"Drones Are Like Laparoscopic Surgery"

Another tip of the beret to Mad Padre's Man In Dublin for putting me on to this piece in Slate Magazine by William Saletan defending the West's use of drones in places such as Afghanistan and Yemen as being the best possible way to reduce civilian casualties. It's tempting to see a vindication of Saltaan's argument in the release today of a U.N. report saying that "For the first time in six years the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan declined", although as this New York Times article suggests, the decline may also be due to other factors, such as the ongoing drawdown of NATO ground troops.

While Saletan rightly points out that drones are still creepy for a bunch of reasons, I think he's right that they are preferable to conventional aircraft and bombs when there is time to identify the target with minimal risk. A human pilot coming in fast and worried about ground fire does not have the luxury of time and careful study of the target, as Canadian troops in Afghanistan learned to their grievous cost.

More On Drones And Privacy/Policy Issues

In 2008, when I was being posted to 14 Wing in Greenwood, Nova Scotia, my realtor at the time was quite excited about the prospect of the Wing standing up a UAV (unmannaed aerial venicle, or drones) squadron. The influx of new personnel, he argued, would be good for home prices and should coincide with the send of my posting, giving me good resale prospects. There would also be a boost for the local economy,new stores, etc. I wonder now how many local residents would have welcomed the prospect of frequent drone training flights and incursions on their privacy.

This story from US National Public Radio (NPR) from upstate New York talks about the impact of military training flights of drones on the civilian community and the privacy issues involved. Those domestic privacy rights issues are also discussed here in an NPR interview with a law professor. http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/image.php/EmpireWire20110117a.jpg?width=220&image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.northcountrypublicradio.org%2Fnews%2Fimages%2F%2FEmpireWire20110117a.jpg

Besides domestic privacy issues, the larger issue I think is the use of drones to target and kill high value targets associated with terrorist organizations, the transparency of policies around drone use to the electorate, and the compatibility of these policies with universally accepted Laws of Armed Conflict. A useful discussion of these issues occured last night on the PBS News Hour:

Watch Exploring Effectiveness, Consequences of Drone Warfare on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Again With The Drones: NYU/Stanford Study Addresses Social/Cultural Impact Of Drone Warfare In Pakistan

I've posted on several items in the military/political news regarding the West's increasing reliance on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (commonly called drones) to conduct military actions and extra-judicial killings as part what we have come to call the War on Terror. These articles have focused on the usefulness or counter-productiveness of these weapons on foreign policy aims and on their implications for military ethics and the laws of armed conflict.

Living Under Drones, a joint study by academics and Stanford and New York universities is the first, to my knowledge, to focus on the impact of drone warfare on a population and culture. The researches conducted numerous interviews in Pakistan, the main theatre of US UAV/drone operations. Their findings challenge the prevalent idea that drones are a surgical and precise weapons system, and suggests that a very small percentage of the thousands believed killed by drone strikes in Pakistan were actually key terrorist leaders.

This paragraph from the report (p. 11) is worth quoting in full, as it speaks to what the report claims is the impact of sustained drone warfare on the culture and lives of the people living beneath them:

Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves. These fears have affected behavior. The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school. Waziris told our researchers that the strikes have undermined cultural and religious practices related to burial, and made family members afraid to attend funerals. In addition, families who lost loved ones or their homes in drone strikes now struggle to support themselves.

Besides rekindling the ethical debate on whether drone technology gives the executive branch an illegal, or at least an extrajudical, power of lethal sanction, to my mind it also raises other questions. The whole policy of COIN (counterinsurgency warfare), widely touted as the only viable means of ending the wars of the last decade, and especially Afghanistan, rests on the idea of winning the hearts and minds of the people while isolating and fighting the insurgents. But if, as the report requests, drones make whole populations fearful and then hostile to the US and to the West, then is this technology working for us or against us?