USA. Indian Springs, Nevada. 2018. Christmas display at Creech Air Force Base, one of the main American drone bases. When I started circling the display, the Public Affairs Officer escorting me quipped, “This doesn’t look very good, does it?” Creech flies drone surveillance and strike missions thousands of miles away. A pilot and a sensor operator spend many hours at a series of consoles in air-conditioned trailers surveying terrain, providing overwatch for infantry units, and periodically launching attacks against suspected insurgents.
Drones have become ubiquitous in the post-9/11 era, but have been around in various forms since World War II (Joe Kennedy, JFK’s older brother, was killed bailing out of an early version of a radio-controlled drone). Initially used largely in reconnaissance, they were quickly retro-fitted to carry missile payloads. Under President Obama, ten times more drone strikes were carried out than under George W. Bush. They have allowed U.S. forces to carry out strikes in areas that don’t have ground forces and killed thousands of civilians, with little accountability. Themediahasbeenlargelycomplicit. According to a report from Airwars, an investigative website that tracks civilian deaths from airstrikes, “Major US media were five times more likely to report on civilian harm from Russian and Assad regime actions in Aleppo than they were from US and allied actions in Mosul—despite similar levels of locally reported civilian harm in late 2016. That suggests a reluctance by newsrooms to engage on the issue when US forces are implicated.”