Terry McDermott: The Problem Drones Don't Solve

Terry McDermott is the author, with Josh Meyer, of The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

I turned 20 years old sitting at a light table in a bright white building at a sprawling U.S. Air Forcebase in Saigon, South Vietnam. I was assigned to a reconnaissance unit, where my job was to select bombing targets in Cambodia. Then, as now, Cambodia did not have much in the way of traditional targets, and as an inexperienced targeteer, even when sober, I really had little idea what I was doing. That didn't slow things down much.

Given the means to attack — B-52s flying miles high above the landscape — and the desire, there was nothing that would stop the air assault. The fact that this was happening in secret, half a world away from Washington and with little or no risk to American lives, made it that much easier to execute. A high-altitude air assault on rural areas with few conventional targets is a very crude form of warfare. There was often extreme collateral damage. The operation was designed to be, according to the order from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves."

Day after day our bombers, flying so high they were all but invisible, rained death on the unsuspecting landscape below.

In the decades since, our aim has improved, but some of the fundamental problems with fighting technological war at a safe and comfortable remove have not. Simply put: American technology — B-52s then, drones now — makes it far too easy to unleash holy hell on our enemies...