The Glade 4.0

The First Anniversary of Hope and Change
By Anthony Gregory
View all 18 articles by Anthony Gregory
Published 01/20/10

First, we look at the first area of policy that helped bring Democrats to power in 2006 and 2008: War and national security.

Foreign Policy

Obama said America would finally, quickly and safely withdraw from Iraq, and even pay for domestic needs with the savings. But it became clear by his February speech at Camp Lejeune that his approach would be more or less what we would have expected from a third Bush term -- following the approximate benchmarks of the Status of Forces Agreement that Bush himself had acceded to in late 2008. Meanwhile, Obama gave no mention of the Vatican-sized embassy, its force protection, military contractors, troops charged with training the Iraqi military or what "non-combat" troops was really supposed to mean. All of this means the U.S. could indeed remain there longer than Bush had promised, and could lead to another escalation in that theater of war. Over a hundred thousand U.S. troops remain in Iraq. One hundred forty five have died there since Obama took office.

In Afghanistan, the situation has been far worse than we could have probably expected under another year of Bush. This is all because, tragically, Obama has kept his promise: He announced in November the deployment of about 30,000 additional troops, bringing the total number up to about three times what it was when he took office. 2009 became the worst year for the Afghan people since 2001 -- more depredations of children's rights and the most civilian deaths since the invasion, including in air strikes that are ripe with scandal and can only contribute to the terrorist threat. As commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Obama picked General Stanley McChrystal, who became the target of controversy in the Bush years for the draconian handling of detention centers, the blocking of Red Cross from these prison camps, and for his involvement in covering up the truth about Pat Tillman's death. Needless to say, when McChrystal publicly contradicted the president's assessment of what was needed for victory, he was not fired for insubordination. Obama and the Democrats always criticized Bush and the Republicans for "neglecting" Afghanistan. The Democrats' due diligence has successfully made Afghanistan a far deadlier place than Iraq in the last year. About 300 have died there since Obama took office.

This is all, supposedly, to take down about 100 members of al-Qaeda who live in Afghanistan and to stop a somewhat larger number in Pakistan from destabilizing that country. To stop the enemy in Pakistan, Obama has dramatically escalated drone strikes, launching them more than 40 times, killing far more civilians than militants and displacing as many as two million Pakistanis from the Swat valley in one of the largest refugee crises since Rwanda. Obama assures us we need not actually invade and occupy Pakistan, since it is a U.S. ally, but this policy of "stability" supposedly justifies the entire U.S. project in both nations.

The military excursions -- which the Democrats used to condemn as "unilateralism" when Bush did it -- mount from nation to nation. In his November speech at West Point announcing the escalation in Afghanistan, Obama promised more intervention in Somalia and Yemen. He had already bombed and even with a small force invaded Somalia, and provided about eighty tons of weaponry to Somalia's "government," much of which ends up in the hands of the insurgents. His administration had threatened to invade Eritria in April. In the next month, at least dozens of civilians were killed in Yemen by Obama's cruise missiles, which was soon after cited by the Christmas Day underwear bomber as the inspiration for his attempted act of blowback.

Although his diplomatic tone toward Iran marks an improvement over Bush's belligerence, it is also less coherent, coming from an administration that claims Iran was "caught" with a nuclear facility that Iran itself had announced, well within its rights, to the International Atomic Energy Agency and that was not nuclearized at the time of this supposed revelation. Obama has approved tough sanctions on Iran, a classical act of war by other means, which will only hurt the Iranian people and strengthen the mullahs. While the claims that Iran is intervening in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan against our forces strain credibility, in October, a terrorist associated with Jundallah -- an al-Qaeda-affiliated enemy of the Iranian government that the United States most likely backs covertly -- carried out a suicide attack that killed 31 people.

Obama has also backed stricter sanctions against North Korea, a billion-plus dollars in foreign aid to Mexico so it can crack down on drugs, and $108 billion in loan guarantees to the International Monetary Fund.

This last bit of spending, incidentally, was included in a war supplemental bill passed in June. Aside from the $108 billion for the IMF was an off-budget $106 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq war spending, $660 million in aid for Gaza, $555 million for Israel, $310 million for Egypt, $300 million for Jordan, $420 million for Mexico and $889 million for UN peacekeeping missions. This supplemental bill was requested by the man who said last February:

This budget looks ahead ten years and accounts for spending that was left out under the old rules -- and for the first time, that includes the full cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price.

The president who won the Nobel Peace Prize has pushed through the largest "defense" budgets since World War II, and just requested a total of $708 billion Department of Defense budget for next year.

In some important ways, Obama's general promise to change foreign policy was always in tension with his specific campaign vows. To the extent it has changed, it has almost all changed for the worse -- more intervention, more war, more foreign aid, more bombings. But the trajectory is approximately identical to the way it was under Bush. What else would we expect from the president who put McChrystal in charge of Afghanistan, appointed John Brennan, another Bush adviser closely associated with Bush's "enhanced interrogation" policy, to the post of Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security, and kept Robert Gates as the Defense Secretary upon taking office on a campaign of hope and change?

Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law

Perhaps in the related areas of civil liberties, the rule of law, and such matters, we could expect to have seen more change than with war proper. Well, if we did, we should be rather disappointed by now. In his first week, Obama issued several orders, closing black sites, setting today as the deadline by which Guantánamo will have been closed, and symbolically reining in some excesses of the Bush years. The fifty-one weeks since then have been nothing but an entrenchment, ratification and expansion of Bush's policies.

The first sign that this might be the case happened shortly after Obama sealed his nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate, when he reversed himself on a campaign promise and voted to legalize Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. As president in April, he demonstrated his commitment to this program as his administration fought a lawsuit to inquire into the program, citing not just the "state secrets" doctrine abused by Bush, but going further and invoking "sovereign immunity."

The surveillance state has continued apace. The Transportation Security Administration has been pushing for full-body scans since 2002 and now has an excuse with the government's failure to stop the underwear bomber. Last year we saw a leaked copy of the Department of Homeland Security's now-infamous report on "rightwing extremism" -- alerting law enforcement to keep an eye out for Americans with unpopular political views, a policy that was also embraced by Bush (and many presidents before). Particularly frightening is the proposal of Cass Sunstein, head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, that the government "cognitively infiltrate" online groups to spread disinformation and discredit "conspiracy theories." If the goal is to quash paranoia, they are not doing a good enough job. But one could be forgiven for believing the real goal is to chill dissent. And speaking of Obama administration officials proposing most disconcerting policies, we must not forget that Rahm Emanuel has suggested that Americans on the No-Fly List lose their Second-Amendment rights.

The most worrisome developments under Obama concerning the rule of law revolve around detention policy. Repeatedly, Obama criticized the Bush administration for its "legal black hole" at Guantánamo, and argued that indefinite detention without the benefit of habeas corpus was an affront to time-honored American values. In an early indication of where this administration would take this policy, it stood by the Bush-era designation of "enemy combatants" and fought a ruling by a Bush-appointed federal judge that habeas corpus should extend, in limited capacity, to the Bagram prison camp in Afghanistan.

In May, Obama stood in front of the National Archives -- in front of the Bill of Rights itself -- and engaged in the most impressive example of doublespeak in our time. He spoke well about the principles of the rule of law and how important they are to our country, even as he unveiled a plan to try some detainees in court, try others in front of military commissions and keep some of them imprisoned indefinitely -- a policy of "prolonged detention" that, in a sense, went beyond the Bush policy of executive detention in that it was now asserted to be a part of our legal fabric, not just an ad-hoc executive prerogative. This was akin to Bush's saying he had to destroy the free market to save it, except it was much slicker and actually fooled many people.

When the Democratic Congress refused to finance the closing of Guantánamo, Obama stood by its decision. Now it appears that he intends to bring many of them to a detention facility in Indiana, thus bringing the lawlessness of Guantánamo into our shores. This is an unspeakably unsettling precedent.

Although Obama has been attacked for trying the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, there was a decent chance this would have happened anyway, and many other terrorists have been given civil trial -- Timothy McVeigh, Richard Reid, and even "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui. An irony, once pointed out by Obama, is that the more evidence the government has against a suspect, the more likely they are to get civil procedure, as opposed to a military commission or indefinite detention. But the concern that Mohammed will find a technicality and be released, and the liberals' triumphant posturing that the rule of law is finally being obeyed, must run against the inconvenient fact that Obama's Justice Department says, even if he is acquitted, he will simply be remanded to indefinite detention anyway!

Two other Bush policies savaged by Obama and his civil libertarian supporters were torture and extraordinary renditioning, whereby detainees would be outsourced to foreign regimes for interrogation unbecoming of our own republican system. As for torture, although the policy is officially that the U.S. does not torture -- which was also technically the Bush policy -- abuses at Guantánamo have only gotten worse. Further, Obama flip-flopped on his promise to release the photographs of torture at the hands of U.S. officials, going so far as to push for an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act with the sole purpose of preventing images of torture since 9/11 from going public.

As for renditioning, it will continue in a modified form, with Hillary Clinton's State Department in charge of "oversight." The use of black sites and secret prisons appears to have ended (although it was probably receding long before Obama took office), but the new president's first case of renditioning raises all new concerns. Raymond Azar alleges credibly that he was tortured in all the ways we'd expect from the Bush years -- deprived of sleep, stuck in stress positions for many hours, subjected to extreme temperatures and taunted that he'd never again see his family if he didn't speak. But there's a twist: Azar was not a terrorist, or accused of one, or even alleged to be the least bit dangerous. His supposed crime was knowing about a petty amount of corruption committed by a U.S.-connected military contractor and not coming forward. He is essentially, if anything, a white-collar criminal, and in the hundreds of billions wasted in defense spending over the years, it is bizarre he would be targeted over a meager amount, and downright terrifying that such extralegal processes and abuses were used in the case of a man alleged to be a Muslim version of Martha Stewart.

Obamanomics and Domestic Affairs

Moderate Americans tend to trust Democrats in domestic affairs and Republicans on national security issues. The financial collapse of 2008 played into the hands of Democrats who wanted to use the crisis as an excuse to expand government power and implement the policies they had long wanted -- just as 9/11 was the type of foreign-policy crisis that formed the perfect storm for Republican interventionism.

Indeed, in the domestic arena there has been the most actual change, at least superficially. Most of the debates in the last year have concerned domestic policy. The flavor of central planning we could always expect under Obama is a mixture of center-left Keynesianism, corporate socialism with an egalitarian veneer, and the machine-politics pragmatism of Chicago from whence his career was launched.

But libertarians, limited-government conservatives and anti-corporatist liberals should actually agree on one thing: Obama's economic policy has been a disaster and a betrayal in practically every way.

We could tell there would mostly be continuity when Obama picked Timothy Geithner, who had been intimate in the Bush-Paulson Wall Street bailouts, as his Treasury Secretary. From then to Obama's nomination of Bernanke to serve another term as Fed Chairman, there has been little for anyone wanting actual "change" to celebrate.

First, a note on Obama's style of governance. A product of a tech-savvy and youthful political movement, Obama repeatedly promised transparency, transparency, transparency. He said the deliberations with drug and insurance companies would be on C-SPAN. He said all non-emergency legislation would be online for five days for the public to read before it was voted on. He has broken these promises.

The first bill Obama ever signed, the Lilly Ledbetter "Equal Pay for Equal Work" law, was not put online as promised. Neither was the stimulus bill. And neither have all the health care talks been on C-Span, as he repeatedly promised. It is also difficult to find an excuse for why Obama's website that showed where all the stimulus money was supposed to be creating jobs listed 440 Congressional districts that don't even exist. This is the kind of mistake that is either the product of such brazen hubris, or such incompetence, that it makes even the most cynical opponent of government corruption scratch his head and laugh.

Now, in the case of the stimulus bill, Obama did claim it was an emergency. The cost of inaction was too great to delay action. "[A]t this particular moment, only government can provide the short term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe." He also said, "For every day we wait or point our fingers or drag our feet, more Americans will lose their jobs. More families will lose their savings."

And how did that work out? As USA Today reported just recently:

Even before Barack Obama took the oath of office, his economic advisers projected that without hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending, the U.S. economy could lose another 3 million to 4 million jobs on top of the 3.1 million lost in 2008.

It turns out they were optimistic. Even with the $787 billion stimulus package that Obama signed in February, more than 4 million jobs have been lost in 2009, the worst year for job losses since World War II. The jobless rate that advisers projected would peak at 8% has topped 10%.

Early on, Obama gave us the auto bailouts that Bush probably would have had he continued serving in office, circumventing bankruptcy law, hurting creditors and essentially nationalizing the car industry. Now the Treasury tells us such "loans" are "highly unlikely to be recovered." Related to this of course was the Keynesian and Rooseveltian "Cash for Clunkers" program, an insane subsidy project whereby cars that could have been sold to people who actually could use them were destroyed wholesale in exchange for a voucher to buy a new car. Many of these new cars were foreign imports, even though the program was supposed to boost America's auto industry. But all in all, what the program did was encourage Americans to either buy a car a little earlier or later than they would have anyway. The only tangible result is American taxpayers were ripped off and perfectly good cars were destroyed.

As far as old-fashioned spending goes, Obama is king. Last Spring, Obama unveiled an unfathomable $3.6 trillion budget with a $1.2 trillion deficit. The deficit is now nearly as large as the entire budget was when Bill Clinton took office in 1992. In real dollars, you have to go back to the height of the Vietnam War, and the U.S. was still not spending as much as the U.S. is borrowing today. Talk about scary.

In terms of the general flavor of Obama's domestic policy, it is generally the same welfare-state corporatism we have become all too familiar with. Those progressives who think the president is standing up to corporate interests should read Matt Taibbi to learn all about how Obama has only taken the Wall Street-Washington revolving door and widened it.

There is a new emphasis on regulation and welfarism that we did not get from Bush, but the shift has mainly been rhetorical. The corporatist nature of America's mixed economy can be seen in Obamacare -- where the insurance companies will have a captive market, thanks to the "individual mandate" that candidate Obama claimed he opposed -- as well as in Cap and Trade, which will create a commodity market in the right to pollute (and that's assuming you take the administration at its word that carbon dioxide is a pollutant).
Speaking of health care, the interventionist scope of Obama's bill is deeply unsettling. By forcing people to buy insurance, the government will soon embark on a virtually unprecedented and unconstitutional intrusion into our personal lives. Meanwhile, keeping with the corporatism of the previous president, Obama's FDA has successfully opposed the reimportation of cheap drugs, which Obama once supported, and his Department of Agriculture represents a continuation of the corporate-welfare subsidies and cartelization in farming we've seen over the years.

Overall, there has been a sharp acceleration of intervention at home. There is no doubt. Obama's health-care plan represents a tax increase, which he claimed he would not impose on the middle class. This administration has banned flavored cigarettes, invaded the corporate boardroom, expanded the budget, buffed up the EPA and regulatory agencies, pushed for an "network neutrality" policy that would hand the internet over to the FCC, and on and on.

Bush's Ninth Year?

While many left-liberal partisans continue to cheer on Obama and attempt to hush all dissent, some on the left have become critical of Obama's continuation of Bush's policies. Those who recognize Obama's first year as essentially an extension of the Bush administration still often fall short of recognizing the fundamental issue here: This was practically meant to be. The two parties hand power off to one another, but the essential political realities remain in place. Caroll Quigley, the brilliant historian of the establishment, wrote in Tragedy and Hope:

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.... Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.

And whatever the particular ideological makeup of the Democratic Party supposedly is -- an active federal government, the advancement of human rights worldwide, national prerogative being supreme over the authority of the several states, central economic planning, a charitable, rather than strict, reading of the Constitution -- there was never any reason that this philosophical matrix when combined with the awesome and invariably corrupting power of Washington DC would yield anything other than an approximate continuation and validation of the Bush years, with some essentially cosmetic changes here and there.

The answer to the Obama problem is the same as it was to the Bush problem, the Clinton problem, and the problem with every president who overstepped his bounds, waged unconstitutional wars, denied due process to suspects, violated the Fourth Amendment and spent so much as to make his predecessor look like a piker -- philosophical revolution. Until the American people are swayed by the arguments for sound money, free markets, constrained government, the rule of law and peace in international affairs, they will continue to elect presidents whose distinctions are greatly overshadowed by their similarities with the men they replace. The hope for real change will be dashed, just as it was when Bush embarked on a presidency of unconstitutional terror policies, stimulus, bailouts, and huge expansions of Medicare and other domestic programs. Just as it is now for so many Obama supporters, who have seen their agent of hope and change continue on the path laid out by his predecessor, except with some window dressing and more rhetorical emphasis on social programs and economic regulation.

If the latter superficial considerations are enough to fool those who thought they were rejecting the Bush-McCain platform by pulling the lever for the Democrat in 2008, they just might find themselves reelecting Bush to a fourth term in 2012. If the conservative opponents of Obama do not find a more consistent dedication to liberty and government sharply restrained at both home and abroad, they just might take the White House in 2012, only to find they themselves had just reelected Obama in all ways that matter -- a person with a different name but with most of the disastrous flaws in governing that they find so readily in today's occupant of the Oval Office.


Copyright © 2010 Campaign for Liberty. Permission to reprint in full or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

1) Signed the fair compensation act

2) Signed the reauthorization of the SCHIP children's health insurance program and expanded it to cover 4 million more children.

3)Reversed Bush's limitations on Stem Cell research

4)Signed the Matthew Shephard Hate Crimes Prevention act

5) Reached out to the Muslim world by offering his first interview to an Arab language network.

6) Increasing troop strength in Afghanistan, pulling troops out of Iraq.

7) Worked (and continues to work) towards reducing our stockpile of Nuclear arms

8) Reversed Bush era policies on the environment, CIA black sites, torture, Guantanamo Bay

9) Reversed world opinion of America, increasing our place in the global political landscape by not being such a gorram jackass.

10) Supports allowing Bush's Trillion dollar tax cuts to expire.

11) When he goes abroad, instead of throwing shoes at him, they throw Nobel Peace Prizes.

LOL. To you, perhaps. However, those are clear and substantive changes, and they are frequently ignored by conservatives that desperately want to make the current president just like the one that everyone wound up hating in the face.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported that President Bush directed the US military to cut its stockpile of both deployed and reserve nuclear weapons in half by 2012. The goal was achieved in 2007, a reduction of US nuclear warheads to just over 50 percent of the 2001 total. A further proposal by Bush will bring the total down another 15%

In Obamerica, the Nobel Prize ridicules you!

I'm curious what their criteria are...

Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Forty-Year Drone War
Posted by Nick Turse at 7:50pm, January 24, 2010.
There’s something viral about the wondrous new weaponry an industrial war system churns out. In World War I, for instance, when that system was first gearing up to plan and produce new weapons by the generation, such creations -- poison gas, the early airplane, the tank -- barely hit the battlefield before the enemy had developed countermeasures and was cranking up his own production line to create something similar. And this process has never stopped.

The wonder weapon of our present moment is the missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, now doing our dirty work, an endless series of targeted assassinations, in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands. Such weapons always come with wondrous claims. Here’s a typical one from a recent Wall Street Journal editorial: “Never before in the history of air warfare have we been able to distinguish as well between combatants and civilians as we can with drones.” When it comes to war, beware of any sentence that begins “never before,” and the claims of future breakthroughs or victories that go with them.

It’s easy, of course, for the editorial writers of the Journal to pen such confident sentiments thousands of miles from the war zone. They would undoubtedly feel quite differently if their hometowns and neighborhoods were the targets of such “precise” weaponry, which has nonetheless managed to kill hundreds of civilians.

Drones, of course, do just what they were meant to do, as surely as did poison gas, the airplane, and the tank early in the last century: they kill. That’s indisputable, but the promised “breakthroughs,” whether aimed at destroying enemy fortifications, enemy networks, or the enemy’s will, seldom follow so reliably. And yet once the wonder fades and the overwrought claims with it, the wonder weapons remain in our world -- and (here’s the viral part) they begin to spread.

There is no evidence that the drones are breaking the back of either the Taliban (Afghan or Pakistani) or al-Qaeda in our distant wars, but plenty of evidence that they are helping to destabilize Pakistan and create intense anti-American feelings there. Now, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates indicated on arriving in Pakistan last week, we are thinking of giving the Pakistanis their own unarmed surveillance drones, while from Iran to China, Israel to Russia, powers everywhere are rushing to enter the age of 24/7 robotic assassination along with, or just behind, us. You might think that this would give the Pentagon pause, but a prospective arms race just gets the blood there boiling, and when it comes to Terminator-style war, as Nick Turse indicates below, the U.S. Air Force has plans. Boy, does it ever! Tom

The Drone Surge
Today, Tomorrow, and 2047
By Nick Turse

One moment there was the hum of a motor in the sky above. The next, on a recent morning in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, a missile blasted a home, killing 13 people. Days later, the same increasingly familiar mechanical whine preceded a two-missile salvo that slammed into a compound in Degan village in the tribal North Waziristan district of Pakistan, killing three.

What were once unacknowledged, relatively infrequent targeted killings of suspected militants or terrorists in the Bush years have become commonplace under the Obama administration. And since a devastating December 30th suicide attack by a Jordanian double agent on a CIA forward operating base in Afghanistan, unmanned aerial drones have been hunting humans in the Af-Pak war zone at a record pace. In Pakistan, an “unprecedented number” of strikes -- which have killed armed guerrillas and civilians alike -- have led to more fear, anger, and outrage in the tribal areas, as the CIA, with help from the U.S. Air Force, wages the most public “secret” war of modern times.

In neighboring Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft, for years in short supply and tasked primarily with surveillance missions, have increasingly been used to assassinate suspected militants as part of an aerial surge that has significantly outpaced the highly publicized “surge” of ground forces now underway. And yet, unprecedented as it may be in size and scope, the present ramping up of the drone war is only the opening salvo in a planned 40-year Pentagon surge to create fleets of ultra-advanced, heavily-armed, increasingly autonomous, all-seeing, hypersonic unmanned aerial systems (UAS).

Today’s Surge

Drones are the hot weapons of the moment and the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review -- a soon-to-be-released four-year outline of Department of Defense strategies, capabilities, and priorities to fight current wars and counter future threats -- is already known to reflect this focus. As the Washington Post recently reported, “The pilotless drones used for surveillance and attack missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with the goals of speeding up the purchase of new Reaper drones and expanding Predator and Reaper drone flights through 2013.”

The MQ-1 Predator -- first used in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s -- and its newer, larger, and more deadly cousin, the MQ-9 Reaper, are now firing missiles and dropping bombs at an unprecedented pace. In 2008, there were reportedly between 27 and 36 U.S. drone attacks as part of the CIA’s covert war in Pakistan. In 2009, there were 45 to 53 such strikes. In the first 18 days of January 2010, there had already been 11 of them.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force has instituted a much publicized decrease in piloted air strikes to cut down on civilian casualties as part of Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy. At the same time, however, UAS attacks have increased to record levels.

The Air Force has created an interconnected global command-and-control system to carry out its robot war in Afghanistan (and as Noah Shachtman of Wired’s Danger Room blog has reported, to assist the CIA in its drone strikes in Pakistan as well). Evidence of this can be found at high-tech U.S. bases around the world where drone pilots and other personnel control the planes themselves and the data streaming back from them. These sites include a converted medical warehouse at Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar where the Air Force secretly oversees its on-going drone wars; Kandahar and Jalalabad Air Fields in Afghanistan, where the drones are physically based; the global operations center at Nevada’s Creech Air Base, where the Air Force’s “pilots” fly drones by remote control from thousands of miles away; and -- perhaps most importantly -- at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a 12-square-mile facility in Dayton, Ohio, named after the two local brothers who invented powered flight in 1903. This is where the bills for the current drone surge -- as well as limited numbers of strikes in Yemen and Somalia -- come due and are, quite literally, paid.

In the waning days of December 2009, in fact, the Pentagon cut two sizeable checks to ensure that unmanned operations involving the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper will continue full-speed ahead in 2010. The 703rd Aeronautical Systems Squadron based at Wright-Patterson signed a $38 million contract with defense giant Raytheon for logistics support for the targeting systems of both drones. At the same time, the squadron inked a deal worth $266 million with mega-defense contractor General Atomics, which makes the Predator and Reaper drones, to provide management services, logistics support, repairs, software maintenance, and other functions for both drone programs. Both deals essentially ensure that, in the years ahead, the stunning increase in drone operations will continue.

These contracts, however, are only initial down payments on an enduring drone surge designed to carry U.S. unmanned aerial operations forward, ultimately for decades.

Drone Surge: The Longer View

Back in 2004, the Air Force could put a total of only five drone combat air patrols (CAPs) -- each consisting of four air vehicles -- in the skies over American war zones at any one time. By 2009, that number was 38, a 660% increase according to the Air Force. Similarly, between 2001 and 2008, hours of surveillance coverage for U.S. Central Command, encompassing both the Iraqi and Afghan war zones, as well as Pakistan and Yemen, showed a massive spike of 1,431%.

In the meantime, flight hours have gone through the roof. In 2004, for example, Reapers, just beginning to soar, flew 71 hours in total, according to Air Force documents; in 2006, that number had risen to 3,123 hours; and last year, 25,391 hours. This year, the Air Force projects that the combined flight hours of all its drones -- Predators, Reapers, and unarmed RQ-4 Global Hawks -- will exceed 250,000 hours, about the total number of hours flown by all Air Force drones from 1995-2007. In 2011, the 300,000 hour-a-year barrier is expected to be crossed for the first time, and after that the sky’s the limit.

More flight time will, undoubtedly, mean more killing. According to Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the Washington-based think tank the New America Foundation, in the Bush years, from 2006 into 2009, there were 41 drone strikes in Pakistan which killed 454 militants and civilians. Last year, under the Obama administration, there were 42 strikes that left 453 people dead. A recent report by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, an Islamabad-based independent research organization that tracks security issues, claimed an even larger number, 667 people -- most of them civilians -- killed by U.S. drone strikes last year.

While assisting the CIA’s drone operations in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the Air Force has been increasing its own unmanned aerial hunter-killer missions. In 2007 and 2008, for example, Air Force Predators and Reapers fired missiles during 244 missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, while all the U.S. armed services have pursued unmanned aerial warfare, the Air Force has outpaced each of them.

From 2001, when armed drone operations began, until the spring of 2009, the Air Force fired 703 Hellfire missiles and dropped 132 GBU-12s (500-pound laser-guided bombs) in combat operations. The Army, by comparison, launched just two Hellfire missiles and two smaller GBU-44 Viper Strike munitions in the same time period. The disparity should only grow, since the Army’s drones remain predominantly small surveillance aircraft, while in 2009 the Air Force shifted all outstanding orders for the medium-sized Predator to the even more formidable Reaper, which is not only twice as fast but has 600% more payload capacity, meaning more space for bombs and missiles.

In addition, the more heavily-armed Reapers, which can now loiter over an area for 10 to 14 hours without refueling, will be able to spot and track ever more targets via an increasingly sophisticated video monitoring system. According to Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, the first three “Gorgon Stare pods” -- new wide-area sensors that provide surveillance capabilities over large swathes of territory -- will be installed on Reapers operating in Afghanistan this spring.

A technology not available for the older Predator, Gorgon Stare will allow 10 operators to view 10 video feeds from a single drone at the same time. Back at a distant base, a “pilot” will stare at a tiled screen with a composite picture of the streaming battlefield video, even as field commanders analyze a portion of the digital picture, panning, zooming, and tilting the image to meet their needs.

A more advanced set of “pods,” scheduled to be deployed for the first time this fall, will allow 30 operators to view 30 video images simultaneously. In other words, via video feeds from a single Reaper drone, operators could theoretically track 30 different people heading in 30 directions from a single Afghan compound. The generation of sensors expected to come online in late 2011 promises 65 such feeds, according to Air Force documents, a more than 6,000% increase in effectiveness over the Predator’s video system. The Air Force is, however, already overwhelmed just by drone video currently being sent back from the war zones and, in the years ahead, risks “drowning in data,” according to Deptula.

The 40-Year Plan

When it comes to the drone surge, the years 2011-2013 are just the near horizon. While, like the Army, the Navy is working on its own future drone warfare capacity -- in the air as well as on and even under the water -- the Air Force is involved in striking levels of futuristic planning for robotic war. It envisions a future previously imagined only in sci-fi movies like the Terminator series.

As a start, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue skies research outfit, is already looking into radically improving on Gorgon Stare with an “Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Infrared (ARGUS-IR) System.” In the obtuse language of military research and development, it will, according to DARPA, provide a “real-time, high-resolution, wide area video persistent surveillance capability that allows joint forces to keep critical areas of interest under constant surveillance with a high degree of target location accuracy” via as many as “130 ‘Predator-like’ steerable video streams to enable real-time tracking and monitoring and enhanced situational awareness during evening hours.”

In translation, that means the Air Force will quite literally be flooded with video information from future battlefields; and every “advance” of this sort means bulking up the global network of facilities, systems, and personnel capable of receiving, monitoring, and interpreting the data streaming in from distant digital eyes. All of it, of course, is specifically geared toward “target location,” that is, pin-pointing people on one side of the world so that Americans on the other side can watch, track, and in many cases, kill them.

In addition to enhanced sensors and systems like ARGUS-IR, the Air Force has a long-term vision for drone warfare that is barely beginning to be realized. Predators and Reapers have already been joined in Afghanistan by a newer, formerly secret drone, a “low observable unmanned aircraft system” first spotted in 2007 and dubbed the “Beast of Kandahar” before observers were sure what it actually was. It is now known to be a Lockheed Martin-manufactured unmanned aerial vehicle, the RQ-170 -- a drone which the Air Force blandly notes was designed to “directly support combatant commander needs for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to locate targets.” According to military sources, the sleek, stealthy surveillance craft has been designated to replace the antique Lockheed U-2 spy plane, which has been in use since the 1950s.

In the coming years, the RQ-170 is slated to be joined in the skies of America’s “next wars” by a fleet of drones with ever newer, more sophisticated capabilities and destructive powers. Looking into the post-2011 future, Deptula sees the most essential need, according to an Aviation Week report, as “long-range [reconnaissance and] precision strike” -- that is, more eyes in far off skies and more lethality. He added, “We cannot move into a future without a platform that allows [us] to project power long distances and to meet advanced threats in a fashion that gives us an advantage that no other nation has.”

This means bigger, badder, faster drones -- armed to the teeth -- with sensor systems to monitor wide swathes of territory and the ability to loiter overhead for days on end waiting for human targets to appear and, in due course, be vaporized by high-powered munitions. It’s a future built upon advanced technologies designed to make targeted killings -- remote-controlled assassinations -- ever more effortless.

Over the horizon and deep into what was, until recently, only a silver-screen fantasy, the Air Force envisions a wide array of unmanned aircraft, from tiny insect-like robots to enormous “tanker size” pilotless planes. Each will be slated to take over specific war-making functions (or so Air Force dreamers imagine). Those nano-sized drones, for instance, are set to specialize in indoor reconnaissance -- they’re small enough to fly through windows or down ventilation shafts -- and carry out lethal attacks, undertake computer-disabling cyber-attacks, and swarm, as would a group of angry bees, of their own volition. Slightly larger micro-sized Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems (STUAS) are supposed to act as “transformers” -- altering their form to allow for flying, crawling and non-visual sensing capabilities. They might fill sentry, counter-drone, surveillance, and lethal attack roles.

Additionally, the Air Force envisions small and medium “fighter sized” drones with lethal combat capabilities that would put the current UAS air fleet to shame. Today’s medium-sized Reapers are set to be replaced by next generation MQ-Ma drones that will be “networked, capable of partial autonomy, all-weather and modular with capabilities supporting electronic warfare (EW), CAS [close air support], strike and multi-INT [multiple intelligence] ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] missions’ platform.”

The language may not be elegant, much less comprehensible, but if these future fighter aircraft actually come online they will not only send today’s remaining Top Gun pilots to the showers, but may even sideline tomorrow’s drone human operators, who, if all goes as planned, will have ever fewer duties. Unlike today’s drones which must take off and land with human guidance, the MQ-Ma’s will be automated and drone operators will simply be there to monitor the aircraft.

Next up will be the MQ-Mb, theoretically capable of taking over even more roles once assigned to traditional fighter-bombers and spy planes, including the suppression of enemy air defenses, bombing and strafing of ground targets, and surveillance missions. These will also be designed to fly more autonomously and be better linked-in to other drone “platforms” for cooperative missions involving many aircraft under the command of a single “pilot.” Imagine, for instance, one operator overseeing a single command drone that holds sway over a small squadron of autonomous drones carrying out a coordinated air attack on clusters of people in some far off land, incinerating them in small groups across a village, town or city.

Finally, perhaps 30 to 40 years from now, the MQ-Mc drone would incorporate all of the advances of the MQ-M line, while being capable of everything from dog-fighting to missile defense. With such new technology will, of course, come new policies and new doctrines. In the years ahead, the Air Force intends to make drone-related policy decisions on everything from treaty obligations to automatic target engagement -- robotic killing without a human in the loop. The latter extremely controversial development is already envisioned as a possible post-2025 reality.

2047: What’s Old is New Again

The year 2047 is the target date for the Air Force’s Holy Grail, the capstone for its long-term plan to turn the skies over to war-fighting drones. In 2047, the Air Force intends to rule the skies with MQ-Mc drones and “special” super-fast, hypersonic drones for which neither viable technology nor any enemies with any comparable programs or capabilities yet exist. Despite this, the Air Force is intent on making these super-fast hunter-killer systems a reality by 2047. “Propulsion technology and materials that can withstand the extreme heat will likely take 20 years to develop. This technology will be the next generation air game-changer. Therefore the prioritization of the funding for the specific technology development should not wait until the emergence of a critical COCOM [combatant command] need,” says the Air Force’s 2009-2047 UAS “Flight Plan.”

If anything close to the Air Force’s dreams comes to fruition, the “game” will indeed be radically changed. By 2047, there’s no telling how many drones will be circling over how many heads in how many places across the planet. There’s no telling how many millions or billions of flight hours will have been flown, or how many people, in how many countries will have been killed by remote-controlled, bomb-dropping, missile-firing, judge-jury-and-executioner drone systems.

There’s only one given. If the U.S. still exists in its present form, is still solvent, and still has a functioning Pentagon of the present sort, a new plan will already be well underway to create the war-making technologies of 2087. By then, in ever more places, people will be living with the sort of drone war that now worries only those in places like Degan village. Ever more people will know that unmanned aerial systems packed with missiles and bombs are loitering in their skies. By then, there undoubtedly won’t even be that lawnmower-engine sound indicating that a missile may soon plow into your neighbor’s home.

For the Air Force, such a prospect is the stuff of dreams, a bright future for unmanned, hypersonic lethality; for the rest of the planet, it's a potential nightmare from which there may be no waking.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His website is NickTurse.com.

Copyright 2010 Nick Turse

Obama wants record $708 billion for wars next year

Wall Street Journal
January 27, 2010
Pg. 7
U.S. Resists Limits On War Tribunals
The Obama administration asked a military appeals court to uphold the convictions of Osama bin Laden's former driver and his videographer, echoing Bush administration assertions of broad government power to use military tribunals for offenses not traditionally recognized as war crimes.
The arguments came at separate hearings Tuesday in the cases of the driver, Salim Hamdan, and videographer Ali al-Bahlul, who are the only two detainees from the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be tried and convicted by a military commission. Military convictions are automatically appealed.
Recalling positions asserted by the administration of former President George W. Bush, prosecution lawyers Tuesday argued that military commissions, like combat operations, should be considered part of the government's war power to subdue the enemy.
Attorneys for the two men contended before the Court of Military Commission Review that neither man's work for the al Qaeda leader could be considered a war crime. The cases should have been tried in a civilian federal court, defense attorneys argued. Both men are Yemenis who were captured after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
—Jess Bravin