Armed Drones and Globalization in the Asymmetric War on Terror

Challenges for the Law of Armed Conflict and Global Political Economy

Fred Aja Agwu

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138566934
• eBook ISBN: 9781351342575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Law

This book is a critical exploration of the war on terror from the prism of armed drones and globalization. It is particularly focused on the United States' use of the drones, and the systemic dysfunctions that globalization has caused to international political economy and national security, creating backlash in which the desirability of globalization is not only increasingly questioned, but the resultant dissension about its desirability appears increasingly militating against the international consensus needed to fight the war on terror. To underline the controversial nature of the war on terror and the pragmatic weapon (armed drones) fashioned for its prosecution, some of the elements of this controversy have been interrogated in this book. They include, amongst others, the doubt over whether the war should have been declared in the first place because terrorist attacks hardly meet the United Nations' casus belli – an armed attack. There are critics, as highlighted in this book, who believe that the war on terror is not an armed conflict properly so called, and, thus, remains only a law enforcement issue. The United States and all the states taking part in the war on terror are obligated to observe International Humanitarian Law (IHL). It is within this context of IHL that this book appraises the drone as a weapon of engagement, discussing such issues as personality and signature strikes as well as the implications of the deployment of spies as drone strikers rather than the Defence Department, the members of the U.S armed forces. This book will be of value to researchers, academics, policymakers, professionals, and students in the fields of security studies, terrorism, the law of armed conflict, international humanitarian law, and international politics.

1
Introduction

Asymmetric Warfare: A Terminological Simplification

Geometrically speaking, asymmetry denotes inequality. It is asymmetrical when the sides in a shape, pattern, or relationship are unequal.¹ Asymmetric relationships are sometimes detonative of congenital or irreversible inequality, like in filial relationships, which can be captured in the imagery, “John is the father of Bill”, a filial relationship between a father and a son.² Asymmetry pervades the physical and social realities of nature. In contemporary security environments, for example, although the nature and threat of inter-state armed conflicts remain unchangeable, real and omnipresent, what has really changed about armed conflicts today is in their physiognomy, the emergence of asymmetric conflicts, defined by the entrance of non-state actors—the sub-national insurgent groups.³ Thus, “an asymmetric conflict typically involves two actors, one “strong” and one “weak”.⁴ It is characterized, as Robert Sloane put it, quoting Robin Geiss, by “significant inequality in arms, disparate distribution of military strength and technological capability in a given conflict”.⁵

So, being intrinsically characterized by “power disparities”, asymmetric warfare has always been a combat that is historically “a logical choice for a weaker military opponent”.⁶ However, asymmetric engagements manifest an uncanny situation in which the strength of the so-called weaker opponent “is paradoxically rooted in its own weakness”, a paradox that is reflected in the Chinese leader, Mao Zedong’s submission “that the insurgent is like a fish that swims in the ocean of the people”,⁷ the people here are, metaphorically, a shield for the insurgent to evade square and direct targeting. It is in the sense of this people connection, the fact of insurgents hiding in the civilian population, that in asymmetric warfare, terrorism is an adjunct; thus, firmly presenting a situation in which “a militarily weak force uses limited resources to offset the strengths of a more powerful military force”.⁸

The implication of the terrorism genre of warfare being asymmetry is that it is also basically of a low-intensity nature.⁹ And being a low-intensity conflict means that this form of warfare does not entail direct confrontation; for the army keeps on stalking “another illusory” or elusive enemy, thus, making nonsense of its predilection and dependence on conventional “mechanization and advanced technology”.¹⁰ Although highly mechanized or technology-driven weapons have led to such anti-terror brands of warfare as “electronic warfare”, “precision-guided weapons warfare”, and “information warfare”,¹¹ the terrorists as adjunct categories in asymmetric conflicts have largely remained resilient. It is in this resilience that asymmetric warfare remains a nightmare that challenges the foundation of conventional “doctrinal development and force structure”¹² in every military organization; so much so that, before 9/11 and their entanglement with counter-terrorism operations, that is, after the bitter experiences of the United States (in Vietnam) and France (in Southeast Asia), both countries and, indeed, every other country’s conventional military, viscerally detest the likelihood or possibility of future involvement in wars of asymmetric nature, be it counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism.¹³

As a matter of fact, in Vietnam, although for the insurgents, there were actually “some rhyme or reason” behind their (the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong¹⁴) guerilla/terrorist tactics, they, indeed, made a mess of the conventional, the doctrinal, and the force structure known to the United States’ military. The doctrinal and force structure known to countries are predicated on “conventional battles”, defined in part as “combat between forces several hundreds of meters apart, whose observation is generally unimpeded by all objects”.¹⁵ In conventional mode of combat, “technology offers much promise” as it makes it possible for the battle to be “dominated by the combatant whose weapon can hit the enemy without the enemy being able to hit back”.¹⁶ It is this technological superiority that countries possess and use to their maximum advantage “when weapon sights and improved munitions take their toll on less technologically sophisticated opponents”¹⁷—the guerillas, insurgents, and terrorists who consequently avoid conventional combats.

In asymmetric warfare, the insurgents embark on a shifty strategy; in which they implicate the enemy in ground wars, but avoid engagements that would allow that enemy “to draw on its technical superiority”.¹⁸ Because it is in the character of guerilla warfare/terrorism that it is not patterned towards any conventional doctrine, groups like the Viet Cong “were not pursuing any military victory” but keen in causing doctrinal disorientation to the Americans.¹⁹ Michael Maclear vividly presents an American soldier’s frustrating description of the hit and run tactics of the non-conventional Viet Cong:

It was hit and miss. Like hunting a humming bird. You would get to one village; nothing there. Another village—and nothing there. The enemy, the humming-bird that we were after, was just buzzing around. You secure a village, you search it, and you leave, and the village reverts to the enemy.²⁰

The U.S. military were, thus, “operating against an enemy they seldom saw”; so much so that they became paranoid and “the minute they got beyond their very, very tightly circumscribed circle of familiarity, it was a foreign, alien—in the sense of ‘other’—world”.²¹ In fact, “the military mission became to inflict casualties and the primary reason for existence became to minimize your own casualties”; and in this reflex for survival, “blowing things up, burning huts” in “frustration of being ignorant and not knowing where the enemy was”²² became the order of the day. And so, the Americans became so frightened or embedded in fear that “in some cases, it led to outlets of violence against the population in general”.²³

This was the kind of situation that Stephen Small had in mind when he wrote that “as evidenced by the Vietnam War, military responses [to asymmetric conflicts] devolved in ham-handed affairs conducted in close proximity to civilian settlements”, and that these are “solutions in the postmodern age [that] lead only to morally pyrrhic victories”.²⁴ Ham-handed military responses to asymmetric warfare lead to pyrrhic victories because the proximity to civilian settlements means that these military operations take place in urban terrains; even though “since ancient times, urban combat has been brutal”, resulting in an inability to minimize collateral damage.²⁵ The arbitrary firepower implicit in ham-handed military operations in urban terrains makes it pretty difficult if not impossible to sort out the enemy combatants from noncombatants, both in the heat of the operations as well as “in the wake of the damage done”.²⁶

Materially, the duel between David and Goliath was not only a classical case of an asymmetric (even though a direct confrontation) warfare, it was also a confrontation between low tech and high tech; for while the Philistines had mastered the art of iron forging against which the Israelites had no chance, the latter only possessed “hard-edge blades”, the stuff that bronze weapons are made of.²⁷ In this biblical duel, David stayed out of the range of the fearsome sword of the Philistine giant, deploying his tactical surprise of pulling out his sling and felling the Philistine while still being taunted by the giant.²⁸ So, whereas “symmetric warfare has been identified as two opposing adversaries disposing of armed forces that are similar in all aspects such as force structure, doctrine, asset, and have comparable tactical, operational and strategic objectives”; “asymmetric warfare—as opposed to symmetric warfare—means that the opposing party is unable or unwilling to wage the war with comparable force, and has different political and military objectives than its adversary”.²⁹

It is in this lack of the capacity for conventional force comparable to the nation-state that terrorist insurgent resort to under-hand or crude tactics like attacking civilians, using crude or dirty weapons, refusing to wear appropriate or identifiable insignia, refusing to bear arms openly and, of course, refusing to conduct operations according to the rules of armed conflict. And unlike the Nigerian Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno State who averred that the Boko Haram’s attacks on “soft targets are signs of the terrorists’ weakness and their desperation to tell their terror co-travelers around the world that they are not yet finished”;³⁰ the attacks on soft targets are actually no weakness on the part of the terrorists but rather their inherent strength, the modus operandi that helps them offset their inability to engage in conventional battles.

Terrorists’ attack on soft targets is, therefore, a paradox to the extent that it is strength in their otherwise weakness. It is essentially because of the evasive and criminal nature of the operations of terrorists that drones (both armed and unarmed intelligence-oriented ones) have been devised to take them out from their hovels or safe havens without, at least, theoretically speaking, risking hitting the “host” state or incurring unacceptable collateral damage. This is principally what makes the use of drones in asymmetric warfare (whether counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism) very attractive. Like drug cartels and other transnational criminal threats, terrorism is part of the “nonparadigmatic” groups eluding existing taxonomies in armed conflicts that have continued to proliferate owing partly to the fact that the foreign policy of interventionism (by the West) often provokes ethical responsibilities and resentments.³¹

Terrorists—who can erupt in forms ranging from asymmetric “combatants” to pure criminals—are elusive and difficult to eradicate with conventional forces.³² In the terrorist brand of asymmetric conflict/warfare, the nation-state is between the devil and the deep blue sea in the choice of using either conventional or “unconventional” weapons. This is because in the absence of conventional combats and the futility or ineffectiveness of “conventional” weapons, the application of electronic warfare against terrorists (through precision-guided munitions like smart bombs or armed drones), has the danger of destroying unintended targets and leading to unacceptable collateral damage that fuels the rage of the t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acronyms
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Insurgency and Terrorism as Forms of Asymmetric Warfare
• 3 The War on Terror (WoT)
• 4 Dirty/Nightmarish Weapon Platforms in WoT
• 5 The Jurisprudence of New and “Unregulated” Weapons
• 6 The Armed Drone Weapon Platform
• 7 Drones in Self-Defence Against Terrorists
• 8 Drones, Vanishing Frontlines, and the Emergence of “Battlespace”
• 9 Drones in International Humanitarian Law, IHL
• 10 Drones and Ethics in WoT
• 11 Drones, WoT, and the Principle of Chivalry
• 12 Drones: Miniaturization, Automation, and Accountability in WoT
• 13 Globalization, Postmodernism, and the WoT
• 14 To Achieve a Successful WoT
• Select Bibliography
• Index