Game of Drones
The biographer Plutarch
tells an anecdote that, in the fourth century B.C., the Spartan King
Archidamus, at the sight of a revolutionary new catapult, cried out, “By
Herakles, it is the end of manly virtue.”
Almost every new military
asset, from gunpowder to the machine gun, elicits condemnation that such
innovations are somehow unfair, if not devilish, in their ability to increase
body counts and erode individual battlefield gallantry. Novel aerial
weaponry—the catapult, the crossbow, the longbow, artillery, planes, and
missiles—proved especially controversial in their respective ages. Unlike the
bayonet or tank, projectiles ushered in death unannounced from the air, without
commensurate risk to the attacker. They eliminated the ground level, first-hand
killing with edged weapons and rifles. New airborne technology brought into
question not just existing tactics and strategy, but even more controversial
issues, from the laws of war to perceptions of infantry obsolescence.
The historian Thucydides
records the story of an anonymous, defeated Spartan who lamented that Athenian
arrows—weapons supposedly outlawed in early Greek hoplite warfare—at the Battle
of Sphakteria left no room for courage, their rain of indiscriminate death
taking down the heroic infantryman along with the coward. Such unfair
randomness, if not cowardice, becomes a theme as early Homer’s Iliad,
when we hope in vain that the sweaty, dirty, and brawling Achilles can finally
get his hands around the neck of the pretty boy bowman Paris, who cleanly kills
better men from afar.
“The bomber always gets
through” was British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s scary warning in 1932 of
probable blitzes against Londoners to come. Of course, in the subsequent world
war, even “Flying Fortresses” did not always get through. When bombers did,
they did not wreck Germany alone, or even prove strategically effective—until
1944, when B-17s and B-24s had long-range fighter escorts and the Luftwaffe had
been nearly annihilated.
The Promise of Drones
The emergence of remotely
piloted drone bombers at the millennium has set off the same sort of confusion
and misinformation. At first, the United States and the West in general were
delighted with early predator drones and their related models of unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs). In the post-modern age of optional ground
interventions, conventional wisdom held that affluent Western forces could not
endure casualties. Mass media proved a force multiplier of battlefield losses,
eroding public opinion with just a brief video clip from Fallujah or Kandahar
beamed into American living rooms.
Western, war-weary publics
rarely saw how helping the Vietnamese or saving the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein
or prepping the Afghans from the Taliban was worth the price of losing suburban
American kids in god-awful places like the Mekong Delta and Sadr City, to booby
traps and horrific improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The public sometimes
was even unimpressed at reports of lopsided “body counts,” as if killing far
more of the bad guys somehow made the far smaller loss of the good guys
understandable.
Yet what if a new
machine—no pilot, relatively inexpensive in comparison to manned aircraft,
uncannily accurate with its video-fed targeting system, often operated remotely
from the quiet of U.S. territory with legal teams in attendance—meant that we
could “surgically” take out the enemy and not lose any Americans in the
bargain? No wonder that, at first, airborne drones seemed a godsend—especially
in their initial primary role of battlefield support, hitting a terrorist
enclave down the block from a trapped American Marine squad, or in advance of
Humvees blowing up enemy IED teams at the next intersection. UAVs were mostly
non-controversial, a cheaper, safer version of an F-16 or A-10 close ground
support mission.
As drone technology grew
exponentially each year during the Afghan and Iraq wars—ever longer airtime,
greater distance, more accuracy and payload—and to the degree that the Bush
administration expanded drone missions beyond the battlefield, Americans still
remained happy with the results.
The West for decades had
been lectured by the radical Islamic world that its suicide bombers and
terrorists loved death more than Westerners loved life. Supposedly ruthless
invisible enemies bragged that they were unstoppable as they blended in with
indigenous populations. As zealots, they claimed that they did not mind going
up in smoke with their American targets. In short, the suicide bomber was not
just spooky, but he flummoxed Western soldiers caught in the wrong place at the
wrong time, unable to focus their vast conventional powers against otherwise
premodern killers.
Drones seemed to square that
circle, using the sophisticated technology and know-how of the West to outdo
the terrorist’s own unconventional methods. If suicide bombers and IEDs came
out of nowhere, then so could we—our Hellfire missiles bringing more accuracy
and more lethality than their cobbled together, cast-off ordinance. If the
terrorists seemed to target Marines sleeping in their barracks or a United
Nations envoy at his desk, then we could vaporize a Taliban member on his
dining room prayer rug or an al Qaeda operative text messaging in his
courtyard. The hubris of terrorists bragging that the enemy
may always be among us could be trumped by the nemesis of
having their leaders constantly searching the sky for deadly missiles with
their names on it.
Again, there was little controversy
over drones extending their mission beyond the conventional battlefield to
nearby Pakistan—at least as long as the missions were relatively few (about
50-70 during the two Bush administration terms) and were thought to be mostly
adjunct operations in the ongoing ground war against the Taliban.
Since 2009, however, three
unexpected developments have raised a national outcry about the use of drones.
First, the politics of UAVs became almost surreal. Barack Obama, who ran in
2008 against the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, arguing that they were
either without utility or constitutional support, increased the frequency of
drone attacks radically when he became president. Indeed, in just four years,
he outdid the Bush total of eight years by a factor of six—to over 400 separate
missions. Kills were now not just confined to enemy combatants on the
battlefield, or even a top twenty cadre from the al Qaeda or Taliban high
command, but, by 2013, may have accounted for somewhere between 2,500-3,500 deaths.
Strikes blew up suspected enemies from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen,
Somalia, and Libya.
Conservatives seemed
exasperated: should they cheer on the Obama conversion (the President likewise
kept Guantanamo Bay open, and embraced or expanded renditions, tribunals, and
preventative detentions), or damn his prior harmful and hypocritical
opposition? Should liberals ignore the legal implications of targeting those
without uniforms and distant from the battlefield, in fear of imperiling the
otherwise progressive Obama agenda? Or should they keep intact their civil
liberties fides by faulting Obama as they did Bush? Or should
they point proudly to liberals’ newfound credibility on national security?
In addition, there was a
political incongruity. The Bush administration’s waterboarding of three
confessed terrorists was considered illegal torture, while vaporizing well over
2,000 suspected terrorists by judge/jury/executioner drones
was not considered such a drastic anti-terrorism measure.
Drone Policy Under President
Obama
Drones seemed uniquely
fitted to the Obama administration’s foreign policy. There is no public support
for further Iraq or Afghan-like ground interventions. Indeed, the Obama
administration left Iraq without a residual garrison and probably wants to do
the same in Afghanistan. Our “lead from behind” bombing strategy of
intervention in Libya proved a blueprint for nothing—and, after the Benghazi
debacle, was not repeated in either Syria or Mali.
For an administration that
is keen on keeping Islamic terrorists away from both the American homeland and
operational enclaves in the Middle East, hundreds of drone missions—without the
risk of losing American lives—were seen as ideal, especially with massive
looming cuts to U.S. ground forces and expensive manned military assets. Obama
became so comfortable with the idea of drone strikes that, at a 2010 White
House Correspondents Dinner, he could joke about sending them against any
potential suitors of his two young daughters: “Two words for you: predator
drones. You will never see it coming.”
Second, no one could claim
that the missions were not successful in taking out hundreds, perhaps even
thousands, of terrorists planning operations against U.S. interests. The rub
came instead from the blowback of incinerating suspects, along with anyone and
anything in their general vicinity. Without exact totals, both leftists and
libertarians have argued that there might have been over 500 collateral
civilian deaths so far from over a decade of strikes.
Meanwhile, counter
insurgency orthodoxy postulated that U.S. forces were symbolic fish that had to
swim in a civilian sea; did drones, then, pollute the waters for Americans on
the ground? No one could quite figure out whether the undeniable advantages of
killing enemies before they could blow up Americans, and at no cost in American
lives, were nullified by alienating civilians. Does an on-the-fence Afghan lose
confidence in the Taliban when the local terrorist operative’s home almost
magically goes up in smoke, or does he join them when the well-known compound
blows apart with a child, his own car, or a horse next to it?
Finally, in 2011, the Obama
administration ordered a CIA-led series of drone missions in Yemen that, on at
least two separate occasions, assassinated three American citizens: the
terrorists Anwar al-Aulaqi and Samir Khan, and, later, apparently by mistake,
al-Aulaqi’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi. While most
Americans, to the extent that they knew of the attacks, probably cheered the
elimination of such an odious traitor as al-Aulaqi, and more or less ignored
the collateral deaths of Samir Khan and later of Abdulrahman, the hits on U.S.
citizens far from a theater of battle raised legal and moral questions.
In 1975-76, the country had
torn itself apart over the CIA’s role in the Cold War assassinations,
successful and otherwise, of supposed hostile enemy leaders. The conclusions of
the so-called Church Committee—lauded by liberals, derided by conservatives—led
to outlawing assassination attempts on foreign heads of state, and curbed FBI
and CIA monitoring of U.S. citizens. Clearly, assassinating U.S. citizens
overseas, without trials, much less warrants, hinged on their indisputable
identification as enemy combatants, busy plotting in a veritable war against
America. Yet the CIA did not claim such status for the young Abudulrahman, only
that the hit on an American teenager was an accident; the unstated implication
was that his father had no business bringing him to Yemen to consort with
terrorists in the first place.
With Senator Rand Paul’s
(R-KY) recent attempted filibustering of the nomination of John Brennan as CIA
Director—an early architect of the drone assassination program—over theoretical
questions of whether the administration has the right to kill an American
citizen on U.S. soil, drones have become far more controversial than at any
time in the Bush administration. For a risk-averse, budget-cutting United
States, seeking to protect itself from radical Islamic terrorists, drones will
see even greater use—at least until the collateral toll, hits on more U.S.
citizens, or the introduction of enemy counter-technologies renders them
militarily, legally, or morally ineffective.
Victor Davis Hanson is a
classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and
author, most recently, of "The End of Sparta." You can reach him by
e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
This article is reprinted
with permission from Stanford
University's Hoover Institution.
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