Drone Warfare – A Test of Your Moral Judgement

Imagine that you are an operator at a nuclear power plant, and you receive an alert that toxic gases have leaked and are on their way to the cafeteria, where the gases will imminently and certainly kill all five people inside. You have the power to flick a switch and divert the gases to an office with a single person working. Would you flick the switch?

Now imagine that you are tramping the Tongariro Crossing. You see on the track ahead of you that a large boulder has come loose, and will soon roll down a slope and kill five trampers in the valley below. You know that if you push the guy tramping in front of you into the path of the boulder that he will die, but his body will stop the boulder and the five people in the valley below will live. Would you push that guy in front of the boulder?

If you are like most people, you would have said yes to the first scenario, and no to the second. Despite the fact that by now you would have realised both scenarios are essentially the same. This is part of a widely proven psychological effect in humans, which seems to make a difference in our choices about life and death. In the first scenario you are one step removed from the killing process, you can remain detached by telling yourself that the toxic gases killed the office worker. However, in the second scenario, you are directly responsible for killing the guy by pushing him in front of the boulder.

Detached Killing

The psychological effect of detached killing has become very contentious with the growing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) or drones by Western nations. The pilots of drone aircraft operating and killing in Iraq and Afghanistan are stationed thousands of kilometres away in the US. The pilots of these drones can drop their kids off at school in the morning, make a moral decision to blow up a house in Pakistan in order to kill a Taliban leader (resulting in civilian casualties), and then take the kids to McDonalds after school.

Does this detachment make drone pilots more likely to choose to fire on targets that kill civilians? Combine this situation with the fact that the US is not officially at war in Pakistan, and that the pilots of the drones are not operating under military law (they are CIA operatives),[1] and you have an ethically and legally bizarre situation. Are drone strikes in Pakistan “legitimate” armed combat? Or are they extrajudicial killings carried out by a superpower with a ‘might is right’ attitude?

Modern warfare – robots vs. tribesmen

The hallmark of today’s wars is that they are asymmetric. In essence, the professional militaries of developed countries (particularly the US) have become far too powerful for their enemies to engage directly (symmetrically). Instead, their enemies employ terrorist tactics (targeting civilian populations) or guerrilla tactics (particularly Improvised Explosive Devices – IED’s) in an asymmetric strategy to try and force their enemy to change its policies. So far this strategy has been extremely effective in beleaguring the most powerful military machine the world has ever seen. Part of the US response to these asymmetric tactics has been the increased use of the CIA in directly combating these enemies, and the development of drone warfare.

The conflict in Afghanistan has evolved into two theatres of war. A classical counterinsurgency against the Taliban has developed in Afghanistan, led by the US military and NATO partners (as well as New Zealand); while a counter-terrorism campaign against Al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership is being carried out in the border provinces of Pakistan by the CIA. As the insurgency in Afghanistan has intensified (see Figure 1 below) so too has the CIA drone strikes in Pakistan (see Figure 2 below).

Figure 1: Kinetic events in Afghanistan [2]

Figure 2: US drone strikes in Pakistan [3]

Sanitised killing

However, unlike the US military campaign in Afghanistan – which is governed by military law and scrutinised by Western media – the CIA campaign in Pakistan is completely covert. Who is actually targeted, and what procedure is followed before launching an attack is unknown. This results in a complete lack of accountability for CIA actions with drones.[4]

Drone warfare is largely defined by the Predator and Reaper drones (for a run down of what they are check out Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MQ-1_Predator)

Or some YouTube clips here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2grd9RVS1Ek http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hGD5JuL-YI).

Pilots of the drones are usually based in the United States (for a look at what flying a drone is like, check out this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unv9C2t7f5c).

Incredibly, no real debate has started in the US on the legality or morality of the use of drones; probably because of the effectiveness of the drones in killing Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders. In 2010 so far, the US has carried out 28 airstrikes in Pakistan.[5] Eight high value targets were killed during this period. CIA director Leon Panetta has described the drones as the “only game in town” in the war against Al-Qaeda.[6]

US citizens also seem more likely to approve of killing by drones. The Bush administration’s anti-terror rendition programme and use of mercenaries blew up into a whirlwind of bad PR. However the Obama administration’s expanded programme of drone assassinations in Pakistan seems to hardly make a ripple. Part of the attraction may be that drone warfare is seen as ‘costless’. Those who carry out attacks are completely insulated from the consequences of their actions in a far away corner of the world.

With the increasing use of drones and robots in warfare continuing for the foreseeable future,[7] it will be interesting to see when the ethical and legal implications of the CIA’s drone war in Pakistan begins to catch up.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/11/AR2010031103653.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns
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[2] Declassified ISAF intelligence report
[3] http://www.longwarjournal.org/pakistan-strikes.php
[4] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_mayer
[5] http://www.longwarjournal.org/pakistan-strikes.php
[6] http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/12/us-military-joins-cias-drone-war-in-pakistan/
[7] http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/02/peter-singers-w/