As many of you are undoubtedly aware, I attended a Model United Nations conference in Washington over the weekend. DC's a great town, of course - I had a memorable trip by all accounts. I spent two hours hunting in vain for an F4U Corsair at the Air and Space Museum on Friday (apparently, the Corsair is at their Virginia site), and even though it snowed and sleeted then, it was sixty degrees last night. I haven't walked around comfortably in short sleeves in so long...I'd almost forgotten what it felt like. There were schools from across the nation and groups from South Africa, Panama, Greece, and Gambia. Unfortunately, I think I may have picked up some sort of bug in the hotel - I'm feeling rather under the weather at the moment. But the real highlight of the trip, of course, was the conference itself. I represented the nation of Zimbabwe on the Committee for Disarmament and International Security (DISEC), and the primary topic of discussion was the use of drones. Specifically, the use of drones by three nations in particular, two of them being the United Kingdom and Israel. You can guess which country completes this trio. As is usual for me at Model UN conferences, I got into the role - this, of course, put me at odds with the land of the free. This conference served to give me a great deal of insight into the strife between the western powers and the developing nations of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
Drones, more technically referred to as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), have been in use for some time. The earliest UAVs were balloons laden with explosives utilized by the Austrians in the 19th Century. For much of the 20th Century, drones that would be more easily recognizable by today's standards were seen as the expensive, unreliable toys of wealthy nations. This changed in the eighties, when the Israeli Air Force used surveillance and decoy drones alongside fighters to crush their Syrian counterparts in the field (or rather, the sky) of battle. In the years since 9/11, UAVs have been used for surveillance (one was several thousand feet over Bin Laden's compound, for instance) and to conduct strikes on suspected terrorists. The issue is that drone strikes often fail to acquire their intended targets. And when this occurs, civilians are too often caught in the crossfire. In nations such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, where drone strikes are prevalent, civilians of all ages report to being terrified of the instances. Many nations view the use of drones in their airspace as a violation of their sovereignty. The US has hardly let up on its use of drones during Obama's presidency - if anything, the number of strikes (reported strikes, at least) has increased. To be fair, the media tends to publicize drone strikes that went awry more than they do drone strikes that went according to plan. At the same time, I think we can all agree that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes is unacceptable. Different sources claim that different portions of the casualties are civilians. But perhaps the most questionable aspect of the drones is the definition of 'militants' killed in strikes. 'Militants' are defined as all males from the ages of 16 to 45. If your gender and your age match up, they can take you down, with no questions asked. It's frightening, it goes against due process, and it removes pilots from the equation.
I think we can all agree that drones are, objectively, one of the most terrifying things in the world today. You could be sitting in your living room, watching the TV or reading a book, and suddenly you could be shot full of shrapnel, without even a hint of warning. If drones are ever used against us, that would be the reality. These UAVs are absolutely petrifying, and part of it is because they remove human thought from the direct process. We don't make a big deal out of things when our Air Force pilots misplace a payload or accidentally launch missiles into populated areas, and there are two reasons why. One: our pilots are so well-trained and the technology of the weapons is so advanced, such instances almost never occur. I can't even name any instance from the past ten years of Air Force pilots bombing civilians off the top of my head. The most recent example I can think of off the top of my head would be the bombings of Baghdad in both Gulf Wars, and in both cases, military bases and governmental structures were the intended targets of the pilots' strikes. And, as previously stated, they usually hit those targets. In my Model UN debate, the delegation representing the United States proposed measures to improve the technology of drones, and to train specialized drone pilots. While I disagreed with that in the context of the debate (Zimbabwe and many other developing nations feel that drones violate their airspace), I agree with it on a personal level. UAVs represent our best efforts to remove humans from bombings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNhR4ZhGOEw). Drone pilots are only connected to the battlefield through video cameras. They don't take off in the drones, or land in them. Personally, my vote would be for drones that simulate a cockpit for their pilots, once we have that technology at our disposal. It may seem far-fetched at this point, but give it ten or fifteen years...that aside, I just don't trust artificial intelligence. There are undoubtedly some people (there were in my MUN conference) who will advocate to remove pilots from the scenario altogether. I don't trust that. I don't trust some computer algorithm to decide the fates of individuals across the globe. While drones aren't inherently any worse than combat aircraft, they have the potential to become considerably worse. We can't be factoring pilots out of the UAV equation...we have to factor them back in.
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