Drones and Murder
John Kaag and Sarah Kreps have a nice essay in the New York Times on The Moral Hazard of Drones. WC is always a sucker for a classical allusion, and the use of the Ring of Gyges is effective and apt.
WC will stipulate that bona fide al Qaeda terrorists present a legal dilemma. Because they use grossly different moral values than Western cultures, abhorrent even to the overwhelming majority of their fellow Muslims, but murder is murder. Homicide is still homicide. And even if the circumstances make the homicides a useful tool, a closed, hidden process for selecting targets is antithetical to American values.
Nor are the weapons as precise as we claim. A Hellfire surface-to-air missile launched from a Predator drone carries 20 pounds of high explosive. That’s not very discriminating when it explodes. And that’s when the intelligence data is good. Otherwise, it’s another wedding party blown to bloody giblets.
The website PakistanBodyCount.Org (by Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, a Fulbright Scholar at the Florida Institute of Technology) shows 2,902 civilian deaths between June 2004 to July 1,2012 and tallying 305 drone strikes carried out by the U.S. That’s just Pakistan. Data for Yemen doesn’t seem to be available.
Some bloggers are even more upset when Americans are killed by drone-launched missiles. Sorry. That’s hypocrisy in WC’s book. An ultra-secret, wholly unsupervised CIA group selecting and wasting humans is simply wrong. Collateral losses – a vile euphemism for killing innocents – simply makes it worse. And probably helps al Qaeda recruitment.
And, in the medium term, probably highly dangerous to U.S. interests. At some point in the not-distant future, drones are going to be available to the bad guys in the same numbers as AK-47s and anti-armor missiles are today. And the precedent set by the U.S. will not only deny us the moral high ground; it will provoke an escalating war of drone and missile technologies.
Like Gyges’ ring, our technology gives us an advantage: we can deliver a butcher’s bill at minimal risk to American troops. At least until someone replicates out technology. It doesn’t make our actions ethical. Or lawful. Or effective. Or even strategic.
Hmmm, drones. Interesting topic. Of course, at the end of the day when it comes to “war” it really doesn’t matter whether the plane is ‘manned’ or not. It makes a small difference in public perception, therefore, an easier job for the official in charge of releasing info when something goes wrong. But a drone vs. an f-15 is a distinction without a difference. As far as engineering advancement is concerned, well, the modern day drone may be bonerific technologically speaking, but is simply an evolutionary extension of the German V-1 buzz bomb.
Will other countries develop one, oh ya. But we’ll have more sophisticated radar / whatever technology to counter act them. Presumably. And if not, well you can faintly make out some sort of blade runner type technological future where we’re not totally in control of the technology. Just mostly in control. And for those at the top of the firepower food chain, that’s always been good enough. For everyone else, well, when you hear the “buzz” i suggest you take cover. Oh wait, you never hear a drone before you’re toast. I guess that is a little disconcerting. But hey, by the time that’s an issue, we’ll have cell phone virus that emit a sonic pulse when held to your ear that erase your last weeks memories. That’ll kinda suck….
mrderik
July 24, 2012 at 9:46 pm
“Even as we learn how this happened, we may never understand what leads anyone to terrorize fellow human beings. Such violence, such evil is senseless and beyond reason.” – President Obama
jamiesnuggets
July 26, 2012 at 4:10 pm
Touché
mrderik
July 26, 2012 at 6:56 pm