Drones and the new way of war

A pillar of US President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign for the presidency was his opposition to the Iraq War and his pledge to end the US force presence in that country and Afghanistan. His position on the need for greater accountability and a higher threshold for action when deciding to go to war not only won him the presidency but earned him the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. In his speech accepting the prize, Obama focused on the tensions between war and peace, the idea of “just war” and offered what was for many a surprising defence of realism in foreign policy, a position that acknowledged the need to use force in defence of national and international interests. To call Obama a starry-eyed idealist or a naive pacifist, as critics often do, is an unfair and misinformed assessment of his thinking.
Obama has tried to honour his campaign pledge. Since winning the White House he has reduced the number of US troops deployed to fight around the world from 180,000 to less than 15,000. At the same time, he has increased the US reliance on drones, or unmanned remotely operated aircraft, to attack discrete targets. The use of drones has been largely invisible to public scrutiny: The programme has been highly classified, the targets are distant and the strikes usually occur in remote locations. According to the report released by the Obama administration, between January 20, 2009, and December 31, 2015, there were 473 strikes that killed between 2,372 and 2,581 combatants and between 64 and 116 noncombatants.
Human rights groups challenged the report. They first questioned the definitions of key words: Which branch of the government is involved: the military or the CIA? What constitutes a “strike”? Where are the areas of “active hostilities” and what does “outside” mean? In addition, they questioned the numbers. After all, the report excludes deaths caused by airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. At the same time, other estimates of the number of civilians killed by US strikes in those “areas outside active hostilities” range from 200 to more than 1,000. To their credit, US officials concede the numbers are uncertain – pointing to the distance and the remoteness of many of the attacks.
In too many cases, however, innocent lives have been lost and the US government has admitted that it got key facts wrong – such as in the January 2015 CIA drone strike on an al-Qaeda compound in northwest Pakistan that mistakenly killed two foreign hostages. Despite a long period of surveillance, the US had no knowledge that hostages were present at the building. Legal scholars note that the Obama administration has not yet provided the legal rationale that gives it authority to carry out those attacks. Executive authority in the US is tightly circumscribed: The president can only wage war pursuant to congressional mandate. Yet many of the attacks occur in countries where the US has not officially declared to be at war.
The critics also note that the executive order Obama issued that calls for protective measures for civilians and requires future administrations to release an estimate of civilian casualties each year can be easily rescinded by the next president.
A real and enduring commitment to transparency will be important since drone warfare will be increasingly popular, and not just in the US. The proliferation of such technologies is already widespread and their use in conflict has become an increasingly attractive alternative to traditional war fighting.
Civilian casualties, however, undercut that advantages. And these attacks make war harder to see, raising moral questions about accountability and the ease of killing. Such invisibility is not necessarily a virtue.