This has obvious advantages. With each advance, the likelihood of a U.S. battle casualty has been reduced further. Indeed, the main risk to the “pilots” of Predators flying “targeted killing” missions over Pakistan these days is from spilling hot coffee on their control consoles in Nevada. Pilots, of course, feel threatened by all this automation: not only is it safer to send a drone to do a man’s work, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper. Almost inevitably, perhaps as soon as 2020, the mix of manned vs. unmanned combat aircraft will shift in favor of “Hal” and his donut-eating controller back in the States.
Besides the angst of pilots (and the makers of their high cost warplanes), a different debate has started which hasn’t received nearly as much attention – which is one reason why I’m happy to see it in the pages of Foreign Affairs magazine this month. In “Washington’s Phantom War,” by Peter Bergen, a counterterrorism expert at the New American Foundation, and Katherine Tiedemann, a GW researcher, the effectiveness of sending armed drones to launch missiles at clay huts in Pakistan is questioned.
They note that very few drone strikes successfully take out an al-Qaida leader. “On average, only one out of every seven U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan kills a militant leader. The majority of those killed in such strikes are not important insurgent commanders but rather low-level fighters, together with a small number of civilians. In total, according to our analysis, less than two percent of those killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have been described in reliable press accounts as leaders of al Qaeda or allied groups.”
Bergen and Tiedemann make a compelling case that the drone strikes are pretty ineffective. Others, including Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, a former aide to Gen. David Petreaus and the world’s most respected counterterrorism strategist, believes they’re also counterproductive in that they stoke anti-American feelings in Pakistan and feed recruits to militant groups.
At a still deeper level, some question the morality of it all. In a moral vacuum, of course, this is just fine. If this were all out war on Pakistan along the lines of the wars fought against Japan and Germany in World War II, we could regret civilian casualties but cite the higher aim of defeating an evil state as a reasonable rationale. But is this really reasonable?
It’s not just arm chair quarterbacks asking these questions. Britain’s Ministry of Defense recently tasked its think-tanks to study the ethics of drone warfare. (The actual report is password protected and available only to MOD personnel – though if someone wants to send it my way, I’d love to read it). The Guardian’s diligent journalists managed to get a peek, however. The report stated: ”It is essential that, before unmanned systems become ubiquitous (if it is not already too late) that we consider this issue and ensure that, by removing some of the horror, or at least keeping it at a distance,” it warns, “we do not risk losing our controlling humanity and make war more likely.”
In the end, you have to wonder: Is it a coincidence that, the further we get from each other on the battlefield, the more tolerance we seem to develop for civilian casualties, regrettable as they may be? Perhaps a robot will someday provide us with an answer.