The past year took Danger Room's team of reporters from Afghanistan to Israel to Georgia, and from the Pentagon to a clandestine air base in Southwest Asia, in what has to be one the wildest years ever on the international stage. Here are our choices for the most important stories of 2009.
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First up: The drone war over Pakistan. This time last year, it was most definitely underway. But in 2009, it kicked into high gear. The Obama administration launched more than 50 reported robotic strikes, killing several hundred people. Compare that to 2008, when there were just 36 drone attacks.
The character of the drone war changed, too. A year ago, the Pakistani government was denying any connection with the attacks. So was the U.S. military. And the idea that Blackwater was somehow mixed up in the whole thing was a plot twist worthy of Hollywood. But that was before Google Earth spotted U.S. Predators parked on a Pakistani runway; before the Air Force let slip that their drones were running missions east of the Durand Line; and before the CIA publicly announced that it was cutting Blackwater's contract for rearming the drones. By May, the unmanned attacks had become such an open secret that CIA director Leon Panetta confessed that the robotic campaign was "the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership.” (This, despite the militants' apparent understanding of how the drones were targeted, and how to see through the robotic planes' eyes.) That view was shared by some in the White House, who wanted to recast the Afghanistan fight along the lines of the drone-heavy effort in Pakistan. But counterinsurgency experts continue to worry that the robotic attacks could destabilize the region as they continue into 2010 and expand to a new front: Yemen.
– Noah Shachtman
[Photo: Noah Shachtman]
On Jan. 3, 2009, the Israeli Defense Forces poured into Gaza, using a collection of new tactics and technologies. From the start, the campaign – a retaliation for Hamas' ongoing rocket attacks against civilians – seemed tangled in contradictions.
On the one hand, the Israelis tried all kinds of things to minimize innocent casualties in Gaza's crowded slums. The IDF called residents before bombing. They kept spy drones constantly flying, and empowered their remote pilots to call off strikes at any time. When the Israelis did decide to attack from the sky, they often dropped small, smart munitions with tiniest of blast patterns. Yet the IDF also fought with an unrestrained ferocity in Gaza with tactics more akin to textbook military campaigns than those used in recent counterinsurgencies. Tanks blasted continuously, forming lethal circles of fire. Troops pummeled militants, even when they holed up in mosques or hospitals or schools. When that wasn't enough, the IDF used incendiary white phosphorous to torch the hideouts. Killer drones fired off mysterious weapons that caused brutal injuries – especially to children. (They turned out to be specialized missiles, wrapped with fragmentation sleeves of tungsten cubes.) "The Arab view is now that Israel is a crazed animal, locked in a cage, fuming to get out all the time," an Israeli Foreign Ministry official told me. That was a very good thing, he added.
The Israelis knew they'd get hit with allegations of war crimes. So they tried to lock the media out and control the message with their own combat cameramen. In the end, it wasn't particularly effective. But the rockets have stopped falling. And there's growing talk concerning a major prisoner swap between January's foes.
– Noah Shachtman
[Photo: via Human Rights Watch]
It was a busy year for Somali pirates, with 174 attacks (and counting) on merchant ships. But things weren't always that dramatic. Back in April, we posted this oddly intimate home video, taken aboard a captured vessel (the ship and crew were released unharmed after a ransom was paid).
It was a boom year for the anti-piracy market as well. An international counter-piracy task force was established in January, and after pirates took U.S. ship captain Richard Phillips hostage, Navy snipers shot and killed three of the pirates who were holding him prisoner in a lifeboat. Private security firms stepped forward to sell their pirate-fighting skills to a wary shipping industry, and the case for armed security got a boost after Israeli guards repelled an attack on the cruise ship MSC Melody. Still, that hasn't deterred the pirates: Last month, they took another crack at seizing the Maersk Alabama, the vessel once skippered by Phillips. That attempt, however, failed.
– Nathan Hodge
[Photo: Wikimedia]
President Barack Obama may have won this year's Nobel Peace Prize for promoting nuclear disarmament, but the revelation that Iran has a clandestine atomic facility has everyone wondering whether Washington and Tehran aren't headed for a showdown over nukes. After taking a close look at the technical specs on Iran’s newly revealed plant, many arms-control wonks concluded it was part of a network of secret sites, designed to keep Iran’s nuclear weapons program going in case of an attack on Iran’s main enrichment plant at Natanz.
In 2009, Iran's squirrely behavior helped shift the terms of the debate, and signs in Washington point to a fresh push for sanctions. But that's not the only option: Over the past year, strategists have been scrutinizing the map, sizing up the targets and counting the number of sorties it might take to knock out Iran's known nuclear facilities. Not that that seems to have dissuaded Iran's leadership: In late November, the regime announced that it had plans to break ground on another 10 nuke sites. Add Iran's continued political turmoil, and you've got a recipe for, uhh, an interesting new year.
– Nathan Hodge
[Photo: President.ir] 
Military science was all about the brain in 2009, as the Pentagon embarked on a handful of projects to either super-charge the human mind, or replace it altogether. It's all part of a long-term focus on troop optimization. Better brain science means improved battlefield decision-making and resilience against post-traumatic stress. Computers that mimic the mind can help over-tasked analysts or fatigued soldiers. Darpa, the Pentagon's out-there research arm, kicked off programs to map monkey minds to understand and repair brain damage, meanwhile looking for new ways for manipulating human neural pathways to optimize memory. But the next decade might see G.I. brains being swapped out for hardware, as the military tries to create machines capable of complex reasoning and able to improve on human decision-making by tapping into "cognitive bias." Of course, advances in science of the mind won't only be used to help American troops – the military's got its eye on screwing with the enemy's brain, too.
– Katie Drummond
[Illo: U.S. Army]
In the summer of 2009, Iran's political opposition mobilized around Facebook and Twitter to protest widespread electoral fraud. By year's end, the Green Movement – which began as a response to ballot-box stuffing and voter intimidation – had morphed into something more radical: a palpable threat to the regime. After the death of Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri in late December, protesters took to the streets again, and this time their rallying cry was "death to the dictator."
But can social networking tools help bring regime change to Iran? The jury's still out on that one. Twitter-inspired flash mobs also rocked the political scene in the tiny post-Soviet state of Moldova (and introduced the world to beautiful rebel Natalia Morar). And it also helped spur a new idea in U.S. foreign policy: supporting the technical infrastructure that allows people to use social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook. It's built around the simple, alluring principle that unbridled communication can undermine despotism. So now that the United States is using social networks to promote freedom abroad, it's worth asking if the military will do the same at home – by letting those in uniform use those tools more freely.
– Nathan Hodge
[Photo: Wikimedia]
New administrations aren't supposed to pick fights with the defense industry – especially when it's waging two wars, trying to survive a financial tsunami and handing out tens of billions to Detroit and Wall Street. So it was a surprise in April, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared his intention to kill or revamp several dozen of the military-industrial complex's most cherished weapons programs. And it was even more startling when Gates got Congress to go along with his radical overhaul of the Pentagon's arsenal – one that largely turned away from arms designed to duke it out with another superpower. The Hill voted to stop production on the F-22 Raptor stealth jet (originally designed to dogfight with Soviet MiGs) and halted the Army's collection of fragile tanks meant for Cold War II. They even put the brakes on a ludicrously-overloaded presidential helicopter that came with a kitchen to heat up meals after a nuclear war. Until the health care vote on Christmas Eve, you could make a credible case that this was Obama's signature legislative achievement of the year.
Still, this is Washington we're talking about. So the victory wasn't total (a small scrap of money for the nuclear 'copter somehow survived). Nor was it built on Purrell-pure arguments. (The Raptor's allegedly low-cost replacement is starting to get awfully expensive). But for a military-industrial complex that rolled over defense secretaries from Dick Cheney to Don Rumsfeld, this was an unusually rare defeat.
– Noah Shachtman
[Photo: DoD]
Laser weapons could be on their way to real-world battlefields, thanks to some major breakthroughs in 2009. For decades, the knock on the ray guns was that they were a bitch to deploy – too bulky, too hard to cool and too tough to power. But earlier this year, that changed when "solid state" electric lasers finally hit what's commonly considered battlefield strength: 100 kilowatts. And that wasn't the only milestone the energy weapons blasted through this year. In tests, a laser-equipped Air Force gunship disabled a truck with its energy beam, while a ground-mounted ray gun blasted drones out of the sky.
Other ray guns didn't fare quite as well. Despite years' of promises, the U.S. military decided against sending its microwave pain ray into battle. Turns out there were unanticipated technical problems – the weapon took 16 hours to reach its super-cool operating temperature – and political concerns, like maybe the United States shouldn't get into the business of making people feel like they're on fire. Those are problems to keep in mind, as the U.S. spends at least another four years and $100 million to weaponize electric lasers.
– Noah Shachtman
At the beginning of this year, there were 36,000 American troops in Afghanistan, backed by a fleet of jets and bombers and drones that were free to unload on adversaries. The war was run by Gen. David McKiernan.
Today, that troop number is just south of 70,000, with another 30,000 on the way. Gen. Stanley McChrystal is in charge now, with a plan to win over the Afghan population. As part of that strategy, he has made it clear that air strikes are pretty much out of the question, except in the most dire circumstances, Not only is America's most potent technological advantage off the table, but troops are even supposed to consider withdrawal, instead of attacking crowded areas. It's been tough for some local commanders to take. McChrystal, however, is convinced, that his strategy will bear fruit. "This civilian casualty issue," he told 60 Minutes, "is literally how we lose the war or in many ways how we win it." But despite the added forces, and despite the strategy shift, the conflict seems in danger of spiraling even further out of control. Which makes you wonder how long it'll be, before the pendulum swings again for the American war effort.
– Noah Shachtman
[Photo: Noah Shachtman]
Ah, those military contractors. It's one of those stories that just keeps on giving. First there was Blackwater. After months of awful publicity, they finally took our free advice and changed their name to Xe. (Danger Room: Your one-stop shop for crisis PR management.) But that wasn't the end. Months after getting their license revoked by the Iraqi government, they were still on the job in Iraq, ferrying diplomats around the Red Zone. Rumors swirled of the company conducting ops in Pakistan for the U.S. military's Joint Special Operations Command. CEO Erik Prince seemed to out himself as a CIA agent. The agency recently terminated the company's contract for arming their killer drones. But Blackwater is proving to be a hard habit to break.
This year's prize for most outrageous mercs, however, goes to ArmorGroup, a.k.a. the 101st Tequila Brigade, whose booze-soaked antics gave us a new, NSFW look at the world of diplomatic security. For that, alone, they deserve their own Hello Kitty-style logo. Next year's project, perhaps?
– Nathan Hodge
[Photo: POGO]
