I don’t share or fully understand the visceral distaste a lot of people have for drone strikes. My problems with The Long War have more to do with strategy than tactics. But I would like to know more about the “dyspeptic Muslim convert whose code name is Roger.” He was apparently in charge of the drone strikes for nine years before he recently was replaced. Steve Coll, who has some connections, calls him “perhaps the most powerful figure inside the C.I.A. since the days of James Angleton, who, as the agency’s chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975, was charged with identifying Soviet moles.”
I talk about Angleton a lot. But that’s primarily because some small portion of his nefarious activities have been declassified over the years.
OK, here are my problems:
Other than that, they are great.
If you have a problem with killing people in other countries, then that’s your concern, not anything specific to drones. If you are worried about errors, none of those errors would be corrected by conventional air force strikes or lightning raids.
If you are worried about public opinion, drones may be terrifying and hated, but tomahawk strikes are many more times scarier and deadly.
If people would separate out what concerns them strategically from the tactic that is employed, that would be very helpful.
I think some people just don’t like drones because they don’t seem like a fair fight.
To me, that’s their biggest asset. Second is that they cause fewer unintentional casualties than any known alternative.
I question whether any kind of military strikes can make a positive difference in this kind of conflict, but the obsession with drones irritates me.
Wait; are we talking about drones or drone strikes? The original post evinced puzzlement over distaste for drone strikes, but the rebuttal to some of the reasons is “this question has zero percent to do with drones,” which is a different subject.
Can we settle on the terms of the discussion?
Not really a different subject unless you insist.
If you want to talk about Amazon delivery methods, well, okay.
Please don’t be disingenuous – unless you are really trying to establish an equivalency between proposed Amazon delivery methods and military strikes with unmanned aerial vehicles.
I’d like to think I can expect better, but I could be wrong.
I guess I don’t know what distinction you are trying to make.
See my first post, which was in response to your answer to dataguy, who brought up three pertinent points about drone strikes, the subject of your Casual Observation post. Your answer then centered on drones, not drone strikes, as if to say that Amazon delivery vehicles were what you were talking about all along, and in re-reading your original post, that’s not what you were talking about at all.
Is your point now that you are puzzled by people’s distaste for any use of unmanned aerial vehicles in any capacity at all? Because that’s not where this started, and I’m not sure I know anyone who has a visceral distaste for UAVs. I do know that people have a visceral distaste for drone strikes (as distinct from drones).
I don’t know how to make that any plainer.
It doesn’t make it plainer at all. It seems to indicate that I was correct to take your criticism lightly.
If you want to talk about drones, go ahead.
I am talking about drone strikes.
WHAT!!!???
AG
You are confused in exactly the way that the NRA is confused about why people get so angry about gun violence when cars kill more Americans. And you can kill people with knives, too, you know. Why focus on guns?
I mostly don’t understand the drone hysteria either, because, like you, I see drones for the function they fill — a function that has been well serviced in the history of war. But drones are new, so people make new associations for a new weapon.
Drones are tailor made for assassination, and came at just the right time to start being used. Strikes used to be about territory and war-making capacity. Now they’re about organizations, and that means taking out individual people. If people aren’t comfortable with assassination, they’re not comfortable with drones. By explicitly assassinating people, we’ve made it acceptable for an enemy to knife one of our generals in the back at a movie theater. Sure, we could bomb the village instead of hitting the house with drones (and that would obviously be much worse).
I think a lot of problems the people have with drones are the exact same that they have with air strikes. The problem is, air strikes are an accepted and absolutely unassailable way of conducting war. It’s like people in the 16th century complaining about their children being obsessed with chess have now moved onto complaining about videogames. The cutting edge is always the best target.
That’s the liberal side of the anger. The conservative war against drones is fear they won’t be able to have successful standoffs with federal agencies from their mountain cabins any more.
And I wrote that last sentence as a joke, but I’m thinking about it, and it’s probably closer to the truth than anything Rand Paul could say in thirteen hours.
air strikes are an accepted and absolutely unassailable way of conducting war.
Even if properly analyzed data from WWII on indicates that it fails on both the effective and cost measures.
Your cavalier acceptance of drone warfare betrays an unwillingness to consider all the impacts and unintended consequences today and tomorrow as drone development continues. Sort of like Americans in the early years after dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Yes, Marie, even if. Talking against air strikes is a non-starter of a conversation. But talking against killing people is almost just as much of a non-starter, and that’s really the problem.
I disagree with the wars we’re having, and how we’re conducting them, how they have, without fail, led to more destabilization and death over the past one hundred years the United States has been doing it; not to mention the politics of the region are so opaque that we’re just as likely to be funding three opposing sides of five different conflicts and the inevitability of blowback, etc.
I’m aware of the issues with drone strikes — which are really amplified versions of the same issues we have with airstrikes (and maybe amplified enough to be qualitatively different) — but isn’t the real issue these wars and involvements themselves?
Oh, one thing I am authentically not cool with is how the CIA is overtly running wars now — not possible without drones. But that’s an aside.
The conversation starter for me is, even if I had to quote from original speaker who I don’t much respect:
War destroys and makes all of us less human/humane.
How could you not respect a general and president who said that? In 1953 no less?
Iran 1953 for one, but list is a long one, and no less destructive and absent any shred of wisdom was Vietnam and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba Nixon. Silence on the commie witchhunts.
How much value did the data you refer to have on those who planned the firebombings of Dresden or Tokyo? These are rational critiques of using air strikes to conduct war but war is not rational.
War has always been about technological advancement. Drones aren’t going anywhere.
Nukes are a different story. MacArthur wanted to use them in the Korean War. Nixon wanted to drop one on Hanoi. Kissinger, of all people, talked him out of it.
As to your first question, don’t know that all the data was in before torching Dresden and Tokyo. However, iirc, punishment rather than effectiveness seemed to be the aim of those two actions.
I think that’s right. They meant to terrorize and punish the civilian population.
I’ve always thought Obama supported increased use of drones because it was less controversial domestically. He can say he’s being strong on terror while not committing troops on the ground. Drones have allowed us to expand the GWOT from Yemen to Somalia and elsewhere because there’s no risk to losing pilots.
This week is the first time there’s been a flaw to the plan as I’m not sure they ever considered that Americans might be collateral damage.
I’m fairly sure that Democrats would be much more outraged if it was a Republican ordering tons of drone strikes.
WHAT!!!???
AG
Seems we desperately need a counter measure for drones. There has got to be a way to hack a drone before it reaches the WH. Also, we need some kind of radar system to detect drones and any other low flying craft. But our 20th century congress is completely concerned about missile defense, lasers, high tech jets, and legislating sexual behavior of consenting adults.
You’re right that it’s more a matter of strategy than tactics, and drones are just tools in the toolchest so far as military options go.
Given this, drones are important because they’re the tool that really makes the current troublesome strategy possible. They’re cheap, reasonably effective, and most importantly, they lower the bar to military action/involvement in a country. Heck, they’re driven through the CIA to facilitate lowering of that involvement bar.
Without drones, we’d not be involved in anywhere near so many places.. at least not in such a visible and high impact (boom) way.
Actually, yes, that is an excellent point. Without drones, we would be unable to prosecute this kind of strategy. Remember when we had to overthrow governments to get people mad at us? Now it’s trivial to sprinkle death into every neighborhood. Someone more clever (and more living-in-the-future) could write about the coming wars as a backlash against drone warfare.
Drone strikes are high tech terrorism reserved for those with the wealth to perpetrate them. (Only the individual drones and the bombs they carry are cheaper than other alternatives. The cost of the infrastructure required for the complete operation is excluded.)
As barbaric as car bombs and beheadings, but those that execute murders via drones consider themselves civilized because they don’t have to sacrifice their own bodies or get actual blood on their hands.
For the moment. The price of the technology is going to come down very quickly in the near future.
Looking forward to the future when a single human can push a button and the robots will carry out the task from start (mining the natural resources) to finish (blowing away some folks).
My fundamental problem with the drone program is one of future proliferation and the utter failure of anyone involved to start thinking seriously about containment and/or tamping down on the technology. Yes, there are human rights issues, legal issues, etc. about our drone program, many of which concern me. But these are all dwarfed by the fact that unless somebody does something very about this technology pretty soon everyone on the planet is going to be able to get their hands on little flying machine guns and pilot them from their basement.
Is this a separate issue from our drone strike program? I doubt it. My guess is that the drone program is driving a lot of the innovation in the private sector and that it is going to bleed out into military programs in other countries, not to mention the efforts of non-state actors. But even if it isn’t, it is certainly making it clear to the rest of the world that they need to work on developing this technology, and pronto.
We are right at the beginning of a massive new arms race.
Micah Zenko
So, is everybody OK with major decision makers in our government only being known by codenames? I feel like that’s almost the more important story, but its entirely elided.
I find this interesting today because an article I read yesterday reported that the President has delegated the target list for drone strikes to the CIA. The President is no longer making the life-and-death decision himself nor it is supposed doing due diligence over who the CIA is targeting. This secret power in whoever’s hands without a means of accountability is what is troubling to so many people — especially since President Obama set the precedent of targeting a US citizen and the White House said that that could occur even in the United States. The CIA then is cop-judge-jury-and executioner in the use of drone strikes. It can pursue its own political agendas, which might include letting a US physician be the collateral damage in and otherwise unnecessary strike on “the bad guys” whoever the CIA deems them to be.
The longer this goes on without transparency and accountability, the more concerned I am about how the meaning of “imminent” is being stretched to aggrandize executive, particularly secret exective, power. Institutionally that can come back to bite US citizens hard. And in retrospect, the facile argument that the President needed unilateral rapid decision-making power over nuclear weapons and the emergency military actions (and that occurred in the Truman administration) because of “imminent attack” (a Pearl Harbor appeal to the public) has been a big mistake.
A drone is smaller or larger improvement and the weaponizing of a model airplane. The biggest problem with the most expensive military in the world developing the technology for reducing the cost of war is that it is a form of unilateral disarmament of its deterrent power, even as it extends its capabilities. That means that it will be easier for smaller nations and even non-state actors (even corporations) to develop effective attack capabilities against the US. And our failure to consider politics in international relations provides the incentives for nations to develop their own drown capabilities and radar evasion capabilities against the US.
Finally, the issue that most provokes criticism is the failure of the US intelligence community to do due diligence on the quality of the intelligence they are using to determine “imminence” and on the identity of the people who are being attacked. Quite often the victims are nowhere near being combatants at all. And attacking non-combatants gratuitously is contrary to international law and not a practice that we would like to see reciprocated.
I think the analogy with Angleton is apt. Who is it that is identifying the “bad guys” in this process? What assurance is there that those identifications are accurate or that the targets are in any way dangerous to the United States. “US interests” is such a vague characterization that it can be anything. And what guarantee is there that the CIA isn’t just whacking people in order to keep a war going to pad their own budgets? After all, they do not know who they are actually targeting through that long-distance video. And after the fact all adult males are considered “militants”. That means that Dr. Weinstein was in that vague category until someone went to the trouble of identifying him.
And if the drone strike was an innovative form of “hostage rescue”, everyone involved in the decision-making for it should be relieved of duty. That is beyond hare-brained.
“That means that it will be easier for smaller nations and even non-state actors (even corporations) to develop effective attack capabilities against the US. And our failure to consider politics in international relations provides the incentives for nations to develop their own drown capabilities and radar evasion capabilities against the US.”
Years ago the US conducted a war games analysis that showed that swarms of fast boats could overwhelm and destroy an entire naval task force (carrier, destroyer, etc) in a very short time. I believe the Navy has taken steps to account for that threat. The point is that this is the nature of war. New technology is deployed and nations adapt their offensive and defensive capabilities. The
” And what guarantee is there that the CIA isn’t just whacking people in order to keep a war going to pad their own budgets?”
The CIA isn’t keeping our wars going. They will get funding regardless. That’s entirely on the President. I think people on the left tend to focus on the CIA as the bad guy when it’s the policymakers who have ceded power to them.
The secretive nature of the intelligence community and the absence of real accountability to Congress leads to the concern that the tail is wagging the dog and that the sorts of tactics that the CIA applies to other nation’s governments is being applied to our own in order to increase the funding and leeway of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
It is one hypothesis for why the policy-makers have ceded more and more to the intelligence community and decades of history have gone missing as a result.
Presidents can be blackmailed and possibly assassinated for resisting. Certainly they can be sandbagged in the same way that other executive departments do.
makes you a most hated person on the planet.
A clueless individual, of the first division.
death on two legs.
you shame us all.
How? The point is that drones or planes, makes no difference: both are immoral and counter-productive to our supposed aims, and neither should be used because “it’s the war, stupid”. See Median’s comment to Marie above.
The point is that drones allow for wars without being wars. And not even counter-state wars.
Drones and non-state actors create war without end. And they are positively reinforcing reactions.
Drones are a difference in kind just as aerial bombardment a century ago was a difference in kind. Civilians in fact become targets more frequently despite the pretense of the action being counter-force and not counter-value.
What Digby says:
Nice sarcasm.
I cannot even stand to read through all of these comments. You have lost your audience, Booman. Too bad. I used to suggest that you change the description of this site from a progressive site to a cenrist site. I take that back. Call it a killing site and be done with it.
Disgusting.
AG