I Will Drone You

... reportedly used as a threat by young men in the tribal areas of Pakistan who frequently hear the buzz of U.S. hunter killer drones overhead.

About a decade ago there was a great deal of talk about a revolution in military affairs, the emergence of the electronic battlefield, the transformation of G.I. Joe into Buck Rogers, and a wide range of gee-whiz innovations, constrained only by the writer’s imagination.  While we’re still waiting for much of what was promised (along with the flying cars, robot housekeepers and free electricity that the fearless forecasters of the 60s assured us would be here long before now), some aspects of modern warfare has been transformed by technology.

A particularly notable example is the mushrooming use of drones.  The consensus estimate is the U.S. has about 7,500 drones -- unmanned aircraft -- deployed today.  They range from the relatively small like the 18 inch Wasp III with a 3 mile radius, to the forty-four and half foot Global Hawk that can fly as high as 65,000 feet and say in the air as long as 36 hours.  The large majority carry cameras and radars of varying types for data gathering and mapping.  Some, like the Predator and Reaper, are used for killing. 

Drones are not cheap; you can fly the little WASP III off the lot for $49,000 but a Predator will set you back over $13 million and the Global Hawk goes for around $15 million.  (All drones include GPS systems and electronics far more advanced than your car; but your car does have a better sound system and more cupholders.)

Most drones are purchased and controlled by the military; some are loaned to other branches of government, from the CIA to the Border Patrol to NASA.  The CIA’s use of drones to attack and kill suspected Taliban in Pakistan and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen has raised some of the most serious questions surrounding their use.

Under the Obama administration the use of drones for all purposes has mushroomed including the use of Reaper or Predator drones for attacks.  Hard data is elusive but it has been estimated that there have been around 300 drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia over the past decade, with at least 118 confirmed strikes in Pakistan in 2010 alone. 

Responsibility for using drones is divided between the Department of Defense and the CIA.  The military operates the drones in Afghanistan and until the first of this year, in Iraq.  (At least there have no public reports of U.S. drone attacks in Iraq since the ostensible withdrawal of U.S. forces.)  Operations in Pakistan are under the CIA and operations in Yemen are divided, with the military making some drone attacks and the CIA others. 

This division of responsibility matters because it affects who gets targeted for drone attacks and who oversees the operations.  There are, according to some sources, three separate “kill lists” -- the National Security Council compiles one, the CIA another, and the miliary’s Joint Special Operations Command a third.  Who decides, using what criteria, to put someone’s name on a list is not clear.  Nor do we know who decides that there is enough intelligence to launch a specific mission targeting an individual.  In addition, the CIA uses “signature” strikes.  Instead of confirming that a particular individual whose name is on a kill list is in fact in the sights of the drone operator, there is a set of behavioral indicators that support the conclusion that the people being observed are engaged in harmful or threatening activities and should be targets of a missile. 

Civilian, specifically Congressional, oversight of both the military and the CIA is central to our conception of American government.  The military use of drones in Afghanistan is overseen by the House and Senate Armed Services committees, while the House and Senate Intelligence committees oversee the CIA operations.  It is not surprising then that the rules of engagement are apparently different for military as opposed to CIA drone attacks. 

I think the use of hunter killer drones like Predator and Reaper raise several issues that you and I as American citizens ought to be thinking about. 

●    who is monitoring the broad policy implications of drone attacks outside formal combat zones, particularly the attacks in Pakistan

●    are targeted assassinations comparable to, or different from, shooting enemy solders during a fire fight

●    who, using what criteria, puts someone’s name on a kill list

●    can the government of the United States execute an American citizen without a trial?

The question of broader policy implications is raised directly by the CIA operations in Pakistan.  CIA drone strikes in northwest Pakistan have complicated an already difficult relationship.  From an American perspective the key issues are internal stability, deep concern about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the use of Pakistani territory by Taliban fighters from Afghanistan, and the potential for a violent confrontation with India. 

The drone strikes seriously complicate U.S. efforts to slow down the growth of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and to support political development because they:

Are wildly unpopular with Pakistan public opinion.  It may well be true that they have gotten far more discriminating and the number of innocent bystanders killed has been drastically reduced, as proponents of the strikes contend.  But they are widely perceived in Pakistan as an arrogant assault on Pakistan’s territory and sovereignty that have killed hundreds of innocent bystanders.  This makes it harder for the government to appear to cooperate with the U.S.   

Divide the Pakistani military.  The popular democratic movement that replaced the military dictatorship with a civilian government did not change the fundamentals of Pakistani politics: the military is the single most important factor.  The military is deeply ambivalent about the Taliban operating in northwest Pakistan’s tribal areas. For some military leaders, especially the Intelligence agency (ISI), the Taliban is a tool they created in the 1980s to help expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and to prevent India from gaining a foothold in the area.  [for a brief overview of the Taliban and its relation to the ISI, see Who are Those Guys?] In 2012 India is the major threat and replacing the weak and corrupt Karzai government with a reliably anti-Indian, pro-Pakistan regime would be a good thing.  Drone strikes kill good guys and are very bad thing. For other military leaders, the Taliban has become a threat to internal stability and urban middle and upper middle classes.  Drone strikes kill bad guys and are a good thing, even if the government must make periodic public protests for the sake of public opinion.

The weightiest issue, I think, is not the drone strikes themselves but who decides that the positive impact of the strikes on the war in Afghanistan outweighs the negative impacts on other aspects of U.S. foreign policy.  It is not clear that anyone is seriously evaluating the larger strategic consequences of the tactical use of drones.

The use of drones to target particular individuals who have been identified as Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders raises a serious issue.  U.S. law prohibits assassination attempts on foreign heads of state.  International law and norms try to maintain a distinction between combat on a battlefield and other kinds of killing.  Drones are used in Pakistan and Yemen (and perhaps elsewhere) to kill specific individual who are believed to be plotting against the United States.  I don’t think this can be justified in the same way that one can justify killing someone in an enemy uniform or someone who is shooting at you.  I can make an argument that it can be justified and I can make the counter argument.  The point is, I think, is that no one has been challenged to make the argument, there has been no demand that the CIA or the Defense Department justify the use of drones as weapons in this fashion. 

Closely related to the question of targeted killings by drones the existence of “kill lists.”  Perhaps because it is so easy to see the targets of the drone attacks as “bad guys who need to be killed” very few people seem to be concerned about the criteria used and the decision process that puts a person’s name on the list.  The arguments for and against capital punishment are well known and the debate has raged for decades and the conditions under which the State can take a person’s life are tightly circumscribed by law.  But a person can be executed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Reaper drone under secret guidelines with no trial.  This seems to be a serious enough action that we ought to be thinking about it.

Signature attacks seem even more problematic.  The criteria are secret  -- some people find it troubling that you can be killed far from a battlefield for doing something that someone sitting in a darkened room at Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas or another installation in the U.S. finds suspicious.  There is no way for you or I to know how useful the behavioral criteria are at clearly distinguishing hostile behavior or how often they yield a false positive by misinterpreting behavior.  There are unconfirmed allegations, for example, that people running to help victims of a drone attack have in their turn been attacked.

For many people, the fact that  American citizens have been executed in targeted drone attacks is particularly troubling.  Anwar al-Awlaki was killed last September in Yemen.  His 16 year old son was killed in another drone strike two weeks later. When word leaked that President Obama had approved adding al-Awlaki to a kill list in the fall of 2010 there was a flurry of protests by civil liberties groups but legal challenges failed and the alleged crimes of al-Awlaki were so serious and he was so public in his hopes to do harm to Americans that most of us paid little attention.  And we paid equally little attention a couple months ago when Attorney General Holder offered a long awaited justification of killing al-Awlaki by citing a secret Justice Department memo.  But some people do remain troubled by the argument that the President has the authority to execute an American citizen without a trial or any judicial process but you and I cannot see the legal rationale.

In some ways the issues raised by drone strikes are some of the familiar issues raised by the “war on terror” which in many ways continues just as it began under the Bush administration, even if the term itself has been stricken from the official vocabulary.  In other ways these issues flow from the use of a new technology whose implications are only now beginning to emerge but that promises to become more and more prominent in our every day lives as well as on battlefields far removed.