ESSAY NOVEMBER 22, 2022
Warfare Unmanned
ibrahim al-marashi
On November 3, 2002, an unmanned U.S. Predator drone fired a Hellfire missile at an automobile in Yemen, carrying Al-Qaeda operative Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, and five other men. All of them were killed. The strike was the first time the US killed a member of Al-Qaeda outside of Afghanistan. It was also the first time a drone had successfully killed its intended target.
Exactly twenty years later, this weapon platform proves to be an addictive means for the US to project death from a distance. It serves as a politically expedient tactical measure for Washington. However, when the US introduced weaponized drones in the region, it would lead others to adopt and adapt these weapons, resulting in their proliferation, from armed hobby drones used by the Islamic State to domestically produced drones in Iran that even Russia has used as low-cost cruise missiles in Ukraine.
Two decades ago, the US ushered in the drone wars, and this conflict will continue to evolve. The technology has already been coupled with artificial intelligence to create a flying killer robot, the threshold of a new phase of digital warfare. Not only would such a technology give the leadership of any country the ability to wage war without the need for human pilots, and thus human oversight, but such technology can be turned within the borders of any state against its own civilians, either for surveillance or crushing domestic dissent.
https://lawliberty.org/warfare-unmanned/
