Out of the Mountains (31 page)

In the decade of war since these words were written, the remote warfare capabilities of the United States (and many other states, not all of which are friendly to U.S. interests) have expanded dramatically. Nonstate armed groups can also access dramatically improved connectivity, giving them off-the-shelf capabilities for remote warfare, so virtual theaters are now the norm. Drone warfare is perhaps the foremost example of this “new normal.”

Kill Shots and Soccer Games

The 432nd Wing of the United States Air Force flies most of the U.S. military's fleet of Predator and Reaper drones. The wing's six squadrons are at Creech Air Force Base, Indian Springs—a town in the high desert of Nevada, about fifty miles outside Las Vegas, on the edge of an old atomic test range. Forward-deployed teams launch, recover, and maintain the aircraft from airstrips close to their targets, but the Reapers and Predators are flown remotely—and their targets are chosen and killed—by operators at Creech.

One of these operators, Major Erik Jacobson, said in
2012
that “the interesting thing about what our operations are at Creech is that we supported the war in Iraq
from
Creech . . . to know that you had a direct impact on battles and ops on the ground just from being stateside . . . you're executing a combat mission and then you drive home and you're at your kid's soccer game.”
9
Note Jacobson's language here: “we supported the war,” “direct impact on battles,” “executing a combat mission.” He is exactly restating the textbook definition of a theater of war. Yet Jacobson's physical location is on the other side of the planet from the war, the city where he lives is at peace, and he (along with the rest of its population) is subject to U.S. domestic law. He's in a virtual theater, not a physical one.

Other remotely piloted aircraft are controlled from bases in suburban neighborhoods, such as Hancock Field in upstate New York. As the
New York Times
reported in July
2012
:

From his computer console here in the Syracuse suburbs, [Colonel] D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended targets, going about their daily lives 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. Sometimes he and his team watch the same family compound for weeks. . . . When the call comes for him to fire a missile and kill a militant—and only, Colonel Brenton said, when the women and children are not around—the hair on the back of his neck stands up, just as it did when he used to line up targets in his F-16 fighter jet . . . Colonel Brenton acknowledges the peculiar new disconnect of fighting a telewar with a joystick and a throttle from his padded seat in American suburbia.
10

Clearly, the pilots and crew who operate these aircraft, target the Taliban, and support ground troops in Afghanistan are not (in any spatial sense)
located
in the Afghan theater of operations, and neither are they in physical danger. It's also worth noting that what's new about remotely piloted aircraft is not so much the airframes and weapons (most of which are commercial off-the-shelf systems, or readily available technologies used in piloted aircraft for years) but rather, the communications systems that allow them to be controlled from the other side of the planet—along with the Internet, communications networks, and GPS navigation satellites that support these globalized systems. In other words, it's not the aircraft themselves, but rather their access to globally networked connectivity that lets these crews take a direct and lethal role in the conflict, makes them an intimate (though geographically disconnected) part of the operation, and thus puts them
virtually
in theater.

This has huge implications, and not only for the psychological welfare of the participants in this videogame-like conflict or for the human rights of their targets. Legally, how are we to conceive of cities such as Indian Springs, Nevada, or Syracuse, New York? These cities—deemed to be outside any war zone, with populations living under United States domestic law—are, through the emergence of virtual theaters, directly engaged in conflict overseas, whether the people who live there realize it or not. If Taliban militants managed to insert an assault team to raid these cities, in a variant of what Lashkar-e-Taiba did in Mumbai, would that action be illegal? During the Second World War, the Allies conducted hundreds of strategic air raids against German bomber airfields that were thousands of miles away from the front lines, many of which happened to kill civilians in nearby urban areas. Might an insurgent (or an enemy nation-state) argue that an attack on Indian Springs or Syracuse would be exactly equivalent to one of these air raids?

The United States government has repeatedly asserted, and the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld, the legal position that America is in a state of war with al Q
 
aeda and related terrorist groups.
11
If we consider it a legitimate act of war for a Predator to strike a target in, say, a city in Pakistan, killing militants in the houses where they live, but also potentially injuring or killing noncombatant civilians, is it legitimate for those same Pakistani militants to strike the city where that Predator's pilot lives? If it's legitimate to kill a militant attending a wedding in the tribal areas, is it also legitimate to kill a Predator pilot at his kid's soccer game in Indian Springs? The U.S. government considers Predator crews combatants, and awards them medals for their service; are they and their families, then, and the bases and communities where they live, legitimate targets, like the German bomber airbases of World War II? Do ordinary Americans living in these towns realize the implications, and would they have a different attitude about “overseas contingency operations”—the latest euphemism for the permanent, globalized war on terrorism established after
9
/
11
—if they did? The answer to these questions is far from clear, let alone widely agreed. Much of the debate on so-called drone operations (drones are actually fully autonomous robotic platforms, whereas Predators and Reapers are remotely piloted aircraft that need to be controlled, moment to moment, by a human operator) has focused on questions of ethics and targeting—but the enormous conceptual and practical implications of remote warfare are yet to be fully explored.

These aren't academic questions: as I've just shown, any enemy who can read English can download the details of drone operations from the
New York Times
website and therefore almost certainly realized long ago that the suburbs of Syracuse, the crews who live there, and their families are much softer targets than the armored vehicles or special forces patrols those Predators support, and on whose operations U.S. ground forces rely. Any enemy suffering continual losses at the hands of remotely piloted aircraft would be stupid
not
to try to strike the aircraft's controllers. In fact, something like this has already happened: Hakimullah Mehsud, head of the Pakistani Taliban, launched a suicide attacker against New York City in May
2010
, in what he claimed were legitimate acts of war in retaliation for Predator strikes against his followers in the tribal areas of Pakistan—strikes that were controlled from the United States.
12
One might suggest that the only reason such attacks don't occur every week is that most populations targeted by Predators simply lack the means to strike back at intercontinental distances. In part, this is because (as Akbar Ahmed points out in
The Thistle and the Drone
, his excellent study of the effects of drone warfare on traditional populations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) over the last decade these have been tribal groups in remote, marginalized, landlocked communities, such as the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
13
But in this, as in other areas, we need to get our heads out of the mountains: as we've seen, settlement patterns are changing as the planet urbanizes, and populations in coastal, connected cities, plugged into global networks, have many more counterstrike options open to them.

Such counterstrikes need not be physical. In one
2009
example, Iranian-backed insurgents in Iraq used Skygrabber, a “$
26
piece of off-the-shelf software” made by the Russian company SkySoftware, “to intercept live video feeds from Predator drones, potentially providing the insurgents with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.”
14
The insurgents simply pointed satellite television dishes at the sky, then used them to intercept video from the satellite uplink that connects the aircraft to their controllers back at bases such as Creech, exploiting the fact that the uplinks were (at that time) unencrypted. U.S. troops discovered the problem when they detained a Shi'a fighter whose laptop turned out to contain intercepted drone video feeds.
15
Other detainees had similar pirated video on their laptops, “leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds . . . the military found ‘days and days and hours and hours of proof' that the feeds were being intercepted and shared with multiple extremist groups.”
16
In effect, the insurgents had hacked the drone control system, a far easier way to deal with the threat than to try to shoot down the actual aircraft.

Like the Lashkar-e-Taiba raiders' use of Twitter as a command network at Mumbai, this incident illustrates that—alongside the democratization of lethality that now lets individuals access weapon systems that were once only available to nation-states—we're seeing a democratization of digital connectivity that lets individuals access very long-range communication and control systems (including encrypted systems) on the open market, giving them remote warfare capabilities that are starting to rival those of governments. Indeed, both these trends are part of a broader pattern that we have called the
democratization of technology
. This is affecting all aspects of human life and, at least in relation to warfare, is breaking down classical distinctions between governments and individuals, between zones of war and zones of peace, between civilians and combatants, and therefore between traditional concepts such as “war” and “crime” or “domestic” and “international.”

In another incident in mid-
2011
, a virus carrying a so-called key-logger payload, which records every keystroke a computer user makes, infected computers at Creech and other Predator bases. Air Force security officers were unsure if the virus was just a random piece of malware that had somehow found its way onto the system or if it was part of a deliberate cyberattack.
17
This highlights another very major recent shift in remote warfare capabilities: the entry of the United States into the business of offensive cyberwarfare.

“Olympic Games” and Offensive Cyberwarfare

In June 2012, David Sanger published
Confront and Conceal
, a description of the Obama administration's covert and remote warfare programs that drew on a series of revelations by administration officials that were startlingly indiscreet, to say the least. The book included a well-sourced account of Operation Olympic Games, a joint U.S.-Israeli cyberoperation that combined virtual and physical attacks—using cyberweapons, including the Stuxnet worm (and, possibly, the related DuQ
 
u and Flame worms), to attack physical structures and infrastructure in Iran's nuclear weapons program.
18
Sanger claimed that the operation had begun under President George W. Bush and that President Obama had dramatically accelerated and expanded it.
19
U.S. government sources later confirmed Sanger's account in interviews with the
New York Times
.
20

Later the same year, U.S. defense secretary and former CIA director Leon Panetta cautioned of the threat of cyberwarfare, warning “that the United States was facing the possibility of a ‘cyber–Pearl Harbor' and was increasingly vulnerable to foreign computer hackers who could dismantle the nation's power grid, transportation system, financial networks and government.”
21
Panetta's statement was met with derision from online activists and cybersecurity professionals, who accused the United States of hypocrisy, given its own use of offensive cyberweapons in Olympic Games. Mikko Hyppönen, the cybersecurity expert who exposed Stuxnet and Flame, wrote in an enraged blog post:

It's quite clear that real-world cris[e]s in the future are very likely to have cyber components as well. If we look for offensive cyber attacks that have been linked back to a known government, we mostly find attacks that have been launched
by
[the] United States, not
against
them. So far, antivirus companies have found five different malware attacks linked to operation
“Olympic Games”
run by US and Israel. When New York Times ran the story linking US Government and the Obama administration to these attacks, White House started an investigation on who had leaked the information. Note that they never denied the story. They just wanted to know who leaked it. As United States is doing offensive cyber attacks against other countries, certainly other countries feel that they are free to do the same. Unfortunately the United States has the most to lose from attacks like these.
22

Hyppönen highlights an obvious risk here: using a conventional kinetic weapon (say, a bomb or missile) generally destroys it. But using a cyberweapon is equivalent to sharing it—the code, and thus the capability, residing in the weapon is now loose in the virtual ecosystem, where it can be picked up, studied, and reused by the intended target, or anyone else.