Since assuming office (and receiving his Nobel Peace Prize) in 2009, President Obama has massively increased the use of unmanned predator drones in what used to be known as the war against terror. According to Chris Kirk, writing in Slate, Obama has authorized five times the number of drone attacks authorized by President Bush. Liberals, who would be screaming bloody murder if it were Bush, have gone strangely (well, not so strangely) quiet about this, while conservatives are cheering on a president whose other policies they abhor.
The use of drones is not, in my opinion, inherently immoral in otherwise justifiable military operations; but the risk of death and other grave harms to noncombatants are substantial and certainly complicate the picture for any policy maker who is serious about the moral requirements for the justified use of military force. Having a valid military target is in itself not a sufficient justification for the use of weapons such as predator drones. Sometimes considerations of justice to noncombatants forbid their use, even if that means that grave risks must be endured by our own forces in the prosecution of a war.
The wholesale and indiscriminate use of drones cannot be justified, and should be criticized. This is something that Catholic intellectuals across the spectrum ought, it seems to me, to agree about. If we don’t speak, who will?
On the lethal side effects of the Obama drone strategy, see this article by Clive Smith.
June 18th, 2012 | 1:44 pm
[...] Catholics Should Criticize Indiscriminate Drone Use – Robert P. George DPhil, First Things/First Thoughts [...]
June 18th, 2012 | 2:33 pm
I think we can all agree that the “wholesale and indiscriminate use of drones cannot be justified.” The question is whether the Obama administration is engaging in the “wholesale and indiscriminate” use of drones. Clearly that is hyperbole, and I think it tells us more about how Robert George feels about President Obama (and his Nobel Prize) than it does about how drones ought and ought not to be used. It is lamentable that anybody gets killed in war, and especially the innocent. But drones have accounted for a small proportion of civilian death since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, “conventional” warfare has killed tens of thousands. The lowest figure I have seen for civilian deaths in the entirely unnecessary Iraq war alone is 66,000.
June 18th, 2012 | 2:47 pm
The linked article suggests two grounds for opposing the way the US employs drones in Pakistan: (1) informants are paid to target terrorists by planting GPS bugs on cars, and they have an incentive to simply take the money and target innocent persons in order to avoid the risk of reprisals if they targeted actual terrorists; and (2) The US considers all males above a minimum age who are killed in a drone attack on a targeted person to be presumptively guilty of terrorism, which bolsters the claim that there are very few “collateral” killings of non-combatants.
To the extent these claims are true, the practices are not only immoral, but counter-productive and dangerous. It would seem to be culpably reckless in the extreme to simply trust paid informants to “put the finger” on the bad guy. Does this actually happen? And the presumption that everyone in the vicinity of a bad guy is a bad guy too, and therefore an acceptable military target, seems wholly incompatible with our traditional definition of combatants and non-combatants.
I don’t understand how anyone could claim that these are morally acceptable practices. Killing innocent people obviously does not help our war on extremists, so the practices fail even on crass utilitarian grounds (unless you want to argue that random killings of innocent people are a general deterrent to people becoming terrorists).
June 18th, 2012 | 8:17 pm
David Nickol:
So Robert George’s claim that the current use of drones is wholesale and indiscriminate is a mere assertion, and partisan at that; yet at least he provides a link to an article that provides evidence of its lethal side effects. Meanwhile, you support your claim that the Iraq war is entirely unnecessary with an impressive use of italics.
June 18th, 2012 | 8:30 pm
Of course it can be justified. The President wants to use them. What other justification does he need?
June 18th, 2012 | 8:46 pm
Meanwhile, you support your claim that the Iraq war is entirely unnecessary with an impressive use of italics.
PhilB,
Actually, my main point was that the Iraq war had “lethal side effects” as did the war in Afghanistan.
Of course the Iraq war was entirely unnecessary. How was it sold to the American people? Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But he didn’t. The Iraqis would welcome us with open arms. They didn’t.
“Wholesale and indiscriminate” is obviously hyperbole. There are serious questions to be raised about warfare with drones, but accusing Obama of using drones in a “wholesale and indiscriminate” manner was not the way to start a serious discussion. It was partisan sniping.
June 18th, 2012 | 9:30 pm
I don’t know how it applies, but there was public outrage at the intrusion into Cambodia to cut the Ho Chi Min trail.
So far, drones have been used in attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Last I checked we are not at war with any of these countries. The first is even counted as an ally, if a reluctant one.
That said, I haven’t made up my own mind on this issue.
June 19th, 2012 | 5:36 am
[...] International Theological Commission has launched its redesigned website (homepage).Robert George urges Catholic intellectuals to speak out against “the wholesale and indiscriminate use of [...]
June 19th, 2012 | 8:49 am
David,
To object to the particular language used to posit an argument is certainly not the same as engaging the argument. The fact that drone attacks have increased 500% under President Obama could reasonably be termed an “wholesale” increase. The deaths of many hundreds and perhaps thousands of noncombatants (including at least 176 children) is not unreasonably termed “indiscriminate”. But let us suppose that Dr. George had used the terms “drastically increased” and “negligent” — would you still have objected?
And what of his ~central point~ that the large scale use of drones creates significant complications — particularly with respect to those who believe in Catholic Just War theory? Are you going to engage that substantively or just nitpick the terms?
As to your “main point” about Iraq — so what? “Johnny does it too — and worse!” is a classic red herring. The question to hand is this President and his administration’s increasing dependence on drone warfare and the attendant problems and concerns. That concern is far from “partisan sniping” – it has been voiced by individuals and publications across the political spectrum. Robert George is echoing those concerns and asking if Catholic intellectuals should not at least agree that there is cause for concern and speak to the issue.
What is is about the ~substance~ of Dr. George’s argument that you object to?
June 19th, 2012 | 8:51 am
[...] George, noting the increase in drone strikes under President Obama, suggests that Catholics from across the political spectrum should be able to oppose “[t]he wholesale [...]
June 19th, 2012 | 9:11 am
If the current use of drones is “wholesale and indiscriminate” (and immoral) then everyone should criticize it, not just Catholics or Catholic intellectuals.
Here’s a comment on another blog that makes sense to me.
June 19th, 2012 | 9:39 am
David,
In your statement you have now moved from red herring and nit picking to outright misrepresentation. George does not, in fact, imply that the use of drones is inherently “immoral”. Rather the opposite in fact: “The use of drones is not, in my opinion, inherently immoral in otherwise justifiable military operations…”
The assertion “that everyone should criticize it” (not just Catholics) contributes as much to the discussion as your citing of the war in Iraq which is exactly nothing.
Please tell us why, in your view, Dr. George is wrong in saying that in light of Just War Teaching Catholic intellectuals ought to be critically engaged and outspoken about the significant increase in the use of drone strikes?
June 19th, 2012 | 9:40 am
Sally Rogers –
Yup. I find it incredible, too.
June 19th, 2012 | 9:44 am
“Catholics Should Criticize Indiscriminate Drone Use”
Our current use of “drones” is not indiscriminate. There is a clear and very restrictive set of Rules of Engagement for all of our military actions. If these are being violated please provide evidence since the military activly prosecutes such violation. The use of target strikes is our best option to kill target inside a war zone (yes Pakistan and Yemen are war zones) while limiting civillian casualties. The other option would be to send in ground troops which would be much more bloody. The terrorists routinely use our ROE’s to thwart our attacks; e.g. placing a child in front of a meeting place, knowing we will not strike the meeting place if we have positive proof children are there. You lost all credibility in your title. You would do more good by asking why we no longer have actual declarations of war from congress and why our presidency has turned into a dictatorship.
June 19th, 2012 | 9:52 am
And what of his ~central point~ that the large scale use of drones creates significant complications — particularly with respect to those who believe in Catholic Just War theory? Are you going to engage that substantively or just nitpick the terms?
david c,
First, I see nothing wrong with my having questioned the way in which Robert George raised the issue. The remark about the Nobel Peace prize was snark. If George wants Catholics or Catholic intellectuals across the political spectrum to join him in criticizing the use of drones, it would be wiser of him to concentrate on the case against drones and not make snarky remarks that instantly rankle those who might support Obama on other matters but criticize his use of drones. George, in effect, was attacking Obama, not Obama’s policy of using drones.
Second, I don’t believe George really made a case. I agree with the comment on MOTU PROPRIO. Just about every military action raises the same issues as drone attacks do. It is practically routine to hear of conventional NATO air strikes killing civilians in Afghanistan. It is the nature of the war in Afghanistan and the war against al-Qaeda that there are going to be civilian casualties.
Third, don’t forget that while innocent civilians may accidentally be killed in the war against al-Qaeda, the very purpose of al-Qaeda is to deliberately kill innocent civilians. How do you propose to fight international terrorists who are willing to do things like commit suicide to blow up passenger planes? You cannot frighten them into good behavior by threatening to capture them and put them in jail?
Anyone who subscribes to just war theory could never have supported the invasion of Iraq.
June 19th, 2012 | 10:31 am
David Nickol:
If that’s your main point, well, it’s less trenchant than you must suppose.
And to reduce Robert George’s post to partisan sniping and nothing else is not fair at all. Further, why choose to pull the discussion in the direction of yet another tiresome partisan food fight when you could actually address the underlying question, which was clearly not just a jab at the current administration.
As to your assessment of the Iraq War, it’s simplistic in the extreme, and depends entirely on after-the-fact knowledge that wasn’t available to the decision-makers at the time. One might even call it a bit of partisan sniping.
Actually, the Bush Administration was heavily criticized in the early stages of the run-up to the war for having too many reasons for going to war, including Saddam Hussein’s ongoing oppression/slaughter of his own people, his general support for terrorism, his ongoing threat to the stability of the region, and his failure to comply with the ceasefire provisions of the first Gulf War, as well as his purported possession of weapons of mass destruction.
And while no WMDs were found, it is beyond dispute that Iraq possessed the capability to quickly reconstitute a WMD program as soon as it would be considered advantageous. (After all, various nerve toxins apparently can be easily prepared from common pesticides; interestingly, huge stores of just these pesticides were found throughout Iraq by our troops).
So while you are correct that the public justification of the war eventually congealed into an over-certain and ultimately incorrect claim of the presence of substantial amounts of WMDs, the underlying rationale, which President Bush articulated early on, remains at least arguable: that we could not afford to wait, in the aftermath of the sudden September 11 attacks, for further dangers to gather, for rogue regimes such as Iraq with dangerous capabilities and bad intent to make common cause with terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda which had just demonstrated their, shall we say, active hostility to the US.
A key point in all this, which your dismissal completely ignores, is that these kinds of decisions are always made in conditions of uncertainty. We learned an important lesson in just how uncertain, when it was revealed that the virtually unanimous assessment of the world’s major intelligence services regarding Iraq’s possession of WMDs was shown to be wrong. But that’s what we had to go on, and to completely ignore it would have been completely irresponsible. On top of all that, Saddam Hussein, for his own reasons, chose to act guilty. Of course, one can argue (as I suspect you might) that other measures short of war could have been taken to address the threat. But to say that the war was “entirely unnecessary” is, to say the least, overly facile.
June 19th, 2012 | 10:31 am
Mike Melendez: “So far, drones have been used in attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Last I checked we are not at war with any of these countries. The first is even counted as an ally, if a reluctant one.”
Here is the relevant text of the Authorization for Use of Military Force: “That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”
The AUMF acknowledges the trans-national nature of the threat against the U.S. and explicitly authorizes military force to be used in places like Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan if the President determines that they are harboring people or organizations connected to 9/11.
More generally, the linked-to article is pretty thin gruel and does not contain any independently verifiable information. When Osama bin Laden was identified as a probable resident of a certain house in Pakistan, the President was given the option of bombing the house and summarily rejected it because of the certainty of civilian casualties.
Innocent people die in war no matter what but I would like to see more evidence that these decisions are being made in a cavalier or indiscriminate manner. Drones don’t do anything that snipers, bombers or cruise missiles have done for decades in armed conflict.
June 19th, 2012 | 10:32 am
A few facts to focus the debate. I worked on UAV, unmanned aerial vehicles, when Bush 43 was President, (and also UGV, and USVs, Submarines). Technology, not policy, was the barrier. A fire cracker was an overload for the first kites. Today, UAVs are the size of airliners. They can loiter over a site for days, waiting for the right moment to learn intelligence, their first mission, or kill. (Generals catch on quick, to new opportunities.)
The moral issue in the use of weaponry has not changed since the arrow was invented. Innocents are killed by random wind puffs. The unchanged problem is the skilled assessment of risk in combat. The unspoken “benefit” is to be able to kill without the daily dirge on ABC that the N+1 American boy was killed today, by our President.
It must be realized that advanced weapons are orders of magnitude more lethal than even Vietnam era technologies. Within the decade we can kill anyone on the surface of the earth, from US soil, in minutes. The real question is who may authorized them, and how are they employed.
June 19th, 2012 | 10:58 am
R.L. Hails – thank you for your insights. I think your last question “how they are employed” is exactly what this post is about.
If we used them during a war to minimize casualties both to ourselves and civilians, then I think everyone can see their value. When we use them in lands where we are not at war, against “enemies” that we don’t even know for sure are enemies then it becomes much more difficult to justify.
The easier it becomes to kill a target without risk to ourselves, perhaps the quicker we are to determine that pulling the trigger is justified in morally problematic situations. I don’t know this for sure — perhaps the risk is overblown. I do think it bears public attention and discussion about how and under what circumstances these weapons are deployed in our name.
I also do think that President Obama’s decision not to capture terrorist suspects (as was seemingly done under Pres. Bush) but rather to order their killing from afar is rather stunning.
What can explain the difference between the loud public outrage over holding prisoners in Guantanamo with the almost deafening silence in response to their execution by drones (along with whoever is beside them)? I myself had some concerns about the proper kinds of due process afforded those prisoners. Some were wrongly imprisoned at Guantanamo – so we let them go. What is the recourse for mistakes of targetting a hellfire missile?
June 19th, 2012 | 10:58 am
The silence from the global, anti-war crowd is amazing. I remember the masses throughout the world protesting the US entrance into Iraq. Now, with Obama’s massive increase in secretive drone strikes on US citizens and others abroad there isn’t a peep. What is concerning is a continuing liberalization of the rules of engagement and the concept that US Law Enforcement will adopt drone use as a “way to save money.” In addition, no one talks about collateral damage. With the use of drones we have a rate of collateral damage between 4.5 – 8.5% according to a recent study. When did stop caring about innocents? The time is now – speak up and protest.
June 19th, 2012 | 11:41 am
There comes a time when one’s dislike of military means splits so many hairs that the only way to continue in ones positions and be consistent is in fact pacifism.
We have heard over and over protests about the peculiar horror of particular weapons. Usually because they are new and strange, though I remember when it was land mines which are hardly new. The most exotic distaste I remember was when it was held evil for one combatant to target the eyes of another with a laser sight as opposed to all the numerous other humane ways of maiming him. Drones are no more indiscriminate then air launched bombs or artillery shells, and somehow past generations were able to get through a remarkable number of wars with their consciences intact. Before such devices it was the general practice to ease logistics by collecting from local peasants and even when that was not done armies tended to bring plague with them. Peculiarly Augustine and Grotius lived both lived in such times.
Now “war is hell” cannot be a justification for any action. However if you really think such comparatively mild means as drones are still disproportionate to the end then the logical course is to question the end as there is no way to make war in a more scrupulous manner then America like most western armed forces, has in fact been doing. Worry about such things is not a sign of increased righteousness. It is only a sign that our ancestors took war more seriously then we do.
June 19th, 2012 | 12:11 pm
PhilB –
True. On the other hand, most PR campaigns experiment with different messages in search of things that’ll ‘resonate’. See, e.g., the current presidential campaigns.
Which was no different than any number of thugocracies in the area, including some of our ‘allies’. One of the big ones, the slaughter of the Kurds, came when Bush Sr. encouraged them to revolt and then provided no support.
Actually, his specific support for terrorism was funding pensions for the families of suicide bombers in Israel. Other ties to organizations like Al Queda seem to have been rather loose, and were known to be at the time. And, again, no stronger than some of our purported allies in the region.
He was pretty well contained, which was demonstrated in the first Iraq war. He could saber-rattle a little, but if he attacked any of his neighbors (except maybe Iran), he’d just have another coalition coming after him. (And he’d already demonstrated he didn’t have what it took to take over Iran.)
Annoying but not a threat – especially not an existential threat – to U.S. security. As demonstrated in the first war.
Have you ever wondered why Saddam would “act guilty” in this area? As already noted, if he attacked any of his neighbors, he’d be stomped. But what if he were attacked? Who’d come to his aid?
He had to at least foster some uncertainty about his capabilities there, just to act as a deterrent to invasion. His army certainly couldn’t do it by itself. Indeed, he couldn’t let his army become too effective or coordinated.
Saddam attacked Kuwait, and got stomped, barely escaping with his skin. Imagine what would happen to him if he actually gave some kind of WMD to a terrorist organization and it traced its way back to him. I’m sure Saddam did – he was evil, sure, but he wasn’t stupid.
Unlike a terrorist organization, Saddam had a fixed base of operations. He couldn’t cut and run (as demonstrated in the second Iraq war).
Game it out. As it was, Saddam was a despotic ruler of a country with all the creature comforts he could want (modulo constant fear of assassination). He could maintain that situation indefinitely without attacking anyone.
Attacking Iran wouldn’t work, he’d proved that.
Attacking his neighbors wouldn’t work, the first Iraq war proved that.
Attacking Israel might well lead to a nuclear strike.
Attacking the U.S. through a terrorist organization would lead to anything from getting stomped and deposed (basically what happened in the second Iraq war) up to a nuclear strike, depending on exactly what the attack consisted of.
And all of this was known before the war started.
June 19th, 2012 | 12:16 pm
I hate to comment on this, because I usually agree with almost everything Robbie writes. However, here he’s clearly off base, because he fundamentally does not understand the ways in which “drones” – usually referred to as UAV or UAS – are employed.
Following a strict ROE, “drones” are when employed as a fires, always utilize precision fires to achieve increased lethality from afar. Otherwise, we would be relying much more on artillery (even using the XM982 Excalibur round) and air assets (JDAM’s, etc) which are inherently more susceptible to collateral damage.
Employment of UAV/UAS assets almost always enhances the ability of our forces to discriminate and analyze the situation before employment of any force. Enhanced C4ISR and other podded technologies has resulted in kills which are much more precise and limited in their scope and effect, ultimately reducing collateral damage and enhancing the civilian populace’s safety.
If the complaint is that groups of civilians have been killed, that is much more an ISR analysis problem than anything relating to the employment of UAS/UAV’s as fires in an operational sense.
June 19th, 2012 | 1:01 pm
“I also do think that President Obama’s decision not to capture terrorist suspects (as was seemingly done under Pres. Bush) but rather to order their killing from afar is rather stunning.”
Moreover, some of those targeted for killing are U.S citizens. At least two Americans have been killed by drones on the orders of the U.S. president. That is also an Obama administration
novelty, and it doesn’t seem to bother people as much as it should.
June 19th, 2012 | 1:34 pm
In addition, no one talks about collateral damage. With the use of drones we have a rate of collateral damage between 4.5 – 8.5% according to a recent study. When did stop caring about innocents?
Eric N.,
Do you realize how good that is? This is from Wikipedia:
June 19th, 2012 | 2:13 pm
Having served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo (deployments under the last 2 Presidents), I don’t believe that any of these theaters of the larger fight against Islamic radicalism are unjust. I don’t believe the governments’s use of drone attacks have been indicriminate. Casualties have generally been quite low in contrast to previous conflicts of this scope.
Counterinsurgency/Counterterrorism doesn’t fit neatly into the Just War theory because terrorism and insurgency don’t fit neatly into traditional warfare. I think that we’re not very far along in working out the ethics of such conflicts. This is an area where Catholic intellectuals could make a real contribution.
June 19th, 2012 | 2:49 pm
The problem with widespread drone use is that we could fall into the same trap that policymakers in Vietnam fell into. The official Body Count became a thing-in-itself eventually. It was quite disturbing to read how the war in Afghanistan has evolved into such bureaucratic routine. Oval Office policymakers meet once a week on Terror Tuesday to go over the kill list. And if you believe the reporters, the President discusses and signs-off on every person marked for termination. LBJ did the samething in 1967-1968 with the B-52 bombings over Vietnam. And once bureaucratic inertia set in, other departments demanded that they be allowed to play. Forty five years later, things really haven’t changed. David Axelrod even attends these meetings. I suppose even the political side of the ord chart must have its say.
Perhaps every single one of the people on the kill list “deserved” to die (I don’t think any Catholics would agree). But, two years ago there were reports that the drone attacks were beginning to create quite a bit of collateral damage (another relic phrase left over from Vietnam). Pakistan eventually closed off logistic routes into Afghanistan as a protest of the drone attacks.
Drones we are finding out can be as addicting as crack. It is the “clean” way to fight wars. They are surgical, they are relatively cheap (compared a drone to a F-22 or M-A1 Abrahm). But, what do they do to our policymakers? If wars, it turns out, can be fought on the cheap will we be fighting more wars in coming years?
And now, every federal department as well as local law enforcement agencies want drones. We are not only militarizing our local police forces, but we are also deputizing every other governmental organization. The Department of Education now employs SWAT Teams, and last winter the Michigan DNR borrowed a drone to spy on an “illegal” hog farmer (I suppose he was raising undocumented hogs). The next morning an 8 man DNR SWAT Team raided his property.
June 19th, 2012 | 3:13 pm
In and of themselves, I don’t see use of drones as problematic. But, at a time when our strategic position in various places around the world is in question (or in retreat), I think it would be wise to highlight the limitations of the drones. They are purely tactical tools, and do not make up for diplomatic or larger policy mis-steps. If we are not careful, our celebration on the sucess of the drones could be akin to the Germans celebrating the arrival of the Mark V or VI Panzers on the battlefields in 1943.
We should be on guard to prevent the drone attacks from evolving into nothing more than a high tech excercise in whack-a-mole.
June 19th, 2012 | 4:13 pm
Bill Hoctor, when Augustine and Grotius wrote they were thinking of a style of warfare that had often had more in common with counterinsurgency/counterterrorism then with “traditional” warfare which in practice only means “eighteenth and nineteeth century warfare as fought between the Rhine and Danube valleys.” Romans and Dutchmen knew perfectly well what fighting against raider tribes was like and no one considered it to be somehow “not quite warfare.”
June 19th, 2012 | 6:07 pm
Jason-the main offensive action we (American forces that is) face from these adversaries are not raids by tribal sized groups but rather attacks by individuals and small groups who disguise themselves as civilians and blow themselves up. The few times that they attack in anything larger than platoon size leads to predictable, and, for them, tragic results.
Where we sometimes attack them (with drones or raids, etc) is in tribal homelands where they take refuge, or try to. Drones make this more difficult for them to do. In essence, they do to the insurgent what the insurgent does to the regular soldier. They expand the battlespace and leave the insurgent without a zone aof safety. They also cause many fewer casualties than the mass bombing raids of the WWII through Viet Nam era.
My Roman history is a tad rusty, but my best recollection is that the Huns, Vandals, and Visigoths were all quite capable of attacking in force, as well as raiding.
In the final analysis, drone warfare and Special Forces raiding represents an adaptation to guerilla tactics just as guerilla tactics represented an adaptation by weaker forces against stronger ones. Earlier American attempts to fight against insurgency (e.g., The Indian wars in the United States, operations in the Philippines in the early 20th century) were often brutal and received much criticism. Drones decrease casualties on both sides. They also permit us to go after the terror kingpins, rather than just the semiliterate low ranking insurgent.
We’ll likely be in conflict with Islamic radicals for about another generation until their underlying population ages and our need to import energy resources from overseas subsides, which will deny them an important source of their financing. Some of these radicals will be surrogates for foreign governments (e.g., Pakistan or Iran); others will be independent actors (e.g., Al Qaida, IMU, Al Shabaab). Sometimes they’ll switch allegiances-murky is how they like it.
These groups, as part of their strategy, will use subterfuge to deny us the kind of certainty about their immediate intentions, or their identity that would make us more ethically comfortable in this fight. It will be and has been a messy, ethically difficult sort of fight.
Who bears the ethical liability for creating uncertainty about the identity of combatants and their intentions? How does one apportion that? When certainty is nearly impossible (you can’t see the enemy coming over the hill) when and to what extent is appropriate to act? What constitutes proportionality in such situations? Are propagandists, recruiters and financiers for terrorist groups combatants? What about cyber terrorists? Do you get plus points ethically if you’re the side that tries to find new means to decrease casualties, particularly civilians?
I do think these sorts of issues can be a bit more complicated and less settled than you appear to be giving them credit for. Catholic intellectuals could make an important contribution here if they are interested.
June 19th, 2012 | 6:44 pm
It really amazes me. As a former infantryman, and one who has seen the power of HEDP arty rounds on human bodies, I see “drones” are a proven tool to reduce collateral damage.
But that’s all they are, a tool. Just like a rifle is a tool, or an artillery round is a tool.
“Indiscriminate use” is what some people are asserting with respect to the use of these “drones.
That’s a laugh.
In the last ten years, this is the first war in which the targets are force fed through the CFFLC straight to a targeting board, reviewed by lawyers and then authorized.
Arguably, each and every use of a “drone” has had more vetting than any one use of an HEDP round.
And yet, no one seems to have concerns regarding the use of that.
This focus on “drones” is absolutely ridiculous.
Furthermore, to suggest that the government of Pakistan has credibility to complain about the type of casualties in a region they are afraid to send their own army into is laughable.
The restrictions on our logpac in Pakistan were used as a way to 1)quell the street, and 2)extract other concessions, including FMS sales through DOD and FMF through State.
I have every confidence that those FMS sales will be used in a way which is vastly more destructive than any use of “drones”.
Drones are simply a tool.
If one wants to complain about the use of drones as a potentially morally troubling issue, then perhaps they should also challenge the use of carbines and rifles – which cause vastly more collateral damage.
I would laugh at those people, but at least they would have some level of consistency.
June 20th, 2012 | 2:55 am
It seems that there are two different issues mixing up together here and making things murky.
1) How much collateral damage do drone attacks cause compared to other types of attacks?
2) When is the (contested) amount of collateral damage that drones do justifiable, given the other options?
For example, it has been claimed (or at least implied) that drones kill lots of innocents compared to attacks by soldiers. It has then been countered that drones do much less damage than artillery strikes or, say, carpet bombing.
I do not know if the first claim is true or not in general, but while the counter undoubtedly is true we still have to get a little more specific for the argument to have any applicability.
In a particular case, the chances of success, worth of the target, and amount of civilian and soldier deaths may or may not make any option, taken in isolation, acceptable, and of those that are acceptable considered in isolation in any single case, some options might be so much worse than others that they too are ruled out.
But which ones are acceptable at all, and which ones get ruled out later depends entirely on the situation – there could be a case where straight up bombing would accomplish the mission with high but acceptable collateral damage and where a troop attack could potentially succeed with very few civilian casualties but have such a low chance of success that bombing is still the way to go. We know this. The relatively new option
The work which needs to be done is in weighing these factors: civilian deaths, soldier deaths, chance of success, value of target.
Doubtless drones will be the way to go in some cases. Being the a relatively new option, it may be that drones, as we learn how to use them, will become the best option in more and more cases, and indeed, win out so much that using them five times more often than in the recent past is justifiable.
But that’s a “may”. The concern here is that we may be using drones to decrease our own soldier deaths at a disproportionate cost to civilians. Or perhaps, the concern here could be said to be that the aforementioned concern isn’t being given enough attention: not that we know that drones result in more civilian deaths than is justified, but that we know this is a question that needs to be asked and don’t often hear it being addressed.
But again, I have no idea what the answer to the question actually is. I’m sure the statistics are out there (though I am not sure whether or not they’d be publicly available). It wouldn’t be enough to say that drones have killed less (or more) civilians than non drones per mission, because each mission is different. It would take knowing the alternatives in each case, or perhaps comparing the results among classes of missions that are considered similar. This would require some military expertise, and would need to be done thoroughly before we can even begin to address whether drones have been over used.
After all of those statistics are compiled. We would then have to figure out exactly how much more harm can be justifiably done to innocent bystanders to prevent harm to military personnel. This is the hard part.
So again, it’s more complicated (at least, a priori it could be and seems likely to be) than “drones are great” or “drones are terrible”. I suppose either one of those conclusions are possible, but if the work has been done to arrive at such a conclusion I’ve yet to see it.
June 30th, 2012 | 3:02 am
[...] Catholics Should Criticize Indiscriminate Drone Use (firstthings.com) [...]
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