Drone Warfare

by Medea Benjamin

  President Obama authorized the use of force in Libya without going to Congress. He insisted that he didn’t need Congressional approval, since it was only an air war and the US was not sending troops. In a report to Congress, the administration claimed that US military operations in Libya were consistent with the War Powers Resolution and did not require congressional authorization because US military operations are distinct from the kind of hostilities contemplated by the Resolution.253 “US operations [in Libya] do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of US ground troops, US casualties or a serious threat thereof.”254

  US operations didn’t involve “sustained fighting,” “active exchanges of fire” or a “serious threat” of US casualties because the fighting was done by drones. Libyan ground forces couldn’t exchange fire with machines that targeted them from 50,000 feet. And they couldn’t kill pilots who weren’t there. While congresspeople on both sides of the aisle refuted this argument, the administration didn’t budge—and there were no legal consequences.

  US involvement in Libya set a precedent for a bizarre definition of war that only applies if US troops are being put at risk. This is a clear example of “war made easy,” lowering the threshold for future US interventions by presidential decree.

  The Libya campaign was also dangerous for two other reasons. It reinforced the notion that high-tech air strikes are free of civilian casualties. “We have carried out this operation very carefully, without confirmed civilian casualties,” claimed NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.255 It took New York Times reporters to refute this claim, with an incomplete on-the-ground examination revealing dozens of civilians killed by air strikes, including at least twenty-nine women or children, often asleep in their homes when the ordnance hit. The US and NATO refused to acknowledge mistakes or compensate victims, as they have been forced to do in Afghanistan.

  The Libya example also reinforces the notion that high-tech weapons spell success, which is not always the case. It was true enough in Libya—without NATO air cover, it’s unclear whether the rebels on the ground would have achieved victory. And in the case of Libya, the air strikes were supporting a popular uprising. But one should never forget the lessons of the US disaster in Vietnam or the folly of the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. History is replete with examples of poor guerrilla armies, with the crudest of weapons, defeating sophisticated foreign invaders because the former were fighting for a cause they truly believed in.

  Technological advantages can be quickly rolled back when the other side creatively adapts, which they tend to do. A case in point is the American Revolution, when the greatest military power in the world was defeated by a ragtag army employing guerrilla warfare. Another example is Iraqi fighters responding to US heavy vehicles by planting simple roadside bombs, or Hezbollah responding to Israeli drones by acquiring drones of their own.

  One of the problems of relying on high-tech weapons is not just that they can create a false sense of superiority, but that they also create a built-in incentive to use them. After spending many millions on purchasing and training personnel for a new weapons system, the military is anxious to test the weapons in real combat. Those who received the training want to test their skills. And of course the arms manufacturers are anxious to see their weapons used, so that more and more will be bought.

  Some of the private contractors who are hired to participate in the CIA’s drone program have another incentive. Joshua Foust of the American Security Project discovered that in some targeting programs, contracted staffers have review quotas—that is, they must review a certain number of possible targets per given length of time. “Because they are contractors, their continued employment depends on their ability to satisfy the stated performance metrics,” Foust explained.256 “So they have a financial incentive to make life-or-death decisions about possible kill targets just to stay employed. This should be an intolerable situation, but because the system lacks transparency or outside review it is almost impossible to monitor or alter.”

  A policy paper on UAVs by the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence asked questions rarely heard in US government circles. “If we remove the risk of loss [of our soldiers] from the decision-makers’ calculations when considering crisis management options, do we make the use of armed force more attractive? Will decision-makers resort to war as a policy option far sooner than previously?” The document goes on to suggest, albeit in a convoluted way, that one of the reasons for foreign military interventions in Pakistan and Yemen is precisely the availability of drones. “That these activities are exclusively carried out by unmanned aircraft, even though very capable manned aircraft are available, and that the use of ground troops in harm’s way has been avoided, suggests that the use of force is totally a function of the existence of an unmanned capability—it is unlikely a similar scale of force would be used if this capability were not available.”257

  Pakistan would never have allowed manned aircraft in its airspace, just like it won’t allow foreign combat troops in its territory. Precisely because drones are unmanned, the Pakistani government felt that this was a way to placate the American government while at the same time providing a pretext to its own people that somehow its sovereignty wasn’t being violated.

  In the United States, this tendency to use force is sanctioned by a population that lives in a state of fear. Ever since 9/11, the public has been subjected to a concerted, massive propagation of fear that has become so common as to be unnoticeable, except perhaps when asked to remove your shoes by airport security. Public fear of terrorism is routinely inflamed and amplified by politicians, including President Obama, through never-ending references to 9/11.

  The official government acceptance of unlimited detention of US citizens in the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and the backing by many politicians of Guantánamo detention and torture, finds support in public fear of terrorism. These policies also reinforce that fear by affirming that these gross denials of human rights are made necessary by monstrous and numerous enemies we are supposedly facing. And it allows the government, in a society that prides itself on being the world’s greatest democracy, to commit gross violations of traditional rules of human conduct, such as international laws, which are norms born out of huge wells of human suffering through decades of war.

  People are more likely to speak out against state-sponsored violence when their fears are countered by another basic human instinct: empathy for those being injured and killed. But since 9/11, the US government and mass media, whether by specific agreement or unspoken understanding, has systematically deprived the US public of images of war wounded and war dead that would evoke feelings of empathy. Pictures of torture from Abu Ghraib did appear, but others remain secret. For years, even coffins of dead US soldiers could not be photographed. And although thousands of people have been killed and maimed by drone attacks, the American public has yet to see photographs or video from the aftermath of these strikes.

  During the Vietnam War, it was different. Certainly the draft and the deaths of large numbers of US soldiers fed the anti-war movement. But as the war dragged on, Americans began to see and learn more about the Vietnamese and their treatment at the hands of US troops. “We see the rice fields of a small Asian country being trampled at will and burned at whim,” roared Martin Luther King Jr. in his famous 1967 address. “We see grief stricken mothers with crying babies clutched in their arms as they watch their little huts burst forth into flames.”

  Today, rather than exposing the public to the horrors or war, drones make war look fun—at least for those firing the missiles. YouTube has hundreds of video clips of combat footage from Iraq and Afghanistan, much of it captured by drones, which are themselves flown using a controller modeled after the Playstation.

  The Defense Department itself began putting up mission clips on YouTube as a way of promoting drones domestically and intimidating the enemy. The
ability to download videos of combat footage to home computers and iPhones turns war into a form of entertainment. Soldiers call these clips “war porn” and they have been a smash hit, with well over ten million views.

  Video clips showing Americans blowing up some anonymous, faceless enemy reinforces racist stereotypes of “poor bastards” who deserve to get toasted. These are a sampling of comments posted by on-line viewers of videos like the one from Afghanistan called “Hell is coming for breakfast”:

  I love the smell of burnt Muslim in the morning.

  They better pre-order some of them? virgins for these

  murderous terrorist jihadists!

  Allah Kaboom!

  I’m loving this shit—blow them mutha fucka’s to

  pieces!

  Kill em alll and let God sort em out!

  Another video, set to techno music, shows an Iraqi being blown up. “Great video! Rock on America. Where can I get the music?” wrote one viewer. “Hold on while I get some popcorn. I want to see more of the barbarians blown up,” another joked.

  “Our side,” the civilized culture, is the one with the high-tech killing machines. Their side is barbaric because they still kill using old-fashioned methods, including knives. A jihadist cutting off his enemy’s head is gut-wrenching. But is it worse than pressing a button to kill the enemy from afar, and perhaps an entire family besides? “People are a lot more comfortable with a Predator strike that kills many people than with a throat-slitting that kills one, but mechanized killing is still killing,” said former CIA lawyer Vicki Divoll.258

  When leaders of Hamas were criticized for launching crudely made rockets into Israel that terrorized civilians, one leader said, “If we had the high-tech weapons the Israelis have, we could target our missiles to hit Israeli military bases and not civilians. But we don’t have them.”259

  Some ethicists and religious leaders argue that drone warfare is a particularly morally bankrupt way of waging war, that it violates the precepts of just war theory to fight in a way that shields one from the mortal consequences. When military operations are conducted through the filter of a far-away video camera, there is no possibility of making eye contact with the enemy and fully realizing the human cost of an attack.

  In 2003, the Defense Department developed a new computer program that was supposed to give the military a better sense of the human cost of an attack. It is an intricate program that shows how much damage would be caused by a particular bomb dropped by a particular aircraft flying at a particular altitude. The dead show up as blob-like images resembling squashed insects, which is why the program was called “Bugsplat.” Bugsplat also became the “in-house” slang referring to drone deaths; “squirters” is slang for people scurrying away trying to flee the attacks. While dead people and terrified people running for their lives might look like bugs from on high, such references certainly don’t inspire a reverence for life.

  The Christian Century, a leading Protestant magazine, editorialized that while the drone attacks have no doubt killed terrorists and leaders of Al Qaeda, “they raise troubling questions to those committed to the just war principle that civilians should never be targeted.”260 Taking aim at one of the aspects of drone warfare that make it so popular with the military and with politicians—that it is a risk-free option for the US military because it avoids American casualties—the Century editors said: “According to the just war principles, it is better to risk the lives of one’s own combatants than the lives of enemy noncombatants.”

  Some suggest that if the military really wants to protect civilians, it should not use drones but ground troops, who are more capable of discriminating between innocent bystanders and militants. While invading countries risk significantly higher casualties by deploying troops, this is precisely what the logic of just war requires.

  In the magazine Christianity Today, founded by evangelical minister Billy Graham, author and president emeritus of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry Paul F. M. Zahl went even further in his critique of drones, accusing them of “emasculating the enemy.”261

  “I use emasculate intentionally, because our victims live in societies where male humiliation is a fate almost worse than death,” wrote Zahl. Snipers in the sky reduce people on the ground to a condition of absolute helplessness, because they cannot fight back against unmanned drones. “This is not a David versus Goliath scenario,” he wrote, “It is a case of the Philistines telling the Israelites that they are not even permitted to put a champion on the field.” While this might appear to be a good strategy, he maintained that it instills a lifetime desire for revenge, “birthed from one ‘silver glint’ way up in the sky that kills without warning or recourse.”

  That “silver glint” way up in the sky, killing without warning or recourse, is in the process of becoming even more distant. Pretty soon, drones could also end up killing autonomously, without any sort of direct human input. “You can envision unmanned systems doing just about any mission we do today,” one Air Force engineer told Popular Science.262 Based on recent tests by the military, the Washington Post predicts that the future of the American way of war could be drones that “hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans.”263 Human traits such as commonsense and compassion, all too absent from wars as it is, could become nonexistent in 21st century conflicts.

  The path towards autonomy is a slippery slope. First comes autonomous take-off and navigation, then target selection, then killing the target without human intervention. While Pentagon officials insist that a human being will remain somewhere in the loop, their role will be minor. “Humans will no longer be ‘in the loop’ but rather ‘on the loop,’ monitoring the execution of certain decisions,” said robotics expert Noel Sharkey. “Simultaneously, advances in artificial intelligence will enable systems to make combat decisions without human input.”264

  While Sharkey is horrified by this notion, Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Mobile Robot Laboratory thinks it’s grand. “Robots are already stronger, faster and smarter,” he explained in an interview with Popular Science. Arkin has designed an “ethical governor” for drones that he argued could abide by the laws of war better than a living, breathing soldier. “Why wouldn’t they be more humane? In warfare where humans commit atrocities, this is relatively low-hanging fruit.” Presumably Arkin has never watched “Terminator” or “The Matrix.”

  Whether machines can ever be “more humane” than the humans that program them is a dubious notion. While human beings do indeed commit atrocities when caught up in the heat of war, they sometimes also empathize with the supposed enemy. A World War II study by US Army Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall interviewing thousands of soldiers found that the majority of troops refused to fire their weapons at other human beings. S.L.A. Marshall’s methodology has been criticized, but his findings have been corroborated by many other studies.265 Indeed, data indicate that soldiers throughout military history have demonstrated a strong resistance to killing other people. Drones, one can safely assume, would not be so resistant.

  Worse yet, autonomous robots cannot discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. The laws of war say that belligerents may not attack civilians, wounded soldiers, the sick, the mentally ill, or captives. “There are no visual or sensing systems for robots that are up to that challenge,” said Sharkey. “The Geneva Convention requires soldiers to use common sense. But computers have no common sense. How can they be ethical when they have no means of distinguishing grandmothers from soldiers?”

  War has always been a powerful incentive for technological innovation. Now technology is on the verge of supplanting the human soldier altogether—with consequences we can barely imagine.

  The Activists Strike Back

  “KIRK: Yes, Councilman, you have a real war on your hands. You can either wage it with real weapons, or you might consider an alternative. Put an end to it. Make peace.

  ANAN: There can
be no peace. Don’t you see? We’re a killer species. It’s instinctive.

  KIRK: But the instinct can be fought. We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes. Knowing that we won’t kill today.”

  —Star Trek

  You may not have heard of the “Creech 14,” but they have a special place in the heart of the anti-drone movement. If you saw a photo of the group, you might think they had just walked out of Sunday mass; indeed, some of its members are priests and nuns. But whether clergy or not, all are spiritually rooted in a theology that calls on people of faith to stand up against injustice—in deeds, not just words.

  And so on April 9, 2009, the group of fourteen activists entered Creech Air Force base—where teams of young soldiers remotely operate many of America’s killer drones—protesting what they considered war crimes taking place inside. As they crossed onto the base, the group invited staff nearby to share a Good Friday meal with them. They were then told to leave, and when they refused, they were arrested, charged with trespassing and held in jail until Easter Sunday.

  While the action was noteworthy, the most remarkable part was not anything that took place that day, but the trial itself, which did not begin until over a year later, on September 14, 2010, at the Clark County Regional Court in Las Vegas, Nevada. There, the defendants turned what would have been a mundane case over a minor misdemeanor into a broad debate about the use of drones. They decided not to be represented by lawyers but to represent themselves. They also invited three expert witnesses to speak on their behalf: Ramsey Clark, who was US Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson; Center for Constitutional Rights legal director Bill Quigley; and Ret. Army Colonel Ann Wright.

  The defendants took turns questioning the witnesses, establishing the fact that drone strikes kill a large number of civilians; that people have the right, even the duty, to stop war crimes; and that according to the post-World War II Nuremberg principles, individuals are morally and legally bound to disobey orders that entail crimes against humanity. They cited the history of protesters who broke petty laws, from the nation’s founders to the Suffragists to the civil rights activists who illegally sat in at lunch counters. “In the long run, we honor them for obeying a higher law, for helping to bring us toward justice,” said Quigley.266