When did they add a lawyer to the flight crew?

Bombing missions over Iraq and Afghanistan have become so high tech and sophisticated now that every mission is vetted by a lawyer for compliance with international law.

Feb. 15, 2008 | UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, THE MIDDLE EAST -- The cavernous control room used by the U.S. Air Force to manage the air wars in Iraq and Afghanistan looks exactly how you'd expect it to look in a Hollywood movie. The lights are low. Around 50 camouflage-clad men and women lean forward in their chairs, staring intently at rows of computer screens glowing with multicolored graphs and fluctuating displays. They sometimes glance up from the banks of computer monitors to gaze at a sweeping panel of large television screens mounted on the front wall. Two massive, side-by-side screens in the center display digital maps of Iraq and Afghanistan. Swarms of U.S. aircraft above the war zones are represented by green labels that move about each map, gravitating toward wherever U.S. troops are fighting on the ground, in case they need backup.

To the left and right of those large maps are four smaller screens. Each is about 5 feet wide, displaying remarkably clear live footage from cameras mounted on the Air Force's un-manned Predator drones that buzz incessantly above Iraq and Afghanistan. The Predator drones, however, are not filming a raging firefight, or a bridge about to be strafed from the air.

They are stalking prey.

You see a man, walking through a shrub-dotted, dusty field. A small dog wanders behind him. Another screen shows a group of individuals, standing huddled together on a city street, looking like they could be chatting about a ballgame. A third Predator tracks a figure getting into a car, following as the car snakes through traffic. Yet another screen stays fixated on a single squat house surrounded by what looks like a low cement wall, as if someone is about to emerge from the front door.

The scenes look misleadingly pedestrian. The miniature people on the screens do not know they are being watched. "We are looking for individual people," Lt. Col. Walt Manwill says, as he stares up at the massive screens. "Especially when you are killing people, you want to make sure you do it right." Manwill, a blockish former pilot whose call sign is Fridge, is a chief of combat operations here, on what the Air Force simply calls "the floor." He handles one of three eight-hour shifts in a job that runs 24 hours a day.

Targeters here show me recent footage of two men on the ground in Iraq. The two men, far below the Predator drone's gaze, appear to be setting up a mortar on a city street. They are in the shadow of a building just feet away. Suddenly, the two men explode. Everything around the men, including the buildings, looks unharmed. But when the dust clears, the two men are wiped away. A small bomb, tailor-made for hunting single individuals, has done the job.

An Air Force colonel describes these operations to me as "getting Bubba." This has become a key component of the air wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and the Air Force has developed it into a science. Air Force officials say the operations are highly effective in targeting enemies of the United States, while minimizing civilian casualties in the war zones. But some experts on international law note that the U.S. has flown into legally murky territory, akin to the Israelis' controversial practice of "targeted killings" in battling Islamic militants.

Is there any sense in acknowledging something as law that has no coercive force behind it to enforce compliance? If international law is so sacrosanct, why aren't more nations willing to provide military forces to enforce it? A four year old child can figure out that the only rules that count are those that bring punishment in their breach, but the highly educated and cultured mandarins of the UN can't understand this most basic fact of human psychology. To the extent that there is a defacto international law, it is represented by US foreign policy. We are the law, by default of every other nation on Earth.

I see one problem with this new method of fighting insurgent wars with high-tech networked systems for command and control, and that is the daily burn rate. We have costly F16 and F18 fighters wearing out in daily sorties serving as nothing more than glorified bomb trucks. If you allocated the costs out over the dozen or so Bubbas that we kill every month, the cost per Bubba would be astronomical. Since we generally achieve air superiority within hours of the start of an engagement, we need to plan our air assets for extended low threat roles like loitering on station with a mixture of ordinance. Cheap, reliable UCAVs would be perfect for this role. Overwhelming technological superiority won't do the job if it bankrupts the treasury before the bad guys are willing to give up.