The Bad Omen of America's Falling Drone Syndrome

Just over ten years ago, in the early hours of September 11, 2001, otherwise quiet news reports led with a mysterious story: the U.S. had lost a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle over Iraq’s no-fly zone. Given the other news of the day, the downed drone, which Iraq claimed to have captured, barely left a mark by the end of the day – except perhaps on the Bush administration and its retaliation plans. But whatever impact the incident may have had on the years that followed, that falling bird certainly looked like a sign ripped from the verse of a Shakespeare tragedy.

Fast forward ten years, past quagmires, backlashes, meltdowns, revolutions, and fear – not to mention all kinds of creepy Internet-friendly stories about actual falling birds – and there are more drones, and more falling drones, than ever before.

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Sometime Saturday night a suspected U.S. drone fell out of airspace above the craggy tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghan border. While it’s unclear what brought down the armed Predator drone – was it picked off from the ground, or did it suffer a technical glitch? – Pakistani militants affiliated with al Qaeda were nevertheless quick to recover the “precious debris.” Oof.

Officials caught wind of the crash after intercepting Taliban radio communications, which unsurprisingly boasted of having blasted the unmanned aerial vehicle out of the sky. Despite faltering relations with the U.S. in the wake of the bin Laden raid, and even as it publicly assails UAV strikes, Pakistan covertly permits drone attacks and even works with the U.S. to pinpoint targets. Naturally, Pakistani forces went on the offensive Sunday morning in a bid to salvage the downed wreckage, Reuters reports. Three militants were killed in the fracas. Three militants and two soldiers were also injured.

Afghans in Jalalabad survey what’s left of a house post-drone crash, August 21, 2011(Reuters/Parwiz)

A Taliban target or not, the weekend’s incident heightens what’s quickly become an epidemic of falling drones. There’s been a rash of crashes and “crashes” in the last month alone.

On August 16, a RQ-7 Shadow drone collided midair with a U.S. C-130 military cargo plane in East Afghanistan.

Just three days later, a surveillance drone slammed into a house in the city center of the Somali capitol of Mogadishu. A correspondent with the Associated Press was able to glimpse pieces of the busted, allegedly American UAV, shaped “like a small plane,” before African Union troops whisked away the debris.

Two days later another surveillance drone – this one operated by the International Security Assistance Force – came down on a house in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province (pictured above).

And how could you forget that weird, mystery avian drone – straight outta TED – that crashed in Pakistan last month.

Is this avian American? (via DIYDrones)

But look a few years further back into the proliferation of UAV tech – there’s been a dramatic ratcheting up of drone presence since Obama took office in 2009 – and this literally downward trend becomes even more apparent.

Drone Wars UK ’s Crash Database has logged 36 “large drones” plummeting to the earth over the past two years. (To be sure, this database was last updated August 24.) Combing accident reports and press releases from the U.S. Air Force and the WikiLeaks War Logs, the database cites nearly 80 of these large drone accidents since 2007. Smaller drones – mini-UAV’s like the RQ-1 Raven and the ScanEagle – crash “so often,” the author explains, that logging specifics (type, cause, location, etc.) “would swamp the database.”

What is this getting at?

Of course the ethics of killing people with drones deserves its own brain time; even the CIA drone chief thinks it’s making the problems in Pakistan and Afghanistan much worse.

But every time a drone falls down, it raises another set of problems. Forget all about the ill-founded crush-you-to-death hubbub over that defunct, 12,500-pound NASA satellite falling back from whence it came sometime this week. What’s alarming about Falling Drone Syndrome is not only the better odds of death-by-falling drone, let alone how incredibly easy it is for anyone to build a UAV with parts off the shelf: after a year of spilled secrets and increased hack attacks, here’s a physical instance of a presumably sophisticated U.S. war machine literally falling into the hands of other countries.

The people that catch America’s falling drones are stealing or selling American secrets, no doubt. But they’re also getting a pretty blunt and regular reminder of how the U.S. does things that other people aren’t supposed to know about. As they say, it’s a bad look.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv