Drone Warfare

John Kaag, Sarah Kreps

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745685359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Pace e sviluppo globale

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 One of the most significant and controversial developments in contemporary warfare is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as drones. In the last decade, US drone strikes have more than doubled and their deployment is transforming the way wars are fought across the globe. But how did drones claim such an important role in modern military planning? And how are they changing military strategy and the ethics of war and peace? What standards might effectively limit their use? Should there even be a limit? Drone warfare is the first book to engage fully with the political, legal, and ethical dimensions of UAVs. In it, political scientist Sarah Kreps and philosopher John Kaag discuss the extraordinary expansion of drone programs from the Cold War to the present day and their so-called effectiveness in conflict zones. Analysing the political implications of drone technology for foreign and domestic policy as well as public opinion, the authors go on to examine the strategic position of the United States - by far the worlds most prolific employer of drones - to argue that US military supremacy could be used to enshrine a new set of international agreements and treaties aimed at controlling the use of UAVs in the future.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: The Rise of Drones

In October 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Pakistan in support of the Obama Administration’s efforts to convince Islamabad to crack down on terrorists.¹ A day before her arrival, however, a US drone strike killed more than one hundred Pakistanis in that country’s tribal region. Thus, when Clinton stood in front of a press conference in Islamabad, she faced two questions that inverted the very premise of her trip. First, Clinton was asked to define terrorism. Then came the follow-up: “Is it [terrorism] the killing of people in drone attacks?”² That question – volleyed by a woman from the back of the audience – perfectly encapsulates the moral, legal, and political ambiguities that prompted us to write this book.

Of course, Clinton’s response was as simple as it was emphatic: No, drone strikes are not acts of terrorism. The Obama Administration’s spokesperson Jay Carney recently stated even more clearly: “Drone strikes are legal, they are ethical, and they are wise.”³ But as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones are qualitatively different than previous military technologies: they allow lethal action at virtually no risk to the perpetrator. As such, it is a mistake to take their legality, morality, and prudence for granted. This book seeks neither to excoriate nor to vindicate contemporary drone policy. Instead, we examine the political, legal, and moral dimensions of the policy and provide a synthetic assessment of the dangers of its current trajectory.

Drones represent the intersection of two important trends in military technology: the increasingly precise nature of weapons and the rise of robotics. Taken together, these evermore-sophisticated capabilities produced a drone aircraft, flown remotely at no risk to the pilot and capable of delivering a lethal payload. On the surface, drone technology seems to offer great benefits: it allows the United States to take the fight to terrorists, wherever they may hide, without risking the lives of American service members. Often lost in that seductive proposition, however, are the second-order effects created by this capability. It is precisely the novelty of drone capabilities that creates new challenges.

Our engagement with US drone policy turns on three mutually supportive pillars: politics, law, and morality. Politically, the costs of war are no longer distributed throughout a democratic society; thus, the costliness of war in blood and treasure, which has historically reined in military adventurism, is greatly diminished. We worry that this dynamic risks enabling a state of perpetual, low-level conflict underneath the public’s radar. Legally, drones seem to alleviate confusion over important points of international law, such as distinction and proportionality, but this appearance only further entrenches dangerous ambiguities. Indeed, the legal edifice supporting the United States’ drone policy goes beyond reasonable interpretation of the principles of jus ad bellum as well as jus in bello by expanding the battlefield to in-clude individuals and spaces considered outside legally recognized combat zones. Morally, drones create a “moral hazard” by shielding US citizens, politicians, and soldiers from the risks associated with targeted killings; unfortunately, these same individuals lack the ethical training to consider the normative dangers of drones. Consequently, drones are becoming banal – leaving their ethical implications unexamined and their ease of use celebrated as intrinsically good. Cumulatively, these arguments comprise a call to action, not necessarily to resist drones as an instrument of warfare, but rather to employ them only if the international community is cognizant of, and comfortable with, their manifold implications.

As the title suggests, this is a book about drones. We take drones as our subject because we believe that the speed of technological development in this area has far outpaced our understanding of how that technology interacts with politics, international law, and ethics. This is not a book about the evolution of airpower, or weapons technology, over time. Consequently, our reservations about drones are not tantamount to endorsements of previous, less precise technologies like carpet-bombing. We see the US military’s commitment to minimize civilian casualties as an unequivocally positive development.⁴ Rather, we seek to elucidate ongoing debates about drone policy by emphasizing, for example, that even a technology that makes discrimination between civilians and combatants easier does not obviate the problem of discrimination, and that minimizing risks to American pilots may save lives in the short term but it also undermines the accountability linkages that keep wars short and bounded in the long term. Moreover, while accepting the tactical effectiveness of drones, we contend that they are not strategically effective – suggesting that there are practical as well as normative reasons to question extant drone policy. Consistent with our pragmatic approach, after exploring the complexities of drones throughout the book, we conclude with recommendations for how drones policy can change to allay some of our normative concerns.

The turn to drones

The use of drones in combat has increased considerably over the last decade. Having authorized just nine strikes outside the context of combat between 2004 and 2007, the Bush Administration authorized thirty-six such strikes in its last year of office. President Obama dramatically increased the use of drones, primarily in the tribal regions of Pakistan and to a lesser extent in Yemen and Somalia. Between 2009 and 2012, there were 295 strikes in Pakistan alone, resulting in about 2,221 casualties, of which about 1,800 were suspected militants, 153 were civilians, and 205 were of unknown identity. While the rate of strikes in Pakistan has declined from its peak in 2010, the number in Yemen has increased, as the United States battles the increasingly powerful al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.⁵ The United States has also conducted a handful of drone strikes in Somalia against al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda affiliate.⁶

As recently as the 1990s, drones were not armed at all. They took the form of sensor aircraft, with Predators operating in Bosnia, Kosovo, and the no-fly zone in Iraq.⁷ Inevitably, however, debates about combat capability arose. Whereas the air force demanded fast, “jet-like” drones, the CIA preferred smaller, surveillance drones. Both the air force and the CIA expressed interest in going beyond gathering intelligence and acquiring an aircraft that could both track and kill suspected targets, although there was considerable debate about how or whether to do so. At the time, CIA Counterterrorist Center Director Cofer Black argued that the United States should not deploy Predators over Afghanistan until they were weaponized, saying “I do not believe the possible recon value outweighs the risk of possible program termination when the stakes are raised by the Taliban parading a charred Predator in front of CNN.”⁸ Yet the armed version of the Predator also had its dissenters prior to 9/11. Former CIA Director George Tenet suggested that it would be “a terrible mistake” for “the Director of Central Intelligence to fire a weapon like this.”⁹

After 9/11, the “gloves came off” and the CIA sent Predators to Afghanistan on September 16, and armed Predators followed on October 7.¹⁰ It was in the post-9/11 threat environment that the United States began undertaking targeted killings by drones, deploying the MQ-1B Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper, armed with precision-guided munitions, to match their adversaries’ flexible tactics. The first CIA drone attack occurred in November 2001, when a Predator killed Mohammed Atef, the “number three” in al-Qaeda.¹¹ A year later, on November 4, 2002, the Agency launched an attack in Yemen, its “first targeted killing outside of a declared war zone using the ‘sweeping authority’ given to the spy agency by Bush in September 2001.”¹² The target was al-Harethi, the terrorist leader responsible for the USS Cole bombing. Yemeni President Saleh claimed responsibility for the attack on al-Harethi, but, after it was leaked that the United States was behind the strike, drones were not used in the country until 2009. However, in 2004, because of the rise of the Pakistani Taliban and the failure of the Pakistani military, the CIA was granted access to conduct surveillance and targeted killing across Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. It has since conducted hundreds of such strikes.¹³ The government claims to have approximately 7,500 drones, up from just a few dozen a decade ago.¹⁴

Thus, what began as an engineering experiment to fit Hellfire missiles onto a surveillance drone in 2001 has turned into a transformation of how the United States uses military force, and, by many accounts, a tactically successful one. Even those who question whether the strategy is effective – -wondering whether the use of drones is ultimately recruiting more terrorists than it kills – concede that the use of drones has eliminated key al-Qaeda leaders.¹⁵ Underlining the basis for drones is that the drone policy makes for good domestic politics. The United States has killed leaders of al-Qaeda and its affiliates while reducing its own casualties and reducing the domestic blowback that comes from body bags returning from war. To the extent that increased casualties reduce the popularity of a conflict and in turn reduce a leader’s strategic options,¹⁶ drones have given leaders greater freedom of action to carry out wars without domestic scrutiny or meaningful constraints.

Indeed, poll data suggest that the American public is widely accepting – while at the same time somewhat ignorant – of US drone strikes abroad. A large majority (65 percent) of Americans claim that they have heard a lot about the US drone program, but when asked where most strikes are occurring, most Americans either cite the wrong country or do not know where those strikes are carried out.¹⁷ More broadly, an astounding majority of people (75 percent) report that they nevertheless approve of these targeting practices, even though their knowledge of the policy is dubious.¹⁸ Yet, in the very same poll, only a quarter of respondents aver that drone strikes are legal.

One thing is clear from the politics surrounding the drone program: Americans express significantly greater concern about drone strikes when the policy seems to affect them directly. As we suggest in chapter 3, Americans are more agitated about the prospect of being spied on by drones than they are by the targeting of individuals in other countries. Moreover, the revelation that the US government has used drones to kill its own citizens and under some circumstances would be willing to do so again in the future caused a public outcry. By bringing the drone issue “home,” an impression furthered by substantial media and Congressional attention to the possibility of lethal drone strikes on US soil, the program finally captured the public imagination. Indeed, out of more than three thousand casualties resulting from US drone strikes,¹⁹ the killing of four Americans dominated the 2013 nomination hearings for CIA Director John Brennan. Despite the increased public attention, most of the populace remains ill-equipped to explain the basic “when and where” of drone strikes as they currently take place.

We should note from the outset that, while this is a book about drones, it tends to focus on the use of drones by the United States. The United States has been the country to conduct the most drone strikes – far more than either Israel or the United Kingdom – providing a useful case study into how drones are used, the domestic politics around the use of drones by a democracy, and the diplomatic consequences of their use. This case study also provides insight into how domestic politics might affect the interpretation of international law and the way that this interpretation might not coincide with some basic ethical arguments that underpin modern liberal societies. It is with this case-study approach in mind that many of the examples we cite feature the United States, but we suspect that they are likely instructive in terms of other countries using drones, especially democracies where the domestic imperatives of minimizing casualties may be especially salient. We do, however, highlight the proliferation of drones internationally. While just forty-one countries had drones in 2005, that number had increased to seventy-six by 2011.²⁰ Most of these are not combat drones, but every major regional actor – friend and foe alike – has either combat drones or plans to acquire them. The second and concluding chapters review the proliferation trends and propose measures to deal respectively with the control and regulation of drone use.

Existing accounts of drone warfare

Prior to 1980, drone warfare was largely the province of science fiction such as Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and Isaac Asimov’s Robot series.²¹ The first books to discuss it as a reality typically addressed the practical and technical challenges that faced designers and engineers. The second wave of drone literature began to provide instructions on how best to use these new devices in a variety of military theaters. “Best” in this sense simply referred to the practical questions of efficiency and strategic advantage. Peter Singer’s Wired for War (2009) may not have been the first but it became the most popular book-length treatment of unmanned aerial vehicles. Singer, for the most part, avoids the theoretical work that we take up in the coming chapters and concentrates his energies on providing a comprehensive analysis of the design, capabilities, and strategy of unmanned aerial vehicles. In other words, Singer concentrates on bringing together the insights of the first two waves of drone literature, and he does this very effectively. He briefly addresses the impact that drones will have on political processes and international law, but, for the most part, questions concerning the legal, political, and moral implications of drones and other semiautonomous weapon systems are generally left for another day. That day has come and we are faced with the rather difficult task of thinking through the implications of a technology that is being implemented at unprecedented speed.

The capabilities of these new technologies have radically expanded in the last decade, and scholars of warfare have struggled to keep up. As Micah Zenko writes:

Five-pound backpack drones are now used by infantry soldiers for tactical surveillance and will soon be deployed for what their manufacture calls “magic bullet” kamikaze missions. Special operations forces have developed a warhead fired from a Predator drone that can knock down doors. K-Max helicopter drones transport supplies to troops at forward operating bases in Afghanistan. Balloons unleash Tempest drones, which then send out smaller surveillance drones – called Cicadas – that glide to the ground to collect data. And now the US State Department is flying a small fleet of surveillance drones over Iraq to protect the US Embassy there. Bottom line: More and more drones have been rushed into service, and their use and application by the US military is seemingly infinite.²²

As the technology has expanded, a growing number of books, primarily anthologies, have taken on the normative implications of drone technologies. Theorists – legal, political, and moral – often find themselves scrambling to explain, defend, and criticize technologies that have already been developed, and, in most cases, have already been used. This “shoot first and ask questions later” mentality recurs in the history of modern military technology. For example, in 1954, President Harry Truman pleaded with an international community that was just beginning to witness an unprecedented nuclear arms race: “We must catch up morally and internationally with the machine age. We must catch up with it, and we must catch up with it in such a way as to create peace in the world, or it will destroy us and everybody else. And that we don’t dare to contemplate.”²³

The danger of technology outpacing well-reasoned scholarship is as present in the age of drone warfare as it was in the age of thermonuclear weapons. Journalists and experts in international law, political science, and moral theory have each made a run at catching up with this potentially transformational military technology.²⁴ But recent attempts have only been partially successful because they have hewn too closely to disciplinary divides. Save for the fact that multidisciplinary arguments appeared in the same anthologies, it has remained unclear how the legal, political, and moral arguments concerning drones are interrelated. We maintain that they are inextricable and only an account of unmanned aerial systems that takes seriously the relationship between politics, law, and morality will be rich enough to address the complexities of our drone age adequately. In this respect, the division of the book into three discrete sections – politics, law, and morality – is an artificial one that is analytically useful but potentially misleading....