Why is drone warfare bad

And that was when flags went flying for me. This technology is being used to kill people overseas. Attia decided to start making art that would stimulate discourse about drones and automated weapons systems. It also got him arrested. For his latest action in front of the UN headquarters, Attia met with a number of large, established nonprofits which seemed excited by the idea and wanted to be involved.

But they never followed through. So Attia said he struck out on his own, atoning, in a way, for his past life in the military. And I saw that there was really no plan to help the country get back on its feet, and we were doing more harm than good. So I did my time, kept my mouth shut, and I got out.

By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. Follow Quartz. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects. This debate is predominantly focused on armed drones and their use to carry out targeted and signature strikes against known or suspected terrorists and insurgents. To the extent that these debates engage with the effectiveness of drones, the predominant argument is that they are counter-productive because they infuriate local populations and governments, alienate potential allies, and serve as recruiting agents for insurgent movements and terrorist networks.

Regardless of where one stands in this debate, drones are here to stay. As a technology, they have a vast number of applications beyond their use in combat operations. Their development is in part driven by commercial and civilian uses from crop-spraying to traffic management.

Banning drones as a technology is thus neither possible nor desirable. One of the questions that consequently arises is about the regulation of drone use. For commercial and civilian purposes, some regulatory frameworks already exist such as in the areas of air traffic and telecommunications.

Arguably, international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict also offer some initial guidelines for the military application of drones, although their interpretation by the US Department of Justice in a White Paper [ PDF - 4. While these debates go on, drone technology, military and otherwise, rapidly proliferates, including to non-state actors. National and international regulation of military applications of drone warfare to one side, there are also a number of practical implications of the current, and future, technological advances.

To date, the overwhelming majority of lethal drone strikes have been carried out by the United States in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. These are countries, in contrast to Iraq, Afghanistan, and arguably Libya, with which the United States and its allies are not at war.

Currently only using unarmed Predator drones for surveillance purposes, the initial threshold for the first targeted strike is likely to be high—such as terrorist mastermind Mokhtar Belmokhtar , the man behind the attack on the Tigantourine gas plant, in eastern Algeria. Yet, as we have witnessed in Pakistan, and less so in Yemen, drones, combined with human intelligence, are highly effective in locating and targeting known terrorist operatives, and inevitably there will be a shift from targeted to signature strikes with very different thresholds applied to decisions to kill.

Another implication of drones is that they have shifted significantly the cost calculations of warfare. Drones can be deployed quickly, for long periods of time, and to lethal effect at lower financial cost and risk to life for those using them, compared to piloted aircraft or ground forces projected over great distances.

This makes it more likely that we will see more covert drone warfare, but less declared war. With countries as diverse as Pakistan , Iran , Turkey , Russia and China also investing in their own military drones programmes, proliferation risks via the international arms market increase, as does the risk that ever more countries will use drones including for military purposes at home for example, in counter-insurgency and in neighbouring countries for example, to target rebel camps.

Yet, proliferation of drones is only one step short of an impending drones arms race, already foreshadowed in recent developments of both anti-drones defence systems and stealth drones which have been used by the US for almost a decade, but are now also in Chinese and Russian arsenals.

As drone technology advances and proliferates ever further, national and international security interests will increasingly come to be seen being served better by drones than by expeditionary campaigns. But I want to focus here on one striking example of how the moral criteria were relaxed, or seem to have been relaxed, in order to justify the costs that drone warfare imposes on innocent people. The men who happened to be in the vicinity of the actual target were never themselves targeted; they were not the specific object of the attack; we had no knowledge of what they had done, or were doing, or were planning to do.

There are ancient precedents for this sort of thing. We are not aiming to kill all the men of military age, but we have made them all liable to be killed. We have turned them into combatants, without knowing anything more about them than their gender and approximate age. This new doctrine of liability may well have been reconsidered and rescinded after the New York Times report.

That means taking strikes only when we face a continuing, imminent threat, and only where … there is near certainty of no civilian casualties. But they probably have not been stopped entirely. All this suggests how important it is to open up the process by which lists of targets are put together and decisions about drone attacks are made.

The general criteria for selecting targets in the zone of war and in the intermediate zone should also be considered and debated not only inside but also outside the government, by the body of citizens, by all of us.

But I do want their deaths to be the subject of ongoing political and moral arguments, and there should be known government officials accountable to the rest of us for attacks that go badly wrong. There is another issue raised by drone technology, which, even if not now real, certainly warrants discussion.

One example of this is the attempt by American officials to expand the target list in Afghanistan to include drug dealers, on the grounds that the Taliban benefited from the drug trade. The attempt was apparently blocked by our NATO allies. Drone warfare, when it involves only the targeted killing of real enemies, can be justified under tough constraints. But these constraints are not easy to maintain and enforce in the circumstances of asymmetric war.

Up until now, at least, high-tech armies like our own have not been able to win these wars. Drones give us what I suspect is only an illusion of victory, though it is a powerful illusion. A long history of exaggerated expectations should make us skeptical about the possibility of winning wars or defeating insurgencies from the air.

But all that is necessary for my qualified defense of drone warfare is that there are real advantages to be gained by the use of drones against our enemies. Adopting a broad definition of combatants or justifying signature attacks are options that should be rejected.

Indeed, we should think very carefully before revising and expanding the targeting rules. The moral and political value of drones lies in their precision, which means using them only against individuals or small groups of individuals whose critical importance we have established, about whom we have learned a great deal, and whom we can actually hit without killing innocent people nearby.

This last point can be driven home very simply: imagine a world, in which we will soon be living, where everybody has drones. I want to stop now and try to restate in my own words a few of the most common arguments against the qualified defense of drone warfare that I have just provided.

And then I will defend my defense. Before I get to the strongest arguments, let me quickly dispose of one bad argument. The likelihood that many states and many insurgent and terrorist organizations will soon possess drones might be a reason for the United States to adopt a set of tough constraints on their use, but one could say exactly the opposite: that the United States should use drones right now without constraint in order to defeat their most dangerous future users.

That was a very bad argument, given the number of civilian deaths that would have resulted from a nuclear attack. A preventive war would have been a crime of vast proportions, and I think that American leaders understood this. By contrast, even the fiercest, most unrestrained use of drones would not produce casualties on anything like that scale. The idea of preventive drone attacks is nonetheless a bad idea.

So whose future use should we prevent? The technology is already easy to acquire and will soon be easier; all sorts of people will have it and will use it; some of them will be enemies. There is no way to prevent all future use of drones. Nor would it be possible to defeat potential enemies by preventive drone attacks, for drones are most useful in asymmetric wars, where conventional victory is probably not available.

So the argument for an early and heavy use of drones fails. The first of these arguments begins from the plausible claim that there is no reason to think that future users of drone technology — states or nonstate actors; officials, insurgents, or terrorists — will use drones in accordance with the rules I have urged the United States to adopt.

Surely other users will adopt rules of their own, suited to their interests and purposes, or they will ignore all the rules. And they will certainly use drones not only against specifically targeted individuals but against enemy targets more generally.

Or, claiming belligerent rights, against the Pentagon, or Fort Jackson, or any stateside military encampment? Or, more in line with their previous and current behavior, randomly, as a terrorist weapon, against the inhabitants of our cities? Why would anyone else observe them? If this is right, then here is the real choice that we face. We can stop using drones entirely and work for an international treaty outlawing their use, manufacture, and sale, and prescribing strong sanctions against any state or organization that makes or uses them.

Or we can acknowledge that they already are or will certainly become a common weapon, sometimes used legitimately, within proportionality limits, but also and probably more often used indiscriminately and illegitimately, beyond those limits. If those are the alternatives that we face, the choice should be easy: ban the drone while we can if we can. The second argument for a ban has less to do with our possible enemies than with our own political leaders.

Drone attacks are a form of warfare uniquely available to the executive branch of the government. He can strike in secret, without congressional approval, and without taking any political risks at home. Conscientious objection to the use of drones would have little point, and political opposition would have none of its usual reasons, for the president would not be asking Americans to risk their lives; he would not be asking them to do anything.

Democracy was born, we have been told, when Athens recruited its poorest citizens into the navy. This being so, it seems that all should share in public office. It can be argued, indeed, that this has already happened, that President Obama is waging war or, at any rate, killing putative enemies in military campaigns that have never been authorized by Congress, campaigns that American citizens know very little about. It is, of course, possible to imagine constitutional constraints, but surely it would be better to remove this tempting weapon from the president's arsenal.

Once again: ban the drone. The third argument for a ban is a radical extension of the second. Drones, in this view, are the harbingers of a new, totally mechanized and impersonal kind of warfare. They require us to think about what was once only science fiction: a war of machines to which human beings are entirely superfluous. Governments capable of waging wars of that sort will not only be free from any democratic control, they will also be free to deal brutally with any citizens who dissent from their policies if there are any.

Enemies of the state will be hunted by machines programmed to recognize or anticipate their enmity. This is the ultimate use of drone technology. Whoever controls the machines rules the country. Readers will recognize the apocalyptic overtones of this argument: drone warfare points us toward, or leads us inexorably to, a mechanized and soon-to-be totalitarian politics.

I will respond to these three arguments in reverse order. There isn't much to say about the apocalypse; it remains at this point science fiction.