Abstract
I evaluate one intuitive argument for, and one against, the use of lethal drones by the United States in its War on Terror. The Lesser Evil Argument appeals to those who think it perverse to reject weapons that enable a more limited use of force. But if harms on all sides and longer term consequences are considered, the argument is much less persuasive. The Targeted Killing Argument is intuitive to those who consider drone strikes against terrorist suspects named in intelligence reports to violate the rules of war. I reject the claim that it would be acceptable to carry out targeted killings because of necessity. Finally, I consider how radical asymmetry encourages terrorism against civilians and how drone operators have the status of executioners, not warriors.
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Notes
- 1.
A Justice Department ‘white paper’ on the legal case for drone strikes on Americans was published by NBC News on January 29, 2013, but Congress has passed no laws to check the President’s authority.
- 2.
In its modern form, the principles that fall under justice in going to war are just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, last resort, proportionality, and likelihood of success. Traditionalists reject the last two principles that are more recent additions to just war theory, considering them as utilitarian in nature and not about duties and rights.
- 3.
Bradley Jay Strawser, “Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles,” Journal of Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (December 2010): 344.
- 4.
Strawser does assume that standard just war requirements are met, for example, that drones do not reduce the risk to soldiers by deliberately targeting innocent civilians. Nevertheless, he allows for harms to be shifted to civilians unintentionally as a foreseen side-effect. Proportionality, on the other hand, is not just about intentional harms.
- 5.
The moral problem is illustrated by the controversy over North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air strikes in Kosovo in 1999 that caused more civilian casualties because NATO planes bombed from high altitudes to keep out of range of enemy anti-aircraft fire.
- 6.
Noel Sharkey, “Saying ‘No!’ to Lethal Autonomous Targeting,” Journal of Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (December 2010): 370, mentions that more than 40 other countries are developing or purchasing military robots.
- 7.
M. Shane Riza, Killing Without Heart (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2013), 47, notes how the use of nuclear weapons marked the first time that enemy noncombatants were at greater risk than American combatants. He sees drone warfare as marking the point at which noncombatants on both sides are at greater risk because there could be collateral damage when drone operators are attacked by the enemy. What I suggest is that combatants have already put their own noncombatants at greater risk once other countries acquired nuclear weapons that could strike at American cities.
- 8.
International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice Clinic (NYU School of Law), Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan (September 2012), Ch. 2.
- 9.
As I write this, there are reports that the United States has set up a drone base in Niger to carry out strikes in the sub-Sahara.
- 10.
Christian Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War (London & New York: Routledge, 2014), 22.
- 11.
The principles that fall under justice in the conduct of war are proportionality (the benefit of achieving a military objective by fighting in a certain way outweighs the harm) and discrimination (between combatants and noncombatants when striking at the enemy).
- 12.
I set aside the question of whether civilian leaders are legitimate targets in war.
- 13.
The United States repeatedly tried to kill the Iraqi leadership with air strikes at the beginning of the 2003 invasion of Iraq with little success and causing numerous civilian casualties. These are perhaps morally and legally different from CIA attempts to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the 1960s.
- 14.
Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 52–3, where he summarizes this view of combatant status that is espoused by Michael Walzer and Thomas Hurka.
- 15.
The absence of a pilot does make a moral difference which I will discuss later.
- 16.
Michael L. Gross, Moral Dilemmas of Modern War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 108–9.
- 17.
I discuss the case for using military means against an especially dangerous international criminal such as Osama bin Laden in my book, Beyond Just War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 169–72.
- 18.
The use of lethal drones to strike at terrorist leaders began under President George W. Bush, and accelerated under President Barack Obama. Both leaders saw targeted killings as an important strategy in executing the War on Terror, and they have been not been challenged by Congress except when the terrorist killed was American.
- 19.
The supreme emergency exemption was controversially proposed in Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 254. Gross, Moral Dilemmas of Modern War, 237–38, has suggested that targeted killings may not remain an exception to be used in supreme emergencies but may become the norm in fighting the asymmetric wars of the twenty-first century. Since the enemies that the United States is facing in the War on Terror are non-state agencies, there is a lack of the reciprocity needed to uphold traditional rules of war.
- 20.
AG Holder’s letter to Rand Paul has unfortunately been removed from the Senator’s website where it had been previously published (http://www.paul.senate.gov/files/documents/BrennanHolderResponse.pdf).
- 21.
As Michael Walzer, “Emergency Ethics,” in Arguing About War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 48–9, says, ‘supreme emergency’ cannot be the norm of warfare but a condition from which we must seek an escape.
- 22.
Critics of Walzer’s supreme emergency exemption have expressed skepticism that there was ever a supreme emergency that necessitated the deliberate violation of jus in bello in the only example used by Walzer, namely when Britain faced Nazi aggression alone prior to the entry of the United States into World War II in 1941. Was the end of Western civilization imminent at the time, as Churchill claimed?
- 23.
Riza, Killing Without Heart, 77–9, describes drones as an example of ‘unusually usable’ weapons that subvert the role of the military in providing advice only on the means of war and not on whether leaders should go to war. Because drones can strike with impunity, they lower inhibitions among leaders on the use of force.
- 24.
Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War, 9–14.
- 25.
Charles G. Kels, “Closing Argument: At the Outer Bounds of Asymmetry,” Journal of Military Ethics 11, no. 3 (September 2012): 223–44, imagines a scenario where ‘terrorists’ attack service members and civilians at command centers on American soil that are associated with the drone campaign carried out against their country. Both Kels and Riza, Killing Without Heart, 45–9, suggest that such personnel are legitimate targets and that the use of remotely operated weapons has stretched the battlefield to include the territory in which drone operators are located, leading to risk inversion that endangers noncombatants on all sides while reducing the risk to combatants.
- 26.
Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War, 36, points out that “recent empirical analyses leave room for doubt about whether the use of drones to decapitate enemy organizations would be effective in the long term.” The removal of leaders might in fact lead to the emergence of more skillful and ruthless leaders.
- 27.
By its very definition, a War on Terror is open ended, as success requires the elimination of every terrorist in the world for all eternity.
- 28.
Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War, 59.
- 29.
As Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War, 81, puts it, “A warlike killing is one for which the killer has a license, but the indispensable condition for this license is exposure to physical risk.”
- 30.
When soldiers are ordered to in effect execute people who are targeted from afar, not in the course of defending themselves in battle, they are asked to bear a burden of responsibility for killing that cannot be ameliorated by the circumstances of battle. John Kaag, “Drones, Ethics and the Armchair Soldier,” The New York Times, March 17, 2013, calls this the ‘existential responsibility’ of killing at leisure, with time to think about whether and when one should kill, which explains how it is that drone operators are at risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
- 31.
International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice Clinic (NYU School of Law), Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan, Ch. 3.
- 32.
Consider, as an analogy, which is a worse evil for ordinary people: A deranged shooter killing dozens of people in a once-off incident, or a serial killer taking the life of a single victim every few months over several years.
- 33.
Riza, Killing Without Heart, 9 discusses the DOD’s FY2009–2034 Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, while Sharkey, “Saying ‘No!’ to Lethal Autonomous Targeting”: 376, points to the trend toward robots that will “operate autonomously to locate their own targets and destroy them without human intervention.”
- 34.
Ronald C. Arkin, a researcher who works on robot autonomy, has argued for the use of such robots on the battlefield in “The Case for Ethical Autonomy in Unmanned Systems,” Journal of Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (December 2010): 332–41.
- 35.
Ryan Tonkens, “The Case Against Robotic Warfare: A Response to Arkin,” Journal of Military Ethics 11, no. 2 (August 2012): 151, argues against Arkin’s view that autonomous unmanned systems would perform more ethically than human soldiers by pointing out that “humans are also capable of morally praiseworthy and supererogatory behavior … that machines may not be capable of.”
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Chan, D.K. (2018). The Use of Lethal Drones in the War on Terror. In: Boonin, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93907-0_11
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