War’s Brave New World
by David Isenberg
March 1st, 2010
From the Partnership for a Secure America
It’s a brave new world out there, but I don’t think it is the one Aldous Huxley had in mind when he wrote his famed book in 1932.
What Huxley gave us was a frightening vision of the future. And in one sense, though not the one Huxley was writing about, that vision is becoming reality. I refer to the expanding role of robots in war.
The most visible aspect of this is the use of aerial drones such as targeting Al Qaeda militants with Predator drone strikes. Predictably, some places, such as the Weekly Standard, think this fine and dandy, and worry only that we do not use them more for which they criticize President Obama. That is ironic as the President has authorized more drone attacks in the first year of his term in office than Bush did in his entire presidency.
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But war is inherently unpredictable. One of the few ways we have of restraining its destructiveness is by having military personnel perform their duties in a framework of carefully wrought, time tested framework grounded in civic-military and ethical considerations. While pilots may sometimes be egomaniacal Top Guns they at least spend some time thinking about these things. But what happens when the man operating a Predator is just another technician, no different from any other journeyman such as an electrician or plumber? What happens when the use of deadly force is just another day at the office?
Boston Globe columnist H.D.S. Greenway noted that before 9/11, the CIA hesitated to strike bin Laden’s farm in Afghanistan because women and children might be killed. But as the war drags on the rules of engagement, rules against targeted assassination, whom to kill and not kill, have slipped, as they invariably do in all wars.
If that is too philosophical a consideration for you to ponder let’s consider the practical. Is the United States ready for the time when other nations use such technology? According to a Newsweek article by Peter Singer of the Brookings Institute who, last year, published the definitive book on the subject, “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century“ at least 40 other countries-from Belarus and Georgia to India, Pakistan, and Russia-have begun to build, buy, and deploy unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, showcasing their efforts at international weapons expos ranging from the premier Paris Air Show to smaller events in Singapore and Bahrain. In the last six months alone, Iran has begun production on a pair of weapons-ready surveillance drones, while China has debuted the Pterodactyl and Sour Dragon, rivals to America’s Predator and Global Hawk. All told, two thirds of worldwide investment in unmanned planes in 2010 will be spent by countries other than the United States.
And what happens when the weapons doing the killing are controlled by civilian agencies, as opposed to the armed forces? In January Hakimullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistan Taliban, was killed by a missile fired an unmanned aircraft hovering over the Afghan-Pakistani border – but launched by an operator in the US. He was the mastermind of multiple suicide bomb attacks in Pakistan and was part of the suicide mission on December 30 at Khost, just across the border in Afghanistan, which killed seven CIA agents.
In the effort to get payback the United States launched 15 clinical drone attacks in which more than 100 people died along the border. Thus, for the first time ever, a civilian intelligence agency is manipulating robots from halfway around the world in a program of extrajudicial executions in a country with which Washington is not at war.
As Singer wrote last month:
American unmanned systems have carried out more than 80 air strikes into Pakistan, more than we did with manned bombers in the opening round of the Kosovo War just a decade ago.
By the old standards, this would be a war. But why do we not view it as such? Is it because it is being run by the CIA and not the military? Is it because Congress never debated it? Is it because we view the whole thing as costless (to us)? Or, are the definitions changing — and what used to be war, isn’t anymore?
Furthermore, a cost-benefit analysis of the use of drones indicates that it may be less effective than thought. A study last October by the New American Foundation estimated concluded that, since January 2008, the American kill has included ”about 20 leaders of al-Qaeda, the Taliban and allied groups in addition to hundreds of lower-level militants and civilians. Under President Obama, the strikes have taken out at most [a] half-dozen militant leaders while also killing as many as 530 others – of those, around 250 to 400 are reported to have been lower-level militants, about three-quarters; and about a quarter appear to have been civilians.” In other words, about one-third of those killed were civilian.