Cspan2. Booktv live coverage of the Annapolis Book festival continues. Starting now a panel on drone warfare. [inaudible conversations] good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Annapolis Book festival. We will be Getting Started in just a minute. This is being broadcast on cspan booktv. We ask that you silence yourself and then remain quiet during the discussion. It is my distinct honor to share the stage with these tremendous authors. Im going to start on my immediate right in introducing them. After my introductions, im going to let each of them talk for about ten minutes, then im going to take the power of the chair and ask a few questions and then open up to the audience for questions. On my immediate right is richard whittle. His book, predator the secret origins of the drone revolution, is the book well be discussing today. Richards a career journalist, he cut his teeth at the raleigh news and observer, then on to the Dallas Morning News where he covered defense issues for a number of years. I happen to be one of the larger fans of his earlier book called the dream machine. And then hes written this book, predator, both of which i would contend are remarkable biographies of machines. And so, again, a remarkable book. Then to my left is scott shane whose book objective troy most recently, just two weeks ago, received an award as the outstanding english book on Foreign Affairs given each year by Foreign Policy magazine and the university of toronto monk school of global affairs. I remember scott from my time at the Naval Academy when i was a young lad and he was writing for the Baltimore Sun where he spent, well, i guess 21 years from 1983 to 1994. His most recent book, objective troy, is about the assassination of anwr almaliki. So we start with the origins of the technology that allowed us this drone warfare and changed the way were fighting wars to a story of this drone warfare. Again, a tremendous book. And then lastly on my left is mark moyar whos done an analysis of the policy of drone warfare thats come about in the last 20 years or so. Again, another tremendous book. Mark is not a journalist like the first two but, rather, a practitioner, a researcher, a true academic but also happens to have served as an adviser to some of the most important operations that weve had from special Operations Command to Central Command to advising people like general mckiernan and general mcchrystal, general petraeus and general dunford. He also is an expert in counterinsurgency, not what his Book Strategic failure is about, but he has an entire generation of young officers that hes impacted from teaching at university. During my time in the marine corps, much of our time was talking about these issues, analyzing american Foreign Policy. Mark moyar was one of the guys we were always talking about, so i look forward to a fantastic discussion. With that, im going to turn it over to rick whit billion for him to talk about his book, predator. Thanks, scott, for that very generous are introduction. Im honored to be part of this distinguished panel and grateful for the chance to talk about my book, predator the secret origins of the drone revolution. Its a book that tells what i think youre going to agree is a surprising story about the predator, how the predator was invented and how in the words of air and space smithsonian magazine, it changed the world. This is, after all, the first weapon in history whose operators can stalk and kill a single individual on the other side of the planet from a position of total ambush and invulnerability. Think about that. My book is largely based on first person interviews with primary sources; that is, the people who did the things i write about. And i tell in detail how the air force armed the predator in 2001 and how air force pilots and sensor operators in a Ground Control station tucked away on the cia campus in langley, virginia, began using this exotic weapon in afghanistan late in 2001. I had been writing about the military for three decades when i started work on this book in 2009, but in the five years it took me to research and write it, i ran into a lot of surprises. The first was that the predator was not invented by the usual suspects in the military Industrial Complex. It was invented by this man, abraham carroll, a former israeli Aeronautical Engineer who many people regard as a genius. He got inspired to work on drones during the 1973 i dont mean yom kippur war in the middle east. A couple of years later he emigrated to the United States, the land of opportunity. And like all Great American inventers, went to work in his garage. His garage was in los angeles. Now, abe went bankrupt trying to sell his ideas to the u. S. Military who werent much interested in drones in the early 1980s. But in the late 1980s, a pair of billionaire brothers who decided to get into the drone business bought abes ideas out of bankruptcy and hired him and his top engineers to go to work for them. Their names are neil and lyndon blue. Theyre the private owners of the san diego area company that build built the predator, and theyre still very active and fascinating in their own right. In 1957 when the blue brothers were in their early 20s and still students at yale, they made the cover of life magazine by flying a small plane around latin america during summer vacation, a trip they decided to take, by the way, before they ever took their first flying lesson. Because neil and linden blue werent traveling for fun. They were born and bred entrepreneur, and they were traveling around latin america to look for a Business Opportunity they could pursue of after college. And as a result of that trip, after they graduated from yale neil and linden blue began working on a created a banana and cacao plantation on the east coast of nicaragua in partnership with the ruling family. For the blues, that venture lasted only a couple of years, but it was the first of many that by the 1980s had made them uncommonly wealthy, wealthy enough to buy general atomics for 65 million. Now, as the name suggests, general atomics began as a Nuclear Energy company, and it still is one, but it got into the drone bids after the blue brothers bought it from chevron in 1986. They had a number of reasons for thinking drones might be a Good Business investment. But among their motives was a desire to help the contra rebels in nicaragua overthrow the leftist sandinistas who in 1979 had overthrown their business partners. Gps navigation was brand new in those days, and neil blues idea was that the contras or an ally could pack a gpsguided drone with an explosive and use it as a poor mans Cruise Missile on behalf of the sand nice thats. Sandinistas. As i say in my book, if necessity is the mother of invention, war is the mother of necessity. And a few years later the war in bosnia and the difficulty of finding serb artillery that was bombarding sarajevo in 1993 led to the actual birth of the predator which was derived from a smaller, less capable drone called the nat750. In 1993 the cia brought two of them to use as spy planes in bosnia, and they got good results. That helped inspire the Defense Department to develop a derivative, the predator, which flew for the first time in july 1994. One of the big improvements over the nat750 was that the predator could be flown by satellite which is why it has that familiar bulbous nose. Theres a satellite dish inside. The predator wasnt armed at first. It just carried a video camera, radar and other sensors that could be used to gather what the military calls isr, an acronym for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. But the military found the predator very useful in the balkans wars of the 1990s because it could stay airborne as long as 40 hours at a time without landing to refuel. And all the while sending its video back to its Ground Control station. Partly for that reason in the spring of 2000, an innovative air force general named john jumper decided to arm the predator. Jumper assigned that project to a very special air force unit that goes by the exotic nickname big safari. In my book i describe big safari as a reallife version of q branch, the Technology Shop in the james bond movies. And thats where the cia comes into the predator story. Because as big saw farly was starting safari was starting that project to arm the predator, Richard Clark, the counterterrorism director at the National Security council, and charlie allen, a very senior cia official, had come to the conclusion that the United States needed to kill Osama Bin Laden before he killed more americans as alqaeda had done in bombing our embassies in kenya and tanzania in 1998, and as it would do again by bombing the uss cole on october 12, 2000, killing 17 american sailors. But if they were going to kill bin laden, first the cia had to find him. So in september of 2000, the big safari crew and a Ground Control station at an air base in germany flew an unarmed predator over a place near kandahar, afghanistan, called tarnac farms. The cia believed bin laden was living there as a guest of the taliban and, indeed, the air force predator crew found him. At that point, big safaris product to arm the predator project to arm the predator went into high gear. They quickly figured out how to put a missile called the hellfire on the predator and wired it so that the Ground Control station could aim and fire the missile from the other side of the planet. Starting with a test launch from a predator strapped down to a concrete pad on january 23rd, 2001, the big safari team, the predator team, launched test shots from the air and at a target tank and then into a building the cia ordered constructed to find out whether hellfire missiles which were designed to destroy tanks would kill Osama Bin Laden if fired into his residence in afghanistan. The arizona contractor apparently misread the specifications and built an adobe brick structure that bore little resemblance to the mud houses of afghanistan. So the testers nicknamed it taco bell and hung this sign on it. [laugher] they were in a hurry at this point, so to help measure the hellfires lethality inside a building, they had to dispense with the usual mannequins filled with ballistic jelly. Instead as you can see in this photo, they used watermelons to simulate people in test shots. Now, i was surprised to learn that in those days, before 9 11, the Defense Department didnt want its people to be the ones who pulled the trigger on a predator hellfire strike that killed Osama Bin Ladennen. So at first they had big safari create a trigger that was connected to the air force flight crews control panel by a long, white cable but was to be operated by someone from the cia. Then the cia argued that they shouldnt be the ones to fire a military weapon, especially in something that would count as an assassination. For years there had been executive orders banning assassinations. So an air force Master Sergeant who was working for big safari dubbed this remote trigger the monkey switch. Excuse me. Whoa, i lost my slide. With wheres the monkey switch . I had it, sorry. Ill dig it up later. [laughter] they called it the monkey switch because they figured that maybe they could just train a monkey to press the trigger, and nobody would have to take responsibility. But while big safari and people at the lower levels of the cia were getting prepared in that summer of 2001 to send an armed predator at Osama Bin Laden p, Richard Clark was having trouble getting the Bush Administration to focus on the threat he and others saw in alqaeda. The Bush Administration National Security council held its first meeting to discuss sending the armed predator after bin laden on september 4, 2001. Many of the preparations had been made. Im not sure how well you can see it in these google earth photos, but this is the happeningly campus at the cia in early september, 2001. The inset shows a doublewide mobile home that was put there to is serve as a command center for an air force predator team. The small rectangle ajays are sent to it is a adjacent to it is a Ground Control station painted white to make it look like an ordinary construction bin. But at that september 4th National Security council meeting, neither the cia, nor the military wanted to take responsibility for pulling the trigger on this unfamiliar new weapon, even using the monkey switch. So they decided to wait. One week to the day later, of course, everything changed. And the day after that, three armed predators were on their way to a base in uzbekistan where they could take off and land for missions over afghanistan. Predator 3034, flown by big safaris captain Scott Swanson and Master Sergeant jeff with quaw, launched the fist lethal drone first lethal drone strike on the first night of the war there, october 7, 2001, a story that i tell in great detail in my book. Three days later president bush, at another National Security council meeting, said why cant we fly more than one predator at a time . We ought to have 50 of these things. And in december of that year, bush gave a speech to the corps of cadets at the citadel in South Carolina where he said, before the war the predator had skeptics because it did not fit the old ways; now it is clear the military does not have enough unmanned vehicles. I think thats when the drone revolution began, and now ill leave it to my fellow authors, scott shane and mark moyar, to talk about how the cias initial reluctance changed in succeeding years quite dramatically. Thank you. Thank you very much, richard. [applause] i want to, im going to give a quick personal vignette as i turn it over to scott shane. I had the great honor to serve as a Research Assistant for admiral turner when i was in graduate school in the early 990s. He was the director of the cia in the carter administration, and you mentioned during your talk, richard, about the executive orders banning assassination. In the aftermath of the Church Committee hearings which some in this room are not old enough to remember, there was a lot of consternation about some cia programs that had as their aim to assassinate political leaders. And executive order 11095 was signed by jimmy carter in february of 1976 that banned political assassination. President carter expanded on that two years later, in january of 78, that banned any sort of assassination. And then ronald reagan, in his first year in office, used that same language in executive order 12333 that banned any agent of the United States from taking part in any assassination. Lawyers within the government revisited that decision in 1998 after the embassies in kenning ya and tanzania were bombed and determined that anyone who was confirmed to be a terrorist could be the target of an assassination. And that was the legal logic behind those tomahawk strikes against those camps of bin laden in afghanistan in 1998. Boy, where have we come from there. The story of not just that, but also specifically the assassination of an american citizen is the story that scott shane has told, and so with that, i want to turn the floor over to him, and i look forward to hearing your few minutes. Thank you, scott. Thank you, scott. So my book is called objective troy, and the subtitle is a terrorist, a president and the rise of the drone. And if ricks book is the biography of the machine, the predator, mine is really the biography of a guy who got killed by one of these machines. Anwar alawlakiment one of my reasons for writing this book was actually to understand how somebody becomes a terrorist, how somebody in this case, Anwar Alawlaki, who had had a happy life for quite a few years in the u. S. , an american citizen, a very successful imam, muslim preacher, condemned 9 11, called for bridge building after 9 11 from his post at a big mosque outside washington, d. C. , how he ended up spending his last years with alqaeda in yemen trying to to kill americans. And so im going to sort of fast forward really to the second half of my book to where Anwar Alawlaki has moved to yemen, has joined alqaeda, and im really going to start with the moment when alawlaki is essentially, hes become essentially the leading spokesperson, certainly in english, for alqaeda and for the cause it represented. Looks like were having a little bit of trouble. Should with play it through the microphone up here . [inaudible] okay. Well, while he works on that, i will tell you what you would have seen. In march the first video is in march of 2010. Anwar alawlaki, this guy who was a, you know, sort of peaceloving preacher in the u. S. Shows up, hes dressed in a camo jacket with a traditional yemeni dagger in his belt, and he speaks right into the camera and says that it is hes speaking english, and hes addressing muslims in the west and in the u. S. In particular. And hes saying it is your obligation, your religious obligation to join the violent jihad against the United States, that the United States is at war with islam and every muslims obligation is to attack america. And this comes on top of, first, he sort of comes to public attention in november of 2009 after nidal hasan, a army psychiatrist, u. S. Army psychiatrist and major, opens fire on people at fort hood. And it turns out they were in communication, and the next day anwr with alawlaki, who was a very techsavvy guy, put on his blog that nidal hasan was a hero and did exactly what youre supposed to do as a muslim in america. Then the second thing that happened was on Christmas Day in 2009 some of you will remember the underwear bomber who tried to blow up an airliner as it came into detroit. The bomb, fortunately, didnt go off, it burned him. But when he came off and eventually was interviewed by the fbi, he told the fbi that Anwar Alawlaki, this guy in yemen, had recruited him, vetted him, coached him and prepared him for his mission blowing up a plane. So when, you know, when he has been proven to be not just a propagandist, but an operational terrorist, president obama asks the Justice Department can i put this guy on the kill list. Will it be legal and constitutional to kill a u. S. Citizen in this circumstance. And the answer comes back in february of 2010 in secret memos written by the Justice Department that, yes, it will be, it is legal and constitutional based on, first, the idea that its infeasible to capture this guy in the wilds of yemen, and secondly, that he poses a continuing and imminent threat to the National Security of the u. S. And to the safety of americans. So thats the order he gives. What follows is, essentially, an 18month manhunt involving all 16 intelligence agencyies, nsa, the National Security agency, essentially drops an electronic net over yemen. The cias offering 5 million to family members and anyone else who can tell them where this guy is. And eventually, after some close calls, they catch up with him at the end of september 2011, and they fire some hellfire missiles at the vehicle that hes in, and hes killed along with a Young American named samir khan, another member of alqaeda and two yemeni alqaeda guys. Theyre basically incinerated in their vehicle are. So the at that point on that day, obama mentions publicly that alawlaki is dead and mentions that the brave men and women of the military and intelligence agencies deserve, you know, its a special achievement for them or Something Like that but doesnt quite say how this man came to die. Because theyre still being very secretive about the Drone Program. A couple years later in a big speech on drones at National Defense university, obama makes the killing of this more than citizen for the first time of this american citizen for the first time sort of the centerpiece of his argument in favor of drones. Maybe you can queue up the next video if it works. Down on the lefthand corner. Oh, no, go back. Forward or backwards . Hit the left arrow, and youll go back to the other one, and then go down to the lefthand corner. You have to use the cursor to go down to the lefthand corner yeah, which slide . The next one. [inaudible] that guy. [laughter] [inaudible] there could be a little caret down there in the lefthand corner of the image. If you get your cursor down to the lefthand caret, it should play. There we are. For the record, i do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any u. S. Citizen with a drone or with a shotgun without due process. Nor should any president deploy armed drones over u. S. Soil. But when a u. S. Citizen goes abroad to wage war against america and is actively plotting to kill u. S. Citizens and when neither the United States nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot, his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a s. W. A. T. Team. Thats who Anwar Alawlaki was. He was continuously trying to kill people. He helped oversee the 2010 plot to detonate explosive devices on two u. S. Bound cargo planes. He was involved in planning to blow up an airliner in 2009. When farooq abdul mat lab went to yemen in 2009, alawlaki hosted him, approved his suicide operation, helped him tape a martyr video to be shown after the attack, and his last instructions were to blow up the airplane when it was over american soil. I would have detained and prosecuted alawlaki if we captured him before he carried out a plot, but we couldnt. And as president , i would have been derelict in my duty had i not authorized the strike that took him out. So thats president obamas, you know, articulation of his thinking in ordering this extraordinary act which hadnt happened since the civil war of a u. S. President giving the order for an american citizen to be killed without criminal charges, without a trial. Still a very controversial decision. But after he was killed, many people at that time thought that he was the most dangerous single individual to American Security, and there was i remember in the days after that at the end of september 2011, you know, the white house and counterterrorism agencies there was a real sense of accomplishment, of victory, and people were quite pleased with themselves. That lasted for about two weeks, because if you could put up the next slide, please thats just a slide. So two weeks after Anwar Alawlaki was killed, there was another strike in yemen. Killed seven guys on the ground, one of them turned out to be anwral Anwar Alawlakis 16yearold son and also his 17yearold cousin. Some of the others were probably linked to alqaeda. But it was, you know, the drone strike was essentially described to me privately, u. S. Government has never said anything about it publicly, as a mistake. They didnt know this kid was there, they didnt know his cousin was there, and obama was reportedly furious when he heard about this because this guy, too, the kid was another american citizen. He was born in denver when his dad was living there, and while theyd gone through this Legal Process on the first case, they had not gone through any Legal Process, and they had no intention of killing him. He had no history of terrorism. By all accounts, a sweet kid, and obama knew that thered be a huge backlash against this in yemen. And, indeed, when i went to yemen in 2014 to report the week, you know, this was what was on peoples minds. They kind of understood the killing of anwral awe backly. He was with alqaeda, he was trying to kill americans. The kid was a different story, and it generated a lot of anger and sort of bafflement, i would say, in yemen. That was in the short run. In the long run, if we could have the next slide, please, there was Something Else that cast a shadow over this whole operation. Anwar alawlaki, as i said, was the leading recruiter and propagandist for alqaeda in english. When you kill a guy who is that big on the internet, you do not actually kill his most important presence. And his, you know, his importance was not as a bombmaker, his importance was a speaker for this cause. And when they killed him, his presence on the internet did not go away. Not only did it not go away, but islam, like christianity, has a long tradition of martyrdom, and his fans began to see him as a martyr. And so the number of videos of awlaki and audio, illustrated audio that his fans kind of cut up and put up and posted and reposted has actually risen. When i was writing the book, theyre up to about 40,000 hits on youtube, that went up to 60,000, now its 71,000 last i checked about a week ago. And it covers everything from his early mainstream stuff about the life of the Prophet Muhammad a always way through his call to jihad at the end of his life where he basically says go blow something up, go kill some americans. And its had an enormous impact. Many of these sort of small scale terrorism cases that you probably havent heard of, when the fbi looks at the laptop of the person involved, theyll find a long history of watching awlakis material and also some of the most famous attacks of recent years. The Boston Marathon bombers, the cher january brothers who blew up the Boston Marathon, big fans of awlaki and got not only their ideology, but their bombmaking instructions from an englishlanguage online magazine that awlaki put out. Charlie hebdo, the shootings in paris, those guys were not even english speakers, but big fans of awlaki, and one of them had been to yemen to see him before he was killed. And even in san bernardino, that couple that shot up the husbands workplace meeting back in december, it turns out a neighbor they were killed by police, but a neighbor who had plotted with the husband said that they had sat and watched Anwar Alawlaki videos for hours and hours. So he actually speaks from beyond the grave with greater authenticity and authority as a martyr than he did when he was alive. Which is just to say that when you kill the messenger in a case like that, you do not kill the message. And, you know, its an example of something thats happened again and again in the war on terror which is that something the u. S. Does to promote American Security and safety generates a backlash, has unintended consequences that play into the hands of the enemy. And i think in this case that drone strike, arguably, has done that. Thanks very much. [applause] well, thank you, scott, and thats a perfect leadin to mark mo to yars book titled strategic failure. Be theres anyone that has if theres anyone that has taken a look and taken stock of this generation of drone warfare thats been going on now for, well, 15 years now, since the first strike on october 7th of 2001, its mark. And so, mark, wed love to hear more about your analysis of the Balance Sheet of drone warfare. Thanks, scott. And great to follow up on richard whittles remarks and scott shanes which i think provide you a lot of the context for what im going to talk about which is the use of the drone as a strategic instrument of u. S. National security policy. And this is mostly a story of the Obama Administration which is really the First Administration to use them on a truly large scale. The Bush Administration possessed them but did not use them in anywhere near the frequency of the Obama Administration. But it is worth looking a little bit at what the Bush Administration did to provide some context for what follows. The Bush Administration certainly had the ability to use the armed drones. Youve seen early on that capability was present. But in pakistan, which was the most likely place to use them where we couldnt go in on the ground, they were used very intermittently in the early years of the Bush Administration. It wasnt really until 2008 that the Bush Administration decided its going to step up the Drone Campaign because theres a rising alqaeda threat perceived in that country. So in the second half of 2008, president bush authorizes large scale use of drone missiles for the first time in pakistan. And we know that at least nine senior alqaeda figures were killed in pakistan during that time period. Is so pretty effective in that time x. We look back on this, this is really of the golden era of the drone. When president obama comes in, he learns of some of the details about the program, and he and his inner circle see this Drone Program as a way to showcase the president s commitment to fighting terror. Hes talking about pulling out of iraq, and hes looking for ways to break the stereotype of the democrats being soft on National Security. So this seems a good and fairly low cost way to do that. But unfortunately whats happened is, you know, in warfare you typically see when a new weapon is introduced, its very effective at first because the enemy doesnt know how to deal with it. But by the time obama comes into office, the enemys already starting to figure out some countermeasures. So one of the things they figure out is that, you know, theres homing devices that were used to target these weapons, and so they start searching people who are coming and going through these areas for devices. They figure out that gps technologys involved, and alqaeda actually publishes a manual of gps devices to tip their people off. The most simple and effective way that they found was simply to move their people out of the areas where the strikes were taking place, because pakistan had restricted the area geographically where the strikes could take place. So a lot of the alqaeda and other extremists simply moved. As it becomes apparent that its not going to be that easy to target these alqaeda guys, other options they use for the drones. One is to extend the groups that are going to be targeted by the drones. It happens that in obamas first year the pakistani government is ramping up operations against the Pakistani Taliban which is conducting an offensive, and thats one of the few extremist groups in pakistan thats actually trying to overthrow the government. And so theyre happy to feed us lots of information on the Pakistani Taliban. The other thing its done is that the criteria for targeting are loosened, and the Administration Starts to permit signature strikes which means you havent actually identified who the person is by name, but theyre doing things that would suggest that they may be a terrorist in terms of how theyre traveling, how theyre communicating, and so that allows us to strike more targets. We do, as a result of these things, the Obama Administration is able to hit and kill a lot more people than the Bush Administration did, and thats a fact that, you know, gets publicized. Of previously the drone administration had been kept under wraps but, again, part of the political motive is to try to show the administration is getting tough on terrorism. When you dig into the numbers which, you know, the numbers are just presented without real context, but when you look at them, theres a couple things that stand out. One of them that most of those people who are killed are actually members of the Pakistani Taliban which is a greater threat to pakistan than it is to the United States. Theres not a lot of people that were most concerned about on that group. Another thing thats very interesting is most of the people who are killed are actually very lowlevel insurgents. Theyre not the sort of terrorist masterminds that people were, i think, led to believe. In 2010 theres a u. S. Official acknowledges that out of 500 people who have been killed, that 90 of them are lowlevel fighters. And in 2011 another report that comes out says only 2 of the People Killed by the drone strikes are considered to be extremist leaders. We also know that in terms of disrupting terror attacks, that the Drone Campaign in pakistan was not what was hoped. Najibullah zazi which was planning to blow up the new york city subway and Faisal Shahzad who got the truck to times square but the detonator didnt work, thank goodness, both of those individuals were actually trained in the pakistani Federallyadministered Tribal Areas during the peak of the Drone Campaign. Over time our ability to conduct drone strikes in pakistan declines. The idea of us doing this in pakistan is unpopular, and theres a growing pakistani opposition to it x. Theres a number of events that lead to a souring of relations between the United States and pakistan, and this culminates with the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the fact that we went in without notifying the pakistanis was cause of great turmoil. So they put a lot of they closed our main drone base in pakistan, put a lot of other restrictions. So the number of drone strikes in pack tan papers off pakistan tapers off starting in 2011. At the same time, 2011 is a time of great strategic change for the Obama Administration. We have a changing of the guard in terms of personnel, career officials and highly influential people like secretary of defense gates, general petraeus, admiral mullen. A lot of them move out, and you have a change in strategy that is spearheaded by Vice President joe biden. And according to their argument, the use of counterinsurgency that we did in iraq and afghanistan where you control send lots of troops to control territory and population, thats too expensive and not really necessary. And what we can actually do is use drones and special operations raids to take care of these extremists at a much lower cost with much smaller u. S. Military footprint. And this idea had been pushed originally by biden in 2009, but hed been shot down. Now that a lot of these other people, especially gates, are out of the way, obama decides this to pick this up. And its used also to cut the size of the military which was prioritized by obama. And so obama at the end of 2011 puts this into his National Security strategy. In fact, were going to get out of counterunjury seven city insurgency, were going to use drones and special operations raids, and its much more drones statistically than the raids outside of afghanistan. And this will have a lot of ramifications for what goes on in iraq and afghanistan is used to justify retrenchment there. In terms of the drone war, the place where it has the biggest impact is in yemen which by 2012 really has become the epicenter of surgical counterterrorism. And pakistans ramping down. And scott provided a lot of rich detail on the specific events. But just in terms of strategically, there was by this time there has been a lot of discussion about the u. S. Approach to yemen. And within the u. S. Special Operations Command, there was the recommends that we need to help the yemenis do counterinsurgency, not just counterterrorism. And so we want to help them control territory, not just kill people. But the administration chose not to do that. They decided that was too much. We didnt want to get tangled up, we could just use the drones. So we ramp up the Drone Campaign against alqaeda in the arabian peninsula. The part when we decided not to be concerned about counterinsurgency, that means we have a smaller presence out in the rural areas which makes it hard to get intelligence. To part of the intelligence problem leads to errant targeting. You already heard a little bit about it. Theres been a number of incidents where women and children are killed by mistake, and alqaeda uses these very effectively to gain new followers. So during the period of drone strikes or the number of alqaeda followers go from 300 to more than a thousand. And its all really kind of collapsing in yemen in 2015 when the houthi insurgents actually overthrow the Yemeni Government which then ruins the whole Counterterrorism Program that weve put in place. We have to pull all our people out, lots of hardware falls into the enemys hands, we dont have intelligence now to do any more drone strikes there. So to sum up, drones have been useful tactically in certain situations. Theyve had, certainly, some benefit. Weve also seen they can be counterproductive when they hit the wrong targets. The idea they can be a strategic instrument i think has been very much disproven by events. The enemy, if we dont have boots on the ground, our friends dont have boots on the ground, youre not going to be able to stop these groups. And the idea is problematic simply because we thought that having drones as a strategy was a viable strategy, and that has prevented us from adopting strategies that are actually more effective. Thank you. [applause] thank you, mark. Well have time for a couple questions. Im going to ask one x then ill turn it over to everyone. You concluded with drones as a strategy. That was the term that you used. And id like to ask each of you the same question but give a little bit of context to this. Drones, during my time in the marine corps, were always viewed as a tool. I deployed right after 9 11 as a forward air controller, as one of the ones on the ground with an infantry unit, and we spent the better part of five months floating off the coast of yemen to try to go get a young man who was one of the highlevel alqaeda folks. We were going to have to go 300 miles inland to get him. Thats a complicated operation in helicopters. Is so we never executed the operation, and we returned in september of 2002, and lo and behold, only a few weeks later he was first individual killed by a drone outside of the afghanistan and pakistan areas. And so as we look to this tool, you know, we were kind of lamenting the fact that we didnt get the call, but also we knew how incredibly difficult it was. And as i continued to deploy and saw the great efficacy of the tool that a drone could give you, he could be over the target for nine hours which is a lot more than the half hour you get with an f16 often times. Were in an election year. If you were advising the next administration as three students of the drone, what advice would you give to the next administration, be it someone in charge of the Foreign Policy Transition Team or even to the man himself, as to how you would tweak or change what weve seen in a drone policy now with two administrations . Be why dont i start with you, mark. Okay, yeah. One thing i would say and one of the very interesting things is within the military where i spent a lot of time, theres almost unanimous recognition and fact this is just a tool, its not a strategic weapon. I think the administration has reluctantly come around to that view. I mean, theyve been forced into that position, and a lot of their own supporters have argued that. But i think its certainly worth everyone icing that emphasizing that surge call strike, its not surgical strike, its not a viable solution to dealing with violent violent extremism. You need a lot of other things. You need counterinsurgency, longterm Educational Programs and diplomacy. So i would just, you know, caution against thinking that this is some kind of silver bullet. Very good. Scott . Well, as a reporter for the new york times, id probably get in trouble if i gave the president any advice. But i will make a point which is why obama embraced the drones to the surprise of many of his fans and detractors, and that was because i think he thought the big wars in afghanistan and iraq had basically been disasters. The cost in human lives in those countries was huge, the cost to american troops was huge, the cost financially was huge. And in both cases, it was, you know, the contribution to American Security was quite e give with call. You know, even after years and years of fighting in those countries, was the u. S. Safer or less safe as a result . So he was, you know, that was not clear cut. So he saw this as a tool that was particularly suited to taking out small numbers of people who were trying to kill americans. He would say lets kill the people who are trying to kill us. And he saw, i mean, i think hes very much a pragmatist by nature, and he saw this as a way of sort of taking out the small numbers of people who were doing this without turning a country upside down with the kinds of, you know, longterm consequences that youve seen in both iraq and afghanistan. And, you know, it clearly has proven problematic in some cases, but ive talked with Administration Officials recently about, and they still believe that it prevented attacks on the United States and that it is, compared to the alternatives, you know, a very useful tool against alqaeda, that style of terrorism. Perhaps less useful against, you know, isis which is essentially, you know, an Insurgent Army and a much larger target. Richard . Well, i think when you talk about the use of drones, you have to bifurcate it, you know . There are two the military uses them in a different way generally. The cia has used them as a means of targeted killings. And the military operates under title x of the u. S. Code, the cia operates under title l, and there are different rules and regulations that affect how they use them. Now, i spent a lot of time talking to military people about drones, and my feeling is that theres a wide recognition within the military that you are not going to win a war by drones alone. The idea of drone warfare really a nonstarter in a way. But for military operations, drones have become almost an essential tool. And theres an insatiable appetite not for the ability to fire weapons from drones within the military, but for the ability to see whats happening on the ground. And thats how theyre playing their greatest role militarily now in the campaign against isis, for example. Mq9 reacher drones are flying over iraq and syria all the time, and they are the way that military locates targets sometimes and then guides manned aircraft to them. The drones are the eyes, the eye in the sky that you didnt have before because they can stay up there for hours and hours at a time. You know, the use of drones for targeted killings, to me, raises a whole host of issues. I would say, first of all, on the question of why did the Obama Administration go into it, leon panetta when he was cia director expressed their attitude beautifully when he said its the only game in town. In other words, they didnt have any more, any better way to deal with alqaeda and the islamic terrorists in their bag of tricks when they decided to pull all troops out of iraq and afghanistan. Not all, but most troops out of iraq and afghanistan. And i think we havent talked about it, but i think an issue that people ought to think about is whether we really want the executive branch of the government keeping a list of people who we are willing to kill based on evidence that no one outside the executive branch sees, based on a process of deliberations that may be well intentioned, but i think needs some oversight either from the congress or from the judiciary. We dont wiretap people in the United States without the fbi going to a federal judge and offering a reason this is necessary. And i think that in a democracy we shouldnt pill people in target kill people in targeted killings without the cia or the Justice Department having to go to a federal judge and present the evidence and say this is why this is justified. Very good, very good. I think we have time for one short question, and then i think were going to have to conclude. So please step to the microphone in the center. Thank you, sir. Go ahead. Thank you. To no one in particular. This tool, weapon has been loosed on the world now. How do you see a possible future iteration of this tool . And how might that come back to haunt us . Great question. Who wants to take that one on . Well, i can talk a little bit about that, i i think the drive within the military Industrial Complex is to make drones more and more automated. Theres been this myth out there up until now that they are somehow killer robots. Theres nothing robotic about them. There are crews that sit and guide drones, and there are people above them who decide what to do with them. And the but the drive is to make their flight more and more automated, to make everything about them more and more automated so that they can be used in conjunction with manned aircraft and other assets in military operations. For example, the new f35 fighter plane sometime down the road might, the pilot might be able to fly with as many as three other armed drones that have similar capabilities to his fighter plane, and he would, in effect, become his own little fighter group. This is one vision that i have heard the navy admiral who runs air warfare talk about. Thats the way it will go. Now, let me just add that i dont think anyone is aiming to create drones that will automatically pick out and kill the their own targets. Thats the myth thats out there as well. Because, in fact, there is a Defense Department policy on the books against a machine being an automated weapon killing a target without any human intervention. So anyway, thats one, thats a very vague answer, but thats one direction these things are going. Very good. One minor, one additional answer to you is that as you might expect, when the u. S. Demonstrates a weapon like this, many other countries take an interest. And i think were up to about a half a dozen countries that now have used armed drones. I think there are 70 countries with Drone Programs. Most of them for surveillance at this point. But one thing that, you know, whatever critical things we may have said today about this weapon, you can bet that it will be, become a, you know, permanent part of many countries arsenals and, for better or worse, well see other countries using it increasingly as the years pass. And i would just add to that, too, other countries, there are a lot of these countries that will not probably be as careful or judicious in how they use these which, for all the mistakes weve made, i think weve been a lot more careful than others. And theres also the potential use for terrorism within this country and other countries is certainly, certainly troubling. Thats a great point. I think we could go on and on. This is a fascinating topic and three gentlemen who have done a remarkable job telling those stories. Id ask you to join us in the authors area where theyll be signing copies of their books, and i certainly commend to you these books and thank you for your attention. [applause] [inaudible conversations] booktvs live coverage of the Annapolis Book festival continues. Starting now, a panel on drone warfare. Usa today reporter ray locker looked into the Nixon Administration and found some things. Whatd you find that others havent . Well, the big thing was that he restructured the National Security council on his first day in office, funneled everything through the white house and away from the cabinet agencies that usually handled that, and that created a series of ree sentiments and rivalries that then nixon had to keep his hands on and cover up a lot of secrets with throughout his entire presidency. Was this unprecedented at the time . Yes, it was. I mean, these agencies state
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