Armed Drones and the Ethics of War

Christian Enemark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136261206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book assesses the ethical implications of using armed unmanned aerial vehicles ('hunter-killer drones') in contemporary conflicts.

The American way of war is trending away from the heroic and towards the post-heroic, driven by a political preference for air-powered management of strategic risks and the reduction of physical risk to US personnel. The recent use of drones in the War on Terror has demonstrated the power of this technology to transcend time and space, but there has been relatively little debate in the United States and elsewhere over the embrace of what might be regarded as politically desirable and yet morally worrisome: risk-free killing. Arguably, the absence of a relationship of mutual risk between putative combatants poses a fundamental challenge to the status of war as something morally distinguishable from other forms of violence, and it also undermines the professional virtue of the warrior as a courageous risk-taker.

This book considers the use of armed drones in the light of ethical principles that are intended to guard against unjust increases in the incidence and lethality of armed conflict. The evidence and arguments presented indicate that, in some respects, the use of armed drones is to be welcomed as an ethically superior mode of warfare. Over time, however, their continued and increased use is likely to generate more challenges than solutions, and perhaps do more harm than good.

This book will be of much interest to students of the ethics of war, airpower, counter-terrorism, strategic studies and security studies in general.

1 Introduction

On a hot August night in 2009, a man named Baitullah Mehsud lay on the rooftop of his father-in-law's house. The house was in the village of Zanghara in the remote and mountainous region of South Waziristan in north-west Pakistan, close to the border with Afghanistan. The man, a diabetic, was at the time receiving a leg massage as well as an intravenous drip to treat dehydration and stomach problems. Suddenly, the house was engulfed in flame as two Hellfire air-to-surface missiles slammed into it, instantly killing the man and 11 other people. Baitullah Mehsud was the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and the missiles had been fired from an uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) or ‘drone’ hovering, undetected, about two miles above the house.¹ According to the Government of Pakistan, Mehsud was the mastermind of the 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and responsible for many suicide bombings across the border in Afghanistan. The decision to kill him, and the pressing of a button to make it happen, reportedly took place almost 7,000 miles away at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a non-military agency of the United States (US) Government.² The person who, via satellite, remotely operated the drone and released the missiles was probably either a CIA officer or a former member of the US military working under contract to the Agency. He or she would have been sitting at a console with a keyboard, a steering device resembling a joystick, and three television screens (one with live video feed from the drone flying over Pakistan, one displaying technical data on the drone, and a third showing a navigation map).³ For hours or days prior to the missile strike on Mehsud, the operator and others would have been watching live, close-up video footage of the house in South Waziristan captured by the drone's powerful camera. This particular drone strike was the last of 15 that had specifically targeted Mehsud,⁴ but it is unclear how many deaths (if any) resulted from the previous 14 attempts on his life.

Since 2004 the US Government has been pursuing an undeclared but not-so-secret policy of using armed drones to launch air strikes against human targets inside Pakistan. Details of the circumstances surrounding the killing of Baitullah Mehsud can only be gleaned from media reports citing anonymous Pakistani and US intelligence officials, so the facts are perhaps not precisely as described above. However, this account fairly characterizes the technologies and processes that enable government agents in the United States to transcend time and space in order to kill a particular person at a precise location, virtually anywhere in the world. Unlike a missile, a drone is a reusable weapons platform, and the putative military value for its ground-based user lies not just in its capacity to strike but also in its capacity to observe. This combination manifests in a deadly new form of power projection which rests largely (for the present) in the hands of the most powerful state actor in the world. The financial and operational commitment of the US military to drone warfare is increasing, and the underlying technologies are advancing rapidly. There has not, however, been a commensurate amount of debate over the embrace of something that might be regarded as politically desirable and yet morally worrisome: risk-free killing. The purpose of this book is to contribute to that debate by offering an ethical analysis of the use of armed drones. The analysis focuses on the United States, which has engaged most extensively in the use of this technology (in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia), although the lessons to be drawn from US experience are applicable to any other country that uses or seeks to use armed drones.

Drones

Military drones come in a range of sizes – from the 8-inch-long Wasp Micro UAV with a range of five nautical miles, to the 44-foot-long Global Hawk with a range of 5,400 nautical miles⁵ – and most are not equipped with weapons. It is also the case that unarmed drones are used by civilian actors for a variety of non-military purposes. For example, the surveillance capability of a camera-equipped drone can assist with such tasks as border monitoring, assessing damage to critical infrastructure (e.g. nuclear power plants), guiding search and rescue workers at natural disaster sites, monitoring weather patterns, searching for persons missing in difficult terrain, and tracking the spread of large-scale fires. From an ethical perspective, there is much that could be written about the use of unarmed drones for surveillance purposes in a domestic context. For example, one important area of concern is public safety. In the dense air traffic environment above major cities, drones need to be airworthy, and capable of avoiding other aircraft, including those carrying a large number of passengers, or stationary objects. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration Modernization and Reform Act (2012) requires the FAA to plan for the safe integration of uninhabited systems into the civil airspace ‘as soon as practicable, but not later than September 30, 2015’.⁶ Safety concerns there had been accentuated in August 2010 when, due to a ‘software issue’, operators briefly lost control of a US Navy MQ-8B Fire Scout helicopter flying at 2,000 feet which then drifted into the crowded and restricted airspace over Washington, DC.⁷ Another issue worthy of ethical assessment is the impact of drone-based surveillance on personal privacy. Remote-controlled and highly mobile sensor platforms enable surveillance (possibly covert) at unprecedented levels of intensity, intrusiveness and endurance. As a result, individuals concerned for their privacy might build up inhibitions about exercising such rights as free movement, free speech, free assembly and free association.⁸

The drones used in civilian contexts tend to be small and light. When it comes to the use of force, however, the size and payload capacity of a drone must be sufficient for carrying weapons. Accordingly, discussion in this book is restricted to drones classified by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) as Class III (weighing more than 600 kilograms), although it is possible that smaller and lighter drones – Class II (150 to 600 kilograms) and Class I (under 150 kilograms) – will carry a lethal payload in the future. The best-known Class III drone is the Predator which, when unarmed, can provide reconnaissance and target-identification capabilities. When equipped with Hellfire missiles, the Predator becomes a platform for both surveillance and strike. A round mounting (known as the Ball) under the nose of this drone carries two television cameras (one for seeing during the day and an infrared one for night time), and a radar device that facilitates viewing through clouds, smoke or dust, but it also carries a laser designator to lock onto any targets detected by the cameras and radar.⁹ The operational advantage that armed drones afford was neatly encapsulated by US President Barack Obama in a speech to the White House Correspondents Dinner in May 2010. Purporting to protect his young daughters from the amorous attentions of some young male pop stars in attendance, the president joked: ‘The Jonas Brothers are here; they're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don't get any ideas. I have two words for you, “predator drones”. You will never see it coming.’¹⁰

Stand-off military technologies that surprise an enemy are by no means without precedent. Indeed, German torpedoes during World War II provided a great advantage because ‘the weapon did not leave a wake and could not be spotted early by defenders to either take evasive or offensive action’.¹¹ Likewise, long-range artillery, missiles, and inhabited aircraft enable the waging of war over great physical distances and, potentially, beyond the range of retaliation. A question that frequently arises with regard to drones is whether the advent of this technology signals change or continuity. Throughout history, new military technologies – the crossbow, gunpowder, the machine gun, the tank and the submarine, to take just a few examples – have occasioned debate over the changing character of war. Each innovation in its time has prompted a mixture of outrage, awe and soul-searching on the part of users and victims alike. In one sense, therefore, the present degree of scholarly and journalistic attention to the rise of armed drones is nothing new, and there is a strong resonance with reactions to the initial introduction of older and now-familiar military technologies. In another sense, however, the advent of drones really is an unprecedented development because it has achieved the first complete surmounting of physical limits of time and space in military affairs. The aircraft already exists, but it is controlled by an on-board pilot. The long-range missile already exists, but travel-time from launch to impact is measured in minutes. Unlike the pilot of an aeroplane and the launcher of a long-range missile, the operator of a drone – a platform that combines aircraft and missile technology – is able almost instantaneously to kill another person as far away as on the other side of the world. This is genuinely new, even if it is more evolutionary than revolutionary.

Ethically speaking, any observation that ‘there is nothing new’ about drones is one that misses the point. Even if the use of armed drones does not introduce an entirely new form of killing, such use might still exacerbate or expand existing moral concerns about when and how force may be used. A moral concern need not be novel to be important, so it does not diffuse an ethical debate over the use of drones to argue that these are only as bad as, for example, B-52 bombers. That something equally bad has occurred in the past means neither that the older technology has become morally acceptable nor that the newer technology is morally acceptable. Later chapters of this book draw comparisons to the use of inhabited military aircraft in the course of exploring the ethical questions of when and how armed drones may be used. However, the fact that drones are uninhabited injects a sufficient degree of newness into airpower as to require fresh ethical consideration. Specifically, if drones cross a line between a mode of killing that entails reduced risk to the killer and a mode of killing that is risk-free, it is worth asking whether war is going on at all. This is a vital question because of the relationship between war and ethics.

War and ethics

When contemplating military technologies, the tendency of many scholars and policy-makers is to think only in terms of what is possible. However, if war is to remain (if ever it was to begin with) a pursuit more virtuous than organized murder, it is vital also to think in terms of what is permissible. War is a state of affairs, but ‘war’ is also a political term of art that ‘gives a certain status and connotation to violence’ as actors attempt to ‘legitimize and formalize the violence in which they engage’.¹² Ethics is thus constitutive of the practice of war as a form of violence that is (or is held to be) morally distinguishable from other forms (for example, violence carried out for law enforcement or murderous purposes). Colin Gray has observed that states conducting their international affairs ‘have always felt the need to provide moral justification for their acts’, and that the credibility of moral claims ‘can be a potent source of strategic advantage and disadvantage’.¹³ Binding war to ethical principles is not just valuable instrumentally, however; it is also inherently important precisely because all wars are a human tragedy. A widely used tool for ethical assessment is the centuries-old and constantly debated legitimization framework known as the just war tradition. This framework is comprised of two strands: jus ad bellum (the justice of going to war) and jus in bello (the just conduct of war). Just war theory within Western philosophical traditions traces its origins to the fourth century when, after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, Christian ethics on violence shifted from strict pacifism to a belief in the right or duty to fight for a just cause. A series of moral thinkers and legal theorists developed just war doctrine over the centuries, including Augustine (AD 354–430), Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). Today, secularized notions of just war are influential components of international laws, such as the 1949 Geneva Conventions (jus in bello) and certain provisions of the 1945 United Nations (UN) Charter (jus ad bellum).

Although adherence to rules is commonly held out as having the potential (to some extent at least) to redeem war morally, the just war tradition may rightly be subjected to criticism. Some welcome the principles within this tradition as providing a pragmatic framework for civilizing the inevitable human tendency to war, whereas others deride these as merely a sophisticated litany of excuses for departing from a pacifist ethics. Tony Burke, for example, has argued that the ‘formal rigidity of just war theory, which allows it to tolerate the killing of innocents provided it is done within its rules, fetishizes procedure over complexity and “intention” over effects’.¹⁴ And Jeff McMahan has lamented that ‘as soon as conditions arise to which the word “war” can be applied, our scruples vanish and killing people no longer seems a horrifying crime but becomes instead a glorious achievement’.¹⁵ A response to the latter observation might be that, through adherence to just war principles, ‘our scruples’ engage (rather than ‘vanish’) by prohibiting our deliberate killing of certain kinds of people (non-combatants) and by leading us to pursue by violent means only causes that are just.

From its earliest years, air-based violence specifically has been often advocated as a mode of restrained warfare that could reduce the overall duration and suffering of war. In the United States, for example, Brigadier General William Mitchell argued in 1925 that using an independent air force to attack an enemy nation's industrial and economic works would benefit not only his own country but also the enemy nation. According to Mitchell, the benefits of airpower would be the avoidance of costly land battles (such as those seen in World War I), the shortening of wars by attacks on the heart of the enemy nation instead of its military forces, and ultimately the saving of much blood and treasure on both sides. In other words, airpower was supposed to give rise to a new and more humane type of warfare.¹⁶ The world war that followed demonstrated, unfortunately, that any form of warfare can be exercised in an unrestrained fashion if the political will to do so is present. When British Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris took over Bomber Command on 14 February 1942, the British Government ordered: ‘the primary object of your operations should now be focussed on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers.’¹⁷ Accordingly, Harris directed the strategic bombing of German cities until the end of World War II in Europe. There was a sense afterwards that ‘what he had done was ugly’, and Michael Walzer reports that there seemed to have been ‘a conscious decision not to celebrate the exploits of Bomber Command or to honor its leader’.¹⁸ It was at the end of this conflict in the Pacific theatre, however, that the potential horror and inhumanity of airpower reached its zenith, when the US bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

As a form of airpower, armed drones tend to be considered not in terms of awesome destructive power but rather in terms of precise application of minimal force. And whereas the crews of World War II bomber aircraft suffered heavy casualties, a key raison d'être of the drone is to remove its operator from physical risk. Given the newness of drone technology, there is no vast record of empirical data to which just war analysis can be directed. Nevertheless, it is not only possible but also important to offer ethical assessments – albeit ones that are sometimes necessarily speculative – before particular military technologies have been used or are used extensively. New forms of warfare challenge us to rethink traditional ethical principles that govern and restrain the use of force, but equally the enduring normative power of such principles challenges us to look for what is good and bad about a given technological innovation. A caveat to this is that, for th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• War, Conflict and Ethics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Post-heroic war and armed drones
• 3 Drones and the war threshold
• 4 Conducting drone warfare: the case of Pakistan
• 5 Radical asymmetry and the moral equality of combatants
• 6 Drone operators and the warrior ethos
• 7 Autonomous drones and post-human war
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index