The problem is the power to use them, not the drones themselves

I haven't thought much about drones since I had to worry about scheduling and clearing airspace for them when I was still in the Army deployed to Iraq. My deepest thoughts regarding them was to always remind myself not to put a tactical UAV over a target house before the raid hits.  As a strategic tool of national security, they struck me as just that: a tool. It is an alternative to a manned aircraft, but with lesser capabilities. No big deal and not something to waste grey cells on.

But then this was published in the NY Times yesterday. I am shocked at the authority the President has to determine who and what is a viable and legal target for precision strikes. I don't blame the President for this extreme power - it's the Congress' job to check his power and they're not doing that. They passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force against terrorists in 2001 and have not updated it since, leaving the President with extraordinary power.  Our strikes (manned or unmanned) in Pakistan, Yemen, and Horn of Africa seem to be against appropriate targets and are conducted in places where we have the authority to do so. It's the ability of the President to decide which individuals should be killed is astounding.

What concerns me about unmanned strike assets is the potential they have, in an environment where a small coterie have wide-ranging discretion to use them, to enable the United States to make a significant moral or strategic blunder. Even though I generally agree with Dan Trombly that many concerns about drones are not relevant today, that does not predict that the concerns he dispenses with will not be valid in the future. At the moment, UAV technology is not so advanced as to make it our primary strike platform across the globe (technology more limited by budgets and policy than capability). And we currently use UAVs in conflicts with the authority of the state where they are deployed. But what happens when we have a president not as scrupulous as President Obama?

My concern about about drones is not the drones themselves. The article linked about has little to nothing to do with drones themselves. My concern is about unchecked power. My concern is that people who can potentially rise to power high enough to direct the use of drones will use them foolishly because of the drones' inherent characteristics. The fact that the United States can now execute a (limited) bombing campaign without putting a single U.S. citizen into harms way is quite alluring - and that capability will on increase with time. With such extensive power, how long until will it be until we have a President who will use this mere tool to conduct attacks that were unfounded, unchecked, or fall short of jus ad bellum criteria. How long will it be until we have a President who orders an attack somewhere but does not understand the nth order effects that might trigger a sizable or regional war? Drones make these types of attacks easier and more palatable because the initial consequences (no loss of American lives) are negligible. We can invest so little and yet realize significant returns, surely, and that makes it so easy to use. But plans don't work out, intel is bad, collateral damage is not acceptable, thinking is muddled - things often assumed as irrelevant before an op but become quite relevant in the aftermath. Especially when it's so easy to execute the strike.

The United States should continue to use drones and develop drone technology for use against its enemies. It is only a tool and it does save (or has the potential to save) American lives while allowing the United States to protect its interests, making it a very valuable tool of American military power.  What we need to do, as a nation, is re-look what powers we vest with the President and ensure it isn't too easy for him or her to use force contrary to our ideals or interests. As drones advance, their use will become alluring to those with interventionist bents who believe that political capital comes cheaply if you don't have any skin in the game. You can't lose what you don't wager and I don't trust that everyone who might have power in the future will understand that using drones is still a wager, even if it's not American lives. Congress should start laying the groundwork now passing new laws to ensure when that person does come to power it's not too late.

The strange ethical paradox of mass slaughter from the air

The July-August issue of The National Interest carries a good review by Richard Overy of Martin van Creveld's most recent book, which I mentioned a few weeks ago. This passage was particularly striking:

[N]o Allied commander would have sent his troops into Hamburg with orders to machine-gun thirty-seven thousand of its inhabitants. It would unquestionably have been a war crime. But Allied aircraft killed just that number in July 1943, and there has never been even the merest suggestion that those who ordered the raid ought to have stood trial after 1945 (though there is now a widely held view that this was a war crime). Indeed, bombing killed hundreds of thousands in horrible ways. What made this kind of airpower different?

Overy hints at a few stale rationalizations, from the all-justifying horrors of the Nazi regime to the absurd suggestion that civilians were not expressly targeted by the bombing campaigns, to which the very psychological-philosophical foundations of Douhet's own airpower theory gives the lie.

So: how is it that William Calley is so reviled for the killing of 22 Vietnamese civilians while Harry Truman is largely forgiven for the killing of perhaps 200,000 Japanese civilians? Why is tactical atrocity punished while strategic atrocity is applauded?