The use of unmanned aerial vehicles in Afghanistan and elsewhere has risen substantially in the past decade, with drones carrying out 95 percent of targeted killings since 9/11, according to one estimate.
Despite the relative ease with which the U.S. can take out high value targets (HVT), there's growing concern of their use actually degrading long-term efforts in the war on terror.
David Segalini writes at Small Wars Journal that the policy is actually replacing broader strategy with simplistic tactics:
A policy of summary execution sounds manly and tough, but it robs the U.S. government of the opportunity to collect intelligence from this HVT as a detainee. It reduces the problem of terrorism to a series of kill lists, instead of a socio-political phenomenon with dynamics that need to be grasped if they are to be overcome. And it makes no provision for a long term resolution to the problem, which is to prevent the rise of such organizations in the first place.
Although drones have failed to halt the spread of numerous al Qaeda and affiliate organizations into vast swaths of the Middle East and Africa, Segalini writes that the strikes "brief well in PowerPoint."
So it looks good for military and intelligence leaders to show the latest bad guy killed by a drone strike, but it ignores the fact that many are easily replaceable. Writes Brian Michael Jenkins, the senior advisor to the President of the RAND Corporation:
In some cases, likely to be rare, we may take the risk, but the expectation that by authorizing the removal of a few terrorist leaders, we will end the struggle is an illusion.
It's not only damaging to intelligence gathering either.
The former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, retired General Stanley McChrystal, warned that drone strikes are so resented abroad that their overuse could jeopardize America’s broader objectives. In an interview withReuters, he said:
"What scares me about drone strikes is how they are perceived around the world. The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes ... is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who've never seen one or seen the effects of one."
Secretary of State John Kerry also addressed drones at his confirmation hearing, saying we need to make sure that “American foreign policy is not defined by drones and deployments alone.”
When it comes to drones and their usage — where and who they can attack — their legality will yield many opinions, especially when the program is so secretive. It gets messy when dealing with "signature strikes," where drone operators do not have to verify a suspect's identity, but instead show that they "bear the characteristics of al Qaeda or Taliban leaders."
As ProPublica reports:
In media reports, U.S. officials have offered scenarios of signature strikes hitting training camps or fighters who might cross the border from Pakistan to Afghanistan. The CIA reportedly uses drone surveillance and other intelligence to try to ensure those targeted are in fact militants.
Other officials, however, have described the policy more loosely – one calling it a “‘reasonable man’ standard.”
That 'reasonable man' standard means that drones do not need to confirm positive identification of a target before firing, a vastly different approach from what a soldier would need before firing on a threat in Afghanistan, for example.
And the standard is highly subjective, as The New York Timesreports:
... some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist “signature” were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bomb makers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.
Jennifer Daskal, a professor at Georgetown Law School and a former DoJ attorney during the first Obama administration, explained it this way to ProPublica:
“In a traditional conflict, there is no requirement that you know every single person’s identity before you strike, so long as there are reasonable grounds for determining that the target is part of the enemy force."
“In the conflict with a clandestine enemy like Al Qaeda, that determination is much harder," she added.
There's no doubt that drones are on the rise, and their ascendancy is certain to continue. Whether in the context of modern warfare or legal ramifications, important questions are still unanswered.
But perhaps most importantly, some would argue that outsourcing warfare to a flying robot is a step in winning the battle, but later losing the war.
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