Brian Williams - Predators

The significant decline in U.S.-Pakistani relations following the September 2009 raid on Musa Nika and the May 2011 Navy SEAL incursion into Pakistan to kill bin Laden also indicate how fraught with political implications unilateral, ground-force operations to kill and capture terrorists are in the sovereign nation of Pakistan. The same certainly holds true for Somalia and Yemen. Even if the Pakistanis allowed U.S. special force raids, the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu, Somalia, serves as a potent reminder of how disastrous snatch operations can be in human terms. In that incident, eighteen U.S. servicemen were killed and seventy-three wounded while they tried to arrest an enemy warlord in territory held by hostile insurgents.

Remote-control drones, in contrast, do not put our soldiers’ or pilots’ lives at risk, and this is an important distinction given that America has already lost more than six thousand men and women to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In military terms, the drones “project capability without projecting vulnerability.” But most importantly, drones also keep civilian deaths to a minimum, as described in detail in chapter 7. The Wall Street Journal best summed up this argument for relying on the drones:

The case is easy. Not even the critics deny its success against terrorists. Able to go where American soldiers can’t, the Predator and Reaper have since 9/11 killed more than half of the 20 most wanted al Qaeda suspects, the Uzbek, Yemeni and Pakistani heads of allied groups and hundreds of militants. Most of those hits were in the last four years…. The civilian toll is relatively low, especially if compared with previous conflicts. Never before in the history of air warfare have we been able to distinguish as well between combatants and civilians as we can with drones. Even if al Qaeda doesn’t issue uniforms, the remote pilots can carefully identify targets, and then use Hellfire missiles that cause far less damage than older bombs or missiles. Smarter weapons like the Predator make for a more moral campaign….

International law also allows states to kill their enemies in a conflict, and to operate in “neutral” countries if the hosts allow bombing on their territory. Pakistan and Yemen have both given their permission to the U.S., albeit quietly. Even if they hadn’t, the U.S. would be justified in attacking enemy sanctuaries there as a matter of self-defense. 48

Another Wall Street Journal article, titled “Predators and Civilians: An Intelligence Report Shows How Effective Drone Attacks Are,” similarly makes the case for the drones as the most discriminate and humane way to fight the terrorists:

The argument against drones rests on the belief that the attacks cause wide-scale casualties among noncombatants, thereby embittering local populations and losing hearts and minds. If you glean your information from wire reports—which depend on stringers who are rarely eyewitnesses—the argument seems almost plausible.

Yet anyone familiar with Predator technology knows how misleading those reports can be. Unlike fighter jets or cruise missiles, Predators can loiter over their targets for more than 20 hours, take photos in which men, women and children can be clearly distinguished (burqas can be visible from 20,000 feet) and deliver laser-guided munitions with low explosive yields. This minimizes the risks of the “collateral damage” that often comes from 500-pound bombs. Far from being “beyond the pale,” drones have made war-fighting more humane. 49

Dan Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, similarly argued that drones are “more precise and careful than other alternatives.” He pointed out that the drones’ capacity to loiter and wait for the right moment to kill their target when there are no civilians around makes them “much more discriminate and therefore moral, ethical, and effective than what we had before.” 50William Saletan made a similar argument in an article titled “In Defense of Drones: They’re the Worst Form of War, Except for All the Others”:

How do drones measure up? Three organizations have tracked their performance in Pakistan. Since 2006, Long War Journal says the drones have killed 150 civilians, compared to some 2,500 members of al-Qaida or the Taliban. That’s a civilian casualty rate of 6 percent. From 2010 to 2012, LWJ counts 48 civilian and about 1,500 Taliban/al-Qaida fatalities. That’s a rate of 3 percent. Drones are like laparoscopic surgery: They minimize the entry wound and the risk of infection…. Over the years, I’ve shared many worries about the rise of drones. But civilian casualties? That’s not an argument against drones. It’s the best thing about them. 51

Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein supported this rationale for deploying drones when she said, “What this does is it takes a lot of Americans out of harm’s way… without having to send in a special ops team or drop a 500-pound bomb.” 52Journalist Noah Shachtman similarly argued, “Taken together, it might be the most precise, most sophisticated system for applying lethal force ever developed—the Platonic ideal of how an air war should be run.” 53Georgetown scholar Christine Fair adds,

If we know little about the drone strikes, we know enough about the alternative means of eliminating terrorists in FATA to know that they’re probably worse. Pakistan has no police in FATA to arrest them. The Pakistan army is now in its 13th month of sustained combat in the region, an effort that has flattened communities and displaced millions but done little to chip away at the insurgents’ strength. Drone strikes may not be perfect, but they’re likely the most humane option available. 54

Similarly, the Economist opined,

Civil-liberty advocacy groups have raised concerns about targeted killings by drones of suspected terrorists, especially in the case of al-Awlaki, who was an American citizen. But so far, the use of drones has not fundamentally challenged the Geneva Convention–based Law of Armed Conflict. This requires that before an attack, any weapons system (whether manned or unmanned) must be able to verify that targets are legitimate military ones, take all reasonable precautions to minimise civilian harm and avoid disproportionate collateral damage.

As long as a UAS pilot can trust the data from remote sensors and networked information, he or she should be able to make a proper assessment based on the rules of engagement in the same way as the pilot of a manned aircraft. Indeed, because of the unique characteristics of UAS, he may be in a better position to do so. He should have more time to assess the situation accurately, will not be exhausted by the physical battering of flying a jet and will be less affected by the adrenalin rush of combat. 55

In other words, drones take away much of the pressure of high-speed combat flying and allow pilots more time to reflect on life-and-death decisions.

But not only Westerners support this perspective. The president of Yemen, Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, has compared the advanced drones hunting al Qaeda to his country’s clumsy MiG fighter-bombers. After saying that he personally approves of every U.S. drone strike in his country, he has added, “They pinpoint the target and have zero margin for error,” and their “electronic brain’s precision is unmatched.” 56An article in the Globe and Mail featured an interview with a Pakistani ISI official who also supported the drone strikes on the basis of their precision and ability to avoid the sort of large numbers of dead civilians and destruction that all too often stemmed from full-scale Pakistani military operations and aerial bombardments against the Taliban. The paper reported, “Not everybody worries about the drones. Asad Munir, former station chief in Peshawar for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s leading spy agency, is among many observers who argue that precision strikes cause vastly less damage than the alternative of sending ground forces into Waziristan. Soldiers kill civilians with stray artillery or bombs, he said, whereas the drones only make mistakes when they’re given the wrong intelligence. ‘They don’t make more enemies,’ he said.” 57A Pakistani civilian agreed: “Drones strike with a lot of precision they mostly kill the terrorists, and we are happy with that. It’s our army that fires indiscriminately.” 58