{"id":95848,"date":"2017-07-24T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2017-07-24T11:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=95848"},"modified":"2017-07-22T19:40:36","modified_gmt":"2017-07-22T18:40:36","slug":"dont-believe-the-dangerous-myths-of-drone-warrior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/07\/dont-believe-the-dangerous-myths-of-drone-warrior\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Believe the Dangerous Myths of ‘Drone Warrior’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

An unmanned U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan on Jan. 31, 2010.
(Kirsty Wigglesworth \/ Associated Press)<\/p><\/div>\n

16 Jul 2017 – <\/em>Drone pilots have been quitting the U.S. Air Force in record numbers<\/a> in recent years \u2014 faster than new recruits can be selected and trained. They cite a combination of low-class status in the military, overwork and psychological trauma.<\/p>\n

But a widely publicized new memoir about America\u2019s covert drone war fails to mention the \u201coutflow increases,\u201d as one internal Air Force memo<\/a> calls it. \u201cDrone Warrior: An Elite Soldier\u2019s Inside Account of the Hunt for America\u2019s Most Dangerous Enemies\u201d chronicles the nearly 10 years that Brett Velicovich, a former special operations member, spent using drones to help special forces find and track terrorists. Conveniently, it also puts a hard sell on a program whose ranks the military is struggling to keep full.<\/p>\n

Velicovich wrote the memoir \u2014 about his time \u201chunting and watching in the cesspools of the Middle East\u201d \u2014 to show how drones \u201csave lives and empower humanity, contrary to much of the persistent narrative that casts them in a negative light.\u201d Instead, the book is, at best, a tale of hyper-masculine bravado and, at worst, a piece of military propaganda designed to ease doubts about the drone program and increase recruitment.<\/p>\n

There is something particularly unseemly about Hollywood\u2019s enthusiasm for bringing Velicovich\u2019s version of drone warfare to the big screen. <\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Velicovich and the book\u2019s co-author, Christopher S. Stewart, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, reinforce the myth that drones are machines of omniscience and precision. Velicovich exaggerates the accuracy of the technology, neglecting to mention how often it fails or that such failures<\/a> have killed an untold number of civilians. For instance, the CIA killed 76 children and 29 adults<\/a> in its attempts to take out Ayman al Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda<\/a>, who reportedly is still alive.<\/p>\n

And yet, \u201cI have no doubt that we could find anyone in the world,\u201d Velicovich writes, \u201cno matter how hidden they are.\u201d One might ask Velicovich to explain the deaths of Warren Weinstein<\/a>, an American citizen, and Giovanni Lo Porto<\/a>, an Italian citizen \u2014 both aid workers who were killed by an American drone strike that was targeting Al Qaeda members in Pakistan.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe believed that this was an Al Qaeda compound,\u201d President Obama announced three months after the strike, \u201cthat no civilians were present.\u201d Indeed, the Air Force had clocked hundreds of hours<\/a> of drone surveillance of the building. It had used thermal-imaging cameras, which are supposed to identify a person\u2019s presence by his or her body heat when the line of sight is obstructed. Nevertheless, the surveillance somehow failed to notice two additional bodies \u2014 Weinstein and La Porto \u2014 who were being held hostage in the basement.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the aid workers went unnoticed because, according to a forthcoming report on the limitations of drone technology co-authored by Pratap Chatterjee<\/a>, the executive director of the watchdog group CorpWatch, and Christian Stork, thermal-imaging cameras \u201ccannot see through trees and a well-placed blanket that dissipates body heat can also throw them off,\u201d nor can they \u201csee into basements or underground bunkers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even more insidious are the memoir\u2019s attempts to co-opt the psychological torment of drone operators and intelligence analysts and turn it into a narrative of valor and stoicism. \u201cI fought to keep my eyes open,\u201d Velicovich writes of working while sleep-deprived. \u201cEvery hour wasted was another hour the enemy had to plan, another hour it had to kill.\u201d<\/p>\n

Compare that portrayal with the reality as described by Col. Jason Brown, commander of the 480th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing. \u201cOur suicide and suicidal ideation rates were way higher than the Air Force average,\u201d Brown told the Washington Post<\/a> earlier this month, explaining why full-time psychiatrists and mental-health counselors have been introduced into the drone program. \u201cThey were even higher than for those who had deployed.\u201d Suicide rates have fallen as a result of the mental-health teams, Brown said. The work itself hasn\u2019t changed.<\/p>\n

The film rights to \u201cDrone Warrior\u201d were bought<\/a> over a year ago, with much fanfare, by Paramount Pictures. (The studio also optioned the life rights to Velicovich\u2019s story.) In the acknowledgments section of the memoir, Velicovich mentions that the forthcoming movie will be directed and produced by Michael Bay<\/a>, the filmmaker behind \u201cTransformers,\u201d \u201cPearl Harbor\u201d and \u201cArmageddon.\u201d<\/p>\n

This development is predictable. The U.S. military and Hollywood<\/a> have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Filmmakers often gain access to locations, personnel, information and equipment that lend their productions \u201cauthenticity.\u201d In return, the military often gets some measure of control over how it\u2019s depicted.<\/p>\n

Pentagon officials and CIA staff are known to have advised and shared classified documents with the filmmakers behind \u201cZero Dark Thirty,\u201d the Oscar-nominated movie that misrepresented<\/a> the CIA\u2019s controversial torture and rendition program as having been instrumental in locating Osama bin Laden. The CIA also has been linked<\/a> to the production of \u201cArgo,\u201d Ben Affleck\u2019s Oscar-winning depiction of how that agency rescued American hostages in Iran.<\/p>\n

But there is something particularly unseemly about Hollywood\u2019s enthusiasm for bringing Velicovich\u2019s version of drone warfare to the big screen. In \u201cDrone Warrior,\u201d the American military may have a powerful platform for portraying its program as effective and its operators as heroic \u2014 instead of overworked and distressed. We have to wonder if Velicovich was approached by the U.S. military to write his memoir. It certainly could help with their attrition problem.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

Alex Edney-Browne (@alexEdneybrowne<\/a>) is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, where she is researching the psycho-social effects of drone warfare on Afghan civilians and veterans of the U.S. Air Force\u2019s drone program. <\/em><\/p>\n

Lisa Ling<\/em> (@ARetVet<\/a>) served in the U.S. military as a technical sergeant on drone surveillance systems before leaving with an honorable discharge in 2012. She appears in the 2016 documentary on drone warfare, \u201c<\/em>National Bird.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 latimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

16 Jul 2017 – Drone pilots have been quitting the U.S. Air Force in record numbers in recent years \u2014 faster than new recruits can be selected and trained. They cite a combination of low-class status in the military, overwork and psychological trauma. But a widely publicized new memoir about America\u2019s covert drone war fails to mention the \u201coutflow increases,\u201d as one internal Air Force memo calls it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-militarism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}