Use of Drones for Killings Risks a War Without End

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/world/use-of-drones-for-killings-risks-a-war-without-end-panel-concludes-in-report.html?action=click&contentCollection=Health&region=Footer&module=TopNews&pgtype=Blogs

by aet • 12 years ago

77 96 12 years ago

nytimes.com

seren3• 12 years ago

What I find really odd is how similar a drone strike is to a terrorist attack. A military convoy is being attacked by a remotely controlled IED, you can retaliate by sending a drone to blow up some pre-defined target. Maybe it is a fitting weapon for the twenty-first century, to put back some symmetry in asymmetric wars. The next logical step is the use of drones to perform terrorist attacks. It is easy to envision an eternal low intensity war with objectives being remotely destroyed by both opponents. It muddles further the blurry line, if any has ever existed, between regular and irregular warfare.

spingsprong• 12 years ago

Sure, if by similar you mean completely different.

If a group did attack a military convoy with a remote controlled IED, it wouldn't be an act of terrorism.

Terrorism is the indiscriminate targeting of civilians.

A remote controlled IED isn't indiscriminate, and a military convoy isn't civilian.

markild• 12 years ago

I'm really not trying to troll here, but what then of military attacks on civilian targets?

rdl2• 12 years ago

I agree, but "we" (western media, etc.) tended to call attacks on the occupation forces terrorism, too. The pretense was the war was "over", so the occupation forces were there for law and order, not war, so attacks on them were criminal/terrorist/etc. vs. "legitimate warfare".

Pressure/etc. detonated IEDs are sort of a grey area, honestly, as are military landmines, cluster munitions where you know a large fraction will become UXO, especially in civilian areas, and inaccurate area attacks like WW2 airstrikes.

seren3• 12 years ago

Maybe you're right, but terrorism has really no clear cut definition. I am pretty sure I have never heard a suicide bomber detonating in a military base being described otherwise than "terrorist".

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

Terrorists often hit military targets as well (Khobar towers, Beirut Marine barracks, etc.). Throughout most of "the troubles" the IRA targeted the military or police, should they not have been considered terrorists?

The techniques of terrorists (say: car bombings) are shockingly little different in practice from drone strikes. Sure, certainly the intent is very different, but the result is nevertheless a disturbingly high death toll for innocents. And that should concern us a fuck of a lot more than it does today.

JackFr2• 12 years ago

Are you willing to hold Churchill and the RAF to the same standard?

sanderjd3• 12 years ago

Terrorism is the indiscriminate targeting of civilians.

Source? Debating the definitions of words is often silly, but I think it's worth pointing out that 1) the definition of "terrorism" isn't broadly agreed upon, and 2) the definition you're using is more narrow than peoples'. The definition that searching google gives is "the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims", which drone attacks certainly fit into.

More generally, it seems that condemning vague things like "torture" and "terrorism" accomplishes very little, because people will simply use different definitions of the terms to skirt the condemnation. So we have to condemn specific things that are wrong, like waterboarding and drone strikes.

sharpneli• 12 years ago

Some of them are effectively terrorist attacks. If anyone remembers that drone strike against Wedding convoy in Yemen. It's exactly the same if someone would bomb a wedding in US that had some military officers there.

mcone• 12 years ago

I think you're getting caught up in semantics here, but you're also groping towards a critical realization: Drone strikes, by all accounts, seem to fit the definition of terrorist attacks.

Noam Chomsky certainly thinks so. He had this to say [1] in 2013:

"Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history: the drone assassination campaigns, which are just part of it [...] All of these operations, they are terror operations. You are generating more terrorist operations.

"People have a reaction” when they lose a loved one to an American drone strike, he added. “They don’t say, ‘Fine, I don’t care if my cousin was murdered.’ They become what we call terrorists. This is completely understood from the highest level.”

[1] http://www.mediaite.com/tv/noam-chomsky-obama-is-running-big...

lukifer3• 12 years ago

I wish I could remember who made this comparison (I'm guessing it was Jeremy Scahill?), but I agree with the idea that the primary hallmark of terrorism is the feeling of utter powerlessness to respond or defend yourself, making drone warfare just as terrorizing as a suicide bomber.

I remember when Maryland residents lived in constant fear of going outside for a few weeks in 2002, due to a pair of uncaught snipers [1]. If I lived in Yemen, I would feel that way 100% of the time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks

kaybe• 12 years ago

I find the official phrase 'counter-terrorism' quite fitting in this context.

davidf188• 12 years ago

The primary hallmark of terrorism is targeting civilians (as opposed to military or infrastructure targets such as trains or refineries or factories). If a drone is used to attack a factory or a military target that is not terrorism. If a drone is intentionally used to attack a civilian, non-infrastructure target (eg, a wedding) then that is terrorism.

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

To be really clear about the definition of terrorism from when anarchists were proud to be called terrorists: "terrorism" is an action during a conflict that is meant to defeat the opposition by creating fear, rather than by removing its physical ability to resist.

Example: If a street gang occupies your neighborhood, you and your neighbors could remove them by 1) taking up arms and confronting them until they take enough casualties that they they have to retreat or surrender, or 2) kidnapping a straggler once every week or so, skinning him alive, recording it on videotape, and hanging him from a lamppost with the videotape around his neck.

1) is an attack on the ability to fight, 2) is an attack on the will to fight.

So IMO Scahill is getting to the essence of it in your reference here.

JackFr2• 12 years ago

In particular the 2008 terrorist attack at the Taj hotel in Mumbai, wherein the attackers were directed by controllers in Pakistan via cell phone and VoIP always struck me as the horrifying equivalent of a terrorist poor man's drone.

rational-future2• 12 years ago

The drones are taking poor man jobs.

AJ0072• 12 years ago

In World War II bombings targeted civilians, and were designed in such a way to inflict firestorms and terror. By body count alone drones and IEDs are quite tame.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Bombers-Bombed-Allied-1940-1945/dp...

seren3• 12 years ago

It is true that if you consider Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the situation has much improved since then.

davidf188• 12 years ago

A terrorist attack is defined by the object of the attack, not the method of the attack. Attacking civilian targets is terrorism. Attacking military targets and infrastructure, and especially in the case of attacking infrastructure when the fewest civilians would be killed (eg, nights or Sundays) is not terrorism.

Thus, the use of drones, against terrorists (those who would attack civilians) or enemy combatants (those who target military or infrastructure targets) is certainly not terrorism. OTOH, if drones were deliberately (and not accidentally) targeting civilian, non-military, non-infrastructure targets, that would be terrorism.

Eliminating terrorists with drones is going to minimize the number of terrorist attacks just as eliminating terrorist with sniper rifles, or bombing.

I am speaking as someone who nearly escaped a terrorist attack in Israel (Jerusalem BMW attack).

geezer• 12 years ago

So Heroshima and Nagasaki were terrorist attacks?

gknoy2• 12 years ago

The trouble is, for most of the population over there, they feel like they could easily be the (mistaken/accidental) target of one of these. Living with a drone circling one's life inspires fear in both civilians and terrorists.

vidarh5• 12 years ago

One of the interesting aspects is how the mere existence of cheap drones will need to alter defence. Consider that for a terrorist group, once they've demonstrated the willingness to use drones, they can drastically increase the cost in defending against attacks by using very cheap fakes.

A government targeted with drones would not dare take the risk of finding out the "wrong way" whether or not the incoming drone is loaded with explosives, or is a cheap toy. Now imagine a steady stream of hundreds of cheap toys, with one every now and again loaded with explosives.

Say (just to pull random numbers) that a real "homemade" drone costs $10k/piece, and a fake one drops down to $100/piece and you can send out 101 w/one real for the cost of 2 real ones. Yet the cost of defending against the attack has gone up 100-fold.

rbanffy3• 12 years ago

Endless war is exactly what military contractors want.

On an interesting digression, "War Without End" is a two-part Babylon 5 episode that won a Hugo award.

gvb• 12 years ago

Unconditional surrender is what terrorist organizations want, and they will wage war without end until they achieve it.

The problem with peace is that it is symmetrical. Everybody has to agree to peace before it will happen. War is asymmetrical. It takes only one entity (including, at the limit, one person) to make a war, even if everybody else wants peace.

eevilspock3• 12 years ago

No, it takes two. Countering violence with violence is not always the only solution. Sometimes sustained violence in response (war) is the the way to go, sometimes it just escalates the original violence into something far worse and far harder to unwind. For example, and as the OP states, we may be generating far more "terrorists" than we are killing.

We humans often fail to see this because we are so myopic and vengeful. We suck at seeing the big picture and taking the long view.

eevilspock3• 12 years ago

A good time to listen to or reread Eisenhower's 1961 speech warning of the Military-Industrial Complex.

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions."

Nice intro with video of Eisenhowr giving the speech: http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-mili...

Full text of speech: http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html

rbanffy3• 12 years ago

Thanks for bringing this up. I also like to highlight another part of the same speech:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist."

lukifer3• 12 years ago

Also relevant: "War is a Racket", by the WWI-era General Smedley Butler.

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

rational-future2• 12 years ago

Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex in the speech draft.

Pretty much `they` have won and we - the 99% - have lost. Queue the downvotes ;)

AJ0072• 12 years ago

The Military-Industrial Complex is often brought up in the context of US capitalism, but was quite relevant to the USSR. In that case, a giant chunk of the country's economy was taken up for military production. The military commanders, KGB, and all of those employed by the USSR's Military-Industrial Complex had a strong interest in justifying their continued existence.

jessaustin4• 12 years ago

I'm glad someone said it, but I have the feeling that if anyone could have slowed or reversed the national infection, Eisenhower would have been that person. (It would have been unreasonable to expect of Truman, anyway.) It makes me wonder if Ike actually even considered the MIC a problem during most of his presidency, or whether perhaps it was only when they stopped taking his calls as a lame duck that he had his epiphany.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

The other is that it will cause large segments of society to not trust the beneficial uses of this type of technology. When everything flying over head is a threat what can you say of your quality of life?

Similar to how the co-opting of vaccinations in very much the same countries has lead to killing of doctors who only come to help.

We are teaching a whole new generation to fear technology and it may take another to fix that.

josefresco• 12 years ago

Where is the line between war and security drawn? Terrorism can't be "defeated" like an advisory in a traditional war, it's more of a mindset. Therefore one could argue that adequate security should continuously identify and address threats to the state. Does this mean we're in a continuous war? I don't think the semantics matters.

bd_at_rivenhill2• 12 years ago

It might be interesting if it were possible to declare war against an organization, as opposed to a sovereign nation. The conflict between Western nations and Al Qaeda is complicated by the fact that it doesn't fit into previous models of military conflict, and there seems to be a reluctance to update those models. It would also be useful if a nation were required to control activities within its borders and not empowered to respond militarily to border violations in pursuit of combatants.

pjmlp2• 12 years ago

One step closer to Terminator days.

sitkack• 12 years ago

Drone wars are a new continuous flow, always on, Kanban killing process.

Probably get some sort of Office 360 interface so we can kill from home. Maybe a new version of Python called KillScript that has some Hebbian learning libraries built in. TFIDF says it is a good time to be average.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

So everything is working according to plan, then?

dragonwriter4• 12 years ago

That's a silly conclusion, since the US has been engaged in essentially non-stop war since at least WWII (with a developing national security state based on that permanent war footing), most of which didn't involve drones.

Drones certainly lower the political cost of war, but they aren't something that "risks" war without end, they are something developed and deployed in an environment where "war without end" was already the established reality.

dmix• 12 years ago

There is plenty of unique things about this new type of long-term warfare:

a) every operation is conducted in total secrecy

b) most of it is executed remotely, or occasionally via Special Forces commandos on the ground when drones can't get the job done

c) they are (apparently) based off of a 'kill-list', which is essentially an assassination list

This is very different than the decades of conventional warfare the US traditionally engaged in, using troops and engagements openly talked about to the public (even if it's after the fact).

It is only comparable to the CIA operations in latin america in the 1980s.

dragonwriter4• 12 years ago

There is plenty of unique things about this new type of long-term warfare:

No, there aren't.

a) every operation is conducted in total secrecy

Within the drone program, which is largely a secrete component of an overt global military anti-"terrorism" campaign, sure. But having a major secret component of an overt effort isn't new or unique since the inception of the drone program, its been a regular part of the post-WWII permanent war.

b) most of it is executed remotely, or occasionally via Special Forces commandos on the ground when drones can't get the job done

Yes, the technology for precisely targetted remote attacks is new, though using whatever remote attack capability was available isn't. So, yes, technology advances.

Obviously, use of Special Forces is not new.

c) they are (apparently) based off of a 'kill-list', which is essentially an assassination list

Assassination as a tool of state policy by the US in the covert portion of its permanent wars isn't a new product of drones, either.

lostInTheWoods3• 12 years ago

To quote Walter White: We are not in danger, we are the danger. And would we want it any other way? Could we as a nation accept being second best at the delivery of death and destruction?

dragonwriter4• 12 years ago

Every other nation on the planet accepts being second (or third...or 197th) best at that, and very few of those seem to see it as a particular problem.

mark_l_watson3• 12 years ago

I agree with you, but there is another view here: much of our military spending is really to serve the purpose of forcing the US dollar as the reserve currency rather that SDRs or even a partial gold standard (i.e., require a percentage, perhaps 10%, of money to be backed by gold). The books Currency Wars and The Death of Money make a pretty good case for this.

ghostwords• 12 years ago

Something to think about on the subject of terrorism, by David Foster Wallace:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/just-ask...

kalleboo• 12 years ago

Well we've always been at war with eastasia...

streptomycin3• 12 years ago

The report raised warnings that other countries might adopt the same rationale as the United States has for carrying out lethal strikes outside of declared war zones. Using an example of a current crisis, it said that Russia could use armed drones in Ukraine under the justification that it was killing anti-Russian terrorists and then refuse to disclose the intelligence that served as the basis for the strike.

“In such circumstances,” the report asked, “how could the United States credibly condemn Russian targeted killings?”

Good question.

davidf188• 12 years ago

Well, if the Russian's are targeting terrorists (those people who attack civilians) then we should applaud their efforts for saving civilian lives.

Pwntastic• 12 years ago

If it's an armed conflict between two groups of people who both consider themselves "citizens" of their locale and another country steps in, is it their right to decide which are the citizens and which are the terrorists?

streptomycin3• 12 years ago

Even if you make the assumptions that killing terrorists is always a good thing, that it is possible to accurately identify terrorists, that it is possible to kill them without collateral damage, etc... How do you know if they are honest about their intentions? Just take Putin's word for it?

DominikR• 12 years ago

Targeted killings are wrong, but Russia isn't doing this anyway.

They still send in troops/police that try to disarm suspects, because the Russian population in some regions would feel oppressed if they started assassinating suspects without a trial and they don't need a new Chechnya.

And outside of Russia they intervene much less militarily than the US is doing right now. (compared to the US, Russia's interventions are almost nonexistent)

bakhy• 12 years ago

"risks a war without end" -- I'm sure many in the Pentagon would gladly take that "risk" :)

tsbardella2• 12 years ago

War without end.. Oh really? Tell me when war has ever ended? We are getting better and this is much much better

dm2• 12 years ago

Drones aren't too much different than normal airplanes doing bombing runs or any mission where a general sits back while troops/drones/missiles/robots kill the target you specified.. There is definitely a sense of, "pick a target, push a button, wait until he blows up" which the world needs to evaluate before allowing.

I think there is a limit to putting real robots on the battlefield, humans will always be necessary. It's always been possible to get the support of citizens and sometimes foreign government support by having real humans in the field doing humanitarian work. This cannot be replaced by dumb robots, a human face will be required to work with machines or else they will always be seen as inferior and untrustworthy.

I could see the US Government eventually having ATLAS style robots with tablets / large screens for faces, kind of like robocop but the soldier would just be remote controlling the robot.

davidf188• 12 years ago

The Israeli's have saved many lives with drones both for reconnaissance and for targeting terrorists. I don't think they would be using drones for killing terrorists if it proved ineffective. It is hard to understand why drones are saving Israeli lives but not American ones.

Use of Drones for Killings Risks a War Without End

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