The Stimson Center, a security think tank, released a report (pdf) yesterday on America’s drone policy, prepared by a ten-member task force of defense and legal experts. The co-chairs of the panel, former Army General John Abizaid and Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, warn in a WaPo op-ed that this policy is making the world more dangerous:
The United States’ drone policies damage its credibility, undermine the rule of law and create a potentially destabilizing international precedent — one that repressive regimes around the globe will undoubtedly exploit. As lethal drones proliferate, the future imagined above is becoming all too likely.
Recent events remind us that the threat posed by terrorist organizations is very real, and U.S. drone strikes have achieved significant tactical successes in certain regions, but the scope, number and lethality of terrorist attacks worldwide suggest that these successes are not producing enduring strategic gains. On the contrary: Overreliance on targeted strikes away from so-called “hot” battlefields creates a substantial risk of backlash and reinvigorated terrorist recruiting and may create a slippery slope leading to continual or wider conflict.
Zack discusses the report’s findings in greater detail:
The Stimson task force identifies a number of specific problems within the larger problem of a future of constant drone strikes. First, ease of drone strikes makes it easy to avoid thinking strategically about whether they’re doing more harm than good. “To the best of our knowledge,” the task force concludes “the US executive branch has yet to engage in a serious cost-benefit analysis of targeted UAV strikes as a routine counterterrorism tool.”
This is hugely troubling, for a number of reasons the report raises. Do constant drone strikes help terrorist recruiting more than they degrade the groups? Do limited drone strikes risk escalating to wider wars? Can this kind of war meaningfully be regulated by Congress? The Stimson authors thinks there’s real concern in each of these areas — and that the US government isn’t paying enough attention.
Jeffrey Smith and John Bellinger, who served on the task force, stress the importance of developing a sound legal framework for drone use before other countries start emulating our bad example:
The traditional rules of war and for use of force do not address the complexities of modern conflicts between states and non-state terrorist groups. We believe the United States has acted responsibly in conducting drone strikes but unless our country clarifies the rules and practices it is following, other states with less justifiable motives can easily point to the U.S. program as grounds to conduct lethal drone strikes that are not remotely responsible. For example, on what legal grounds could we object to Russian lethal drone strikes on Ukrainian “terrorists” in Eastern Ukraine?
But Waldman isn’t sure he buys that logic:
Reading the report, I was struck by the general presumption that other nations are going to be taking their cues from us, both in positive and negative ways. For instance, members of the task force write, “US practices set a dangerous precedent that may be seized upon by other states—not all of which are likely to behave as scrupulously as US officials.” If those nations are unscrupulous, then why would they care how responsible we’re being?
This is important because pretty much every country with a military either already has drones or will be getting them soon (most of those are for surveillance and not yet weaponized, but they will be eventually). We can impose all kinds of checks and balances on our drone policy, but no matter how thoughtfully they might be developed, that doesn’t mean that China or Russia, not to mention smaller states, would do the same.
The Dish previously covered drone proliferation here. Adi Robertson, meanwhile, explores the panel’s claim that drones are not a bad tool in and of themselves:
The report, interestingly, refuted what the ACLU has called the “PlayStation mentality,” the idea that remote operation makes killing easy. “UAVs permit killing from a safe distance — but so do cruise missiles and snipers’ guns,” they wrote. “Ironically, the men and women who remotely operate lethal UAVs have a far more ‘up close and personal’ view of the damage they inflict than the pilots of manned aircraft.” They cited a 2011 study in which nearly half of drone operators reported high levels of stress, a finding that was backed up in 2013 by the Department of Defense. The report’s claim that this is because they “watch their targets for weeks or even months … before one day watching onscreen as they are obliterated,” though, may not be totally accurate. The 2011 study’s authors attributed the stress levels to long hours as drone use steadily increased; they were surprised to find that relatively little stress was a result of watching targets.
The Dish 