Noise and safety. They sound like reasonable priorities, especially if the topic of interest happens to be drones, excuse me, “unmanned aircrafts.” If the National Park Service can get the ball rolling on a temporary ban on small-scale, personal-use drones within the area of a national park purely based on these two concerns, can Americans expect to see a similar approach to the ongoing discussion of large-scale, military-use drones overseas? Fat chance.
CNN reported that on June 20 the NPS announced that it would be prohibiting the use of drones from its “lands and waters…84 million acres in every state and territory.” The report quoted the statement from Director Jonathan Jarvisin, which read, “It all comes down to noise and safety.”
According to this report, NPS implemented this ban on drones so that an appropriate policy for their use could be determined taking into account any negative impact “flying unmanned aircrafts” may have in national parks.
The San Gabriel Valley Tribune quoted Laura Shuman, spokesperson for the Joshua Tree National Park, earlier this week saying that the buzzing of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAV’s, within the park “made a lot of people uncomfortable.”
Alright, so that’s it? People were uncomfortable, so the entire NPS banned drones while an appropriate policy is determined. Sounds like an easy and simple way to address an issue like this.
They may, as some media outlets have suggested, implement a permit system for small-scale usage of drones for photography, videography, etc., in which case the use of such devices would be considered on a case-by case basis, and the time and frequency of use might be limited in order to ease the jitters of national park guests.
So why doesn’t this simple, push-pause-and-discuss approach work in the larger-scale version of drone use? Well, for starters, the NPS is dealing with drones that take landscape images for media-related or artistic purposes…the military uses drones primarily to make a lasting physical impact in areas that are difficult or dangerous for soldiers to literally enter on foot, or otherwise.
To have a conversation that puts personal, domestic drone use and military drone use overseas in the same category is short-sited. The U.S. military drone program kicked off in 2001, after the 107th Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force. Can we simply hit pause, and re-evaluate our program at this point? No way.
Much like trying to legislate the Internet, which changes too rapidly for congressional gridlock to keep up with, the military use of drones overseas has expanded too much for a temporary ban to hope to contain.
The American Security Project published an in-depth background and analysis on the U.S. drone policy, which reported that, under President Obama, the frequency of U.S. drone strikes overseas has increased from one every 40 days under President George W. Bush, to one every four days.
Common critical questions amongst media headlines ask whether drone strikes kill more terrorists than foreign citizens. The chilling thought that a U.S. military policy causes far more harm than good makes many uncomfortable… like walking through a national park and being photographed by a free lancer via UAV.
But the contextual conversations are too different to compare. The NPS’s temporary ban on drones is a pause for consideration of a relatively new concern. Domestic and international concerns about the U.S. military drone policy are over a decade in the making, and over a decade behind.