A grim commemoration in Libya

As aerial warfare is entering a new controversial phase in its history with unmanned and remote controlled targeted killings with what has become known as drones, there is extreme irony in the fact that the world’s latest concluded war only weeks ago ended in Libya with just such an attack on the fleeing convoy of president Gaddafi. It represents a grim commemoration of the first bomb from the air 100 years ago in that very same country.

On November 1, 1911 an Italian pilot, Guilio Cavotti became the first man to drop a bomb of sorts from an aeroplane. His target was the oasis of Tagiura just outside Tripoli during the war against the Ottomans of Turkey at the time. His bombs were grenades that he tossed by hand over the side of his little monoplane.

After his attack on the oasis, he also dropped a single grenade on a nearby military camp. Cavotti did not succeed in injuring a single enemy soldier in this mission. Less than six months later, during the same conflict, he would also become the first pilot to undertake a night mission.

But, how things have changed since that crude Cavotti-effort with four grenades stacked in a leather bag. During World War II we saw the largely complete  destruction of cities, but nothing illustrated the game-changing impact of aerial fire power as, first, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and then the dropping of the American atomic  bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Probably the most far-reaching implication of this development has been the fact that it has blurred, if not eradicated, the distinction between combatants and civilians in what has become the centre piece of modern warfare. Arial attack is almost totally indiscriminate in this respect.

It also largely removed the human element from warfare, of engaging the enemy and seeing  the white of his eyes.

The quest to deliver destruction on the enemy remotely through the air also started during World War II with Germany’s rockets aimed at London and launched from the continent.

Even more impersonal

In the latest development aerial attack has become even more impersonal with pilots sitting in air-conditioned facilities thousands of kilometres away, in an exercise resembling a video game,  engaging in targeted killings. The Americans describe it as putting warheads on foreheads.

A good example of this is that Gaddafi was finally captured and killed when the convoy with which he was leaving Libya was taken out by an aerial-attack by drones. There are however also examples of the Americans having killed even their own citizens in foreign territories after they have been identified as enemies of the state.

How impersonal this form of war has become is illustrated by the fact that today’s operators of automated, aerial weapons are said to refer to the results of their global work as bug splat.

In a comprehensive essay on the way in which aerial warfare has developed, under the title Lines of descent on the openDemocracy-site Derek Gregory, describes a concurrent development with far-reaching moral, ethical and legal implications: “The CIA has been authorised to use lethal force against unnamed individuals in Pakistan on the basis of their suspicious ‘pattern of life’.  These people – at best ordinary foot soldiers, at worst innocent civilians that ‘walk off the straight line’ ­­– are known as ‘signature targets’, and in their anonymity and abstraction they are ghostly traces of the target signatures that animated the electronic battlefield.”

These developments also remove the potential inhibiting political factor on decisions to engage in war of dead soldiers returning home in body bags.

These developments combined by the American doctrine of war on terror created a situation where wars become borderless with no clearly defined battle fronts. How a dangerous a place it made the world is well illustrated by another quote from the Gregory-article: “If the battle space is now global, and if the United States claims the right to use lethal force against its enemies wherever it finds them, then what happens when other states claim the same right?  And when non-state actors possess their own remotely piloted aircraft?”

And the arsenal of these deadly machines of war are still growing and becoming more sophisticated. AFP reported last week that the US military is to add a lethal new robotic, helicopter, called the Fire Scout, to its drone fleet.

In the words of George Vardoulakis of Northrop Grumman, the company that won the contract to arm the Fire Scout: “By arming the Fire Scout, the Navy will have a system that can locate and prosecute targets of interest. This capacity shortens the kill chain and lessens the need to put our soldiers in harm’s way.”