Analyzing the Drone Debates: Targeted Killing, Remote Warfare, and Military Technology

Targeted Killings, Remote Warfare, and Military Technology

James DeShaw Rae

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137393074
• eBook ISBN: 9781137381576
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book examines principal arguments for and against the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and 'targeted killing.' Addressing both sides of the argument with clear and cogent details, the book provides a thorough introduction to ongoing debate about the future of warfare and its ethical implications.

1

Introduction

Abstract: This chapter describes the scope of the scholarly debates over drone warfare and introduces the broad positions favoring and opposed to their usage. It briefly summarizes the organization of the book, which encompasses perspectives from national security, law, ethics, and public policy. Finally, this chapter traces the modern historical development of unmanned aerial vehicles, their employment as part of a revolution in military affairs, and their functions in military operations.

Keywords: development of unmanned aerial vehicles; history of drones; types of drones

Rae, James DeShaw. Analyzing the Drone Debates: Targeted Killing, Remote Warfare, and Military Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0004.

Day and night, the wasps buzz overhead watching and listening. Families in earthen homes try to fall asleep but the machay, wasps in the Pashtun language, continue their ominous sound. Without notice or warning, a sudden explosion leaves severed body parts strewn across the landscape while blood soaks the dusty earth. Halfway around the world, young men sit down for a long, dreary shift watching distant images on a video screen of night vision green globs, multi-colored infrared shapes, and grainy figures of people gathering. Others in distant reaches collectively observe and new voices join the refrain with more information from unknown sources while lawyers offer advice on the propriety of taking a decision; a joystick is depressed to begin the kinetic activity. The chair is warm for the next on duty when the tired “pilot” is finally relieved and drives along the dusty highway back home for a night of sleep. Such is the battlefield in contemporary asymmetric conflict where the United States’ expansive use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a.k.a. drones, is radically altering the nature and morality of warfare and could have far reaching social consequences as commercial applications become more affordable.

The precision of drones promises risk-free war that is so accurate as to eliminate collateral damage and so remote as to remove virtually all threat to the pilot. Yet this yawning asymmetry pitting machine against man threatens to lose the hearts and minds of those who live in the terrain where these automatons commonly patrol in modern interventions. The secretive, if not covert, aspect of these shadow wars in the name of self-defense that execute constant surveillance and “targeted killings” of those who endanger national security overseas and may soon find currency in domestic law enforcement and public safety belies the professed customs of a free and open democratic society that enshrines fundamental civil liberties like the rights to privacy and due process. Dramatic technological advances and rapid global production of unmanned systems will likely transform international affairs, state-society relations, and people’s everyday life. Among the contested aspects of the new national security apparatus and its commensurate policies are profiling distinctions based on group membership, monitoring domestic religious and political meetings, mining metadata, intercepting communications, acquiring biometric information, trying suspected terrorists in military commissions or civilian courts, detaining suspected enemies and terrorists sometimes in secret “black sites” or transferred to third countries as extraordinary renditions for enhanced interrogation, and killing alleged terrorists using hit squads or drones.¹ Already, these practices of state violence have legitimized the acceptability of discourse in the United States regarding the merits of assassination and torture.

This book examines the primary arguments for and against the development and use of unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and targeted killing. Targeted killing is the “use of lethal force attributable to a subject of international law with the intent, premeditation and deliberation to kill individually selected persons who are not in physical custody of those targeting them.”² A targeted killing may be accomplished by sniper fire, shooting at close range, missiles from helicopters or gunships, car bombs, poison, and now with a drone.³ Advocates for the use of drones argue principally on the basis of efficacy and utilitarian ethics, while finding legal defenses to justify their conformity to the laws of war. Drone technology is less expensive and less risky (i.e., deadly) to U.S. operatives than special operations, conventional counter-terrorism, or military intervention. Advocates also believe that drones are more effective, killing more terrorists per dollar spent than any other form of counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism technique. President Barack Obama declared “our actions are effective” in a speech on counter-terrorism at the National Defense University in May 2013 and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan summarized the benefits of drone warfare:

compared against other options, a pilot operating this aircraft remotely, with the benefit of technology and with the safety of distance, might actually have a clearer picture of the target and its surroundings, including the presence of innocent civilians. It’s this surgical precision, the ability, with laser-like focus, to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al-Qaida terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it, that makes this counterterrorism tool so essential.⁴

Finally, and more broadly, the use of drones for killing suspected terrorists is seen as no more objectionable ethically than the bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan during the course of World War II, an unpleasant but necessary tactic to prevent enemies from implementing their plans. Ironically, targeted killing in the Obama administration has been less controversial than torturing detainees was in the Bush administration.

Opposition to U.S. policy regarding drones, targeted killing, and especially “signature strikes” are founded on a variety of objections based on the veracity of efficacy claims, questionable legal bases, multiple ethical perspectives, and the logic of unintended consequences. This book provides a concise yet thorough overview of these disparate positions for a general readership who may know only a little about the coming changes associated with drone capabilities and their current practice as part of a controversial national security strategy but who are nevertheless curious about what transformations in daily life and public policy may result. The goal is to arrange the scope of debates into categories and offer a balanced analysis of the merits of each in light of security, legal, ethical, and political perspectives on other aspects of warfare, intelligence gathering, and counter-terrorism. Thus, the overall questions investigated include the following: What are the parameters of the drone debate among scholars, policymakers, and analysts? What are the real costs and benefits of the current use of drones? Are drones different than other technological innovations in warfare? What are some future unintended consequences of advancing technologies related to unmanned aerial vehicles?

Most of these debates have followed war and foreign policy around for decades if not centuries and are not so unique to drones. Distance between killer and victim began with some rudimentary tool, perhaps the bow and arrow, a slingshot, or a poison dart, but drones are a culmination of a technological revolution in military affairs that changes the equation for future combat and in effect empties the battlefield. Christian Enemark describes drone technology as the first complete surmounting of physical limits of time and space in military affairs.⁵ Drones uniquely track human behavior over long periods of time using relatively sophisticated cameras and other receptors to observe targets. Their surveillance capabilities are so effective and their strikes are accurate enough that they enable policymakers to draw up lists of individuals they would like to kill and allow agents of government to remotely execute that homicide. They are also part of a broader trend in industrialized democracies where invasive technological advances enable government officials to deliver ever greater security in public places by monitoring, tracking, and watching society writ large. As Mark Bowden writes, “The drone is new only in that it combines known technology in an original way; aircraft, global telecommunications links, optics, digital sensors, supercomputers ... a weapon that employs simple physics to launch a missile with lethal force from a distance, a first step into a world where going to war does not mean fielding an army, or putting any of your own soldiers, sailors, or pilots at risk.”⁶

Although written while considering the Balkan wars of the 1990s, never truer was Michael Ignatieff’s statement: “we now wage wars and few notice or care.”⁷ YouTube videos of drone strikes are easily accessed and still photos of drones now appear in magazines and newspapers, yet few images of drone warfare appear in the American media or government public information systems. At most, government officials offer oxymoronic platitudes, exhibited in the words of Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clark: “We’re convinced that it was an appropriate target ... We do not know yet exactly who it was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  National Security and the Efficacy of Drone Warfare
• 3  Targeted Killing and the Legality of Drone Warfare
• 4  Remote Killing and the Ethics of Drone Warfare
• 5  Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone Technology
• 6  Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index