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 world we live in: if you couldn't laugh, you'd have to cry

This morning the president will announce his intent to streamline the federal government by merging a number of trade- and commerce-related agencies. In order to do so, he is requesting that Congress grant him so-called fast-track consolidation authority; this would allow the president to propose consolidations to the legislative branch and get a clean up-or-down vote within 90 days. No president since Reagan has held this power.

As you might imagine, this proposal is expected to be politically contentious. Republicans in Congress are unlikely to accede to the president's demands in an election year, notwithstanding the fact that this sort of consolidation and streamlining is generally consistent with their political platform.

Now consider this: the president can go to war without even asking Congress. When he does deign to request approval, it is reflexively and near-unanimously granted. The executive branch has consistently interpreted the Constitution as granting unitary executive authority to the president in matters of war and foreign policy. What's more, every White House since Truman's has asserted the unilateral right to use nuclear weapons as the president sees fit.

The president must go to Congress with hat in hand in order to merge the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Small Business Administration, but he can embroil this country in expensive, bloody, and strategically dubious foreign wars with scarcely a phone call to the Hill.

He needs an up-or-down vote from the legislature in order to roll up a few sub-cabinet offices, but can invoke the "housekeeping privilege" to bar the release of executive-branch records to the judicial branch—including in cases where the very question of executive privilege and presidential power is at issue.

I vaguely remember a literary quotation I read as a kid (and which I am of course completely unable to track down or even attribute in my adulthood, even with the powers of Google) that said something to the effect of man's inattention to the most important things and attention to insignificant things are the mark of a strange disorder. Quite.

"The more things change...": Statecraft and Malice Aforethought Edition

Let's flash back to America near the turn of the century, shall we?

And we can only say that it looks very much as though, in this case, the action of the United States government had been determined primarily on the basis of a very able and quiet intrigue by a few strategically placed persons in Washington, an intrigue which received absolution, forgiveness, and a sort of a public blessing by virtue of war hysteria—of the fact that … victory was so thrilling and pleasing to the American public—but which, had its results been otherwise, might well have found its ending in the rigors of a severe and extremely unpleasant congressional investigation.

Ok, you've found me out. The turn of which century?, you perceptively ask. It's obvious we're not talking about the close of the twentieth, of course; the very suggestion of a modern Congress investigating the executive for a foreign policy failure is risible.

The ellipses above mark where I omitted Admiral Dewey's name in George Kennan's analysis of the fleet action at Manila Bay and subsequent dispatch of an expeditionary army to the Philippines in 1898. Among the "strategically placed persons" were both Dewey and Theodore Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy and aspiring imperialist.

What should we conclude from this episode?

For its part, Congress seemed incapable of analyzing a presidential proposal and protecting its institutional powers. The decision to go to war cast a dark shadow over the health of U.S. political institutions and the celebrated system of democratic debate and checks and balances. 

The dismal performances of the executive and legislative branches raise disturbing questions about the capacity and desire of the United States to function as a republican form of government.

That's all? Oh, wait, sorry: that's Louis Fisher's verdict, in a 2003 Political Science Quarterly article (pdf), on the embarrassing show put on by the White House and Congress in the run-up to the Iraq war. Sorry for that distracting and totally irrelevant non-sequitur! Let's get back to Dewey at Manila.

Thus our government, to the accompaniment of great congressional and popular acclaim, inaugurated hostilities against another country in a situation of which it can only be said that the possibilities of a settlement by measures short of war had been by no means exhausted.

Why do you hate freedom, Kennan, you disgusting peacenik?

[Kennan's words are reproduced from American Diplomacy, a book adaptation of several lectures he gave in 1950. The quotes are from pages 14 and 12, respectively.]

Who needs bipartisanship when we've got pervasive groupthink?

Les Gelb has a not-very-interesting article in the newest issue of The National Interest entitled "We Bow to the God Bipartisanship." In it, he derides what he views as the tendency to overrate the value of bipartisan support to presidents' ability to carry out their foreign policy preferences. "[B]ipartisan backing at home has too often been purchased at the price of good policy abroad," Gelb tells us.

This is a curious assertion, especially since Gelb spends much of the next 3,000 words supplying historical evidence for precisely the opposite point of view: presidents have in large part ignored domestic criticism and succeeded in enacting policies that ranged from the grievously wounding to the mildly successful.

The only real support Gelb provides for his thesis statement comes in the form of fact-free assertion about the Obama administration's purportedly craven pursuit of popular policies "where it has little faith its efforts will succeed," as in the case of Iran, North Korea, Middle East peace, and Afghanistan. To which I can only muster a disinterested and disbelieving "meh."

All of this is more than a little galling coming from the man who perhaps more than any other represents the embodiment of the American foreign policy commentariat's uncritical pro-executive consensus -- and this at his own word. On the subject of the Iraq war, here's Gelb's unashamed explanation:

My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.

Incentives, eh? Perhaps all this "bowing to the god bipartisanship" is more of a distasteful personal habit, one that's left our man with a bit of a guilty conscience.