Seth J. Frantzman - Drone Wars: Pioneers, Killing Machines, Artificial Intelligence, and the Battle for the Future

T he concrete staircase felt claustrophobic. At the bottom was the sound of gunfire. Above, beyond a small door that led to the roof of this three-story building in Mosul, was an imperceptible buzzing. And somewhere in the distance, hiding behind a mattress or secreted in a similar stairway, an ISIS sniper was watching us. Thats what the Iraqi major said as he motioned to three of his soldiers to move quickly up the stairs to avoid a gap in the wall that overlooked an alleyway. It was I raq, 2017.

We were being hunted. Hours ago wed entered the city as the hunters, the ones with the US Air Force at our backs and an endless supply of ammunition and Humvees and a mass of soldiers. But the enemy was here, waiting. Their inexpensive weapons, including quadcopter drones armed with grenades and mortars they made in underground factories, were deadly. So were their booby-traps in homes and vehicles laden with bombs. But its the buzzing of an ISIS drone that I still can hear, years later. It is endless and unnerving, like the distant reverberations of explosions and other sounds of war. It also represents a new generation of warriors. The drone warriors.

Prior to the battle, the drone threat had seemed surreal and distant. We were at a makeshift Iraqi basesomeones one-story house on a hillock, transformed into a soldiers squat. One Iraqi soldier laced up his boots, sitting on a black plastic chair in a concrete-wall enclosed courtyard. The boots were khaki-colored, with spots of dirt around the bottom. He pulled them tight, looping the laces around the clasps at the top to hold them more tightly to his ankle. He was a member of the Emergency Response Division (ERD), an Iraqi army unit that was supposed to be used in a crisis. Today, and for the last several weeks, the ERD had been slogging its way into the city of Mosuls western edges.