The supposed intended targets, high-level Taliban and al Qa'eda commanders, had left the scene only 10 minutes before two Hellfire missiles struck a compound in Pakistan's North Waziristan region, close to the border with Afghanistan. According to reports quoting Pakistan security sources, some nine others, including a woman and two children, were not so lucky and were killed in Friday's attack. They were the latest victims of drones, the pilotless, remote-controlled aircraft upon which the United States is becoming increasingly reliant in its "war on terror". The attack was the second this week in a region that has reportedly seen a series of similar strikes by drones this month.
The growing Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan is being fed by militants flowing into the country from mountain redoubts in neighbouring Pakistan, a long-time but shaky ally of America, presenting the US military with a political quandary: how to go about attacking its enemies on Pakistan's territory without alienating Islamabad. The solution to which the United States is increasingly turning is the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which, thanks to satellite communications, can be flown from a remote location, at no risk to US personnel, and yet is capable of delivering missiles that previously would have required the danger and expense of deploying manned aircraft.
The United States releases very little information about its UAV operations, but it is clear that over the past few months death has come to remote border regions in Pakistan at the hands of American "pilots" flying Predator drones and releasing their missiles from the safety of what are little more than sophisticated video-games consoles on an air force base in Nevada. The early drones were surveillance models, first used in the mid-1990s in Bosnia and elsewhere, but in 2001 a weapons revolution took place. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the San Diego-based manufacturer of the Predator, successfully produced a model capable not only of surveillance but also of carrying two Hellfire missiles.
Today, says John Porter, the deputy director of business development at General Atomics, at any given time as many as 30 attack-capable US UAVs are flying missions over combat zones around the world - a number that does not include the variants performing a range of reconnaissance, research and search-and-rescue missions for organisations including the US air force, army, marines and navy and the US Department of Homeland Security, Nasa and the Central Intelligence Agency.
In fact, according to sources spoken to by The National, so many of these drones are currently criss-crossing the skies of Iraq that military commanders increasingly fear the possibility of a mid-air collision with manned aircraft. It is a problem that illustrates just how far the technology has come since the Second World War, when Germany's unguided, point-and-shoot V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets rained down on Britain.
Today's UAVs are linked to satellite systems that give their "pilots" precise, real-time, remote-control capabilities. The US air force controls its Predators using the same portion of satellite bandwidth that carries countless hours of television programming to millions of viewers around the world. The first successful UAVs, flown solely for surveillance and reconnaissance, were smaller than today's versions. Little more than beefed-up hobby aircraft, either their flight destinations were pre-programmed or they were limited in range by reliance on line-of-sight radio control.
Typical of the type was the RQ-2 Pioneer, a 200kg drone that entered service with the US navy, marines and army in the 1980s and is still in use, primarily for reconnaissance. It was not until advances in computer imaging and satellite-guidance systems in the 1980s and 1990s that the conditions were ripe for UAVs to morph into long-range attack craft. The US Predator drones flying throughout the world today are being operated primarily by the 11th, 15th and 17th Reconnaissance Squadrons, air force units that carry out their missions from the security of Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.
Physically and technically, the Predator is a veritable Goliath among UAVs: 8.2m long, with a wingspan of more than 14.5m - 4.5m longer than the F-16 Fighting Falcon. Yet, thanks to its lightweight graphite-composite frame, at its heaviest ? fully armed and fuelled - it weighs in at less than 230kg, 2,300kg lighter than the F-16, whose role it is rapidly assuming along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The propeller-driven Predator is powered by a four-cylinder, gas-fuelled engine. Although it has a low cruising speed of about 170kph, it has distinct advantages over its fuel-guzzling jet-powered cousins - including relative quiet and incredible endurance, known in military parlance as "loiter capability". Some early versions of the drone could fly for 800km and remain on the scene for 24 hours. Tactically, this loiter capability also allows near-instantaneous access to targets, eliminating the need, in some instances, to call in and wait for a cruise missile launched thousands of miles away, perhaps from a ship in the Indian Ocean.
When a drone is shot down, as unknown numbers of them have been, there is no pilot to extricate and less likelihood of an ensuing diplomatic embarrassment, such as the Cold War crisis triggered in 1960 when Gary Powers, an American U2 spy-plane pilot, was downed flying a mission over Soviet territory and captured, tried and jailed for espionage. In 2001, the Predator became the first UAV to graduate from reconnaissance to attack when it was equipped with weaponry. Its first high-profile success was on Nov 3 2002, when an al Qa'eda leader believed to have been responsible for the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 was killed in Yemen by the US air force, flying a Predator from a French base in Djibouti, across the Gulf of Aden.
"The attraction of an armed Predator, in what amounts to denied airspace like Pakistan or Yemen, is that they are harder to detect," says Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based research organisation. "They're stealthier; they're subtler; they're less objectionable to the population in the area; and hence, we're willing to put more of them into the airspace on a more regular basis."
They are also cheaper than the alternative. According to the air force, whereas $30.5 million (Dh112m) buys four Predators and the ground control stations and satellite equipment needed to fly them, a single F-16 will cost close to $20m - to say nothing of the maintenance and crew-training costs. Predators now operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan can carry a 204kg payload of two Hellfire missiles. Able to fly at an altitude of up to 7,600m, the drone feeds back images to its operator from a range of equipment, including normal video monitoring and infrared imaging which allows the "pilot" to scan a landscape at night. The operator can choose to view human beings as white or black dots, says Mr Porter of General Atomics: "It's pretty sophisticated - the differentials in temperature it can detect are very small, a fraction of a degree." Usually, the drones are launched from a landing strip close to the area of operations and flown initially by a "pilot" at the scene, who hands over control to an operator in Nevada. Once over the target, the drone can supply real-time images to any number of decision-makers anywhere in the world, including intelligence analysts in the Pentagon, the White House or at the CIA, allowing instant scrutiny of what could be insurgent hideouts, weapons depots or enemy troop deployments. Unsurprisingly, demand for Predators and their variations has soared. One of the latest versions of the Predator is the Reaper, which has a ceiling of 15,000m and can carry an even bigger payload of two precision-guided bombs and four Hellfire missiles. About 50 of these have been sold to the US air force, the Department of Homeland Security, the US navy, Nasa and even to foreign militaries, such as the UK's Royal Air Force and the Italian armed forces, says Mr Porter. Until now, very few people outside the armed forces have seen a Predator and lived to tell the tale, but from this month millions of cinema-goers around the world will be seeing the Reaper; thanks to the co-operation of the Pentagon's Entertainment Liaison Office, one of the UAVs features in Steven Spielberg's latest film, Eagle Eye, now showing in the UAE. For all the advanced gadgetry and novelty, however, even the latest generation of UAVs lacks what analysts say is needed most in America's counter-insurgency wars - thinking skills. And when factors such as hearts and minds are thrown into the mix, the importance of minimising civilian deaths in sensitive areas becomes critical. "The big problem in Iraq is telling who the enemy is and who the friendly people are," says Dr Biddle. "Nobody wears a uniform. Nobody has a neon sign above their head that says, 'I'm an insurgent, shoot me'." On-the-ground human intelligence and the development of trust, he says, "such that people can tip off what they know about who's friendly and who's not - that's what really made the critical difference in routing al Qa'eda in Iraq in 2007. UAVs can't do that for you." But if used indiscriminately, what they can do is push potential allies into the arms of insurgents. Over the past month, Predator missile strikes have reportedly increased, along with American frustration, as Pakistan has appeared reluctant to rein in the militants on its soil while also opposing incursions over the border by US troops. Last month the American media reported that President George W Bush had approved secret cross-border operations by troops without the consent of the Pakistan government and, on Sept 3, Islamabad claimed American soldiers had raided a village in Pakistan, killing up to 20 people, including women and children. On Sept 5, Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, said, "Unilateral action by the American forces does not help the war against terror because it only enrages public opinion. In this particular incident, nothing was gained by the action of the troops." In the light of this, the increased use of drones appear to be a kind of uneasy compromise between the United States and Pakistan, but while incidents - and deaths - are escalating, experts are sceptical that the machines have a decisive role. For all the talk of UAVs revolutionising warfare, says Dr Biddle, their impact has been limited. "If you look at gross trend lines, it's not suggestive that new technology has revolutionised this conflict," he says. "UAV use is up, up, up, and the situation in Pakistan is worse, worse, worse."
hnaylor@thenational.ae