The war of the drones

• Wide angle Nudes to bioterrorism
• Wide angle Europe, in no man's land

Technology has democratized the bombings. Where until just five years ago an Air Force was necessary that, almost by definition, was the exclusive patrimony of the States, today a few planes without a pilot are enough. The best example has come this week, when around 10 devices manufactured in Iran managed to erase from the map 5% of the world's oil production against the largest petrochemical complex on the planet, that of Abqaiq, in Saudi Arabia, and against the from Khurais, in the same country.

Al Qaeda had already successfully attacked Abqaiq with two suicide bombers in two car bombs in 2006. But, where human beings failed, the drones succeeded . A few impacts were enough to reduce by more than half the flow of hydrocarbons that leaves that plant, as large as 500 football fields.

Of course, drones are anything but new. In fact, the first attempt to use unmanned devices for war could have caused a humanitarian and cultural catastrophe of apocalyptic dimensions. But nobody thinks that happened in the days of Nazi Germany or imperial Japan. It was in July 1849, when the Austrian Empire, which was surrounding Venice, launched 200 hot air balloons with incendiary bombs against the city . But the wind saved the Venetians. Only one of the artifacts reached Venice. The rest fell away from their goals and some even impacted the Austrians. Now, drones celebrate their 170th anniversary with a success that compensates for that failure.

But, although we tend to see drones as a result of the technological advances of the last two decades, they have been here for quite some time. 54 years ago, Mao Zedong's China exhibited the remains of eight aircraft without a US pilot that had shot down over its territory and that had left Okinawa Island. It was called Type 147, a ship that was launched by a C-130 transport plane whose crew controlled it remotely.

The Type 147 had an autonomy of 2,000 kilometers, and could fly from an altitude of 18 kilometers to ground level, to the point that a photographic sequence shows one of those devices passing under a high voltage power line in Vietnam from North. Then, at a "meeting point" designated before the mission began, Type 147 was "captured" by a helicopter. The system was so effective that in 11 years of missions over North Vietnam, the US did not lose a single device due to anti-aircraft fire, although due to accidents. In that same period, Israel was able to take a momentous step in the small history of airplanes without a pilot , when it got them to take off and land from airstrips, like normal airplanes, without the need for nurse airplanes.

But all those drones had a limitation : they only served for reconnaissance missions. They did not carry weapons. And sometimes the information they gave to the soldiers who handled them was not well managed. That is what happened on January 29, 1991, in the middle of the First Gulf War, when a drone from the United States Marine Corps detected a column of Iraq tanks that, in the midst of the massive bombing that was undergoing the The Armed Forces of that country had performed an incomprehensible or suicidal maneuver: instead of seeking refuge, dozens of tanks and armored vehicles had left the Emirate of Kuwait, which they occupied, and were moving towards Saudi Arabia. The drone video, which had been recovered by the Marines, left no doubt . But no American general took that information seriously. The Iraqis were being pulverized, so it made no sense that they were advancing on an offensive.

Actually, they were attacking. A few hours after the pilotless plane delivered its video, Iraq was taking the Saudi city of Jafyi, which had 40,000 inhabitants, which had been evacuated before the conflict. What followed was a brutal battle in which hundreds of Iraqis died and convinced the US generals that the ground war should start soon, because Saddam's forces had no capacity to confront those of Kuwait's allies.

What did not convince them, however, was the importance of drones. Four years later the Air Force and the CIA, which is truly the first aircraft without a pilot, the MQ-1 Predator, entered into service. For the next six years, this device was used in reconnaissance missions in the wars of the former Yugoslavia, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. But he never carried weapons. Until October 12, 2000, Al Qaeda was about to achieve what would have been the first sinking of a US warship since World War II, when it launched a suicide attack on the destroyer Cole in the port of Aden, in Yemen. 12 US sailors died, and the ship was so damaged that the US Navy had to hire a special Norwegian vessel specialized in transporting oil platforms to load it and take it back to the US.

When the Cole was knocked out, the Bill Clinton government was considering arming the AQ-1 with anti-tank missiles and launching them over Afghanistan on the hunt for Bin Laden. In January 2001, an AQ-1 fired missiles for the first time at a firing range in Nevada. The problem, however, was the bad information about where Bin Laden was. The US even contacted the head of the Afghan anti-Syrian resistance Ahmad Shah Masud, to give them information about the terrorist. But the plan never finished, despite the enthusiasm of the CIA.

The air out of the poor

On September 4, 2001, the Government of George W. Bush approved a plan against Al Qaeda that excluded the use of armed drones. Five days later Masud was killed by al Qaeda, and a week later 3,000 people died in the US in the attacks of 9/11 . When Washington began bombing Afghanistan on October 7 of that year, among the attacking planes there were already AQ-1 armed with anti-tank missiles. In fact, that same night, one of those airplanes let the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, escape in an incredible chance, because the ship's operator in the US was not authorized to fire. The killer drones were still very new for the Pentagon to leave their pilots hands free . Today, 18 years later, drones are the air force of the poor.

With a simple drone purchased from Amazon, any troop can observe the opposite, drop a bomb in the center of its camp and, in addition, record it and hang it on YouTube as propaganda. Since this summer, the Nigerian army has suffered a series of attacks at its bases in the state of Borno by jihadist militia Boko Haram. There are already 30 dead, twice as many injured and the feeling that they have better drones than themselves.

On November 7, 2004, the Lebanese group Hezbollah used a drone for the first time to enter Israel's airspace for 30 minutes in which the city of Nayahiya flew over and then fell into the sea. That seemingly harmless operation changed the offenses of armed militias forever. From that moment on, all of Israel's anti-aircraft defenses had to adapt to the search and destruction of small unmanned devices. Hamas copied Hezbollah's model and then, in the Syrian civil war, it was the jihadist militias that used them on all fronts.

Arthur Holland Michel, author of Ojos en el cielo and drone specialist, believes that " the possibility of buying cheap commercial drones gives many armed groups a range of capabilities that they could not have dreamed of just a few years ago . they can use as rudimentary guided missiles or to drop small ammunition. "

The Roman legions watched in the distance the flight of the crows to know the position of the enemy, because these birds followed the armies to eat the leftovers of their food. Today, crows carry batteries and go to remote control.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• Al Qaeda
• Israel
• Iraq
• Afghanistan
• Saudi Arabia
• Yemen
• Hamas
• Iran
• Boko Haram

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