by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright April 2016
Eye in the Sky is a mix of high technology and deep frustration happening in a near future combat situation. It is addressing the issue of who is in charge in a combat situation? This is an important issue and presented quite dramatically in this movie. The inconsistency is that in real life this issue is well known and has been addressed for generations.
This movie is about how high technology is going to change small-scale combat. It addresses using high-flying surveillance drones and intimate insect-disguised micro-drones. It then mixes in lots of politics as there is a surprise in the mission situation and everyone has to adapt to it.
The surprise is that the terrorists who are to be captured in a Kenyan slum village house by a squad of Kenyan soldiers have already acquired some suicide bombs and are equipping them. This changes the mission from capture to kill, and to using a missile from the high-flying drone that is watching them instead of a squad of soldiers. And to make it more emotional there is a cute little girl selling homemade bread outside the house who will become collateral damage if the missile is used. Go ahead or not?
The high tech part is mixing in big and small drones and having the commanders of this operation being in England, the USA and Kenya -- quite a mix all around, but the movie makers do a good job of keeping all this clear.
The biggest inconsistency in this movie is that this issue of who is in charge during an operation is a well known one, and is constantly addressed by military organizations with each generation. An example of doing it right was showing Barack Obama and staff watching the attempted capture, then kill, of Osama Bin Laden by Navy Seal Team Six. He watched, and that was all he did. He didn't try to intervene in any way. This is SOP -- standard operating procedure -- because the problems of attempting to micromanage combat situations by higher-ups are well recognized. What this movie does do well is show what happens if that SOP is ignored -- lots of frustration.
What it doesn't show is the bad choices that often get made when this protocol is violated. A good example of that is the conduct of the Crimean War in 1853 on the British and French side. The telegraph had been recently invented and there were telegraph lines between near Crimea, Paris and London. Given that blisteringly fast communication (for the time), how much say should the generals back in the capitals have in day-to-day operations on the ground in Crimea? The kind way to say what the result was is: They were working out the answers to that issue.
The inconsistency in this movie is that they haven't worked out the answers so they are showing lots of higher-ups doing micromanaging. Good drama, but not real.
Next, the movie portrays this neighborhood as jam-packed with gun-toting radical militiamen. This means that the originally planned capture operation was going to involve lots of shooting and lots of collateral damage. This rocket attack that blew up just a single house was a surgical strike by comparison.
Finally, changing the plan just because there were suicide bombs in the house did not make sense. These bombs take time to arm and they are a lot clumsier to handle than grenades. With all the guns in the neighborhood, they were adding very little to the total armament involved in this operation. There should have been no need to change plans.
This is a good movie about bringing up the moral issues that near future combat technology is going to be opening up. But it is not closely connected to what happens in real life combat. In real life combat rules of engagement are designed to answer the questions brought up in this movie weeks, years or even decades before the engagement actually happens. The Geneva Convention is an example of addressing these issues long before they happen.
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