When a Predator flies above a conflict-ridden area, it’s usually taking pictures of people doing very bad things. Sometimes, it’s about to use its missiles to kill someone. But Pentagon officials want to put the drones to work on a very different job — saving lives.

The new initiative aims to retask the military’s massive fleet of overhead-surveillance gear — drones, blimps, spy planes, satellites — to place watchful eyes on the perpetrators of mass atrocities. And that’s just the beginning. Jammers might stop the radio transmissions of aspiring genocidaires. Text and social media could alert the American forces about civilians at risk of being slaughtered.

Inside the Pentagon, the term Mass Atrocity Prevention and Response Operations, or MAPRO, is gathering momentum. That’s thanks to Rosa Brooks, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for rule of law and international humanitarian policy, who’s worked since the autumn to turn MAPRO into a basic military function. A big part of that effort is enlisting military tech to provide early warning about where mass murders or rapes are developing.

At its heart, the MAPRO initiative is about saving lives without putting U.S. troops in the middle of foreign quagmires. When mass atrocities happen, senior officials “end up saying, essentially, ‘Mr. President, we can either do nothing — except wring our hands and hope diplomacy alone will work — or else we can send in 30,000 troops,’” Brooks tells Danger Room. Most often, that keeps the United States on the sidelines of civilian bloodbaths. MAPRO gives presidents more options: detection, deterrence and even limited intervention — even though the technologies being considered for them are totally unproven at stopping massacres.

Indeed, MAPRO isn’t just about early warning. A drone that snaps pictures of trucks full of militia heading for a besieged village can also be a “powerful deterrent,” Brooks says, if their boss believes that someday, an international court might enter drone footage as evidence in a genocide trial.

That’s a big if. Not every mass killer cares about ending up in court, or about being watched — especially if he doesn’t think foreign armies will come to topple him. Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, for instance, surely knew the United States had spy satellites overhead while his forces committed genocide in Darfur, But the slaughter continued. Since no one’s talking about launching missiles from Predators at genocidaires, will any killer really fear having them record full-motion video of his crimes? 

But there are coercive things the military can do to stop a brewing genocide — even without sending troops into combat. Think jamming. “Arguably, had the U.S. or another international actor jammed Radio Libre des Mille Collines in Rwanda in 1994, it might have slowed the pace of the killing,” Brooks says, referring to the anti-Tutsi radio station that helped incite the Rwandan genocide.

Other techniques are less conventional. About two weeks ago, Brooks invited a group of think-tankers and techies to the Pentagon for a bull session on emergent technologies that could be put to use to help stop atrocities. “The cutting edge is in leveraging crowdsourced data and mining social networks,” says Sheldon Himmelfarb, a scholar with the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Text and social mapping tools like Ushahidi proved their worth in getting information to relief workers during the Haiti earthquake and Pakistan floods last year, to say nothing of Twitter and Facebook’s role in facilitating the current Mideast uprisings.

It won’t work everywhere, since not every potential atrocity situation occurs in places with good connectivity. And Brooks’ team isn’t entirely sure how to harness crowdsourcing for atrocity prevention. But she’s warming to the idea. “Just as you can get, through social media, a really good crowd-sourced map, really fast, for finding good hot dog stands in Mississippi, you can also potentially use crowd-sourcing and social media to map incidents of police abuse, mass grave sites, or hate radio broadcasts,” she says.

Now to enlist the military. Janine Davidson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for planning, doubts that it’s such a difficult task: commanders have come a long way from the days when they viewed humanitarian assistance as a job for someone else, thanks in part to Iraq and Afghanistan’s counterinsurgency wars — COIN, in mil-speak. “Protecting populations are a huge part of the COIN problem set,” Davidson says, “and I think this is a sort of logical spin-off, intellectually.”

Getting the civilian bureaucracy on board may be more difficult. Preventing mass atrocities isn’t any one office or official’s specific responsibility, and no one’s exactly jumping up to take it on. Brooks’ goal is to have President Obama issue a document by mid-year that creates a clear set of authorities for handling an atrocity situation once early-detection tools perceive it to unfold.

“We want to be able to say, ‘Mr. President, DOD can offer a much wider range of options beyond sending in the Marines,” Brooks says. “Potentially every [military] asset has some atrocity prevention and response value, if you get creative about it.”

Photo: U.S. Air Force

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