The Case Against The Case For Drones

Kenneth Anderson has an essay in Commentary called “The Case For Drones,” arguing that conservatives should accept drones as effective, moral, and basically awesome, and that any conservative who doesn’t is a kooky isolationist. I suppose some drone pushback from the neoconservative wing was expected after Rand Paul grabbed the spotlight for the libertarian wing a couple months ago, but I’m not sure I’m convinced by Anderson’s case.

To be fair, he makes some good arguments against the weaker, more tangential anti-drone claims, such as the hazards of remote impersonal killing (he asks how is it any less impersonal than an old-fashioned pilot dropping bombs on things he can’t see, and says we still need ground contacts for drone-able countries), or the slippery slope that killer drones will soon be circling London or Paris (he says we only need them in countries with weak governments that can’t control their insurgents). But those kinds of things were never my real problems with our drone policy. Regarding the heavier claims, my anti-drone bias remains skeptical.

Are Drone Strikes Effective?

Anderson argues against the claim that drone strikes are counterproductive because the resentment of civilian casualties creates more militants for every one we take out. In a response that seems bizarre to me, Anderson claims that “village-level resentments fueling recruitment… matters far less in terms of war fighting when the United States no longer has infantry in those places.”

Maybe I’m missing something, but I thought we were striking militants because they were planning attacks against the United States, not because they might attack our nearby soldiers. So, hey man, villagers might join al-Qaeda after we drone-kill their civilian relatives, but it doesn’t matter because we’re getting our troops out of there anyway and sending them back home, which is actually the place those new members are plotting to attack. What?

Anderson also seeks to downplay how much Pakistani citizens hate the drone strikes, apparently putting more trust in something a soldier “remarked” to him than the actual data, which he also misrepresents:

Do Gallup polls of the general Pakistani population indicate overwhelming resentment about drone strikes—or do they really suggest that more than half the country is unaware of a drone campaign at all? Recent polls found the latter to be the case.

There was a Pew poll indicating that “just over one-in- three Pakistanis (35%) have heard about the drone strikes,” but Anderson conveniently leaves out the rest of the details: “Nearly all (93%) of those who are familiar with the strikes say they are a bad thing.”

Instead, Anderson takes the time to make red-herring arguments against ever fearing blowback, because, hey, if George McClellan hadn’t been replaced because he was too concerned about blowback, “the Union would have lost the Civil War.” Ah, so we point out how different the global war on terror is from traditional warfare to defend the necessity of drone strikes, but we’ll draw random historical parallels to downplay the arguments against them. What?

If anything, I might argue that blowback is more likely from arbitrary targeted killings that drop out of the sky into normal life and accidentally kill civilians than it is from the sort of traditional bombing of countries at declared war. So I don’t think Anderson has made a convincing case that the drone strikes are not counterproductive.

Are Drone Strikes Moral?

Anderson argues that drone strikes are moral because, even though they kill civilians, they kill fewer of them than any alternative we have. He finds someone who concludes that “on average, each drone strike seems to have killed between 0.8 and 2.5 civilians.” Oh, is that all? That’s honestly higher than I expected; the median may be lower than the average, but are we really saying that basically every drone strike kills at least one civilian? Is that what we should expect if drones really allow us to “choose a moment to attack when civilians might be least at risk”?

Anderson tries to throw doubt on the numbers by reminding us of the “differences in legal views defining who is a civilian,” leaving out the detail of the U.S. government’s view that all “military-age” males are by default not civilians – which would tend to undercount any such tolls, and while we’re at it, would almost certainly affect the morality of the overall strike decisions. Is that really “lawful under long-standing U.S. interpretations of the laws of war,” I wonder?

Anderson also tries to defend the “signature strike” tactic, which I’ve criticized for being error-prone because it involves targeting people based on suspicious patterns from surveillance even without knowing who the people are. He suggests that a “behavioral signature” might be “organized groups of men carrying weapons, suggesting strongly that they are ‘hostile forces’.” I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure how I feel about arguing that the government should freely dispatch with unidentified people bearing arms, no matter how “intelligent” the “assessment” is claimed to be…

Anderson calls some important doubt on the oft-cited NYU/Stanford report for having a strong anti-drone bias, but he does not deny, much less defend, the “double tap” tactic that I find particularly insidious.

Are Drone Strikes Constitutional?

Anderson agrees that the current structure of drone strike policy is not ideal; “the list of matters that need legislative and administrative reform in order to put drone warfare and targeted killing on an institutionally stable footing is a long one.” But he doesn’t seem as interested in preserving freedom and liberty as in offering “firm institutional and political support to drone warfare as a legitimate, effective, legal, ethical, and necessary tool of counterterrorism.”

I suppose this is where the conservative wings diverge on their differing views about the scope of government. We have a government that experiments with power in one administration, expands them into defined policies in the next, and perhaps tries to codify it all into law in the third. In principle, I agree that drones are a “tool,” and I don’t really agree with the knee-jerk, total anti-drone attitudes.

But I think this tool fit naturally in the hands of an expanding big government that is always stretching the limits of its enumerated powers, which is how we’ve gotten things like signature strikes and double-tap strikes and dubious interpretations of “associated forces” and “combatants” and “imminent threat” – immoral things that also make the tool counterproductive. Firmer Congressional definitions would be better than the arbitrary executive ones, but that does little to prevent the continued onslaught of powers against personal liberties.

Given my observations of government behavior over the last decade and beyond, it’s just hard for me to be optimistic that this tool will tend to be used for good in their hands. There doesn’t seem to be much of a limiting principle here. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with clever scenarios where it would be both “effective” and “moral” to change domestic policy to allow armed drones within our borders; this is the stuff from whence torture and internment are justified.

Are Drone Strikes Necessary?

Thus our foundational divide. People like Anderson seem to strongly believe that drones are a necessary tool for protecting America, and they treat the political limits with a sort of hand-wavy magic that our government will somehow find a way to make it all safe and legal.

People like me strongly believe that personal liberties are necessary for keeping America worth defending, and we treat the military limits with a sort of hand-wavy magic that our government will somehow find a way to keep us safe without things like “targeted” killings on unnamed suspects who are potentially American citizens. Besides, if drone strikes really aren’t effective, and I remain skeptical that they are, we’ll have to find another way.

Fundamentally, I just don’t trust the government to ever have enough information and enough accuracy to determine the fates of people who are not obviously engaged in warfare on a battlefield. Scenarios that justify such things tend to assume too much confidence in what we actually know about the people involved, and mistakes thus far have shown those assumptions to be wrong many times.

But what if there really are terrorists who hide in the mountain villages of weak governments to plot lethal attacks against us, and defensive military tactics are not reliable enough, so targeted drone strikes really are the best way to counter them while still killing fewer civilians than any alternative we have? I don’t know enough to discount the possibility that this may be true, which is why I’m not calling for a total drone ban. But based on everything I’ve learned and observed so far, forgive me if I’m still mighty skeptical.