Undeclared War: Unmanned Drones, Human Rights and Collective Security
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Undeclared War: unmanned drones, human rights and collective security Susan Carolyn Breau, University of Reading/Mark Olssen, University of Surrey Drones constitute, as Barbara Ehrenreich notes, in her ‘Foreword’ to Medea Benjamin’s Drone Warfare: Killing by remote control, the “ultimate action-at-a-distance weapons, allowing the aggressor to destroy targets in Pakistan or Afghanistan while ‘hiding’ thousands of miles away in Nevada” (Ehrenreich, 2013, p. vii). Yet, as Ehrenreich continues, “it is hard to even claim that their primary use is ‘military’ in any traditional sense. Drones have made possible a programme of targeted assassinations that are justified by the US ‘war on terror’, but otherwise in defiance of both international and US law” (p. viii). She notes how Benjamin in her book documents impressively how “it is the CIA, not the Pentagon, that operates most drone strikes in Western Asia, with no accountability whatsoever. Designed targets…have been condemned without evidence or trial – at the will apparently, of the White House. And those who operate the drones do so with complete impunity for the deaths of any civilians who end up as collateral damage.” (p. viii) Although the technical expertise for producing drones was developed as early as the WWI, and although unmanned aerial vehicles were used for gathering intelligence and for reconnaissance during WWII and during the Vietnam and later Balkan wars, their adaptation to becoming lethal military vehicles for the purposes of attacking and destroying specified targets has taken place more recently. Although Abraham Karem assisted the Israeli’s in developing unmanned robots in the 1970s, and built the first Predator drone in his garage in Southern California in the early 1980s 1, the first official use in military conflict only occurred since 1999 with the NATO Kosovo intervention where unmanned robotic aircraft were adapted to carry missiles “transforming them from spy planes into killer drones” (Benjamin, p. 15). Since 9/11, technical and commercial development is moving rapidly. While this creates the prospect for the private production and deployment of drones, so far it has been the military that has constituted the driving force for their deployment in armed combat. Drones are essentially a response to the US war on terror. While production has been spearheaded by US firms such as General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, other countries are also moving fast, often in association with the Americans. Hence, the Israeli armed forces have, according to Benjamin, long utilised drones for targeted killing, intelligence gathering, and as decoys since the 1970s, and especially in the 1982 war in Lebanon, and still continues today (Benjamin, p. 15). It was 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that led to an explosion of their use by the military. As Benjamin reports: “In 2000 the Pentagon had fewer than fifty aerial drones; ten years later it had nearly 7,500” (pp. 16 - 17). Moreover, she reports aerospace industry sources that maintain that “global spending on the research and manufacture of drones is expected to total more than $94 billion between 2011 and 2020…” Although many of these 1 See Benjamin, p. 14 cites Peter Finn, ‘The Rise of the Drone: From Californian Garage to Multi-Billion Dollar Industry,’ Washington Post , December 24 th , 2011. are intended for intelligence gathering, there is no doubt that the increased demand and production since 2002 is witnessing the shift from non-lethal to lethal purposes. As Benjamin states: “armed drones are used in three ways. They supply support when US ground troops attack or come under attack; they patrol the skies looking for suspicious activity and, if they find it, they attack; and they conduct targeted killings of suspected militants” (p. 18). Such killer drones, aptly carrying names such as ‘Predators’ or ‘Reapers’, 2 are operated by remote control. It works, as Benjamin puts it, “[m]uch like a video game, he aims, shoots and fires at targets he sees on a satellite map” (p. 29). The escalation of drone warfare, otherwise known as unmanned aerial vehicles’ (UAV) or unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), or remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) has most notably taken effect under the period in office of American President Barach Obama. In Afghanistan, by 2010, the air force was flying some twenty Predator drones a day for intelligence gathering purposes. Increasingly, however, they were also used to target identified Taliban terrorists. Despite the fact that Obama sold himself to the American electorate as a peace candidate (Benjamin, p. 6), he has in fact done more to endanger global security through promoting new types of warfare by the use of aircraft that kill and destroy by remote control: known as drones. According to Benjamin (p. 7), Obama carried out the first the first drone strike just three days after his inauguration in Pakistan on the 3 rd January 2009. Although Benjamin reports that initial reports stated that the attacks hit “suspected terrorist hideouts… in reality the missiles struck the home of Malik Gulistan Khan, a tribal elder and member of a local pro-government peace committee, and killed him and four other members of his family” (Benjamin, p. 7). 3 Yet, there can be no doubt, and Benjamin concedes, that Obama clearly believed that such new forms of military weapon would make warfare both more accurate, lessen overall casualties, as well as lower the overall necessity for full-scale wars of a traditional sort. She cites him from a ‘Google chat’ of 30 th January 2012 where he comments that “drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part, they have been precision strikes on Al Qaeda and their affiliates…It is important to understand that this thing is being kept on a very tight leash.”(Cited, Benjamin, p. 8) While killer drones were increasingly being used in Iraq and Afghanistan, outside the armed forces, other sections of the US government also were procuring drones. By far the largest procurer has been the CIA in the interests of counter terrorism. After 9/11 the CIA received permission to target Al Qaeda anywhere in the world, and for this purpose, says Benjamin, “the CIA has been putting drones to work”. In addition to the CIA, groups such as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) as well as private contractors have been active. Although the US has been dominant actor in the manufacture and use of drone missiles to date, Benjamin reports how its dominance is rapidly coming to an end. Partly this is because technical knowledge is hard to contain, and leaks across the globe to both friendly and unfriendly nations. The last five years have witnessed an explosive expansion of drone warfare with some seventy five countries now possessing such military hardware. “Between 2005 and 2012,”reports Benjamin (p. 70), “the 2 Other types of drones are Global Hawks, which are concerned with surveillance, to the smaller Ravens, all of which have been required for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 3 Later reports confirmed this to be true, says Benjamin, p. 7. number of countries that acquired drones doubled from about forty to more than seventy-five.” Such an escalation, we will argue in this paper, creates nightmarish consequences for global security and threatens the prospect of constituting a self-generating mechanism for the endless expansion of networks of terrorist activity. Arguments for the use of drones: One argument initially accepted by advocates of drone warfare was that drones enabled new levels of precision to be achieved in waging warfare, thus minimizing what in military parlance is termed as ‘collateral damage.’ Such greater precision, often represented as being able to achieve breath-taking accuracy, would enable civilian casualties to be avoided or at least minimised compared to the clumsier and blunter traditional methods of warfare through air, sea or ground attack. As well as greater precision in terms of accuracy, drone warfare allows for a radical shift in military tactics and strategy away “from boots on the ground to assassins in the air” (Benjamin, p. 7). Combined with the argument of greater accuracy and increased precision are parallel arguments that the use of killer drones represents good value for money in that their use is cheaper as well as being more effective than traditional methods of warfare and of dealing with enemies. Indeed, it has been pointed out that the use of drones’ enables objectives to be achieved that traditionally never were possible in terms of identifying and eliminating enemies in isolated locations in far off lands. They constitute the war that should have been fought but which never actually was. Our thesis thus directly contradicts most of the contributions to another important new edited book edited by Bradley Jay Strawser, titled Killing by Remote Control: The ethics of an unmanned military. Given the recent publication of this volume, our own thesis will proceed from this point by way of challenging the central perspectives of many of its contributions. In a review of the volume, Chris Cole (2013) notes that most contributions in fact come from a military perspective, and most endorse the use of drones in warfare. In this context we can let editor Strawser speak for himself. As he maintains, “none of the contributors hold that there is an absolute moral prohibition against [drone] use…however, many have principled issues with their use [and] some argue that there is something about this form of remote warfare in general which should cause us to be morally dubious of it, even if it is not absolutely prohibited in principle.” (p. 9). Cole also cites Strawser to the effect that “the speed of technological change brought by these vehicles and the haste of their military deployment are quickly outpacing thorough ethical and policy analysis.” (p.