Category: 2012

This article is part of the Remote Control Warfare series, a collaboration with Remote Control, a project of the Network for Social Change hosted by Oxford Research Group.

Drone pilots perform function checks after launching an MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle Aug. 7 at Balad Air Base, Iraq. Source: Wikipedia

Over-burdened in its requests for continuous surveillance of an expanding battlefield, the US military is increasingly turning to private contractors to fill key roles in its drone operations.

In March this year, US Air Force Secretary Deborah James appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee, looking for a $10 billion funding hike. “I can tell you the number one thing that the combatant commanders say they want from our Air Force is more ISR, ISR, ISR,” she told the committee. “That is the number one priority.”

ISR is Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and encompasses a complex array of functions. It includes spyplanes and drones with special sensors and cameras, the satellites which control them, and the analysts who turn this information into “products”.  It also includes the “distributed common ground system”, an unwieldy term for the network of devices which allows personnel to access this information and the “products” derived from it.

The volumes of data being passed back from surveillance flights is now so vast that the military can no longer deal with it in-house. So, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (‘The Bureau’) found in a six-month investigation, the Pentagon has turned to the private sector to plug the gaps, employing contractors as imagery analysts or “screeners”.

Screening

The screener’s task is not a simple one. Like much of military life, it involves long spells of tedium – twelve hour shifts in front of a screen – interspersed with occasional spikes of activity. But it demands high and continuous levels of concentration. As one screener told us: “A misidentification of an enemy combatant with a weapon and a female carrying a broom can have dire consequences.”

Screeners can have an important safety function in reducing collateral damage – the proverbial “busload of nuns” which appears out of nowhere into the field of fire. But their interpretations of video imagery – “calls”, in military parlance – can also influence drone pilots to take shots. As one screener commented, once you’ve influenced the mentality of the pilot by indicating the presence of something hostile, it’s hard to retract it.

In one notorious incident, the crew of a MQ-1 Predator drone flying over Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province in February 2010 ignored ambiguities in their screeners’ assessments as to whether the trucks they were tracking contained combatants. As a result, at least 15 civilians were killed.

“When you mess up,” The Bureau was told, “people die.”

Contractors

The companies being paid to undertake this work range from industry leviathans like BAE to specialist tech firms like Zel Technologies and Advanced Concepts Enterprises.

Finding out who was performing this work was itself an arduous task. The Department of Defense records thousands of procurement transactions most days every year. From 2009 to the end of 2014 there have been over 8 million transactions between the Pentagon and the private sector. The Bureau analysed these transactions through its own specially constructed database, which allowed it to identify activities relating to ISR and then build up profiles of the contracts and companies carrying out those activities.

Table: US Military Imagery Analysis Contracts since 2010 (click to enlarge)

Data in this table is drawn from public sources including the Federal Procurement Data System (fpds.gov), Federal Business Opportunities (fbo.gov) and contractual material released under the Freedom of Information Act. Business information is taken from Bloomberg, Hoovers and Orbis.
Companies named in the reporting but not included in this table are BAE, Booz Allen Hamilton and Advanced Concepts Enterprises. The Bureau has documented evidence of their involvement in ISR from sources other than contracts and transaction records.
Click here for the full dataset

The Bureau identified over $260 million of screening transactions. But this is a niche market compared to the wider outsourced ISR effort. The private sector has been operating smaller surveillance drones over Afghanistan and other countries, managing communications between drones and their bases in the US and elsewhere, maintaining data collection systems and servicing sensors, to name just some functions. Procurement costs for these services run into billions of dollars.

Questions of accountability come to the fore in this type of outsourced warfare. Following considerable pressure, the military now publishes figures of contractors on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this transparency does not extend to ISR missions conducted in those countries – or elsewhere – from behind computer screens in Florida and Nevada.

From Screening to Targeting?

Although contractors are so far not supposed to have their fingers on the drones’ triggers, fears have been expressed that this distinction might be harder to maintain in practice. One military outsourcing specialist, Laura Dickinson, told us that if the ratio of contractors to government personnel swells, “oversight could easily break down, and the current prohibition on contractors making targeting decisions could become meaningless.”

Shortly after The Bureau published its investigation in The Guardian, the Pentagon announced that it would ramp up the number of ISR missions with ten new contractor-operated MQ-9 Reaper Combat Air Patrols. This puts contractors into the driving seat of large, combat-capable drones for the first time, although the Pentagon says these will be “ISR only”. The private sector’s involvement in drone warfare, it seems, is just taking off.

Crofton Black is a researcher, journalist and writer with extensive experience of complex investigations in the field of human rights abuses and counter-terrorism. He is a leading expert on the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation programme and a specialist in military and intelligence corporate contracting. He has a PhD in the history of philosophy from the University of London.

Crofton completed a report for the Remote Control Project last year on the use of contractors in US special forces operations.

This post by Oxford Research Group’s Global Security Consultant, Paul Rogers, was originally posted by openSecurity on 3 July, 2014.

An image grab taken from a propaganda video by jihadist group ISIL shows ISIL militants gathering Iraq. Source: Screenshot from World News Online

The recharged war in Iraq that got underway in June 2014 is moving towards its second month. A remarkable feature of this phase is the formation of a largely unacknowledged coalition of four states opposed to the advance of the extremeSunni paramilitaries across much of northwestern Iraq.

Iran’s involvement is clear enough: senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officers are active in Baghdad, and Iranian reconnaissance-drones are being used to aid Iraq’s troubled armed forces. Syria too is active, with Bashar al-Assad’s air-force conducting intermittent (and perhaps largely symbolic) strikes against jihadist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) targets inside Iraq.

This reflects a shift in the Assad regime’s position. As long as ISIL could be considered little more than an irritant in Syria (even if occupying substantial ground), the group had a propaganda value for Damascus, which could project an image of being steadfast in the face of radical Islam and even secure tacit acceptance by western governments in the process.

Now that ISIL is getting stronger and more confident – symbolised in itsdeclaration of an “Islamic State” in the territory it controls – the potential challenge to Damascus’s as well as Baghdad’s security is evident. Assad may therefore continue to encourage periodic cross-border air-raids, but he will also work harder to damage ISIL within Syria.

The late shift

The two other states in this extraordinary anti-ISIL confluence are the United States and Russia. United States forces in the region are being steadily expanded, though it remains difficult to discern the full extent of personnel deployment in Iraq. This is partly because several thousand Americans in Iraq were already in Iraq before the new war erupted –  including diplomats, weapons-technicians and private military contractors. It is sure, however, that three further groups of military personnel are now entering Iraq.

The first is composed of security people (probably around 300 in total) assignedto guard diplomats and civilians; the second (at least 100) to safeguard Baghdad airport, among them probably specialist helicopter-crews available to retrieve aircrew (the potential need is highlighted by the US navy’s regular F-18 reconnaissance sorties off the USS George HW Bush carrier in the Persian Gulf). The third group is troops, mostly special-forces personnel, sent to Baghdad and elsewhere to boost Iraqi government forces in their operations. The key point here is that the overall authority, US Central Command, calculates that its operation is unlikely to yield results for several weeks (see Daniel Wasserbly, “US assesses mission in Iraq, considers military options”, Jane’s Defence Weekly, 2 July 2014). US personnel may already be advising Iraqi army troops in their stalled attempt to retake the city of Tikrit, a political necessity for Nouri al-Maliki’s government to demonstrate that it was seen to be doing something to address a military disaster. But the US military is taking a longer-term view of its work in Iraq.

Russia completes this unlikely anti-ISIS coalition. Its main involvement so far is the provision of a number of Su-25 Frogfoot ground-attack aircraft. The Su-25 is a robust if relatively slow-flying aircraft of the 1970s, roughly analogous to the US’s A-10 Warthog (though less heavily armed). It was widely deployed by the Iraqi air-force in the war with Iran (1980-88), and used by the Soviet air-force in the two Chechen wars (1994-96 and 1999-2002). Few if any survived in Iraqi air-force service after the 1991 war; so it is close to a quarter-century since any Iraqi pilots flew this aircraft – which like all ground-attack planes requires particular skills and much practice. The implication is that if Su-25s are used against ISIL and other militias in the coming weeks, it is near-certain that Russian pilots will fly them.

Thus, both US and Russian forces are preparing to aid the Maliki government at a quite significant level, and may even cooperate more closely than either Washington or Moscow will want to acknowledge. Indeed, that may already be happening: the hundred US troops inserted to help protect Baghdad’s airport will be guarding the very same base from which Su-25s are already flying, no doubt with Russian pilots.

The weeks ahead

An image grab taken from a propaganda video by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant shows the group travelling through Iraq. Source: World News Online (Youtube with Creative Commons license)

If the war is creating strange alliances, a question of timescales may also become relevant as events unfold. Neither US and Russian support for Iraq, nor any from Iran, will have much effect on the situation until mid-July. This means that ISIL’s planners have a short window of opportunity to consolidate their recent gains. Several sources indicate that ISIL already has groups in place in western Baghdad to aid any assault on the city (see “The Iraq Crisis [Part 111]: Is Baghdad at Risk?“, 30 June 2014).

The next two weeks, then, are an acutely dangerous period (see Borzou Daragahi, “Iraqi capital nervously awaits Isis attack“, Financial Times, 1 July 2014). The aim of any ISIS attack will not be to take control of the whole city, for Shi’a militias in the eastern Baghdad districts are strong enough to contest that; instead it will be to damage and demoralise the regime to an extent that Baghdad can’t prevent the Islamic State consolidating itself.

That outcome would give ISIS a further lease of life. It would also be welcomed by many in the region, not least Saudi Arabia. But it would also be no more than a temporary gain in a war which may yet have far more dreadful human consequences.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University and Global Security Consultant at Oxford Research Group.  He is the author of numerous books including Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on twitter at: @ProfPRogers

Max G. Manwaring, a Professor of Military Strategy in the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the U.S. Army War College has written an interesting piece on what he calls the “new security reality in which business-as-usual approaches are of little use.

Manwaring focuses particularly on the changing nature of threats posed by non-state actors (insurgents, transnational criminal organizations, terrorists, private armies, state proxies etc.) who are able to exploit trends and circumstances such as poverty, social exclusion, environmental degradation, and political economic-social expectations for violent ends. He argues that from a US military point of view, “the enemy has now become a state or nonstate political actor that plans and implements the long-term multidimensional kinds of indirect and direct, nonmilitary and military, nonlethal and lethal, and internal and external activities that threaten a given society’s general well-being and exploits the root causes of internal and external instability.”

Such a change in the global security environment must surely result in changes in our risk analysis and threat assessments. In a piece for the International Relations and Security Network, Myriam Dunn Cavelty writes that “In order to identify risks, elaborate scenario-based approaches combining expert-knowledge from various fields are used. The aim of these undertakings is to develop a concrete basis for political action by ranking the identified risks by their estimated probability and severity: the more likely and the more damaging, the more urgent the response.” Yet while many governments around the world have begun to place a greater emphasis on understanding the factors that drive conflict (rather than just the instances in which conflicts are expressed in forms of violence around the world), not enough is being done to bridge the gap between threat analysis and policy response. It is one thing to accurately identify new drivers of insecurity, but quite another to find ways of mitigating them through preventive public policies. Central to this must be a greater emphasis on prevention in civil service training and recruitment programmes across a number of areas.

For example, a report by the Center for American Progress released last year noted that “While there have been a number of well-received conflict prevention trainings by and for U.S. government officials, they are too few in number and insufficiently available to all interested foreign affairs officials.”

Of course, for militaries, the changed threat environment that Manwaring and others are pointing to means not only a need for new training but also for a cultural shift in the way they think about the utility of their traditional tool – the use of force. For Manwaring, “…power has changed. It is no longer combat firepower. Power is multidimensional, and more often than not, is nonkinetic (soft). It is directed at the causes as well as perpetrators of violence.”

Addressing the causes of insecurity requires what groups such as Saferworld and others refer to as ‘upstream conflict prevention.’ This can easily become a catch-phrase used by governments and NGOs with little effect on actual policies, a point picked up on by Saferworld in their excellent new briefing on what upstream prevention actually looks like in practice.

Thinking through the consequences of the changing nature of global security, both in terms of threat assessments and policy responses to those threats (military and non-military), will certainly require new approaches at the broad conceptual level. The fact that this is being touched upon by think tanks, NGOs and even army war colleges is surely a good sign – is sustainable security an idea whose time has come?

Ben Zala is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester.

Image source: Utah National Guard.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defines food security as “all people at all times having both physical and economic access to the basic food they need”. However, due to a complex range of interconnected issues from climate change to misguided economic policies, political failure and social marginalisation, over 2 billion people across the world live in constant food Insecurity. It is important to take a sustainable security approach to look at the importance of “physical and economic access to basic food” by exploring the links between food insecurity and violence.

A recent article published by the journal Conflict, Security & Development examines food riots as representations of insecurity and looks at the relationship between contentious politics and human security.

Thomas O’Brien, author of the article, argues “the upheaval caused by a food riot can lead to lasting instability and violence as social and political structures are challenged”. Global rises in basic food prices triggered demonstrations and often violent protests in “over 30 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East in 2007-08”. The article puts recent food riots and the current global food crisis in historical perspective. Food riots are about more than “just access to food”.  They represent dissatisfaction with political structures and perceived injustices.

It is important to note that “the extreme nature of the rise in food price in the absence of much evidence of food shortages, left a sense of something unnatural about the way food markets were working”. Although poverty, weak states, ineffective civil society and lack of political freedom all contribute to food insecurity and the possibility of violent food riots, we cannot ignore to challenge underlying transnational and global power structures: “146 protests in 39 countries over the 1976-92 period were linked to the imposition of International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural adjustment policies.” Food security is fundamental to human security and needs to be approached by addressing underlying causes and drivers. A sustainable response to food insecurity would take global cooperation, justice and equity as key requirements.

An often mentioned driver of food insecurity is climate change. Climate change already has a great impact on global security concerns and the physical, social and economic effects will undoubtedly only be exacerbated in the near future. Increasingly high temperatures and little or inconsistent rainfall have devastating effects on crop yields in places such as India, Africa’s Sahel region and the mid-western United States.

The catastrophic food crisis in Niger in 2005 for example was largely attributed to the effects of climate change and competition over limited resources. Years of too little and too inconsistent rainfall have meant devastating droughts and diminishing harvests in this Sahel country of west Africa which has the highest birth rate in the world. Increasingly advanced desertification due to climate change means competition and potentially violent conflict, over limited resources such as water and arable land, intensifies.

In the 2005 food crisis however, although thousands of children died of malnourishment, Niger had produced enough food to feed its population. The real issue was a food shortage in neighbouring Nigeria. Nigeria has an economy based primarily on oil exports with a significantly weakened agricultural sector. Instead of Niger feeding its own population, much of the harvest was sold to wealthier Nigeria at prices much higher than anyone in Niger could have afforded. This is a good example of why free market economy and trade liberalisation do not necessarily benefit all parties involved. Writing about the great famines of the last century, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen noted “a drought is natural but famine is man-made”. What this tells us is that although the challenges we face by climate change are serious threats, there is much that can be done to ensure more food security through political and economic policies.

Farmers in Niger are struggling. But so are farmers in Jamaica. In contrast to Niger, Jamaica has a wealth of fruit, vegetables, fish and an abundance of fertile land. About one fifth of this island’s population is employed in the agricultural sector. Still, farmers are struggling to survive because they cannot compete with the much lower prices of subsidised agricultural imports from the USA. As cheap foreign products flood the market, Jamaican prices are driven down which makes local food production by and large unprofitable. As they rely more on foreign food imports, Jamaicans will be increasingly vulnerable to price volatility on the global marketplace. With the average Jamaican spending about half of household income on food, such vulnerability to price changes is a real danger to food security.

Importing less foreign food products is a difficult matter for Jamaica because of the strict trade liberalisation policies imposed on the country through its debt relief agreements. One could also argue that if it is cheaper for Jamaica to import food than to produce its own, why should it still encourage its local agricultural sector? When a country is dependent on food imports, it cannot assure food security for its population.

So far US imports have been much cheaper than local Jamaican produce. 2012 however has seen the “worst US drought in 50 years” according to last month’s Aljazeera article entitled Food riots predicted over US crop failure. “Grain prices have skyrocketed and concerns abound the resulting higher food prices will hit the world’s poor the hardest- sparking violent demonstration” says the newspaper. Corn is a primary staple in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America, and prices have already gone up 60 per cent since June because “the United States accounts for 39 per cent of global trade in corn and stockpiles are now down 48 per cent” due to the drought.

Price fluctuations on the global food market do not affect all people in the same way as “people in wealthy industrialised countries spend between 10 to 20 per cent of their income on food. Those in the developing world pay up to 80 per cent. According to Oxfam, a one per cent jump in the price of food results in 16 million more people crashing into poverty.”

A sustainable approach to food security would address underlying forces such as climate change, economic and political policies and social marginalisation.

Paul Rogers, expert on global conflict and consultant to the Oxford Research Group on global security, was recently featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme Costing the Earth. When asked whether free markets can help feed us, he replied:

“It will contribute in some way, but I think it is fairly minimal. There are far more important things to consider. Look at it this way: Back in the world food crisis in the early 1970s, which was the worst for about 80 years, there were about 450 million people malnourished.  Now the figure is closer to 800 million. Now, that malnourishment and lack of food is not generally because there isn’t enough food to go around. Even at the height of that crisis there was still half the normal reserve. It is because people cannot afford to get the food or to buy the food. […]  If you are looking at the situation of poor people across the majority world, there has to be some way in which we can actually improve the production of food in and around those areas to provide greater resilience in the face of what is coming because beyond all of this is the whole issue of climate change. I think we will have a wakeup call this year in terms of what might come.”

Anna Alissa Hitzemann is a  Peaceworker with Quaker Peace and Social Witness. She currently works with Oxford Research Group as a Project Officer for the Sustainable Security Programme, with a focus on our ‘Marginalisation of the Majority World’ project.