Drone wars

The second point may be unpopular, but it needs to be said. And that is, in strict military terms, the campaigns have been highly successful. Indeed, President Obama is reportedly considering reducing the scale of US strikes, in part because the number of al-Qaida senior leadership targets has been reduced so much.

The campaigns have, however, been problematic politically. To a considerable extent, this has been a consequence of the confused strategic thinking that has characterised the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in particular. Specifically, once al-Qaida’s overt operations had been largely curtailed by military action, including drone strikes, the US administration turned its forces against other refractory organisations, notably the Taliban. Not only was this inconsistent with the original justification for invading Afghanistan – to remove it as a haven for al-Qaida – but it also eventually alienated significant elements of the local and international communities.

In other words, if there has been a problem with drone strikes, it has been political, not military.

The ethical and moral dimensions of those strikes continue to be debated vigorously both within official circles and publicly. There is, however, one aspect of the topic that has received little attention from the media and public critics. And that is the rights of one’s own soldiers.

As noted above, the drone campaigns have been a significant military success. Better still, they have been conducted at almost no risk to friendly forces. (It is disturbing to note that some Australian commentators have suggested that the use of drones is somehow ‘unfair’, implying that war is a game. ) Nor have the drone campaigns required the invasion and occupation of foreign countries by Western armies to fight so-called ‘counter-insurgency’ wars, a strategy that for half a century has been an unmitigated disaster for all concerned (think Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, the Lebanon, Afghanistan). Because of that flawed theory, millions of locals and tens of thousands of young Americans and Australians have died.

Within that context, France’s defence chief, Admiral Edouard Guillard, recently told his country’s senate that the great immorality open to the West would be to not use drones when they can be substituted for our own forces’ lives. General Jim Molan – one of the few Australians to have commanded armed drone strikes at a senior level – made precisely the same point in the April edition of AA.

As people like Admiral Guillard and General Molan continue to speak out, we can expect a better understanding within the public and the media of what drones are and what they do. But it is clear that a great deal more education is needed.

For example, the inference is frequently drawn that drones are autonomous, and that they act independently without a man in the loop. The irony here is that while autonomous drones – aerial robots if you will – already exist in large numbers, they do so predominantly within the civilian domain, where they are used to survey crops, monitor pipelines, assist emergency services, and so on.

By contrast, it is almost impossible to envisage countries like Australia, which are signatories to the full suite of protocols that govern the conduct of war, ever operating a weapon system that can kill without a person in the loop. And it will be that person, not an ‘autonomous’ machine, who will decide whether it is legitimate to prosecute a specific target with lethal force.

Finally, it sometimes seems the background noise that accompanies this debate drowns out the reality that armed drones are simply the latest expression of a military/technological process that for centuries has sought to increase the distance – and therefore the degree of safety for our own forces – from which targets can be prosecuted.

It’s time in Australia for a wide-ranging and informed debate on drones, featuring more light and less heat than is presently the case.