 I'm going to speak briefly along with Walter Dorn about the use of drones by the United Nations. It's a pleasure to sort of share this part of the day with Walter, who's a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, has worked with the UN in East Timor, Ethiopia, and elsewhere, and is a member of the UN's expert panel on technology and innovation and peacekeeping. He wrote a book called Air Power and UN Operations, which was invaluable to me and which I highly recommend to all of you. I'm accidentally going through the slides before I intended to. So I'd like to speak, in part, about the UN's use of drones in and of itself, in part because there tends to be a lot of attention paid today to the sort of large drones like the Predator and Larger, the Global Hawk, for historical reasons, and the small sort of DJI phantom and peer-sized drones which have proliferated so quickly. There's a little bit less discussion of the things that are in the middle. Like this, this is a Selex Falco. It's called the UN has five of these in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They're actually operated by Selex, an Italian company who also make the drones on a contract with the UN and have been there in the Congo for about a year and a half. Just to give some context, the peacekeeping operation in the Congo has about 20,000, mostly soldiers, also civilian employees, and policemen, and women, and is the largest UN peacekeeping operation in the world. The Eastern Congo has been at war for nearly 20 years since 1996. It's a war in which many millions of people have died and is something that's a sort of ongoing tragedy. So the question that sort of came to rise in the writing of this primer and in the organizing of this day was, what effect can this particular technology have on the situation in the Congo? So the drones are obviously, no one in this room sort of needs to be told, not a silver bullet of some sort or another. At present, so Goma is the principal city. I don't have a map here for you, but is the principal city of the Eastern Congo and the headquarters of the UN peacekeeping operation. There were five drones which were deployed there initially. After nearly a year, about 11 months in November and December of last year, they were moved to another city called Bunya in the north. Only two of the drones and one of the ground control stations was moved. So what this means is at a cost about $13 million a year, which is a lot of money to most NGOs in the context of the peacekeeping operation, which costs about $1 billion, it's not an enormous amount. So it takes about $13 million and 10 people at a time, more than 10 people in total on shifts, to maintain and operate these drones. There's two of them in Bunya. They fly within the line of sight, which means typically a radius of about 100 kilometers. And they fly for about five hours at a time, usually. They have an endurance that's longer than that, but the mission allows for some margin of error. They're part of a, here's some UN helicopters. It's not a great picture with the light. You probably can't see more, but they're part of a much, yeah, you can't really see these, I don't know how well you guys can see these, they're part essentially of a larger UN aviation operation in the Congo. Wanted just switching the order here slightly by way of contrast, the UN gets between one city and another on their own airplanes, which they operate. The roads in the Congo, I don't know how well you can see this picture, this is a relatively good road, are not good, it takes hours to go tens of miles. So there's a real, which is a point that some of the other panelists will come to later, but there's a real difference between how the UN experiences the Congo and how the Congolese experience the Congo. This is a protest that took place last fall against the UN. The popularity of the UN is very low in the Congo because of the ongoing state of war. In general, the attitude of the populace, and this was both anecdotally, I was visiting there a few months ago and the few public opinion polls that do exist in the Congo, just because of the ongoing state of insecurity and a sense that the UN has a tremendous amount of resources, the population in general resents the UN presence and by extension the drones, although there's not a sort of particular resentment of the drones as a surveillance technology. Surprising to me, the reaction of the average Congolese who knew about the presence of drones, which was most of the people in the cities and also knew about American armed drones, people's reactions was why aren't these drones armed so that they can put an end to this war, which is a sort of a polar sort of opposite to the sort of questions that people in the NGO community in the Congo tend to be asking, which isn't to say that I'm advocating for that idea. So this, I'm not, I don't think it's a good one. This protest took place after a massacre in Benny, which is a region to the north of Goma in the fall. In response to this series of massacres by an armed group called the ADF, that was what motivated the UN to move their drones from Goma to Bunya. I realize these are a bunch of cities that most people in the room probably don't know. I spent some time in the Congo sort of asking the UN intelligence officers whether the drones had let them achieve anything distinctly new in their fights against the armed groups. The answer basically was no for a variety of reasons. In part, the ADF operates in an area of triple canopy jungle, so the drones they fly above them can't really see much. They do have electro-optical IR sensors that are more sophisticated than an IR sensor you would have on a small drone. So they can see people below the jungle canopy, not always, but often. What they can't make out is who those people are and what they're doing, and it's very difficult to see if somebody's part of an armed group or if they're just villagers walking around. One way you could tell is that an armed group might be carrying weapons. The ADF generally caches their weapons and don't carry them around for exactly this reason. The other sort of limitation, this is a volcano that's just outside of Goma. I brought that up just because the line of sight limitations when the drones were based in Goma that they couldn't fly where the rebel groups were operating because they couldn't really fly around that volcano. They had one drone crash in October, which is still in the village where it crashed. They have parts of it there, so that's just, I mean the crash was, that's the engine. The crash is only, it's interesting insofar as the drones are not all weather capable. They took off in circumstances that were, it was a rainstorm, they knew they were borderline circumstances. They thought the risk was justified by the things they wanted to see, which I'm not sure exactly what those were. I mention that only because in the question of sort of how useful are drones in peacekeeping? The weather limitations are a major one. I found a number of times I asked, oh, can you tell me a time that the drone came in useful? And they'll mention, oh, there was an attack on some of our soldiers and we would have, we wanted to have the situational awareness of the drone, but it was raining, so we couldn't, and that happens frequently in the tropics. A lot of the armed groups that the drone observes are members of the Congolese army who are in fact allies in a sort of complicated fashion with the UN peacekeeping troops. This is a outpost, Congolese army are outpost, which again, the sort of information that the drones have are often, oh, that's where our allies are, which is something that presumably you maybe should have known already, but it's a very difficult, logistically difficult situation. That's in a village, it's another village in the countryside, so this is the sort of terrain that these drones are operating in. The bigger limitation is that the Congo is a very large country, it's the size of Western Europe, and having one drone in the air at any given moment means that there's always more things happening where you aren't than where you are, which goes to the point I was sort of mentioning earlier in the day is that if you're trying to map out, use a drone to make a map, you know where you're making a map of. If you're trying to use the drone to find armed groups, whether you're the US military who has that drone with a hellfire missile on it, or if you're a peacekeeping force who have a sort of substantially different rules of engagement and a substantially different mandate, it's harder to do, which is why the US military has had to devote so many resources to that, and to keep 50 or 60 predators in the air at any given moment, takes thousands and thousands of people isn't the kind of low-cost, decentralized thing we're talking about elsewhere. That also applies to these sort of drones that are somewhere in between in size between a predator and a phantom. They're cheaper than a predator, but they're still not straightforward to operate. You need trained operators. You also need to be interacting with, at the very least, the UN community, ideally the Congolese as well. And that's where, although there's a big effort being made, the information sharing by the UN's own account is sort of not where it should be, which means that it's very hard to see what the actual effect of these drones is. There's, in a sort of broad sense, better situational awareness, but it's hard to see a concrete way in which the UN peacekeepers are dramatically more, I mean, there's marginal help in terms of scouting out road conditions, which are, as I mentioned, often bad, and you can see that, okay, this road will take us four hours to drive down or six hours to drive down, but they haven't, as opposed to other applications where we can see drones being a sort of fundamental agent of change in peacekeeping, which is not to say I don't think they can be useful and even are useful to a small extent already, but in sort of delimiting both the capabilities and limitations of drones, this was just, and this is a little bit distinct from a lot of the rest of the discussions today, but it's an area in which so far, at least, they have yet to sort of live up to their potential because of the limiting factors of the other parts of the UN peacekeeping operation. Walter knows that history sort of far better than I do, so I'm gonna cede the podium to him now, and he can sort of help put the Congo in context a little bit, so thanks very much. Delighted to be at this cutting edge conference on a cutting edge subject, and speaking about how this new technology can be used in the service of peace and development, and Constantine has asked me to give some context, and I have to go back for the context, not to 96 with the First Congo War, but to 94 with the Rwandan genocide. General Delaire, a Canadian general, was responsible for the UN assistance mission for Rwanda, and he had rumors that there was plans for attack that some of the Inter-Rahamwe forces were planning to kill 1,000 people in 20 minutes, that they had caches where they were keeping weapons, and he sent in facts back to UN headquarters called the Genocide Facts, and saying that he didn't substantiate these rumors, but he'd heard them, he had somebody who was conscientious informant who wanted the UN to know about that danger and to do something about it. Well, it started on April 6th, 1994, the slaughter began right according to schedule with 10 Belgian peacekeepers being killed, which according to the informant was they were killed first in order to ensure the removal of Belgium and the UN from the mission area. The Security Council did downsize the mission from around 2,500 to 250, but General Delaire stayed on, pulled by the conscience and the horror that he was seeing around him, and he actually managed to save 20 to 30,000 lives just by being a presence in a horror stadium and confisal hospital in various locations where they would send people every day or so, but in many areas where they were not able to travel, the slaughter just went until 800,000 people had died and something that really gave a black eye to the international community and to the United Nations. And it was something that Bill Clinton said after the end of his presidency, that it's one of the areas that he regretted, that they didn't do more to support the UN and to prevent the genocide before it occurred in 1994. And peacekeeping operations provide a way to actually have boots on the ground in the field. In fact, the largest employer of peacekeeping, largest employer of forces in the world today is not the U.S. government, it's the United Nations. In actual operations, they have over 100,000 uniform personnel from 107 countries. And it includes the Congo and Constantine has already mentioned the use of UAVs in the Congo. And I was already pushing since the early 1990s for the UN to use satellite reconnaissance and then aerial reconnaissance and UAVs in the Congo and I participated in some efforts to get those drones into the Congo. The earliest effort was in 2006, the European Union decided they needed to support the first democratic elections in the Congo since 1960. And the Belgians provided four UAVs, bee hunter UAVs, and they proved extremely useful. They were able to show there were violations on both sides, both by the government and by the, well it was in fact the vice president, the vice president, Bemba. The government was bringing in tanks by rail, which was in a contravention of the UN Security Council. And the vice president was bringing in small arms across the Congo River in these dugout canoes. And the UAV using infrared was able to detect those night passage of those little canoes and be able to get a sense of what the balance of arms were. And also allowed the SRSG, special representative of Secretary General Bill Swing, the former US Ambassador to the Congo, to be able to deal with the parties, be able to de-escalate. Actually at one point he was actually at the residence of the vice president and a firefight started and the helicopter outside the residence was blown up with an RPG. And the SRSG was caught in the middle of that fire trying to create peace while it was actually going on and drones were in the air, able to guide the peacekeepers to the area, de-escalate the conflict, make sure the people inside were safe and secure. The drones proved useful as you could see from the images of the time. Now they also had some problems. One time the hunter saw this bird in the air and decided to shoot at it and just happened to get the right rivets and the UAV came down in the Congo. Another time it was more tragic. It was right near the Kinshasa airport. For those of you who know the airport, it's a very near populated area. And the remote pilot had set the UAV off the runway and then before it actually took off the ground, decided to abort. But just that moment it got airspeed, takeoff speed and it went up in the air. The engine wasn't working and it went right down and actually killed two people when it landed in neighboring area. So a tragedy for that first mission. But the UN saw how what the Europeans did and they said, well, the field said, well, we really want one. So in 2009, they had a competition open bid, bid system, a combination of Israeli and British company won that bid. But then that was the question of cost. There was $90 million over five years. The UN decided they'd prefer to get helicopters, manned helicopters to do this kind of work. So they dropped that. Meanwhile, in other missions, the UN was starting to use UAVs by the contingents. They weren't mission assets, but they were contingents. One of them was the case in Chad where the Irish had brought a UAV. And in fact, the UN didn't even know that that contingent had the UAV. It wasn't officially on their equipment chart, TOE chart, until the Irish came to them and said, well, we have a little problem. And they explained that they had sent the drone off into the look around their camp and in the environs of the camp. And the drone had lost radio contact. And it was programmed to be able to fly a box until the radio contact was re-established. So it had been flying for a couple hours. And then the gas was running low. So the drone was also programmed when the gas was running low that it should return to home base. So the Irish thought everything was fine until they realized that they hadn't reprogrammed and the home base was in Ireland. So then they came to the United Nations and said, oh, we have a loose drone. We don't know what to do with it. And it became an issue for the UN to deal with as it was flying in the direction of Libya and Mediterranean and who knows where it went down. In Haiti, the Brazilians brought a drone. It turned out to be very useful. Not so much for the reconnaissance because it was just a primitive. One of the battalions had it as kind of a toy. But they actually dropped leaflets over Cité Soleil, an area where the Haitian national police hadn't been able to patrol for three or four years. And they dropped leaflets saying the UN is going to be taking operations there. Please don't come out at night. And to the gang in Haiti, please give yourself up. We respect your rights and we don't want to fight you but we will arrest those who are on the arrest list. And so they took action and they seized back Cité Soleil from the gangs in 2006, 2007 in a very successful operation. Now the UN tried to gain in the Congo and the bidding process went very smooth with the French Undersecretary General, Latsous, who was keen on technology. And in 2013, December, they started flying those Falco drones that Constantine had showed us. And my assessment of the usefulness of the drones comes to a mission that I made last July. So the people that I spoke with in the field that was sent by UN headquarters gave a much more positive assessment of it. And in fact, they were very proud that they had actually saved lives. In one of the exercises, they had established a radar which was something new for the UN on Lake Kibu. And they determined that they were trying to look at certain boats on Lake Kibu and see what the radar picked up and see whether they could do a ground air mapping of capability. Well, they selected one boat that seemed to be stopped and then they sent the UAV over it and it actually capsized with over 25 people on board. So they told the Uruguayans to send out their Zodiacs. They managed to pick up the people and actually save lives in that search and rescue operation. The drones were very useful for humanitarian operations, humanitarian assistance, for root reconnaissance. Some of the humanitarian agencies wanted to know whether they should even bother going out to this town in the distance because they knew there could be washed out roads, the bridges might no longer be functional or there might actually be trouble, armed trouble along the way. So being able to scout out where some of the armed groups were was an important function for the drone itself. And when the UN took robust action under the force intervention brigade, which for the first time in UN history, the security council gave a part of the mission, the mandate for offensive operations to actually actively go after these groups that have been so resilient and so problematic, then they had been very useful in being able to get a sense where the M23 were and successfully neutralized the M23. Then monitoring of resources. There was a lot of artisanal mining going on, a lot of mineral resources. The UN has to stop that source of funds that give fuel to the fires of conflict. So that was another aspect where they could get a better sense of the resource mandate in the field. Now drones can have many uses outside of just the conventional peacekeeping operation. They can, they could also be used by the UN in the future. And I imagine that in some cases, the UN may actually want to know what the powers that they'd be mandated to do operations like in Libya can do. So I could see the UN having some right of oversight for accountability for operations as occurred in Libya. Or when NATO is taking enforcement action. And for a lot of countries like the United States that don't want to provide peacekeepers on the ground, they, this could be a wonderful opportunity to provide a technological capability. So in our expert panel report, we proposed a technology contributing country as opposed to a troop contributing country. And President Obama is due to give a, have a summit on peacekeeping in September. He'll be calling on nations to contribute more to peacekeeping. And of course there'll be a lot of people saying, well, what's the US doing? And drones is one area where the US excels. And we could actually see the US responding with by being a tech CC as opposed to TCCC. And I can't go back. I can't mention being here in Washington without recognizing that the founder of a national organization was a US president. And President Obama is in his footsteps. The 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, when he originally proposed an international organization for peace, he said that this new organization should be the eye of the nations to keep watch on the common interest. An eye that does not sleep or slumber, an eye that is ever watchful and attentive. And this new technology, plus all the other capabilities, and I put a diagram on the table outside, you can get an idea about the range of new technologies that can actually make a difference for peace. Thank you very much. If you want to hear and then give away to the next panel, a microphone, yeah, a microphone will shortly, we don't have a drone delivering microphone, so we worked on it, but couldn't get it done in time. Go ahead and just ask, yeah. Did you experience, they divert part of the time for their own missions, and then the other time for either the NATO or UN mission. And then that acting as a distrust between the partner nations. Okay. And that example is out of, right after the peace accords in Bosnia where US would be flying the predator, sometimes passing it through to NATO and other times keeping it China walled for just US forces. Right, so I believe the first time the predators flew was in Bosnia while the UN operation was there, the UN protection force. And yes, it did cause problems. The head of the force commander was French and at that time they weren't part of the NATO integrated military system. So he was not able to see the images that his deputy a Canadian could see because of classification. So it caused tension there. I mean, the deputy could tell him what the import of the images were, but it did cause problems. And we had problems with national interests coming into missions all the time. I mean, the most famous case was at the UN special commission in Iraq, which was looking for WMD and did a very successful job at being able to destroy WMD. But at the same time, there were nations, particularly United States that had an objective to be able to do other things while on those inspections. So the UN has to have a standard that they'll only take instructions. I mean, I've signed such a thing when I was a consultant, only take instructions from the United Nations and not from national governments or other sources. So it's a problem with working together as a world, as a global community, but at the same time, it's something that you can get around. Yeah, I mean, just to elaborate, besides the sort of Congo deployment at present, the only sort of substantive UN use of drones and peacekeeping that I know of at least is in Mali, where both Belgian and Swedish contingents have their drones deployed there. I don't know that there's that distinction particularly applies there, that there's a sort of thing the Swedish troops are doing for Sweden and something they're doing for the UN. I think it's in that context more sort of unified, so I don't think that issue comes up there. In the back. And around the corner, yeah. Sorry, I'm hidden back here. There's been an historic reluctance on the part of the UN to employ intelligence collection assets. And I don't think that there's any difference between, it's not an observation tool, it's a collection asset. How is the experience of the DRC changing that, and do you see any changes in the UN in terms of how they're gonna employ them in the future? I think it is changing it and as to how slowly is the one word answer. One of the intelligence officers I spoke to there said precisely along the lines of your question, intelligence used to be a dirty word in the UN that's changing. They have more, he says, it was an American Army officer, a very, very nice guy, a capable guy. He said, look, I have five people here to do the job that I would have between four and 500 to do in a comparable sized American deployment. He said, I need more people to do open source intelligence collection. It's a place where, like anywhere else in the world, social networks are being used. He's like, I want people to look at Facebook and Facebook more than Twitter, but mostly Facebook to see what's going on. He said, I don't have that. There's a weird paradox there where the one drone in the air at any given time that they have can't cover the whole country and there are armed groups, not in the whole country, but in large parts of it. They also don't have enough people to analyze the images that they do gather. So they're saying, I need more people. We're getting these very good reports. The reports are written by the contract employees of Sellex who are largely American guys with experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the world. So they know what they're doing. And then the reports kind of, they seem to say, well, we write the reports and we pass them on, which goes to some of what, I think Walter and I maybe had slightly different impressions there, but my understanding was that a lot of things that could be happening in principle, for instance, scouting routes for humanitarian convoys is a very natural application. I didn't get the sense that that was actually going on in practice, that just the faults in communication between the groups were just too big. Okay, just on the evolution of intelligence. A big step was in 2005, the rest of the time it's being incremental, but for the first time the UN decided to have in its peacekeeping operations, a intelligence unit. And that's what the creation of what's called JMAC Joint Mission Analysis Center. And now with that told, you can actually get some of the analysis and some of the intelligence before it was really done on that ad hoc basis by who was in command, but now it's accepted part of the mission structure and peacekeeping operations. I should mention, by the way, Walter's paper, I think it's called Intelligence-led Peacekeeping, correct me, about this sort of episode with C.T. Solay is just like a fantastic read and you should all download it. It's riveting and answers that question in part. Thank you again. Esther Bremmer now at George Washington University in McClarty. So he's previously at the State Department. So it's been a lot of time on peacekeeping. So a question here, as you say, one of the issues is the integration of technology into peacekeeping operations. I wonder practically what would make most sense. After you passed the Security Council Resolution and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations actually then writes the concept of operations. Would that be the point to say this is how we want to apply technologies in this peacekeeping operation? Is it in what they ask the TCCs and PCCs and others to contribute? Because it says you think in DRC, we also had, for example, the use of cell phones for human rights. We're pointing, there's some real efforts to try to use technology that particularly troubled peacekeeping operation. Would that be the point, where would be the point to have the most impact to have a mission-wide thinking through the use of technology, particularly in peacekeeping? Yeah, the concept of operations is key. It's done by the military planning service in DPKO for the military side. Then they have an integrated planning process. But I think even before that, you need to already have some stockpiles in places like Brindisi, Italy. And you need to mainstream the idea of technology because the current peacekeeping is 70% the developing world, which doesn't already have technology mainstreamed even on the military side, where military people are used the most embracing of technology. So there needs to be, already before the Security Council mandate, when they're doing a technical assessment mission or they're even looking out already some introduction of technology and planning for it. And I'm happy to say that we're seeing more receptivity now than ever before, at least in the 25 years that I've been looking at it for incorporating technology in the concept of operations and the force commander's guidance. And we're actually getting templates now for how you'd use certain technologies. And they created a policy in 2010 on monitoring and surveillance technologies. I think we'll take one final question from Penny and then give way to the next panel. Hi, Penny Davis from the Ford Foundation and previously UK government. You mentioned conflict minerals. And I mean, the US has some legislation and currently there's ongoing discussion in the EU on legislation to control sourcing of conflict minerals. I wondered whether you see this kind of technology as significant going forward and monitoring of that by both public and private sector or whether this is sort of, marginal to the monitoring of conflict minerals. Absolutely. I think that using reconnaissance methods, aerial and space and ground based is essential for being able to put a stop to blood diamonds and other conflict minerals, coal tan, especially from the Congo that help the powers or cell phones. Those kinds of materials are feeding into an international market and there's such a demand for it that it's really hard when you're playing the hide and seek game when you have only one drone in the air. So you need a much larger capability and then you need to be able to get the Congolese government to be able to put a stop to it and it's dealing with a corruption. But at least if you have the monitoring capability, you can spot, identify where the violation is and shame the government into doing something. Yeah, I mean, I think I don't disagree with any of that but just maybe emphasizing the point that knowing about something is only the first step in doing something about it. And then that gap in somewhere like the Congo is large. So with that, thank you to Walter and everybody and we'll end the next panel up.