“I could see two men in the front their faces were covered. “I could see exactly what kind of gun it was in back,” the pilot told me later. Those who have seen unclassified clips of aerial attacks have only a dim appreciation of the optics available to the military and the CIA. Communicating via a digital audio link, the colonel instructed the men on the ground to back away, then gave them a few seconds to do so. “Are you ready to help?” the colonel asked.Īn overlay on the grid showed the anticipated blast radius of an AGM-114 Hellfire missile-the drone carried two. Once the computer locked on the pickup, it stayed zeroed in on the moving target. A button on the joystick pulled up a computer-generated reticle, a grid displaying exact ground coordinates, distance, direction, range, etc. The colonel told the pilot to fix on the truck. They’re gonna be screwed if you don’t do something.” 50-caliber machine gun, a weapon that could do more damage to an army than a platoon of Goliaths.Ī colonel, watching over his shoulder, said, “They’re pinned down pretty good. The young pilot zoomed in tight on the approaching truck. He had been instructed to watch over the patrol, and to “stay frosty,” meaning: Whatever happens, don’t panic. The drone he was flying was roughly 15,000 feet above the besieged patrol, each member marked clearly in monochrome on his monitor by an infrared uniform patch. This was his first time at the controls, essentially a joystick and the monitor. He had graduated from basic training straight out of high school, and was one of a select few invited to fly Predators. A battered pickup truck was closing in on them and popping off rounds from what sounded like a big gun.Ĭontinents away, in a different time zone, a slender 19-year-old American soldier sat at a desk before a large color monitor, watching this action unfold in startlingly high definition. One day this past January, a small patrol of marines in southern Afghanistan was working its way at dusk down a dirt road not far from Kandahar, staying to either side to avoid planted bombs, when it unexpectedly came under fire. If anything, the act of willfully pinpointing a human being and summarily executing him from afar distills war to a single ghastly act. But when you pull together this disparate technology, what you have is a weapon capable of finding and killing someone just about anywhere in the world.ĭrone strikes are a far cry from the atomic vaporizing of whole cities, but the horror of war doesn’t seem to diminish when it is reduced in scale. When linked via satellite to a distant control center, drones exploit telecommunications methods perfected years ago by TV networks-in fact, the Air Force has gone to ESPN for advice. The first Predator drone consisted of a snowmobile engine mounted on a radio-controlled glider. Unlike nuclear weapons, the drone did not emerge from some multibillion-dollar program on the cutting edge of science. Today we find ourselves tangled in legal and moral knots over the drone, a weapon that can find and strike a single target, often a single individual, via remote control. Within my lifetime, that evolution has taken a surprising turn. We held civil-defense drills to practice for it. Growing up, the concept of global annihilation wasn’t just science fiction. Ivy Mike, the first thermonuclear bomb, capable of vaporizing an entire modern metropolis, of killing millions of people at once, was detonated over the Pacific before my second birthday. I was born into the age of push-button warfare. Technology has been tilting the balance of battles since Goliath fell. David’s weapon was, like all significant advances in warfare, essentially unfair.Īs anyone who has ever been in combat will tell you, the last thing you want is a fair fight. The slingshot, a small, lightweight weapon that employs simple physics to launch a missile with lethal force from a distance, was an innovation that rendered all the giant’s advantages moot. But subtract the theological context and what you have is a parable about technology. Armed with only a slender staff and a slingshot, he confronts a fearsome warrior clad in a brass helmet and chain mail, wielding a spear with a head as heavy as a sledge and a staff “like a weaver’s beam.” Goliath scorns the approaching youth: “Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves?” (1 Samuel 17)ĭavid then famously slays the boastful giant with a single smooth stone from his slingshot.Ī story to gladden the hearts of underdogs everywhere, its biblical moral is: Best to have God on your side. The shepherd lad steps up to face in single combat the Philistine giant Goliath.
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