Deep Blade Journal

“Reaper” drone aircraft

National Pentagon Radio does Reaper promo

It must be nice for the US Air Force to have for its public relations campaigns a listener-supported national radio outlet and a staff of fawning reporters to do its work. That’s the role Mary Louise Kelly of NPR took on Friday for the Air Force as she reported on the latest version of its unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a killing machine known as the “Reaper.”

The old version, called “Predator” was used to assassinate people who insufferable NPR host Robert Siegel called “suspected terrorists” in his introduction. The Reaper is a “bigger, stronger version” Siegel reports with a relatively cheerful inflection, almost a chortle. Hey, wow, “twice as fast as the Predator, and can carry far more ordnance — 14 Hellfire missiles as opposed to two.”

Shouldn’t the tenor of all this talk about sending Reapers to kill while controlled from a lab half a world away at least be grimly appropriate? Not on NPR, where the copy flows like brochures at an armaments industry trade show.

I won’t dwell on the details of the remote killing machine and its ambitious delivery schedule talked up by Kelly. But here is something that really struck me near the end of the five-minute audio brochure. At that point Kelly quotes as follows one Major John Chesser, a bomber pilot obviously very anxious to drop bombs:

Chesser also sees a distinct advantage to flying by remote control–instead of long tours of duty overseas, he points out, “You get to go home and eat dinner with your wife.”

I was reminded immediately of the episode of the TV series MASH where psychiatrist Sidney Freedman writes a letter to Sigmund Freud. In one scene, Sidney observes how the staff at the 4077th deals with a bomber pilot who had bragged of his easy days at the office dropping bombs on Korea from 20,000 feet, followed by comfortable meals at home. He then saw how the surgeons operated on a badly wounded eight-year-old Korean girl. Hawkeye and Col. Potter explained,

Col. Potter: Someone dropped a bomb on her building from an airplane.
Bomber Pilot: Who did it?
Hawkeye: He just dropped it. He didn’t autograph it.
Bomber Pilot: Was it one of theirs or one of ours?
Hawkeye: What difference does it make?
Bomber Pilot: A lot. It makes a lot of difference.
Col. Potter: Not to her.

Beyond the question of whether or not it is “the moral high ground” (quote from a military guy, also in Kelly’s report) to be assassinating even “suspected terrorists” with diabolical remote-controlled machines, it is inevitable that the 500-lb bombs and hellfire missiles exploded on top of residences will kill a lot more innocents than “suspects.” Unfortunately, Major Chesser and colleagues probably never will see for themselves that aspect of their work. Someone should send these Air Force men a DVD of that MASH episode. It should be viewed at NPR as well.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 01:06 and is filed under commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.