Drones: Accentuate the Positive!

Ben Wittes has a thoughtful reply to my drone-war post from the other day. Good points are made and collegiality spreads. But it's worth putting a bit of stress on one of his arguments:

[H]e seems to be looking at only one side of a coin that, in fact, has two sides. Ackerman sees that drones make it easy to get involved in wars. But he ignores the fact that for exactly the same reason, they make it easier to limit involvement in wars. How one feels about drones is partly conditioned by what one believes the null hypothesis to be. If one imagines that absent drones, our involvement in certain countries where we now use them would look more like law enforcement operations, one will tend to feel differently, I suspect, that if one thinks our involvement would look more like what happened in Iraq. Drones enable an ongoing, serious, military and intelligence involvement in countries without significant troop commitments. In other words, without drones, would our involvement in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia really be lesser, or might it involve greater exercises of force? Would we really now be able to contemplate a withdrawal of large numbers of troops from Afghanistan, a withdrawal predicated on our ability to conduct ongoing counterterrorism operations from more stand-off positions? My point is not that drones are a magic bullet; they aren’t. But their precision and safety and relatively low cost do allow the country to contemplate limited involvement in conflicts that might otherwise prove magnets for escalation and quagmire.

Again: good point. But we ought not to be so quick to conclude that drones are a substitute for expensive, expansive foreign commitments. History is full of military schemes that promised little up-front investment to meet minimal objectives that then spiraled out of control. Even drones aren't just drones. Strikes are a lagging indicator of an intelligence network, including some human sources (and drone intel! Remember, most drones are spying machines, not killing machines), a logistics chain, etc.

That's not to say the drones don't have a lower, cheaper profile than ground wars, just that nothing's free or easy in this wicked world. And once you commit the resources to a drone war, it's easy to see a host nation wanting more out of you; or a problem festering beyond the point drones can address; etc. There's no contradiction in being wary of technological pledges of zipless interventions even while we maximize what new technologies have to offer. 

Comments

[mikey]

Not to have an unduly negative impact on all the congeniality, but that's a specious argument. Your position (which I agree with, but it's also glaringly obvious) is that the use of drones to attack targets in other nations lowers the threshold for US Military involvement. So it then follows pretty simply that choosing to NOT employ drones must RAISE the threshold for US intervention. But Mr. Wittes seems to be saying that, absent drones, we would merely lower our threshold for lethal action and in at least most (some?) cases would resort to more traditional forms of attack.

I think that's obviously wrong. We're using drones in places we CLEARLY would not use more conventional forces (Pakistan for one), so I can't see how one might argue that their use hasn't expanded US involvement in more local conflicts (Yemen, Somalia).

Personally, I'd still like to hear somebody explain how it is somehow different to bomb a sovereign nation with an unmanned aircraft rather than a manned aircraft. Because this seems to be the operative premise, not only from the US but seemingly broadly accepted throughout the international community...

[Joanna Bryson]

I'm not convinced that lowering the troop involvement lowers the overall / gross casualty rate for all sides of a conflict. Perhaps despite the counterfactuals involved someone will start coming up with comparative numbers on this. I also don't know enough about relative accuracy of drone vs. ground troops vs. piloted air craft.

I think that the ethical issue many people in artificial intelligence are worried about is whether blame will ever be displaced on a robot for the decisions of commanders and/or sloppiness of operators or deployers. We don't like to hear about how drones kill people: People are killed with drones, not by them. But the press are doing a good job on this, with lots of stories about the real drone pilots.

[John Henninger]

Drones could delude policymakers further into believing that military action is the end all solution to the conflicts in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia while ignoring the political tensions in these countries that helps to foster extremism. In the sixities, McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow thought that the selective bombing of North Vietnamese targets would somehow solve the political problems in South Vietnam. But when this use of airpower failed American ground troops became quickly involved in the Vietnam War. Drones have now replaced airpower as the new panacea for trying to resolve military conflicts throughout the developing world. Today's policymakers seems to be making the same mistakes as McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow made in the 1960s in believing that the use of advance military technology can solve the political problems of the Third World.

[Will North]

A bit tangential,but in line with John Henninger's historical parallel above, I've been reading Victoria Clark's Yemen (http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300117011). She describes how the Ottomans and British both bribed local leaders to try to keep rebellious tribes in line, missing the point that their authority didn't really work like that. That has its own parallels with US policy towards Saleh, and, I guess, to AfPak.

She goes on to describe the other side of the British approach, from the 20s onward, using the air force to bomb those they couldn't bribe. In the 1961, her father (a BBC correspondent), "accompanied a raid to the Lower Yafi Sultanate, and reported back, explaining how many advance warnings were given to move humans and livestock out of the area and how carefully pinpointed the targets were and concluding the dispatch with: 'This is a highly exacting task and the RAF rightly resents any suggestions that bombs are being scattered careleslly or lives endangered'".

That seems reminiscent of the arguments made for careful drone strikes being less harmful to relations with the local population than outright war.

Elsewhere in the same passage, she looks at the responses made to those who questioned the wisdom of this bombs and bribes strategy: "Anyone who dared to question the morality of Britain exercising a protectorate over an area it was arming to the hilt was asked if he would prefer to see a military occupation of Yemen's hinterland, and, 'if so, how many divisions of troops'"

That seems to finally bring me to an appropriate parallel to the question here. The bombs and bribes may have been cheaper than a few divisions of troops, but Britain still ended up less than a decade later fighting and losing a war against insurgents, and losing all of its influence in the country.

[Timberland UK]

Very, very nicely done!