The latest drone strike in Pakistan is apparently the deadliest yet: Reports describe between 45 and 70 dead and many injured. The details are far from clear, but we can at least answer some questions: is it really possible for a drone attack to be so lethal? Is new, more lethal weaponry being deployed?

One thing to bear in mind is that not all so-called "drone strikes" may be carried out by U.S. drones. On previous occasions, there have been strong suggestions that the strikes were actually carried out by Pakistani F-16 jets. It may be much more politically convenient for the Pakistani government to point the finger at the U.S. when it comes to killing its own people.

In this instance, however, Al-Jazeera does have an eyewitness:

"I saw three drones, they dropped bombs," Sohail Mehsud, a resident of Makeen, said.

Whether the average Pakistani villager can tell manned from unmanned aircraft is another matter. But it may also be significant that in this case bombs, rather than missiles, are being reported.

In the early days of drone wars the only strike aircraft was the MQ-1 Predator, armed with one or two hundred-pound Hellfire missiles. The AGM-114 Hellfirewas originally designed as an anti-tank missile for attack helicopters (the name is supposedly a contraction of "Helicopter-Launched Fire and Forget") and carried a shaped charge for punching through armor. Later a version was developed for the Navy that replaced the shaped charge with a blast/fragmentation warhead, and most recently we have seen the AGM-114N thermobaric versionwith enhanced blast which flows more efficiently than standard explosives " capable of reaching around corners, striking enemy forces that hide in caves or bunkers and hardened multi-room complexes."

The Hellfire warhead weighs around twenty pounds; the anti-tank version will damage very little except the vehicle it hits, and the thermobaric version is extremely effective inside buildings but blast is has a relatively short range outdoors. The Air Force budget suggests that only a handful of the blast/frag versionare being bought.

However, the Predator has now been joined by the much larger MQ-9 Reaper, which can carry a heavier payload, around three thousand pounds, including a large number of Hellfires and GBU-12 Paveway IIand GBD-38 JDAMbombs. These are different types of 500-pound bomb, one with laser guidance and the other satellite guided. Both are based on the 1950's-vintage Mk 82 bomb ; less than half the weight of the bomb bomb is explosive, and the rest is the steel casing. The reason for having such a thick casing is shrapnel: when the bomb detonates, the casing blows up like a balloon before bursting and spraying high-velocity steel fragments in all directions. It is these fragments, rather than blast, that do most of the damage.

Marc Herold, in looking at casualties in Afghanistan, quotes an 'effective casualty radius' for the Mk82 of 200 feet: this is radius inside which 50% of those exposed will die. Quite often the target is taking cover or lying down and the effect is reduced, but if you can catch people standing up or running then the full effective casualty radius will apply.

This brings us to the photograph above, which was originally supplied to NBC journalist Kerry Sandersby a U.S. military source in 2006. It was taken from a Predator and shows a group of almost 200 Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan; U.S. officers wanted to attack the group, but were prevented because the rules of engagement did not allow attacks on cemeteries. A military statement noted that coalition forces "hold themselves to a higher moral and ethical standard than their enemies."

The situation in Pakistan was similar and may have offered a similarly dense concentration of targets: a funeral, attended by a large number of Taliban. However, there are differences in the accounts of when the attack took place, and although Al-Jazeera says it was "at the funeral of a suspected Taliban commander," a Pakistani intelligence source quoted in the UK's Guardian newspapersays that it happened "as people were dispersing" after the funeral.

In any case, the high body could have potential to be an embarrassment rather than a triumph. The apparent target of the attack, Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, seems to have escaped unscathed, and some of the dead may have been villagers attending the funeral rather than Taliban. In the long run, one well-placed bullet from a drone may be more effective than a five-hundred pound bomb.

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