. Now, of course, it has lots of risks to civilians within that theater of conflict, but it means that you have that public disconnect and that democratic disconnect to the conflict of which you're involved in and what you're waging. As more and more countries embrace this war by remote control, we have to confront some difficult questions. What is the cost of distance?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  How does it change the way we, as a society, think about killing? And what happens when precision attacks go wrong? So on this episode of Throughline from NPR, we're exploring the past, present, and future of drone warfare. Because one thing is clear: this is just the beginning.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  This is Tori in Corvallis.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Dallas, Oregon, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from iXL. The first few weeks back at school set the tone for the rest of the year. iXL is designed to help kids build confidence and get up to speed fast. Covering pre-K through 12th grade, iXL offers personalized, interactive practice in math, language arts, and science. One subscription covers everything for all the kids in your home. Receive an exclusive 20% discount on an iXL membership at ixl.com/npr.

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  Hey, Rand here. We want to try something new on the show, and we need your help. Have you ever had a question about something in the news or wondered why something is the way it is? Anything from big geopolitical things, like how Russia's Vladimir Putin came to power, to everyday quirky things, like how did astrology make such a strong comeback? We already have an episode about both, by the way, if you really are wondering. We would love to hear your questions. Send them to us at [email protected], or call 872-588-8805 and leave a voicemail. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number, too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. And thanks.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Part One: Destroy Everything.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  On a cold cloudy day in December of 1903, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two brothers made history. The world's first airplane, created by Orville Wright and his brother Wilbur, is about to take flight. Here at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, this primitive kite made aviation history.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Wilbur Wright had tried and failed to pilot their newly invented flying machine just a few days earlier. So on this next attempt, his brother Orville geared up, braved the wind, and climbed into the flyer. With this first catapult to take off, man's age-old dream of flight became a reality.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  The invention of aviation would change the world forever. It would change travel, it would change trade, and it would change war.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts: for democracy.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  On April 2nd, 1917, less than 15 years after the Wright brothers took that first flight, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to formally enter World War I.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  I shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  And so you have hundreds of thousands of American troops who are deployed onto the bloodiest battlefields of Europe, into those entrenched, muddy, bloody places.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  The trenches were cold and damp and dirty, full of rats and lice, infections and disease. These dugouts were places full of nightmares, not dreams.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  And you have a vast amount of casualties.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Over 100,000 US soldiers died, and almost 12s many were wounded.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  And as this generation comes home, this lost generation, as it's often called, you have mass public outcry, you have protests in the streets. Why is it that America is sending its troops, its best, its brightest, its youngest, its sons, over abroad to fight these foreign wars? There wasn't the public appetite for this.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  This is James Rodgers. He's a war historian who's written several books about drones, including "Drones: What Everyone Needs to Know."

• 9:56Speaker 03

  And there's a branch of the military, a fledgling branch of the military, that starts to listen to this public outcry. And this is the US Army Air Service.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  The American people made it clear that they weren't going to stand for so many casualties. And so the military responded, not by deciding to fight fewer wars, but how to fight wars with fewer deaths, a novel pursuit of how to fight ethically. And this brand-new branch of the military, the air service, thought, well, planes could help.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  They're like, well, if we don't want to send our troops on the ground into these trench warfare battlefields, there may be...

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Air power can provide us with an alternative. And they come up with this idea of instead of going through the enemy, you go over the enemy. Over the enemy with planes and bomb specific targets that were crucial to the enemy war effort. Maybe weapons depots or industrial sites. And actually, they ended up using the term precision bombing doctrine. So this term precision goes all the way back to nineteen seventeen. And here's how it worked.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  You fly over the enemy. You bomb their ammunition factories. You bomb their oil refineries. You bomb the places they make tanks. You bomb the places they make rubber.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  You bomb these things that weaken their ability to fight on the battlefield. And that means that when you eventually do send troops in to face the enemy, you won't have that entrenched bloody muddy warfare where it's a stalemate for years on end. Because the enemy has nothing to fight with. So you move through and you move through swiftly to victory because air power allowed you to do it. Because World War One sparked a public outcry over the hundreds of thousands of American dead and wounded. The pressure was on politicians to figure out a way to avoid this from ever happening again. And they saw precision bombing as the golden ticket.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  And so quite a lot of money then goes into developing technologies that will allow this to happen. Money that funded the first iteration of the drone. Although it was perhaps more accurately known as the aerial torpedo. And this was the Kettering bug. The Kettering bug.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  And this was invented by somebody called Charles Kettering, who was responsible for inventing all sorts of strange things. And it was a partner project with someone called H. H. Arnold. H. H. Arnold, one of the first ever military personnel who was taught to fly by some of the only people who knew how to fly. The Wright brothers. But this is how early we're talking here. This is fledgling air power. I mean, the planes have only just taken off the ground.

• 12:47Speaker 06

  And now we're already thinking how to use them and how to bomb and how to bomb in more of an ethical way, I suppose, if you can call it that.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  So 1917 is when Charles Kettering developed this first drone prototype or aerial torpedo. And as many male inventors like to do, named it after himself, the Kettering Bug. And what made this plane so drone like? There was no pilot.

• 13:11Speaker 06

  It was about the size of a normal, single-engine plane.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  It was set on rails.

• 13:16Speaker 06

  It had a sperry gyroscope to keep it stable in the air.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  It had a motor.

• 13:21Speaker 06

  And so it would take off in the air off these rails. It would fly straight as the crow flies. And then, once that motor had spun its certain amount of revolutions, it would shut off. Because technically then, that would be when it was above the target.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  At that moment, the wings would fold up against the body of the plane.

• 13:42Speaker 06

  And then it would swoop down on its enemy, on its prey, like an eagle.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  And it was automated, right?

• 13:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 13:51Speaker 06

  It was as high-tech as you could get in 1917, 18.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Which turns out, wasn't high-tech enough. The bug had some bugs. It was a complete flop.

• 14:03Speaker 06

  In reality, it was worse than useless. It would flail around in the sky and it would even sometimes turn back on its, on its own people who were testing it. So it was really unpredictable. But that almost doesn't matter in what we're talking about, because what matters is the intention behind it. And the intention there was to separate the human from the practice of killing, to separate American troops from having to be sacrificed in war and to be put at risk by deploying robots, remote systems, systems that could be sent off to go and kill the enemy without putting American service personnel at risk. And that was the birth of this idea.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  The Kettering Bug was revolutionary, but at the same time, a failure. The idea of a plane without a pilot that shed its wings and turned into a torpedo that could hit a precise target was literally too good to be true. But lessons were learned.

• 15:05Speaker 06

  They learnt that they had to use pilots.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Piloted aircraft to do the bombing because you needed the pilot to guide the aircraft. That in order to be precise, you still needed a human being to make the call. You needed a person behind the robot. And what they did actually was they invented a thing called the Norden bombsight. And this was by an engineer called Carl Norden. Right in time for the US to use this technology in World War Two. The Norden bombsight wasn't a drone, but was basically an early analog computer that helped the pilot drop bombs with more precision. You could put in wind speed, you could put in altitude, the velocity, and it would compute when you should drop the bomb.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  And so when you were over the enemy cities and you had your target, it would tell the bombardier when they needed to release the bomb.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Strategically, this was important. In the past, hitting targets was so unlikely that you had to fly tons of planes overhead over and over and over again and drop bombs over and over and over again in order to finally hit the intended target. This obviously wastes fuel, manpower, weapons, and causes massive civilian deaths. The Norden bombsight allowed you to, for the first time, somewhat successfully hit your target with just a few or sometimes even just one plane.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  So there's a strategic element to it there, but there's also that moral element. I remember reading through the archives and it said explicitly, "to avoid the enemy populace and their livelihoods."

• 16:43Speaker 01

  So you can stick to striking a weapons factory without obliterating the neighborhood next door.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Now, of course, there are blurred gray lines there, but that's the ambition. This is the core of American bombing strategy through the early years of the war.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  This is in stark contrast to the strategy of their allies in Britain and enemies in Germany. Their air strategies were almost the opposite to bomb the morale of the enemy.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  To bomb their cities into submission. Carpet bombing, you could call it.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Destroy everything in order to destroy something.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Including civilians.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Include especially civilians. Because if you bomb the morale of a population, then you will force those civilians to go to their political leaders and say, "Stop this war." That's the theory behind it.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  I mean, you think of a Hamburg, you think of a Dresden, the firebombing of these places. You think of the destruction of London during the blitz of Coventry, of Hull, of Grimsby, of Plymouth. I mean, they are destroying each city systematically, one by one by one, in order to destroy the will of those publics. The face of London changed. Historic landmarks disappeared.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Night after night, London was left a sea of fire.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Britain's Winston Churchill tried to convince the US to follow suit, telling them they needed to go big to win the war. That-

• 18:10Speaker 03

  In order to destroy something, you have to destroy everything.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  And by the end of the war, the US gave in.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  And so you have this twist, this turn, towards area bombing, carpet bombing, which you see in places like Tokyo.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Super thoughts on Saipan. A task force of B-29s. Their noses point towards Japan. Their shining bellies are filled with bombs for Tokyo.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  A hundred and eighty thousand dead in one night with the firebombing of Tokyo.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  The Nakajima aircraft plant is the main target.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  The irony of this shift in strategy is that when the US decided that it needed to destroy something in order to destroy everything, like the firebombing of Tokyo-

• 18:57Speaker 03

  To create maximum destruction.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  They used the technology invented to do the exact opposite, the Norden Bomb Site.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  And so this precision technology, with its moral and ethical intentions behind it, was turned to unintended extremes. You know, when it comes down to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what bomb site are they using to make sure that the bombs are dropped in the place they want to? Well, it's the Norden Bomb Site.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  It's finally released exactly at the designated hour. And the explosion occurred as planned.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  It's madness. Why are you thinking about precision when it comes to nuclear bombs? Well, for maximum impact. To make sure that these expensive weapons are successful in their first test on an enemy target.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  The original intentions behind the creation of precision bombing was to save lives. But people discovered as precisely as these weapons could save lives, they could take them.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, some of the most heinous things in the history of humanity have happened with the best intentions.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  When we come back, precision gets an upgrade.

• 20:31Speaker 05

  Hi, this is Margaret from San Francisco, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  This message comes from iXL. The first few weeks back at school set the tone for the rest of the year. iXL is designed to help kids build confidence and get up to speed fast. Covering pre-K through 12th grade, iXL offers personalized, interactive practice in math, language arts, and science. One subscription covers everything for all the kids in your home. Receive an exclusive 20% discount on an iXL membership at ixl.com/npr.

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  This message comes from Granger. This is the story of the one. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Granger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Granger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs. And next-day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com. Or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  This message comes from Abrams Books. Don't scramble for a knockout gift this holiday season. Give them the brand new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, Fight or Flight, available wherever books are sold.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Part Two: White Flags.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  After World War II, the United States military continued to experiment with both precision bombing and with pilotless spy planes. In every war, they tried something new, but it wouldn't be until the Vietnam War that they started to find some success with the drone.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  When you think of Vietnam, you don't really think of precision, do you? There's not much precision in napalm, and there's not much precision in these vast, conscripted

• 22:48Speaker 05

  wars in which thousands of US troops are sent into this battle. I can't say that I'm scared stiff, but I'm scared. I mean, after a while, you know it's gonna come, and you can't do nothing about it. And you just look to God. It's about the only thing you can do.

• 23:06Speaker 05

  There's one side where precision missiles continue to be developed, and there's another side where drones continue to be tentatively developed. Some of the most remarkable contributions to aerial reconnaissance during the Vietnam War came from an unusual assortment of remotely piloted vehicles.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  And those remotely piloted vehicles, those drones flying high above the thick rainforest canopies of Vietnam, became known as... The Lightning Bug.

• 23:32Speaker 05

  The Ryan Firebee drone, otherwise known as the Lightning Bug.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  The Lightning Bug was a small aircraft. So small that it would be attached to a much larger one. And once that was in the sky, the Lightning Bug would be deployed and split off from it.

• 23:55Speaker 06

  They were used to take pictures over enemy territory. And then the drones would swing back around and they would crash land almost.

• 24:06Speaker 05

  At a designated location in time, the drone shut off its engine and deployed a parachute system.

• 24:12Speaker 06

  And then they would be picked up by intelligence corps. And then that film would be taken back to US bases and it'd be processed and pieced together. And then you would try and create a picture of where the enemy were. They were also used, quite interestingly, as almost wingmen to crewed aircraft, to bombers going in. They would fly off the wing of them to draw enemy fire. They would be like a deflective shield for aircraft. It would look like more aircraft were coming in. And so it would hopefully protect the central aircraft going in and fulfilling its mission. They were disposable in the air in order to try and reduce the risk to American pilots' lives.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  The US military believed the Lightning Bug drones saved American lives. And so they called it a success. The only problem was, initially, the Lightning Bugs had a short lifespan.

• 25:10Speaker 06

  They weren't particularly reliable. They would crash an awful lot and you would just lose drones. And that's why, you know, well over a thousand of them were used during Vietnam. Because they just churned them out almost disposable to try and use them for those intelligence and surveillance gathering uses.

• 25:31Speaker 05

  While more than 200 drones were ultimately shot down, their use prevented the loss of at least that many reconnaissance crews. And undoubtedly many more.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  During the Vietnam War, thousands of American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese people died.

• 26:14Speaker 06

  The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  It was a bloody and brutal conflict fought by a large number of drafted soldiers, meaning they had no choice but to go fight. And this meant many, many Americans had a loved one in Vietnam. The longer the war went on, the more people in the United States took to the streets to protest against it.

• 26:42Speaker 06

  Some 175,000 people from all walks of life, with differing ideologies and purposes, marched from the White House to the Capitol.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Once again, like in World War I, there was public pressure on politicians and the military to end the war and bring American soldiers home. And the impacts of this protest movement would be felt in American politics for decades to come.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Five months ago, Saddam Hussein started this cruel war against Kuwait. Tonight, the battle has been joined.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  In 1991, the United States went to war against Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. For the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, there was no draft. The US military was all volunteer. And from the beginning, the American military was focused on keeping their own casualties as low as possible. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the tiny country that is a primary source of oil for much of the Western world. Saddam Hussein chooses to invade Kuwait because he wants to have the financial gain of the vast oil reserves in Kuwait. And so he goes into Kuwait thinking...

• 28:09Speaker 01

  That America will not send in vast amounts of troops onto the ground to stop his military. They won't repeat the mistakes of Vietnam. He says that America is not the type of country that can take 10,000 casualties in one battle. In some ways Saddam Hussein was right. What he does not realise, however, is that there has been vast advancements in technologies in the US, vast advancements in microcomputing, in the ability to achieve precision strike, in aircraft, in everything that you need to win a new, super-fast, high-tech war.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  By 1991, the US military had an assortment of new technologies to conduct precision war: laser-guided missiles, stealth aircraft, and better drones. Pilotless planes could fly higher, go farther than they ever had before, and had advanced computer software on board, and they were ready to use them. And it's at this point the drone becomes an incredibly useful surveillance and target acquisition tool. So it is able to then fly back and to tell US targeters where Saddam's troops are, and then they can send in the ever-more-advanced cruise missiles, and they can send in the

• 29:33Speaker 01

  precision bombing and the US Air Force aircraft in to go and bomb those troops. And the US dropped a lot of bombs, over 88,000 tonnes on Iraqi military and civilian infrastructure, killing thousands of people.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  It's here that you start to hear stories come.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  That when Saddam's troops saw drones flying high above them, they knew that it meant certain death and certain destruction was coming. And so they tried to surrender to the drones in the sky. The live video feedback showed five Iraqi soldiers waving white flags as they surrendered to the drone. It's the first time in the history of warfare that you had a human try and surrender to a robot. During Operation Desert Storm, precision weapons seemed to do their job.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  The war only lasted about a month. There was no massive protest movement like Vietnam. And the US military lost 143 soldiers, a relatively low number. And then something happened that would totally change the game. You start to see this coupling of the lethal targeting and the utility of the drone itself, and this continues. Now drones became armed with missiles. The angel in the sky watching out for soldiers had now become the angel of death.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  The Air Force's Predator system, its unmanned reconnaissance and strike plane, hunts enemies covertly from the sky, attacks on commands received by satellite, and removes enemy leadership with precise geographic target information.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  And so you have the merging of the drone and the precision missile into one integrated system.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  But it's good enough if we see a truck or an HVT, a high-value target that we need to prosecute immediately, that we would be able to at least scare them a lot. It's a precision asset and it's very, very accurate.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  With this new weapon, some in the US military believed they'd fulfilled the promise of the Kettering Bug, the Norden Bomb Site, and the Lightning Bug. It was the culmination of generations of research and development. And it suddenly gave the US High Command a godlike ability to stalk enemies and kill them at a moment's notice.

• 32:24Speaker 07

  You do definitely get the sense that you are sort of a guardian angel. You're like an eye in the sky for them. You're sort of their third eye, if you will.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  When we come back, the drone wars begin.

• 32:58Speaker 07

  Hi, my name is Lindsay. I'm calling from unseated Duwamish Territoria, and you are listening to Throughline from NPR. I love the show. I've been binging all of the episodes for probably two weeks now. The ones that I think I'm not going to be that interested in are always the ones that I end up being the most interested in and learning the most from. So, thank you for all the work and labor and knowledge that you put out there. Bye.

• 33:36Speaker 05

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  This message comes from iXL. The first few weeks back at school set the tone for the rest of the year. iXL is designed to help kids build confidence and get up to speed fast. Covering pre-K through 12th grade, iXL offers personalized, interactive practice in math, language arts, and science. One subscription covers everything for all the kids in your home. Receive an exclusive 20% discount on an iXL membership at ixl.com/npr.

• 34:09Speaker 05

  This message comes from Granger. This is the story of the one. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Granger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Granger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs. And next-day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  This message comes from Abrams Books. Don't scramble for a knockout gift this holiday season. Give them the brand new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, Fight or Flight, available wherever books are sold.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  Part Three: Death from Above.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  For the angel of death spread his wings on the blast and breathed in the face of the foe as he passed. And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  And their hearts but once heaved and forever grew still.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Lord Byron.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  On October 7, 2001, a plane glided in the sky over the city of Kandahar, Afghanistan.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  It looked down on Earth like a giant hawk circling its prey.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  But there was nothing alive inside it, no pilot. This was an MQ-1A Predator drone, controlled by operators thousands of miles away. It was a 27-foot war machine carrying Hellfire missiles, and it was looking for a target.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  It flew so high that it would have been virtually undetectable by anyone looking up at the night sky.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Almost one month had passed since the US was attacked on 9/11 by al-Qaeda, a terrorist group based in Afghanistan. The Taliban, the rulers of Afghanistan, were harboring al-Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, and it appeared they were in the crosshairs of the US military. But on the ground, on October 7th, the stillness of a Kandahar fall night would tell you nothing of the things that were to come.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Yet.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  The target for the Predator drone was a man named Mullah Omar. He was the leader of the Taliban government. The US military thought, maybe if we take him out, the Taliban will fall apart. This was it. This is what the drone was built to do: use precision bombing to take out the leader of the enemy, and use limited numbers of special forces fighters and their allies to avoid a costly, full-scale invasion, saving thousands of American lives.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Mullah Omar sat in a building with no idea that a Predator drone was above him, watching and waiting for the command to fire. US military and intelligence staff were keeping tabs on him through a satellite feed from thousands of miles away. But what they were seeing wasn't some crystal-clear image of the ground, nothing even close to that. Back at that point, it's like viewing the world through a kind of grainy straw, I guess. You're looking through a straw at a small...

• 38:40Speaker 04

  Small part of that country focused in on what these people are doing, but you can't really tell. They're kind of just filling in the gaps.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Even with this fill-in-the-gaps type of information, the US military personnel still had to make a call. They had to decide where the drone should shoot its missile.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  They take the strike.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  But they end up blowing up a truck near to his compound, sends loads of smoke into the sky, loads of dust into the sky, and Mullah Omar escapes.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  Just think of the implications for that. What different war would we have had if a drone had taken out the head of the Taliban on the first day of the war in Afghanistan?

• 39:51Speaker 02

  The Predator drone strike missed its mark. Mullah Omar would live, and the US ground invasion of Afghanistan would follow. But this wasn't seen as just a failure. No, in fact, the drone program continued. So this tells us that many of the military personnel in that room, the officers, drone operators, and intelligence experts must have on some level realized that they just witnessed the beginning of a new era in warfare.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  You know, I've spoken to a few of those who were in the room on that first strike.

• 40:26Speaker 04

  And they were in the room thousands of kilometers away, watching the video feed. This is that first case of remote warfare. And you can't escape feeling that that is a fundamental revolutionary change in warfare.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  It's that achievement of that longstanding US Air Force ambition that goes back to US air power thinkers all the way back in 1917. After that first failed strike against Mullah Omar, the Predator drone, the great technological breakthrough, would be used over and over by the CIA and US military under President George W. Bush. We can talk to about 50-plus drone strikes during the Bush administration. There are some who feel like that if they attack us, that we may decide to leave prematurely.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  They don't understand what they're talking about if that's the case. Let me finish. There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  In 2003, the US invaded and occupied another country, Iraq. And as that war intensified, drones were used there too. And they continued to get more advanced.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  So the technology improves, of course. That is the nature of humanity. We improve technologies over time. We are ever more high-tech.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Drone communications got more reliable. The aircraft could fly longer and faster. And with every year, their impact on the war increased.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Here's the key thing about a drone, I guess. If you have a piloted aircraft within a conflict, you have to send it from a base to fly over. It can take maybe 10 minutes to get there. It then has to fly, hit the target, turn around, and go back. And it cannot linger, because the longer it lingers, the more it is at risk of being shot down. With a drone, it flies high in the sky, almost

• 42:40Speaker 03

  unseen and it just loiter's it can sit there above troops above a key area where you know the Taliban are operating and it can just wait until a target presents itself

• 43:04Speaker 03

  like an eagle hovering over its prey looking for a field mouse on the ground and then when it sees it it can swoop in and it can strike and that's what a drone can do if you want to kill in war and you believe that that war is something that increases your national security then you want to be effective as possible and so the drone is an effective way to kill in that regard

• 43:30Speaker 02

  we've lost thousands of American lives spent nearly a trillion dollars alienated allies neglected emerging threats all in the cause of fighting a war for well over five years in a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the nine eleven attacks when President Obama campaigned for office in two thousand eight the US was embroiled in two wars both very messy that had caused the death of thousands of US soldiers and thousands more Afghan and Iraqi civilians

• 44:03Speaker 03

  public support invariably faded as the body bags started to come home as the improvised explosive device the IED started to make it so that you couldn't have troops on the ground the infantry personnel couldn't trust the ground they were walking on well it was at this point that President Obama was as elected of course he made a promise to the American people he would withdraw them from the bad war in Iraq and he would win the good war in Afghanistan but over time he would reduce that risk to American military lives and he would make it so there would be less of a human footprint an American military human footprint on the ground because we no longer had the appetite for the war on terror

• 44:47Speaker 03

  as a candidate for president I pledge to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible

• 44:55Speaker 05

  For the sake of our national security and to strengthen American leadership around the world. But that leaves you with a dilemma, right? How do you continue to take on the global threats of terrorism but without deploying your troops on the ground? Well, here is where the drone is a panacea, because it allows you to deploy force thousands of miles away with a minimal footprint. And this, of course, in turn, reduces the risk of the threat to life to American military personnel. But if you have a reduction of the amount of troops, or at least you're trying to reduce the amount of troops, then you want to fill that gap.

• 45:34Speaker 05

  And that gap for Obama, who becomes known as the drone president, is filled by the drone. And under the Obama administration, there is a real change in strategy. It starts off with what we call signature strikes. Now, signature strikes are based upon a predefined terrorist signature. And that signature can be based upon the gender of a target, and it could be based on how you define a terrorist, right? So, for example, they could be males of fighting age in regions where the Taliban are known to operate. What do you think the fighting age is?

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Fifteen? Sixteen?

• 46:24Speaker 05

  Fourteen years old and above is what we're talking about him. And again, it's hard to tell an age through the grainy image of a drone. And that, it's argued, leads to a confirmation bias. You think you're seeing a terrorist conducting terrorist activity, and so... You take the strike because it fills out all of your tick boxes. And so you've had vast amounts of mistakes that happen as a result of signature strikes.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  The aftermath of a drone strike in Pakistan's southwest Zoroastan region in 2008. Amongst the victims were numerous civilians. I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey. And for a short period of time, the mental tension and fear eases.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  In Yemen's rugged and barren countryside, people live in constant fear. Fear of what they call the killer planes or drones.

• 47:31Speaker 05

  Eighteen male labourers, including at least one young boy, fourteen-year-old Saleh Khan, were killed by a US drone. As the drone war spread around the world to Somalia and to Yemen, to those places that we don't really talk about because we don't know so much about the drone wars there, but you do have weddings being hit with Hellfire missiles from drones or funerals being hit.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  It was an astonishing bulletin today. Another public enemy taken out by the United States. The al-Qaeda leader called the most dangerous man in the world, the American citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki.

• 48:08Speaker 05

  A lot of these strikes come with the Commander in Chief's seal of approval.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  The Justice Department has acknowledged that four American citizens had been killed in drone strikes. Today, the president said only one of them was specifically targeted. New Mexico-born Anwar Al-Awlaki, a top al-Qaeda leader in Yemen.

• 48:26Speaker 05

  If you're killing a US citizen, that's going to come straight from the Commander in Chief.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Mr Obama has deployed drones more aggressively than President Bush. For that, the president offered no apology.

• 48:38Speaker 05

  When was the last time in the history of American warfare, the Commander in Chief was directing strikes on the battlefield?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Decisions that we are making now will define the type of nation and world that we leave to our children.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  The Obama administration says it has killed more than 2,300 enemy combatants by counterterrorism strikes, but it acknowledged the harsh reality that the once-secret drone program may have been involved in anywhere from 64 to 116 civilian deaths since 2009 in areas outside active war zones.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Despite all of the controversies surrounding the use of predator drones, at a White House press center, President Obama still found a way to make a joke about it. The Jonas Brothers are here. They're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but, boys, don't get any ideas. I have two words for you: Predator drones. You will never see it coming. You think I'm joking? Some estimate that during the Obama administration, there were almost 1,900 drone strikes.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  The total number of civilian casualties during the Obama drone wars has never been definitively recorded, mostly because we're depending on news reports and NGOs. The US government is resistant to providing that information, and often count anyone who is of fighting age as a combatant, whether or not they were carrying a weapon. The range for civilian casualties from US drone strikes are in the hundreds to a couple thousand. In a leaked Defense Department document provided by a whistleblower to the news outlet The Intercept, it was reported that between 2012 and 2013, quote, "US Special Operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Of those, only 35 were the intended targets." Well, thank you very much, and good afternoon. As president, my highest and most solemn duty is the defense of our nation and its citizens. Last night...

• 50:59Speaker 06

  At my direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless precision strike that killed the number one terrorist anywhere in the world, Qasem Soleimani.

• 51:13Speaker 05

  You look back to January 2020 and you look back to President Trump's drone strike on General Qasem Soleimani, who is a state representative of the Iranian state, one of the most high-profile and high-ranking military commanders of the Iranian state. That drone killed a state representative in a third-party country in Iraq without that country's permission. So the drone violated the sovereignty of Iraq.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Qasem Soleimani was an Iranian military commander who'd been directing lethal attacks in Iraq for years. The US had long blamed him for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and allies there.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  The precedent that is set here is that it is okay to kill representatives of a nation-state by lethal drone strike in nations of a third party without their approval. What does that mean for the future of drone warfare? As a lot of hostile nations around the world are getting armed drones, will they start using them against representatives of the West when they're in Yemen or in Iraq? The US founds the United Nations along with the victorious allies after the Second World War. It's meant to be an upholder of international law. If we get to a point where the US is undermining the laws that it created itself, then how

• 52:42Speaker 05

  do we expect anyone else to abide by those international laws when it comes to drones?

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Those international laws say that drones must only be used to target combatants and military objectives, and that all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid or minimize civilian harm. But as more and more countries are turning to drones for their warfare, civilian deaths continue to be an inevitable consequence.

• 53:08Speaker 05

  When we look to future war, we need to see that any future conflict is going to have a drone element. And so if you want to know what your country is doing...

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Is doing in your name, then you need to understand drone warfare.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and Ramtin and

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Lawrence Wu.

• 53:42Speaker 07

  Lane Kaplan Levinson.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  Julie Kane.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Victor Ibeiz.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  Anya Steinberg.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  Yolanda Sanguey.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Irene Noguchi. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Thank you to Courtney Theophin, Casey Herman, and Farai Masika for their voiceover work. Also, thanks to Anya Grunman, Tamar Charney, Greg Myrie, Adriana Tapia, and Noranda Matzariakos. Thanks also to Johannes Dergi, Leana Simstrom, Julia Redpath, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Gilli Moon. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvi. Cho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected].

• 54:33Speaker 01

  And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number, too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.

• 54:53Speaker 00

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