Strange as it may seem, there was a time when a lot of people cared about the American government’s drone warfare in the Middle East. Not so long ago, round about 2010-13, the military and the CIA were using drones to kill thousands of people, and there was a fair amount of interest in the issue: major articles in many publications, discussions about the limits of government power and the morals of killing with drones, Senator Rand Paul filibustering to get an answer on whether drones can be used on Americans, and so forth. Then the issue seemed to mostly fade away.
Now an anonymous whistleblower has released a trove of documents relating to the drone campaign. They are being made available on theintercept.com. The papers apparently expose details in how targets are selected, when strikes are ordered, and how much collateral damage occurs. There doesn’t appear to be any verification yet that the documents are genuine, but I haven’t seen anyone charging that they are frauds.
An article on the site titled The Assassination Complex argues that although assassination is very definitely illegal for the U.S. government, it’s been defined and enforced so loosely that assassination was easily the norm during the drone campaign. Targets were selected and strikes ordered based on incomplete information, and the percentage of those killed who weren’t “intended targets” was quite high.
The focus on drones always struck me as kind of weird. The issue of whether we should be targeting people with bombs in the very vaguely defined “war on terror” certainly seems like a complicated issue worth debating. But as to whether its done with drones versus cruise missiles or traditional missiles/bombs fired out of a manned airplane seems basically irrelevant.
And yet, people seem weirdly focused on the “drone” part of the drone campaign.
It’s them being riskless to the operator which makes it akin to shooting fish in a barrel with a punt gun that disturbs people.
Plus the fact a government might someday turn it on them.
I agree. It always seemed so strange that “drones!!!” is like an argument unto itself. The only real difference is that it allows you to do things you might not otherwise do because you didn’t want to risk human lives (on our side, that is). One might argue that drones create an option the wouldn’t otherwise exist.
But, you are absolutely correct. The principle and legality of targeted killings is independent of whether we use drones or not. At least for now… just wait until the drones are equipped with AI to make the “kill or don’t kill” decision.
People can (and have) said those same things about ICBMs, fighter planes, submarines, ironclads, repeating rifles, rifles, artillery, and pretty much every advance in warfare since the invention of a board with a nail in it.
I don’t think most, if any, of the places we use them on have the ability to shoot down American planes, so I’m not sure riskiness is really a factor. Plus cruise missiles and the like are equally riskless.
Yeah, if at some point we have autonomous weapons - systems that can decide for themselves whether or not to kill someone, that’s a valid subject for debate, and those systems would be distinct from every other means by which one human has attacked another. We don’t have those yet, though - for now, a predator drone is not meaningfully different from a gun with a really long range. It’s important to ask ‘should we be killing people in this situation?’. It’s not important to ask ‘should we kill them with this tool vs. some other?’.
I would disagree with that. People focus on the drone part of the drone campaign because drones aren’t being kept on as short a leash as manned aircraft. As far as I am aware the US government no longer sends a USAF fighter-bomber to cluster bomb some random third-world country, and that’s a good thing. When at least that level of restraint is shown with drones, the problem will not be the drone program in particular.
When you can use a rifle from 2000 km ( which is the range of Iran’s Fotros ) let me know. And the fact Iran, China and North Korea presently have drones indicates the Heartland may not be infinitely safe. Many smaller actors will acquire the technology seen enough.
Some commentators try to make the point that there has always been remote warfare, flippantly citing the longbow and the trebuchet (a roman catapult) as examples from the distant past. But that is nonsense. The ability to control weapons at vast distances while being in no personal danger, combined with their ability to loiter for many hours looking for ‘targets of opportunity’ (rather than the say the one-off shot a cruise missile) is a significant difference that is having a real impact on warfare. To put it briefly, the ability to be ‘remotely persistent’ makes armed drones significantly different from other armed aircraft. **
Dronewars.net**
And when you can use a sword from a kilometer away I’ll believe you when you tell me that rifles aren’t a dangerous leap forward that allows soldiers to kill with no risk to themselves and which the government might use against us someday.
I suppose that if we are concerned that drones make it too easy to engage in military intervention you can arrange it so that each time we run a drone mission we shovel several hundreds of thousands of dollars into the incinerator, every third mission we wait for the target to leave the building before we bomb it, and every 30th mission we execute a random US airman. But somehow this doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Presumably those who oppose drones as making it “too easy” don’t actually object to the ease with which the attacks occur rather they object to the humanitarian costs of the attack frequency. In that case you are better off arguing that the humanitarian costs should be weighted higher, rather than arguing that the military costs should be artificially increased.
We can start by saying that each drone strike should have a specific list of targeted individuals, and that the families of anyone wounded of killed that is not on that list will be given multi million dollar compensation.
It’s worth noting that Ford’s EO bans “political assassination.” Now, that doesn’t have a precise definition, but I think that “killing one particular person because we disagree with them” is probably in the ballpark, as opposed to “killing one particular person because they are trying to cause us harm,” which would be a very interesting limitation on the conduct of a war authorized by Congress.
Modern use of military force against irregulars seems like it’s largely one big gray area to me. That’s not very satisfying to contemplate given how black and white much of America’s WWII involvement was. It’s hard to let that go as the archetype for how war should be waged. So I’m not sure there’s a better way to evaluate modern war than this kind of piecemeal whistleblower-type analysis, because the grand strategy of it all doesn’t seem to be fleshed out and communicated to the people very well.
I think the notion that drone warfare is “too easy” is a shorthand for saying that the types of wars that our government wages with drones are becoming impossible for the American people to have any control over. As we can see, vast numbers of drone strikes occurred in Somalia and Yemen during the years in question. But how many Americans were even aware that it was taking place? It’s looking more and more like secret wars will be waged constantly, with some large number of people getting killed, and we’re just expected to trust that the government is hitting the right people.