Send in the drones - at what cost?

Illustration: Michael Leunig

Technology transports humans everywhere — and nowhere. I say this on the back of news that the use of drones are being used more and more frequently by the United States. Unmanned aerial vehicle, to call them by their jargonistic name, are used for all manner of civilian work, such as rescue and transport, but it is their use by the military that brings them into the spotlight.

This week Iraq criticised America for it use of drones in surveillance operations and as protection over the US embassy, consulates and American personnel in that country. Such roles for those unarmed flying robots may be expanded by the State Department to other countries. Militarily, drones have been used about 300 times on targets in Pakistan for about six years. They have also been used in Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen and there are drone bases in the Seychelles and Ethiopia.

The armed drones don't always hit their targets. George Monbiot, writing this week in The Guardian quotes a report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that states 2300 people had died from drone attacks from 2004. Up to a third of those were civilians, many were children. It is estimated that for each terrorist killed, either Taliban or al-Qaeda, the civilian casualty rate is much higher.

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According to Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defence Initiative at the Brookings Institution, the US has 7000 drones. In The New York Times last Sunday, Singer warned of the political and moral consequences of an increasing use and reliance on drones against enemies. It is a frightening scenario.

He writes that although, in the main, he does not condemn drone strikes he is troubled in ''how a new technology is short-circuiting the decision-making process for what used to be the most important choice a democracy could make. Something that would have previously been viewed as a war is simply not being treated like a war.

''Without any actual political debate, we have set an enormous precedent, blurring the civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution's mandate for authorising it. Freeing the executive branch to act as it chooses may be appealing to some now, but future scenarios will be less clear-cut.''

And if the US can do it, other nations — and Singer says there are 50 with drone technology — will have no trouble following that lead. It is, in its small silent way, eternal war, without the declaration.

There are also consequences beyond the target zone. Joshua Foust, a fellow at The American Security Project (a non-profit, bipartisan public policy group), has written in The Atlantic magazine: ''The problem with the drones policy isn't that drones themselves are bad, but that they are happening without broader political, social and even economic policies that could mitigate their pernicious consequences.

''As one example, drones carry inherent political costs to the regime that allows them. Among domestic populations, drones are almost always unpopular, as they represent a distant and unaccountable foreign power exercising the right to kill them at will.''
And that's the rub in relation to a broadening of their use. People on the ground don't know if that robot flying over their heads is armed or not. How would they feel? How should they feel?

But for US domestic consumption, the call of the drones, to politicians, drowns out objections. When a drone goes down, there's no untidy mess to clean up. No bodies missing or found disfigured. No coffins, draped in the American flag, to be flown home to Smallville, USA. No grieving. No aftermath. No backlash. Perfect.

Who wouldn't embrace such a method of warfare? The fewer men and women sent to war the fewer casualties. It's progress, yes, of a kind. For in moving in that direction, the way is also paved for it to be easier to go to war. The calculus of casualties for the side with the drones — named somewhat predictably Predator, Reaper and Global Hawk — becomes obsolete.

If a country does not send its people to the frontline, but rather machines, the fallout is diminished because in the first instance the greater public would not be aware it is happening, and second, it would not have an impact on them. Is it really a war, or even combat, if a country does not invade that land, but rather flies overhead? No one is going to tie a yellow ribbon around a tree for a missing drone.

The drone is a growth industry. It is estimated, for example, that by next year the US will have spent more than $20 billion on them over the past six years.

It is also an industry in which the act of killing an enemy is removed from the arena of war. This is not anywhere near the same scale of judgment as pressing the nuclear button, but it is the future, for now.

In The Dead Hand, subtitled The untold story of the Cold War arms race and its dangerous legacy by David Hoffman, a contributing editor at The Washington Post, he describes the dark times of mutually assured destruction.

''By 1982, the combined strategic arsenals of the superpowers held the explosive power of approximately 1 million Hiroshimas. Even with their huge arsenal, Soviet leaders feared they could perish in a decapitating missile attack before they had a chance to respond. They drew up plans for a system to guarantee a retaliatory strike. They envisioned a fully automatic system, known as The Dead Hand, in which a computer alone would issue the order to launch.

''But they had second thoughts, and instead created a modified system in which the decision to launch all the land-based missiles would be made by a small crew of duty officers surviving deep underground in a globe-shaped concrete bunker. The system was fully tested in November 1984 and placed in duty a few months later. At the climax of mistrust between the superpowers, one of them had built a Doomsday Machine.''

The world may have stepped back from that time, but if there is one thing constant about humankind, it is this: we never tire of inventing new ways to arm ourselves.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/blogs/wokkapedia/send-in-the-drones--at-what-cost-20120131-1qr0c.html#ixzz1l7kV8bGf