Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Women, Combat, and Fort Hood

Fort Hood, Texas, hosts tens of thousands of men who are trained to fight for their country. But none of them stopped Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as he blew away 13 of their colleagues Thursday afternoon. It was a civilian police officer, Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who confronted and shot him in an exchange of gunfire. For her trouble, Munley took bullets in both legs and an arm. Maybe the president will pin a medal on her.

Here's a better way to honor Munley: End the ban on women in combat.

More here.

Hide and Seek

This week, the U.S. Army announced its "Top Ten Greatest Inventions of 2008." It's pretty clear what the Army is most excited about: the ability to see and kill the enemy from where you aren't.

Guerrillas and terrorists already have this ability, in the form of improvised explosive devices. They also have two other advantages: the element of surprise (through indigenous deployment) and fewer compunctions about collateral fatalities. To counteract these advantages, the Army needs the ability to scout and fire from places where soldiers aren't vulnerable to attack. That's what this year's celebrated innovations deliver.

First on the Army's list is the XM153 Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station:

Capable of being mounted on a variety of vehicles, this system provides the capability to remotely aim and fire a suite of crew-served weapons from either a stationary platform or while on the move, using the system power of the host vehicle. The system affords increased Soldier protection since the gunner is not exposed. It enhances target acquisition, identification, and engagement capabilities for non-turreted light armored vehicles; and also situational awareness during both day and night conditions using day and thermal cameras.

As you can see from these photos (PDF), the system turns a nonturreted vehicle into a turreted vehicle, except that the gunner doesn't have to be near the turret. He can "remotely aim and fire" any of its weapons. And he doesn't need night-vision equipment; the gun's thermal camera does that for him.

Next on the list:

The Projectile Detection Cueing 4-Corner System is a low cost acoustic gunfire detection system capable of detecting and locating the origin of incoming gunfire events. The Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station Lightning is a lightweight common remotely operated weapon station capable of supporting small arms weapons. ... The operator can monitor, control, and command both PDCue and CROWS Lightning from a single user interface. The integrated system increases Soldier effectiveness in detecting and locating enemy sniper positions, and provides the Soldier the ability to automatically move remote weapon stations to the detected sniper threat.

This works with the CROWS system above: From wherever you hunker down with the user interface, you can acoustically trace the location (PDF) of anyone firing nearby and send your "remote weapon station" to take him out.

Further down:

The Enhanced Mobile Rapid Aerostat Initial Deployment Vehicle system combines multiple intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities onto a single, integrated platform. ... The system gives remote operating units the ability to quickly employ the system's combined capabilities to detect imminent attacks and take the appropriate actions to defeat enemy forces.

An aerostat is a buoyant aircraft. You can get a pretty good idea of the concept from these Raytheon photos (PDF): You float artificial eyes up into the sky, locate the enemy from there, and kill him.

And finally:

The One System Remote Video Terminal A-kit is an innovative modular video and data system that enables Soldiers to remotely receive near-real-time surveillance image and geospatial data directly from tactical unmanned aerial vehicles and manned platforms.

This AAI brochure (PDF) illustrates the basic technology: From wherever you are with your portable screen, you tap into a nearby drone and scout the whole area without poking your head out.

The overall pattern of these innovations is a gradual correction of guerrilla and terrorist advantages. We can't ambush, fire, and bomb as freely as the enemy can. We're much more vulnerable, emotionally and politically, to casualties among our fighters. We need the ability to hunt bombers and snipers patiently and precisely, without killing civilians or exposing our soldiers to easy attack. Step by step, technology is making that fantasy real.

Bombs, Innovation, and Afghanistan

In today's New York Times, James Dao reports that Afghan IEDs

are becoming more common and more sophisticated with each week, American military officers say. This year, bomb attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan have spiked to an all-time high, with 465 in May alone, more than double the number in the same month two years before. At least 46 American troops have been killed by I.E.D.'s this year, putting 2009 on track to set a record in the eight-year war. ... At the current rate, I.E.D. attacks on Afghan forces could reach 6,000 this year, up from 81 in 2003, an American military official said.

At least three of the lessons we drew from Iraq seem to apply in Afghanistan. First, IEDs enable insurgents to strike with a level of precision that would be impossible from a distance. Second, IEDs can be assembled from inexpensive, readily available components, such as fertilizer, artillery shells, and cell phones. Third, instead of risking human lives, you can hunt or disable IEDs with dogs or robots. The bomber isn't risking his life. Why risk yours?

Afghan insurgents are exploiting the same cheap technology that worked in Iraq. According to Dao, "The bombs are often made with fertilizer and diesel fuel, but some use mortar shells or old mines that litter the countryside. Some bombs are set off when vehicles pass over pressure plates. Others require remote control, like a cellphone. Still others detonate with a button or a wire touched to a battery." Likewise, we're using familiar detection methods: dogs, robots, and drones.

So what has changed? One difference is a lower level of technology in Afghanistan. Sometimes this works to the insurgents' advantage:

With few paved roads, Afghanistan is even more fertile territory for I.E.D.'s. than Iraq, where hard pavement often forced insurgents to leave bombs in the open. Not so in Afghanistan, where it is relatively easy to bury a device in a dirt road and cover the tracks.

But it can also make them vulnerable. U.S. officials tell Dao that IED deployment networks connect top layers of "financiers, logistical experts, bomb designers and trainers" with lower layers of "bomb planters, often villagers or nomadic herdsmen paid $10 or less to dig holes and serve as spotters." The weak link is the top layer. In Afghanistan, there may be fewer people with the expertise to run such networks than there were in Iraq.

To get the key players, you have to operate like a crime scene investigator. Dao reports:

Like a police forensic unit and a bomb squad rolled into one, Lieutenant Brown's 25-member team not only disarms I.E.D.'s but also scours sites—more than 50 this year—for telltale signatures of a bomb. Soil samples, electrical parts, fingerprints and photographs are sent for analysis, and detailed reports are compiled in a central database.

This is one of the main questions being tested in Afghanistan: Can forensic investigation and a pooled database unravel IED networks? Can high-tech police work catch the experts and organizers instead of settling for the suckers who plant the bombs? IEDs, like drones, are an evolving story of measures and countermeasures, technologies of destruction and technologies of detection. We don't know how the story will turn out. But we know which weapon will prevail. It won't be a device. It will be a process, a talent, and an attitude: innovation.

War as a Game

We've talked a lot in this blog about what happens when war, through remote-controlled drones, becomes more like a video game. But what happens when a video game becomes more like war?

Six Days in Fallujah, an interactive product being developed by Atomic Games, raises that question. Jamin Brophy-Warren explained the project in last week's Wall Street Journal:

The company sees it as a new kind of documentary. "For us, games are not just toys. If you look at how music, television and films have made sense of the complex issues of their times, it makes sense to do that with videogames," Mr. Tamte [Atomic's president] says. ... "Six Days," which uses actual events as its backdrop, is billed as having far deeper roots in reality and will be the first major game released about the ongoing war in Iraq. "We replicate a specific and accurate timeline—we mean six days literally," says Mr. Tamte. ... Atomic is working with more than three dozen soldiers who were in Fallujah, consulting thousands of photographs (some of which were mailed on memory cards from Camp Fallujah), and looking at classified satellite imagery to ensure that the game's appearance is faithful to the actual location.

The project's developers call it a "game-amentary." It sounds educational. But then a different kind of reality—commercial interest—intrudes on the documentary spin:

"Six Days" lacks one notable aspect of documentary: commentary. ... [T]hose involved in the new game said they didn't want to push a particular viewpoint and certainly weren't taking a stance on the morality of the invasion. "We're not trying to make social commentary. We're not pro-war. We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience," says Anthony Crouts, vice-president of marketing for Konami, the game's publisher. "At the end of the day, it's just a game."

Unless you think the battle of Fallujah was entertaining in real life, you can't make a video product about it that's both documentary and "just a game." Maybe someday, somebody will produce an interactive replica of the Iraq war. This doesn't sound like it.

Heaven’s Wrath

Big news from Pakistan: The government there is becoming a partner in our remote-controlled assassination campaign. Here's the deal: They'll let us kill our enemies on their soil if we'll use the same drones to kill their enemies, too.

Officially, Pakistan continues to object to the drone strikes. We just hit two more targets yesterday, prompting Pakistan's Foreign Office to declare that "these attacks are counterproductive and we hope that as a result of the policy review in Washington, we would have some positive outcome."

That's a pretty funny protest, since today's Wall Street Journal brings this news:

U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials are drawing up a fresh list of terrorist targets for Predator drone strikes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, part of a U.S. review of the drone program, according to officials involved. Pakistani officials are seeking to broaden the scope of the program to target extremists who have carried out attacks against Pakistanis, a move they say could win domestic support. ...

Already, the campaign has apparently stepped up attacks on the network of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who is believed to be behind the 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was [current President] Zardari's wife. In the fourth of a series of recent attacks targeting Mr. Mehsud's network, a drone attack Wednesday killed at least eight militants along the Pakistan-Afghan border, according to two Pakistani officials. The intensified campaign could help win domestic support for the strikes because it shows that the drone attacks are targeting direct threats to Pakistan, said a Pakistani official.

To put it crudely, we seem to be renting out the drones. Since President Obama took office, the drones have been slaughtering Mehsud's fighters. Apparently, we're doing this to satisfy Zardari's government. And it's not clear whether the satisfaction is political or personal. Do the hits on Mehsud really generate "domestic support" for the drone strikes? Does the average Pakistani conclude that the CIA's killing machines aren't so bad after all? Or does the "domestic support" consist of Zardari? Are we buying his support by sending our drones to avenge his wife's death?

It's almost Shakespearean. But since we're in the 21st century instead of the 16th, we seal our pact with the king by sending machines, not human assassins, to bring heaven's wrath on the warlord who slew his beloved. And this time, the wrath really does come from heaven. Put yourself in Zardari's shoes. You're being offered the chance to destroy your enemy with a power unknown to history's greatest kings and generals: a bloodless, all-seeing airborne hunting party. Would you refuse?

And if you were Obama, would you refuse to wield this power? No way. According to the Journal, Obama has "concluded that the drones have been an effective weapon," and his aides are now "examining ways to reduce the time it takes between identifying a target and when the Predators fire—now less than 45 minutes." And in a curious coincidence, the U.S. also just announced a $5 million reward for "information leading to the arrest or location of Mehsud" and another warlord.

Something tells me there won't be an arrest. Location will be enough.

Iran's Drones

What's more unsettling than U.S. military planes flying over Iraq with nobody inside them?

Iranian military planes doing the same thing.

Last Thursday, Danger Room reported that according to its sources, American planes had shot down an Iranian drone in Iraqi airspace. Yesterday, the United States confirmed it. We and our friends are no longer the only nations flying remote-controlled vehicles over other countries. Instead of looking down on the enemy through the eyes of unmanned aircraft, our military personnel will increasingly find themselves on the wrong end of the camera—and eventually the missile.

The United States claims that the Iranian drone shot down on Feb. 25 spent more than an hour in Iraqi airspace and was "well inside Iraqi territory." Depending on whom you believe, it was 10, 12, 25, or 80 miles inside Iraq. One theory is that the drone was spying on a camp full of Iranian dissidents (or, to put it less nicely, terrorists). Another is that it was looking for routes to smuggle weapons into Iraq. It was unarmed and relatively unsophisticated, with a range of 90 miles (which means it almost certainly didn't go 80 miles into Iraq) and an altitude limit of 14,000 feet.

The incident raises at least three questions. First: How many other drones does Iran have, and what can they do? According to Danger Room:

In 2007, Iran said it built a drone with a range of 420 miles. In February, Iran's deputy defense minister claimed its latest UAV could now fly as far as 600 miles. ... Iran often exaggerates what its weapons can do. But, if this drone really can stay in the air for for that long, the Washington Times notes, "it could soar over every U.S. military installation, diplomatic mission or country of interest in the Middle East."

Today's Los Angeles Times adds:

Iran has been developing unmanned aviation technologies, displaying drone aircraft during military parades and incorporating them into war games along its eastern and western borders in recent years. In December, Iran said it had developed a new generation of "spy drones" that provide real-time surveillance over enemy terrain. And last month an Iranian air force officer told media Iran had created drones with a range of 1,200 miles.

The distance from Iran to Tel Aviv is about 600 miles.

Second: Who else has drones? We know, for example, that Israel, Georgia, and Pakistan have them. Iran's ability to produce them means that Iranian-affiliated miscreants will be deploying them, too. Danger Room notes:

Iran has supplied Hezbollah, the Lebanese terror group, with both models [its Ababil and Misrad drones]. Misrad drones flew reconnaissance missions in both November 2004 and April 2005. Then, in 2006, during Hezbollah's war with Israel, the group operated both Misrads and Ababils over Israel's skies. At least one was shot down by Israeli fighter jets.

Third: How will the proliferation of drones affect future wars? The emerging ability of our adversaries to do to us what we've been doing to them—invade, spy, and eventually kill without risking any personnel—is a huge problem. The number of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan since President Obama took office is now up to six, with a casualty count exceeding 100. Imagine somebody doing that to us.

On the other hand, nobody died in the Feb. 25 incident. According to the U.S. military, before firing, our forces confirmed that "no collateral damage would result from a shoot-down." In fact, we knew more than that. We knew we wouldn't be killing any military personnel, either, since the drone's pilot was in Iran. That made it easier to shoot down the drone without triggering a political confrontation and blowing up diplomatic efforts with Iran. It's been three weeks since the incident, and Iran still hasn't mentioned it in public. If tomorrow's spy aircraft can be shot down without spilling blood and starting wars, that's not such a bad thing.

Drones and Spies

How are humans and unmanned vehicles getting along in our experimental robot proxy war in Pakistan? Pretty well. Yesterday's New York Times revealed more about collaborations between U.S. drones and Pakistani ground forces. A few highlights:

1. Pakistanis on the ground are spotting targets for the drones.

"The intelligence sharing has really improved in the past few months," said Talat Masood, a retired army general. ... Intelligence from Pakistani informants has been used to bolster the accuracy of missile strikes from remotely piloted Predator and Reaper aircraft against the militants in the tribal areas, officials from both countries say. More than 30 attacks by the aircraft have been conducted since last August, most of them after President Zardari took office in September. A senior American military official said that 9 of 20 senior Qaeda and Taliban commanders in Pakistan had been killed by those strikes.

2. The drones are tracking targets for Pakistanis on the ground.

The C.I.A. helped [Pakistani] commandos track the Saudi militant linked to Al Qaeda, Zabi al-Taifi, for more than a week before the Pakistani forces surrounded his safe house in the Khyber Agency. The Pakistanis seized him, along with seven Pakistani and Afghan insurgents, in a dawn raid on Jan. 22, with a remotely piloted C.I.A. plane hovering overhead and personnel from the C.I.A. and Pakistan's main spy service closely monitoring the mission, a senior Pakistani officer involved in the operation said.

3. Pakistan is tracking the drones. Its agents know their whereabouts in real time.

In addition, a small team of Pakistani air defense controllers working in the United States Embassy in Islamabad ensures that Pakistani F-16 fighter-bombers conducting missions against militants in the tribal areas do not mistakenly hit remotely piloted American aircraft flying in the same area or a small number of C.I.A. operatives on the ground, a second senior Pakistani officer said.

4. Reliance on drones is protecting American but not Pakistani troops. This is the chief strategic problem exposed by the war. We can hit the enemy from an unmanned aerial vehicle with impunity. But the enemy can retaliate against our ally on the ground, thereby putting pressure on the alliance. According to the Times, "Pakistani Army officers say the American strikes draw retaliation against Pakistani troops in the tribal areas, whose convoys and bases are bombed or attacked with rockets after each United States missile strike."

Human Nature's interest in the Pakistan conflict is all about its experimental lessons in unmanned warfare. Toward that end, two of the key factors to watch are 1) the ability of manned and unmanned forces to work together and 2) the enemy's ability to punish manned forces for damage inflicted by unmanned forces. We'll keep watching both.

Spying With Google Earth

The picture, taken from directly overhead, shows an airfield in Pakistan. It looks like a video frame from one of the American killer drones that have been hunting Taliban and al-Qaida fighters there. But that can't be: The drones are right there in the frame, sitting on the ground. So who took the picture?

A plain old commercial satellite, apparently. The image was freely available on Google Earth until Wednesday ...

More here.

Present Without Leave

The boss of the Pakistani Taliban likes to train his fighters at a big house in the mountainous region near Afghanistan. Or perhaps I should say, he used to. Reuters has called the house "fortress-like." If U.S. troops had tried to storm it, the militants inside might have repelled or killed them. But the Americans never showed up in person. Instead, on Saturday, they sent an unmanned aerial vehicle, which fired a missile into the compound, killing around 30 enemy insurgents. So much for fortresses.

Then, today, American drones struck another Pakistani Taliban hideout. The initial casualty count at the second compound is even higher. And that's before all the bodies are pulled from the rubble. 

Even by the lowest casualty estimates, these are the two most lethal strikes of the monthslong robot proxy war we've been waging in Pakistan. For those of you keeping score, the number of drone strikes since July is now running into the 30s, and the body count has passed 250, including eight or more senior al-Qaida officers.

The military advantage of sending drones instead of soldiers is that we can blow away fortresses and adversaries while keeping our troops out of harm's way. But there's a political advantage, too: If we don't set foot on Pakistani soil, Pakistan's government doesn't have to explain to its people why it's tolerating an American occupation.

That's why the official U.S. and Pakistani response to reporters' questions about the massacre at the Taliban compound is silence. The CIA, which operates our Predator drones in Pakistan, isn't talking. Neither is our embassy in Islamabad. Neither is the Pakistani government. Nothing to see here, folks. No American boots on the ground. Move along.

But—oops!—it turns out that we do have people on the ground in Pakistan. And they're managing the drones. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., spilled the beans at a Senate hearing on Thursday. Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times explains what happened:

Feinstein expressed surprise over Pakistani opposition to the campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Islamic extremist targets along Pakistan's northwestern border. "As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base," she said. ... [F]ormer U.S. intelligence officials ... confirmed that Feinstein's account was accurate. ... As chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Feinstein is privy to classified details of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.

It didn't take long for Feinstein's slip to hit the Pakistani press. And it was news to most Pakistanis, who, like the rest of us, have assumed all along that the drones flew over the border from Afghanistan.

Predators may be unmanned, but they're hardly unsupervised. In addition to being remotely piloted, they're locally prepped and serviced. In military parlance, they're unmanned "systems," and the systems include on-site crews. If the Predators are operating from a base in Pakistan, then we have personnel at that base to tend and help launch them.

Who are these personnel? Miller reports that in recent years, the CIA "has deployed as many as 200 people" to Pakistan, working "alongside other U.S. operatives who specialize in electronic communications and spy satellites." If the CIA operates the Predators and the Predators take off from Pakistan, then ... well, it's pretty obvious. And this defeats much of the political advantage of using drones in the first place. It puts our forces squarely on Pakistani soil.

Why the agency bases its drones in Pakistan instead of just flying them over the border from Afghanistan baffles me. But a senator blurting out this secret at a public hearing? That doesn't surprise me at all. Unmanned vehicles are getting smarter and less error-prone all the time, but human beings are as fallible and foolish as ever. Maybe now that we've learned how to keep pilots out of harm's way, we can do the same for politicians.

Obama's Drones

New president, same war.

Saturday's Washington Post brings the latest report from Pakistan:

Two remote U.S. missile strikes that killed at least 20 people at suspected terrorist hideouts in northwestern Pakistan yesterday offered the first tangible sign of President Obama's commitment to sustained military pressure on the terrorist groups there. ... It remained unclear yesterday whether Obama personally authorized the strike or was involved in its final planning, but military officials have previously said the White House is routinely briefed about such attacks in advance. At his daily White House briefing, press secretary Robert Gibbs declined to answer questions about the strikes, saying, "I'm not going to get into these matters."

Why is Obama sticking with Bush's drone war? Because it's doing its job, grimly and quietly. Reuters has the body count:

The United States carried out about 30 attacks on suspected militants with missiles fired by pilotless drones in 2008, according to a Reuters tally, more than half after the beginning of September. The attacks killed more than 220 people, including foreign militants, according to a tally of reports from Pakistani intelligence agents, district government officials and residents.

That's roughly equal to the body count from the first day of Israel's December assault on Gaza. But the outcry is nowhere near as loud. In fact, the Post notes,

The Pakistani government, which has loudly protested some earlier strikes, was quiet yesterday. In September, U.S. and Pakistani officials reached a tacit agreement to allow such attacks to continue without Pakistani involvement, according to senior officials in both countries.

Pakistan finally piped up today, meekly expressing its "sincere hope that the United States will review its policy and adopt a more holistic and integrated approach."

Why the comparative silence? Because the drones aren't human -- technically, U.S. forces aren't in Pakistan -- and because they pick off their targets a few at a time, not in a massive blitz. They can hover, study, track, and wait for hot intelligence from the ground. That's one reason why they're killing a high ratio of bad guys to civilians.

Regional and intelligence experts say the strikes have improved in precision and have hit several top insurgent commanders in recent months. The notable change in tempo and reported accuracy could be partly attributed to a growing sense of urgency inside the Bush White House as the progress in the seven-year long war in Afghanistan stalled during the waning days of the administration. Samina Ahmed, director of the International Crisis Group in Pakistan, attributes some of the change to increased cooperation between the United States and Pakistan. "Given the fact that the past few strikes have actually gotten their targets with minimal or no civilian casualties, there is obviously better cooperation between the U.S. military and Pakistan," Ahmed said.

Remember, Israel's worst mass killings of civilians in Gaza happened when Israeli forces returned fire. But a drone doesn't need to return fire. It can listen, watch, and wait until it has the bad guys in its sights with few civilians in the way.

If I'm a new U.S. president who needs to hunt, kill, and deter terrorists without invading or occupying countries, this is the kind of war I want.

Gaza’s Missing Bodies

How carelessly is Israel killing civilians in Gaza? Let's ask the hospitals and the United Nations.

In Dense Gaza, Civilians Suffer

Among the total dead—between 320 and 390, according to the United Nations—Palestinian medical officials say that 38 were children and 25 were women. The United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees said 25 percent of those killed had been civilians. (New York Times, Dec. 31, paragraph 6)

Sounds bad. Or how about this:

Israel Deepens Gaza Incursion as Toll Mounts

Palestinian medical officials estimated that the death toll during the war reached 550 on Monday. The United Nations estimated that about a quarter of those killed were civilians. (Times, Jan. 5, paragraph 8)

It's amazing how high the ratio of civilian to combat injuries can be. For example:

Gaza Hospital Fills Up, Mainly With Civilians

In recent days, most of those arriving at Shifa appeared to be civilians. On Sunday, there was no trace here of the dozens of Hamas fighters that the Israeli military said its ground forces had hit in the past few hours in exchanges of fire. The exact reason was not clear. Many ambulance drivers refused to go near the fighting. It also seemed possible that Hamas and Israeli fighters were still battling at some less lethal distance. It was difficult to know whether fighters were spread out at other hospitals. (Times, Jan. 4, paragraph 16)

And now, today:

U.N. Suspends Food Aid Into Gaza

The United Nations suspended its food aid deliveries into Gaza on Thursday after one of its contract drivers was killed during an Israeli attack ... (Times, Jan. 8, paragraph 1)

Those nasty, reckless Israelis. All they seem to hit is one civilian or rescue worker after another. In fact, you have to read all the way down to the very bottom of today's 30-paragraph story to find this:

But Palestinian residents and Israeli officials say that Hamas is tending its own wounded in separate medical centers, not in public hospitals, and that it is difficult to know the number of dead Hamas fighters, many of whom were not wearing uniforms.

Oops! No wonder the Times couldn't find those Hamas fighters at Shifa. The fighters aren't at the hospitals. So we don't really know how many of them have been wounded—or killed, since they aren't in uniform, even if we had access to all the bodies. So we don't know what percentage of the dead or wounded are civilians. All we know is that the percentage is lower than you'd guess from counting patients at the hospitals.

Every life is precious. The bloodshed in Gaza is awful, and I hope it ends today. But the ratio of civilian to combat injuries and casualties being reported out of the war zone is inflated, and we simply don't know by how much. It makes one side look more careless than it actually is. And the other side, by concealing its dead and wounded, is controlling the inflation.

Eyes and Ears

A week ago, when we last checked in on the drone war in Pakistan, the news wasn't good. Insurgents had bombed a Pakistani hotel and a security checkpoint, apparently in retaliation for drone strikes on them. The Pakistani government, in turn, was asking the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, to call off the drones. Petraeus said he'd listen. It looked as though the United States might buckle.

Then Petraeus went to Afghanistan and praised the drones. "It is hugely important that three of 20 extremist leaders have been killed in recent months," he told the AP. And on Friday, the Pakistanis got their answer. A drone attack killed another dozen suspected militants at a Taliban commanders' house.

The machines have now racked up more than 100 kills in Pakistan since August. Petraeus has been lobbied, and Barack Obama has been elected, but the drone strikes go on.

How is Pakistan greeting this aggression? Is it threatening to fight? Hardly. Yesterday the country's president told the AP, "We feel that the strikes are an intrusion on our sovereignty, which are not appreciated by the people at large, and the first aspect of this war is to win the hearts and mind of the people."

"Feel"? "Not appreciated"? It's hard to come up with weaker language than that. The real message seems to be: Do what you must, but try not to give us political trouble.

From that standpoint, drones are a lot less harmful than the alternatives. The biggest popular anti-American protests in Pakistan recently were triggered not by drones but by a U.S. ground incursion. Likewise, in Afghanistan, recent politically incendiary mass killings of civilians have been inflicted (accidentally) by human operators on the scene. Yes, the drones have killed some Pakistani civilians. But not nearly as many, it appears, as Pakistani forces have killed in their own clumsy campaign against the insurgents.

Why do the drones have a better record of minimizing mistakes? For one thing, they don't have to make quick decisions. They can hover, watch, and wait. The intelligence they collect can be sifted and weighed by multiple supervisors before reaching a decision to fire. And in Pakistan, they seem to have an additional asset: human sources on the ground. The Washington Post explains:

Brig. Gen. Mahmood Shah, former longtime head of [Pakistani] government security in the tribal areas, said the missile attacks have become noticeably more precise, leading some to believe that local tribesmen in the border areas are supplying the U.S. military with better information about targets. Shah said rumors about so-called U.S. spies among the tribes have fed paranoia about the possibility that signaling devices have been deployed in area villages. Tribesmen have lately made a habit of sweeping the areas around their homes for such devices, he said. "They're not sitting outside in their compounds anymore because they are afraid that they will be struck by these missiles," Shah said.

All this time, I've been looking for technological answers to the mystery of the drones' precision, their increasing ability to find the bad guys. But maybe the answer isn't machines. Maybe it's people.

And if it's people, then the bad guys don't have to fight the machines. They can do what they already know how to do: kill some people and intimidate the rest. That seems to be what they're trying. A day after Friday's drone strike, Agence France-Presse reported:

Taliban militants killed two Afghan men Saturday in Pakistan's restive tribal belt after accusing them of spying for US-led forces. ... The executions were the latest in a string of similar killings and come a day after a suspected US drone fired missiles and destroyed an Al-Qaeda sanctuary in North Waziristan, killing 14. ... Executions routinely follow suspected US missile strikes against militant targets in Pakistan, which officials say are often conducted on intelligence provided by paid local informants.

According to the AP, the two bodies were thrown onto a road, each pinned with a note that said, "See the fate of this man. He was an American spy."

Were the men really spies? If so, were they scouting targets for the drones? I don't know. But for the last three months, somebody's been doing a heck of a job finding the bad guys in northwest Pakistan. Maybe, as U.S. military sources have let on, it's the drones themselves. Or maybe that's the cover story for what's still the world's greatest enemy-detection device: the human being.

Robot Proxy War Update

I can't keep up with the drone war in Pakistan.

This morning, I posted a piece on the evolution of the Pakistan border conflict into the world's first robot proxy war. There have been so many drone strikes along that border in the last four weeks that when I linked to the reports on all of them, it felt like-pardon the reverse metaphor-overkill.

Now it turns out I missed one. The machines' body count is now 20 higher, thanks to a strike last night. It's the 19th drone attack since August. According to an update this morning on the New York Times Web site, the strike occurred 20 miles inside Pakistan and took out two Taliban commanders who have launched raids on U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

How good are the drones? According to the Times, one of the targeted commanders "was believed to have been visiting the compound ... to pay his respects to the families of those killed in an American drone strike on Friday" in a different location. The machines find and kill you, and then, when your boss shows up somewhere else to console your relatives, the machines are waiting for him there, too.

Down the road, we should all be scared of what this technology can do. But for now, I'm enjoying our ability to find and kill these guys without putting boots on the ground.

Now, about those other 18 casualties ...