Is war becoming like a video game?It's nothing like a video game

What's next for these robots of the battlefield?

We're in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The US Air Force have invited the mediato

Holloman Air Force Base. The main attraction is the Reaper,an unmanned

aerial vehicle. I don't know where to go to actually get a

shot of the Reaper taking off but we can provide extra B-Roll probably tomorrow.

First we meet the squadron commander.

This is a MQ-9, this is a Reaper. Why have drones or RPAs as you like to call

them become so popular with the US Air Force? Do you have an explanation?Yeh, they work.

They are a force multiplier and they save lives. You know I really believe that the

Remotely Piloted Aircraft, not drones because we are actually controlling them... But Remotely

Piloted Aircrafts save lives. This is a MQ-9, this is a Reaper.

What is it used for?It's used primarily for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance

and it does have a strike role too. What is the pay-load? The pay-load is what you see

on this airplane, on each side you can carry two hell-fires, you can carry a bomb and on

the other side you put another bomb, 500 pound class bomb and two hell-fires so you got four

missiles, and two bombs on each airplane.How long can this plane stay in the air?This airplane

can stay in the air for probably 16 hours. And that is a big advantage compared to an

M-16 or a fighter plane.It is, that's one of the advantages that this one has, it's

got persistence, persistence and it's always over the top if they are needing help from

above. You don't need to fly back to base to re-fuel you can just stay for 16...We can

stay for a long place for a long time, yes Like the colonel said, primary role is intelligence,

surveillance and reconnaissance. So to accomplish that we do have the primary payload, cameras

both day TV and night vision camera.Do you have a live video link from the aircraft back

to base?Yes sir.And how good is that quality? You can really see pretty good what's happening

on the ground?Yes sir, its very good quality.Can you give me your name and rank?No sir, uh,

my name is Majoy Trey.And your last name?Not able to divulge that.

This is an Air Force policy that we are following, so all were doing is following that policy

that's been set in place to protect our pilots since they are operators due to much of the

occupational security risks that they may face in their line of work.To your right is

McDonalds!Anything, nothing? It's early. The Americans claim the drones are vitalin

combating terrorism. They're much cheaper and easier.You can do

some serious damagewith them.They want to suppress Al Qaedathat way.

This is Anwar Al-Awlaki. The CIA say he was the leaderof Al Qaeda in Yemen. Yemen and

America are not at war.But the US sent a drone after this manand three fellow passengers

anyway. All of them were killed without trial or a

public presentation of evidence against them. They were killed when missiles were fired

from drones that were operated by the CIA or the US Military.

ACLU, a civil rights organisationin New York......is currently suing the state forsummary executions

with drones. I think there is certainly concern that the

United States is setting the precedent in it's use of drones that it would not be happy

with other countries using in the same way. Your absolutely right that the technology

of drones is not particularly complicated at its base. And there are dozens of nations

now that are developing or already have drone technology. And the United States now claims

the ability to use these drones to kill people all over the world. I suspect that the United

States will not be so happy if a country like Russia or China or Iran claims the same authority

and starts going after United States citizens or others, it's really a dangerous precedent.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are controlledfrom these containers in America. The pilots don't

gointo the war zone at all. They drive to the base in the morning, kill some Al Qaedaor

Taliban fighters and go home for dinner at the end of the day.

It is a unique capability to be able to operate State side and then go home to your family.

It's kinda weird though, because half of your day your operating and performing missions

then you go home to be with your family and for some folks that can be a challenge, for

some of the younger guys but the Air Force does a very good job we have a lot of resources,

chaplains, medical personnel for any issues they may see they are well taken care of.

But are drones precision weapons,or do they cause civilian casualties?

I wanna make sure the people understand that actually drones have not caused a huge number

of civilian casualties. For the most part they have been very precise, Precision strikes

against Al-Qaeda and their affiliates and we are very careful in terms of how its been

applied so I think that there is this perception some how that were just setting in a whole

bunch of strikes willy-nilly this is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list

of active terrorists and so on. Mistakes like these, when an Americanchopper

pilot shot Iraqi civilians, should now occur less frequently. Drones are said to be more

precise.But that turns out to be not entirely true.

Shit happens,that's what they say in war.Murphy's Law. Things go wrong. And that goes for UAVs

as well as aircrafts.You think you've cornered an Al Qaeda fighter on a farm. So you send

a rocket out thereto kill him.When it's about to hit, whether froma manned or a unmanned

aircraft......his wife comes out the door.What do you do? The scenarios for such actionsare

unchanged. A drone might be a few inches more precise, but the consequences are the same.

So you have two people operating the aircraft?That's right, the pilot is flying the airplane, the

pilot commander is in charge and the sensor operator is operating the target pod, under

the direction of the pilot. You need two to maximize the capabilities of the aircraft

so as you can see, the sensor operator is actively involved in moving that targeting

pod around, finding the blue forces, convoy etcetera. It's pretty much a full time job,

allows the pilot to focus on not just maneuvering the aircraft to produce optimal imaging but

also to be in charge of the overall tactical scenario, how your going to employ the weapon

system.What is this joystick used for?That's the control stick, its not a joystick, it's

the control stick for the aircraft. It's just a big computer game.It's funny how

these pilots, although they are 'desk pilots', still wear flight suits, to make them look

like real pilots. Is war becoming like a video game?It's nothing

like a video game and the reason it's nothing like a video game is because this is connected

to a real airplane flying through the real air. These two crew members are acutely aware

of that, right and in fact and because they have an egocentric respective they actually

start to feel that they are on board the aircraft after a bit of time.

In a way the Americans alreadyreached a turning point in 2009, 2010.They trained more screen

pilots, than pilots physicallyinside an aircraft.And they purchased more unmannedplanes than manned

ones.Which is not surprisingsince they're much cheaper. So it's not science fiction,it's

everyday reality?It's everyday reality. This is the Step desk is what we call it and

the operation supervisor is in charge of all the missions that go on.Is that a civilian

car on the road?It is a civilian car here in New MexicoSo your training, locking on

to civilian cars?Were able to track them we do not simulate or actually engage those vehicles

it's just simply to track them to be able to follow a moving target.With or without

their permission?They do not know that we can see them but we are just following the

vehicle with a camera. You were in Afghanistan in 2008 what happened?I

was invited to an interview by a Taliban commander, I went to the interview with two afghan colleagues

and instead of interviewing us he kidnapped us and took us into the tribal areas of Pakistan

and held us prisoner there for 7 months.So you were a hostage.Yeah we were held in an

area called North Waziristan its part of the tribal areas of Pakistan, they train suicide

bombers there, there are foreign militants and also there are American drones circling

overhead in the sky all the time. It was amazing to be on the other side of a drone strike,

drones, circled all the time overhead in the tribal areas of Pakistan. These drone strikes

happened once every 10 days or 2 weeks and the militants would be angry when they would

occur. It was hard for me to tell what was happening but it did seem like militants were

being killed in attacks along with some Civilians. The closest missile strike was, we moved to

a small town in South Waziristan and there was a car driving next to the house where

we were being held and a missile strike hit the car and we were so close that pieces of

metal, pieces of shrapnel from the missile actually landed in the courtyard of the place

where we were being held. I was afraid that civilians had been killed, I was afraid that

I would be killed in revenge for the attack, it turned out that 7 foreigners and Pakistani

militants were in the car, all men and they had been killed. One of the things the Obama

administration has tried to do is have a light footprint that compared to a Bush style large

scale invasion with 100'000 troops in Afghanistan or Iraq; the Obama administration tries to

use smaller amounts of force, more precisely targeted against Al-Qaeda not other groups

and they think in the Obama administration that the drone strike does this. It doesn't

it's not a light precesne, it is a military weapon of war and when you use it, Pakistanis

or Yemenese get angry about it. It's not this precise thing that doesn't really bother people.

A lot of people thought:Obama is in power now.He's not such a cowboy as Bush was.He

probably won't do such things.But precisely because unmanned systems are so clean and

outside our scope, and able tohunt down individual terrorists, many Americans think: Go ahead,

do it, and don't tell us the dirty details. So even a liberal president does it.He probably

thinks:This is already a controversial war. I'd better not endanger my pilots and my special

forces.What else do I have? Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Deploy them.

Drones aren't only popularwith the army. Police and security services alsouse them on their

own territory, to find criminalsand combat illegal immigration.A privacy organisation

from SanFrancisco is suing the state for this. So why are you suing the Government?Well we

are suing the Government because were very concerned about the use of drones domestically

in the United States. We already know that the State and local law enforcement are using

drones but we don't know much about how or why. Drones have the capability to include

al different types of privacy invasive technologies, they are able to use thermal imaging technologies

to see inside buildings, there able to use communication intercept technologies, to listen

in to our phone calls, location tracking technologies to track where we've been, where were going.

For all these reasons I think drones are of real privacy concern.

Privacy is an issuein Europe too. If our air forces buy drones,the police can use them

too. In the Netherlands last year a small drone was deployed justto find an arsonist.

What would your advise to the Dutch people be?My advice would be to think through these

issues. Spend a little time before Authorising the Government to purchase drones and just

go out and use them. Come up with policies about what kind of information can be collected

and whether a court order needs to be sought before the information can be collected where

drones could be operated legally. I think all of these are important issues.

In the Netherlands there are plans to invest funds into drones. There is almost no debate

about the legal or the moral issues surrounding them, does that surprise you?There's been

very little debate here in the United States and one of the criticisms is that if a republican

president had done this many drone strikes as Obama did there would be much more protest

from the left. I think Obama and his administration need to do a better job of making the drone

strikes public and explaining why they are doing them.After 7 months in captivity, how

did it end?We were desperate we thought they would hold us for years and while our guards

were asleep we used a car toe-rope I had found to lower ourselves down the wall of the house

where we were being held prisoner and we walked to a Pakistani military base. We were nearly

shot at the base, they thought I was a suicide bomber; I had a beard down to about here.

But a moderate Pakistani military officer let me on the base. My Afghan colleague, the

guy I was kidnapped with brought me to the base sp those two moderate Afghan and Pakistani

men saved my life and that's the reason why I'm still home today.

At about 30 pounds, the man portable 3-10 SUG V Robot is lightweight enough to fit inside

a molly or alice pack. It's compact and can be taken anywhere. Designed by iRobot and

the Boeing company, the 3-10 SUG V performs dismounted operations like surveillance, reconnaissance,

EOD and route clearing missions with ease. And these robots are advancing. The Air force,

army and navy are all using them more and more regularly. This is a small spying vehicle

with four cameras and night-glasses. And this is a sort of pack mulecarrying communication

equipment.

What robots are for in general are jobs that are dull dirty and dangerous. Chris Anderson is the editor-in-chief

of "Wired", a big technology magazine. Every month it discusses the advance of robots in the military.

In general keeping people's boots of the ground and keeping people out of conflict seems like

a good thing by and large. You know, to the extent that drones again keep humans out of

harms way, I think that's probably good. Were here at Wired's office but you also have a

company, whats that about?Well we don't just write about technology, we live with it. Were

here in the middle of Silicone Valley and we can't help but participate, drones are

my passion, robotics is my life so were doing something about it.You have a company producing

drones.I do yeah. Anderson's company is calledDIY Drones.It

produces small helicopters withmanual and automatic controls and a recording camera.