Addicted To Drones?

From A Charging Elephant:



Addicted to Drones


Posted on October 1, 2010

by dancingczars
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Foreign Policy Magazine



BY MICAH ZENKO

Is allure of war by remote control the root cause of America’s dangerously unbalanced foreign policy?





“The military’s impressive, isn’t it?,” U.S. President Bill Clinton remarked to his aide George Stephanopoulos in 1994, as the 82nd Airborne Division stood by for orders to invade Haiti to remove the Raoul Cédras’s regime from power. For civilian officials, the military’s ability to find and destroy things from a safe distance never ceases to amaze. The CIA’s ongoing drone strike campaign is a particularly redoubtable example, with drone operators in the United States taking out targets in Pakistan’s tribal areas.




In September alone, the agency launched more than 20 unmanned drone strikes against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban operatives in Pakistan.
These recent drone strikes epitomize an important trend: When confronted with a foreign-policy problem that threatens U.S. national interests, civilian policymakers routinely call on limited military force such as drone strikes, cruise missile attacks, and special-operations raids. Many experts — from pundits to anonymous U.S. officials — laud such drone strikes as a low-cost, highly responsive, and effective military tactic. In practice, however, drones — like other uses of limited force — have substantial downsides that deserve attention given their increasingly prominent role.



One largely ignored downside is procedural and pertains to an unsexy and wonkish aspect of policymaking: interagency coordination. Under pressure to act in response to a threat and seduced by the allure and responsiveness of limited force, presidents elevate military options above other instruments of statecraft. Inevitably, after the missiles are launched, they announce their intention to keep the pressure on targeted adversaries with a follow-on campaign using all elements of national power. Once the bombs have been dropped, however, and the politically necessary “do something” box has been ticked, complex, robust secondary measures rarely come to fruition.



For example, in August 1998, in retaliation for bombing U.S. embassies in East Africa, the Clinton administration launched cruise missiles against a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan suspected of producing nerve gas and against al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden was thought to be hiding. The Clinton administration announced the strikes as the opening phase of a long-term fight against al Qaeda, with one White House official promising: “This is not a one-shot deal here.” Yet, as the 9/11 Commission revealed, subsequent attempts to apply political, diplomatic, and economic pressure on al Qaeda and the Taliban floundered. Nothing focuses the attention of senior policymakers more than the quick prospect of using military force, but once they do so, competing interests soon eclipse the original threat.



Another shortcoming is that the readily available option of limited force compounds the persistent underresourcing of non-military instruments of statecraft. Most civilian and military officials recognize the dire need to strengthen the civilian expertise required to implement the long-term development, capacity-building, and governance programs designed to handle the underlying terrorism and other security challenges — as best stated by none other than Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “Military success is not sufficient to win.” But compared with the celerity, tangibility, and political expediency of military force, long-term and laborious diplomacy and development policies almost invariably lose out. Congress is just as guilty of this mindset as are executive branch policymakers — legislators are on the verge of whacking around $4 billion from President Barack Obama’s foreign-affairs budget, which is projected to be only 7 percent of the forthcoming defense budget.


Perhaps most troublingly, limited force undermines its own political objectives by tarnishing the image of the United States regionally. In Pakistan, for example, CIA drone strikes are increasingly perceived as the face of U.S. foreign policy and denounced by mainstream figures from media commentators to pop singers. (According to a recent poll in the tribal areas, more than three-quarters of residents living there oppose drone strikes.) The sensationalist Pakistani media amplifies misperceptions by presenting harmful untruths that go unchallenged by U.S. officials, who are gagged by rules governing covert operations — even though the drone strikes are the world’s worst-kept secret

 
My comment/response was:
 
Christopher W.

October 1, 2010 at 8:11 PM
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In 1991, the Air Force conducted a Reduction-In-Force in which it cut its entire force of Target Intelligence Officers, of which I was one. I was the designer of the Korean Air Campaign, which would be used in the event of a war on the Korean Peninsula. We were tasked with choosing and vetting each and every target, and ensuring that the minimal force necessary to accomplish the mission was used. We decided the whats, whens, wheres, whys and hows. Shortly after the Air Force got rid of all of us, the United States Air Force bombed the Chinese embassy in Sarejevo, something that would never have been allowed to happen before. I was appalled, but not surprised–there is simply no process of target selection and verification any more. I have watched over the years as air bombardment became more and more like a pilot’s video game, and we have increasing numbers of very controversia civilian casulaties–in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a result. Now there are no decision points or checks and balances in the engagement of ground targets–it is now simply a matter of stimulus and response: the controller sees something, and then shoots a missile at it. As I have watched this develop, I have had more and more qualms about it, especially from a Laws of War point of view. We will continue to see more problems come about because of this practice. I understand the reluctance to endanger a pilot in a manned strike aircraft, but mistakes have been made (frequently) and more will be made, and there will be serious unintended consequences. A world war can start with a single bullet.






Christopher W.
October 1, 2010 at 8:20 PM
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P.S. Our potential adversaries are watching us intently. In their war exercises they simulate defeating our remote-controlled warfare by jamming our satellite navigation and communication capabilites–both are required to conduct Predator strikes, or by destroying those capabilites. (Why do you think China had such a destructive anti-satellite test a few years ago?) We can where there is an absence of air defense, but not against our military peers. If we ever fight Russia or China, we will not have the remote-controlled wonders made possible by GPS for guidance for bombs, missiles or aircraft–manned or unmanned.