Chris Woods examines the United States’ questionable reliance on drones in covert warfare
The word drone evokes a myriad of striking images: remotely controlled aircraft at 15,000 feet tracking in close detail what’s happening on the ground below; a missile being fired at a target that turned out to be a wedding party or a funeral; buildings full of pilots who never leave the ground and steer aircraft thousands of miles away. It evokes phrases like “precision strike” and “careful intelligence.”
Starting with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the introduction of drones has changed not only how the U.S. goes to war, but also what it does in covert operations against presumed enemies.
Chris Woods’ “Sudden Justice” details the rise of drones in American warfare. The title, based on a quote from George W. Bush, should instead be “Sudden Injustice.” Justice in a democracy, after all, involves a legal process by which guilt and innocence are assessed dispassionately and with the right of the accused to confront their accusers. As Woods puts it, “The United States targeted and killed more than 2,800 people in its secret conflicts in Pakistan and Yemen to the end of 2014. This was four times the number of executions carried out on U.S. soil over the same period ... And as many as one in five of those killed were civilians.”
Drones have been most notoriously used in assassinations, a practice begun by President Bush and vastly expanded under President Barack Obama. Drones were originally developed to gather intelligence. It was only a step from watching the bad guys to arming drones with missiles and taking them out. On actual battlefields, this promised to reduce civilian and friendly-fire casualties since a targeted missile from a drone is much less likely to miss its target and hit unintended targets than a conventional air strike.
Problems arise when drone killings replace ground-based intelligence operations. Special forces operating on the ground in a pre-drone world tended to capture and question their targets, rather than immediately killing them. That at least reduced the percentage of deadly mistakes. Drones are useful for observing patterns of behavior that may indicate covert operations on the part of an enemy, but such “signature” patterns may actually indicate something else, as when a conference of tribal elders is taken to be a gathering of terrorists. Many unintended casualties of drone strikes have their source in this type of mistake.
Since the U.S. has defined the world as a battlefield, members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban are considered combatants in that war, regardless of what they are actually doing. “Enemies,” regardless of where they are, are considered fair game for air strikes, constrained only by political considerations.
Civilians can be considered another problem: so-called “collateral” damage. It’s often claimed that drone strikes are “precise” and “limit” civilian casualties. Indeed, the Pentagon sets up something called the “noncombatant casualty value” (NCV). For example, at one point in the Iraq War the NCV was set at 30, which meant that a pre-planned air strike could be carried out without high-level approval if 30 or fewer civilians were at risk; if there were more than that, the strike would need higher-level authorization. The figure made it possible for Pentagon spokespeople to say honestly that they were limiting civilian casualties, even though 30 civilian deaths might seem high to someone outside the echo chamber of military decision making.
The CIA, on the other hand, has finessed the question of civilians differently. It apparently has defined almost anyone caught in a drone strike as either a “military-aged male” or a “voluntary human shield,” thus categorizing them as support elements for the presumed terrorists. Not surprisingly, most CIA strikes in Yemen and Pakistan were reported as having no civilian casualties at all.
A third problem is with the “intelligence” used to identify targets. Woods quotes former State Department official Lawrence Wilkerson: “You can have the most precise Hellfire missile in the world … but if your intelligence is flawed you’re going to have fuckups … none of them [at the CIA] would say that intelligence is any better than 60 percent accurate at any given time.”
Woods does well at identifying these types of issues with our drone wars in the Middle East and Africa. His history of drone warfare is meticulously documented and detailed. He points out that the precedent of using drones for targeted assassination will likely have unfortunate consequences when other countries and groups besides the U.S., the U.K. and Israel gain access to this technology.
Probably in the interest of “objectivity,” Woods tends to discuss the legality and practical implications of drone warfare, rather than the philosophical underpinnings of what was once called the war on terror. Are terrorist bombings really a “war” that can be responded to with air power in places where no battles are going on?
Like it or not, we expect civilian casualties and inadvertent killing in war, but what becomes of the rule of law when the president can decide to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime?