Drones and Support for the Use of Force :

James Igoe Walsh, Marcus Schulzke

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780472901173
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique militaire

Drones and Support for the Use of Force utilizes experimental research to analyze the effects of combat drones on Americans' support for the use of force. The authors develop expectations drawn from social science theory and then assess these conjectures using a series of survey experiments. Their findings—that drones have had important but nuanced effects on support for the use of force—have implications for democratic control of military action and civil-military relations, and provide insight into how the development and proliferation of current and future military technologies influence the domestic politics of foreign policy.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Choosing War

Political leaders face two key challenges when they decide to use military force: winning the war itself, and winning support at home. In the past two decades, the United States has pursued a technological solution to these problems by developing combat drones—weapons that can both selectively target opponents and minimize the costs and risks of combat. In this book, we seek to understand how this solution to the challenge of military victory also addresses the need for public support for engaging in conflict.

Combat drones have been employed by the United States against insurgent and terrorist groups. These militant organizations are materially weaker than the governments they fight. Their relative weakness leads them to avoid direct military confrontations and to use the civilian population to mask their identities, attempting to pass as noncombatants by eschewing uniforms and by residing in populated areas. A key challenge that authorities face in countering insurgencies is solving this “identification” problem of distinguishing bona fide militants from civilians.1 Doing so allows the authorities to bring to bear their superior military power. But failure to correctly identify militants means that strikes risk military casualties, mission failure, and civilian harm.2 This is not only unfortunate but counterproductive, as militants can use their opponent’s failure and the deaths of noncombatants to persuade the population that the authorities are indiscriminate and unjust, while the militants can offer protection today and the promise to replace the government in the future.3

The United States faced just this problem in its attempts to counter insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In Vietnam, areas subject to aerial bombing experienced many civilian casualties and saw declines in government control and increases in influence by militants. In Iraq, inadvertent killings of civilians by the United States led to more militant violence in regions where government influence and support was the weakest. In Afghanistan, popular support for the international military coalition led by the United States declined in villages where its use of force resulted in civilian harm.4

Leaders in democracies also need to maintain domestic political support for the conflict by convincing the public that the benefits and likelihood of eventual victory will exceed the human and financial costs. Their ability to do so depends in part on success on the battlefield, but it is difficult to demonstrate with much certainty that counterinsurgency campaigns are “working.” Militant movements present few opportunities to decisively defeat the enemy in set-piece battles, and the militants’ ability to hide among the population makes it difficult to assess their military capabilities. Even when militants lose major engagements, as they did during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the Battles of Fallujah in Iraq, the outcome rarely feels like a victory because the confrontations provide evidence of militants’ strength and foster doubts about whether long-term political objectives can be met. Citizens can clearly see the costs of using force against militants—government spending and military casualties, for example—but have difficulty seeing any successes. Mounting financial and human costs, especially military casualties, directly reduce support for countering insurgencies. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan illustrate this dynamic; in each case, public support for the use of force declined as casualties increased.5

Technological developments now allow the creation of weapons, the most prominent of which are armed unmanned aerial vehicles, or “drones,” that promise to make it easier to address both challenges. These combat drones have two relevant characteristics when it comes to managing the costs of counterinsurgency and improving the chances of success. The first is selectivity, understood as the ability to identify and strike a well-defined target—such as a particular building, vehicle, or individual—while minimizing harm to nearby noncombatants and civilian infrastructure. Weapons are more selective when they can be actively guided to their targets, such as missiles directed to specific geographic coordinates. Selectivity is also enhanced when the weapon is integrated with multiple streams of intelligence—collected by the weapons platform itself or by other systems, such as satellites or communications intercepts—that provide information about the identity and location of a target. Greater selectivity means that a weapon is better able to solve the identification problem, allowing more effective detection and targeting of hostile militants while timing strikes to reduce the possibility of civilian casualties. Drones hold advantages in terms of both aspects of selectivity, as they are tools for conducting protracted reconnaissance missions to track suspected enemy fighters and for launching attacks using relatively low-yield munitions that reduce the risk of inflicting civilian casualties.

The second characteristic is pilot invulnerability: the capacity to achieve battlefield victories while minimizing the risk that military personnel face when engaging enemy forces. Pilot invulnerability is a function of the range with which a weapon can strike from its operator. In general, the longer the range, the less vulnerable the weapon’s operator is to enemy fire. Field artillery, for example, typically has a much longer range than mortars, meaning that soldiers manning the former are, all other things being equal, at less risk than those operating the latter. Similarly, the crews of aircraft armed with guided missiles are less vulnerable than their counterparts flying aircraft that drop simple “gravity” bombs, which have to fly closer to their targets to increase their accuracy.

This invulnerability is a characteristic of the pilot, not of the machine. Drones remove their human operators from danger, but the machines themselves may be attacked and destroyed. Current generation drones are generally more susceptible to attack than aircraft with onboard crews because they tend to fly slower, have limited defensive capabilities, and perform poorly in air-to-air combat against enemy aircraft.6 Drones may also be hacked, spoofed, or suffer from technical faults that interfere with their control systems. These limitations put the machines at risk of attack or failure, yet the pilots remain invulnerable because they are at such extreme distances from the battlefield that their fate is completely divorced from that of the aircraft. The entire American drone force could be shot down without causing any loss of human life; the same cannot be said of aircraft without onboard crews.

Both characteristics have powerful political consequences, especially when they are combined in the same weapon system. This has not received sufficient attention, in part because until recently the designers of weapons have faced a trade-off between selectivity and pilot invulnerability. To continue the examples introduced above, mortars are typically more selective than artillery but place troops in greater danger of counterattack. Strike aircraft armed with laser-guided bombs can regularly hit specific targets, but this selectivity declines when they fly at higher altitudes to avoid anti-aircraft fire. For this reason, much analysis has focused on either selectivity or pilot invulnerability, while assuming that these goals cannot be realized simultaneously.7 There is a robust debate dating back to the 1920s, for example, about how selectivity influences political and military outcomes.8 Other works have considered how pilot invulnerability reduces the costs and risks of using force, for example by allowing attacks with long-range aircraft compared to the use of ground troops.9

Recent technological developments have sharply narrowed the trade-off between selectivity and pilot invulnerability. Combat drones—remotely piloted aircraft armed with air-to-ground missiles—are the best example of a weapon system that incorporates both characteristics. Drones are more selective and offer their operators greater safety than their most similar weapon system, the strike aircraft with an onboard crew. Both are armed with accurate, guided munitions and can collect intelligence about potential targets from onboard sensors. Drones have the advantage of being able to loiter for much longer periods, allowing more time for the integration of intelligence, the positive identification of targets, and the selection of a time to strike that will maximize damage to the target while minimizing risks to noncombatants. Modern strike aircraft have considerable ability to avoid taking enemy fire, including high-speed, defensive weapons, and in some cases a “stealthy” design. But their crews are always at some risk of being shot down or experiencing a malfunction, while the pilots of a drone may be located thousands of miles from the battlefield and immune from physical harm. Importantly, drones represent an improvement in both selectivity and pilot invulnerability over other weapons systems. Piloted aircraft, for example, can increase the selectivity of their attacks by flying closer to their targets, but this increases the vulnerability of their crews to ground fire or accidents. Drones require no such trade-off; they allow attacks that are more selective while eliminating risks of physical harm to military personnel.

The ability of more selective weapons, such as drones, to mitigate the political difficulties of war—winning on the battlefield and securing domestic support—has been debated since the advent of air power in the early twentieth century.10 Campaigns that shaped this debate include the British use of air power to counter rebels in northern Iraq and in Waziristan in the 1920s and the United States’ extensive bombing against insurgent Viet Cong units during the Vietnam War.11 Most of these attacks were carried out with gravity bombs dropped from manned aircraft, which could not be directed to their targets with much precision and which placed their crews at risk. Later assessments concluded that they had little effect on, or actually strengthened, the insurgents they targeted.12 The use of truly selective weapons has been much less frequent or sustained. The United States launched cruise missiles against al Qaeda bases in Sudan and Afghanistan after attacks on American embassies in 1998, but these attacks were not maintained for long enough to undermine the group. Israel has used missiles fired from helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and drones, as well as snipers and ground troops, in a campaign of “targeted killings” directed against armed Palestinian groups in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the United States used similar technologies of violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. These campaigns were certainly more selective than their predecessors, although their military effectiveness has been debated, and they continued to place military personnel at some risk of harm.13

Drones may fundamentally alter these trade-offs and more generally the costs and benefits of using armed force. Scholars of international politics have long thought that the costs of conflict influence potential combatants’ willingness to take up arms.14 Recent work uses as its starting point the assumption that states and other actors who have different interests and preferences bargain with each other to resolve these differences. Using force, or threatening to do so, is one strategy an actor can adopt to press its opponent to make concessions. But even successful military action is costly; it risks the lives of military personnel and civilians, is expensive in financial terms, and reduces the capacity to use force in other theaters or against other opponents. Before resorting to military force, states and other actors subtract their estimates of these costs from the benefits they expect to accrue from successful coercion of a foe. This creates a “bargaining range,” understood as negotiated agreements that both sides prefer to incurring the costs and risks of war. When the bargaining range is larger, there are more potential bargains that the sides might prefer to war.15

The costs of war are an important influence on the size of the bargaining range; as these costs change, so does the range of peaceful settlements that both sides would prefer to armed conflict. Innovation in military technology and doctrine is one way that the costs of war change. Innovations that make war more costly should, ceteris paribus, create a larger bargaining range and thus reduce the likelihood of war. A good example of this is the effect of nuclear weapons on interstate conflict; many conclude that, under the right conditions, nuclear weapons can prevent conflict by hugely raising its costs.16

Nuclear weapons increase the costs of war, while drones reduce them. This means that possession of armed drones could strengthen incentives for an actor to start or to sustain conflicts. The pilot invulnerability that drones allow eliminates a key cost of military action: the military casualties that undermine domestic political support for the conflict. Their selectivity means that weapons launched from drones are more likely to achieve their battlefield objectives, increasing the costs imposed on the opposing side. Selectivity also lowers the chances that releasing such weapons will result in harm to civilians, which, like military casualties, can make political actors at home and abroad less willing to support the conflict. Drone ope...