David Nather at Politico has written a nice polemic (” Drones: Tough Talk, Little Scrutiny “) taking American lawmakers to task for posturing and hot air–at best–in response the current moment of awareness regarding drone warfare, indicting them with their own words.
Via Nather:
“The idea of having 535 commanders in chief decide the target is ridiculous,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, who plans to introduce a resolution next week supporting the drone strike program. “It should reside with the commander in chief to decide who is an enemy combatant.”
Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says he’s fine with the drone strikes even though he was one of the lawmakers calling on the Obama administration to release the legal opinions.
“This has been a huge value-added in disrupting al Qaeda events. And guess what? Sometimes Americans have joined that organization to kill Americans. That’s their choice, not ours,” Rogers said in an interview on MSNBC Wednesday.
Whereas more critical lawmakers seem to be most concerned with scoring points on the principle of oversight and congressional responsibility.
The underlying issues with drone warfare, however, go far beyond the current controversy over access to classified legal opinions or even the marginal utility of drone strikes in a dry-eyed cost-benefit analysis. This is a technology that has been introduced incrementally, with mission creeping along to keep pace with capacity. A state that deploys such technologies absent a thoroughgoing examination of the moral and existential implications runs the risk–I would argue in the case of the United States that we have already succumb to the temptation–of adopting a practice, the use of drone warfare inside of other supposedly sovereign states, simply because we can. The capacity is driving the policy, and the capacity is at this point ever-growing.
The conundrum is rather obvious: What commander-in-chief is going to voluntarily quash the further development of a capacity to inflict precisely targeted mayhem on those designated as enemies with (1) no direct threat of loss of American life and (2) no significant political opposition?
Now, when I say that drones inflict “precisely targeted mayhem” I am speaking, of course, in relative terms. The current generation of combat drones mostly deploy Hellfire Missiles –the precision of which is as in comparison to conventional artillery, bombs or cruise missiles. “Collateral damage” in the form of the unintended killing and maiming of non-combatants who happen to be in the vicinity of intended targets (or the misidentification of targets) is both politically explosive and morally fraught–and difficult to quantify exactly, given the often remote locations of strikes and the secrecy surrounding the program. But we make a serious mistake if we focus exclusively on the problem of civilian casualties. While there are certainly those in the U.S. establishment who find such casualties “acceptable,” there is virtually no one who would not minimize or eliminate them if this could be done without undermining the capacity to “take out the bad guys.”
This suggests that the problem with drone warfare is primarily technological and operational: if only we could make and deploy munitions that were even more precise, that would be sure to target and kill only those we want dead, then all would be well. This, it would seem to me, is a relatively trivial technical problem. Designing small, relatively inexpensive drones armed with the functional equivalent of a handgun, perhaps deployed in swarms as sub-munitions dropped as a payload from a larger drone–in effect, assassin drones–is well within current capacities. Thus it is a simple matter to imagine a capacity to target virtually any person on the face of the earth, individually, with no material risk.
Such a capacity, no matter that it would doubtless reduce the number of noncombatants killed and injured, would effectively dissolve the difference between warfare and capital punishment, giving the U.S.–and in a short time doubtless many other states, the technology involved is not that difficult–the ability to act as judge, jury and executioner over everyone on earth. Such a power is in some ways even more frightening than nuclear weapons, precisely because the lack of collateral damage makes the use of drone-weapons thinkable, as we have already seen even with the current generation of relatively clumsy weapons.
Who will be left, then, to object? Yet the giving over of a juridical power to target and kill specific individuals anywhere on the planet is a power veritably like that of the angel of death, godlike in its ubiquity, terrifying in its implications. Who should be trusted with such a power? And how does the process of converting warfare into targeted assassination not sanitize the endeavor, making it into something acceptably permanent? Perhaps everyone, or at least everyone found to be politically unreliable should have his (or her) own private drone assigned, hovering patiently just out of sight, ready to convert us into “enemy combatants.” Sword of Damocles anyone?