The Drone Paradox: Fighting Terrorism with Mechanized Terror.

• Author: Coyne, Christopher J.
• Position: Essay

My time in captivity filled me with enormous sympathy for the Pakistani civilians trapped between the deranged Taliban and ruthless American technology. They inhabit a hell on earth in the tribal areas. Both sides abuse them.

--David Rohde, "The Drone Wars" (2012)

Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are aircraft controlled remotely or autonomously via computer without a human pilot. Although drones have been in use for decades (see Hall and Coyne 2014), they have become closely identified with the U.S. government's transnational "war on terror." This association is justified. Since 2001, the drone has shifted from an instrument of training and surveillance to a tool for conducting offensive strikes against enemy targets. Over this time, the U.S. government's covert drone program has become institutionalized as a defining aspect of its military strategy and operations.

This institutionalization has raised a number of controversial issues related to the use of drones, including: (1) potential violations of international law and state sovereignty, (2) ethical issues regarding the use of robotics in warfare, (3) collateral damage (which includes the injury and death of innocent civilians from drone strikes), (4) the lack of transparency by die U.S. government regarding its drone program, (5) appropriate checks on the U.S. government's use of drones as a tool for waging war, (6) adverse psychological effects on drone pilots, and (7) the precedent established by the U.S. government for the future use of robotics by other governments to engage in surveillance and warfare. (See Singer 2009; Martin and Sasser 2010; Gregory 2011a, 2011b; Benjamin 2013; Kaag and Kreps 2014; Calhoun 2015; Chamayou 2015; Cockburn 2015; Hall 2015; Plaw, Fricker, and Colon 2015; Woods 2015; Gusterson 2016; Kreps 2016; Scahill 2016.)

This paper considers another issue with the U.S. government's use of drones: they create and propagate widespread terror among foreign populations. This terror results from two factors.

First, the targets of drone strikes are rarely isolated. Instead, they are typically embedded in communities that include innocent civilians. This means that even where drone strikes are successful in annihilating a target identified by the intervening government, they will simultaneously produce negative externalities, or "neighborhood effects," which impose significant costs on the surrounding populace. These negative effects can be physical (bodily injury or death) or psychological (anxiety and terror) and can contribute to economic and social degradation. The remote and covert nature of drones is what makes them effective at killing targets. These same features, however, also make drones extremely effective and efficient at creating and promulgating a sense of terror among the broader populace within which targets are embedded.

Second, the intelligence associated with drone strikes is highly imperfect. Decision makers often rely on patterns of behavior that have been predetermined to be general "signatures" of terrorists. Subsequent "signature strikes" occur when a drone is used to target a person or group of people based not on their known identity but instead on their general behaviors observed from afar. In many instances, these pattern-of-behavior analyses are inaccurate, with the result that innocent people are injured or killed by signature strikes.

An associated issue is determining what constitutes an "accurate target." In many instances, the category "target" is so overly broad and abstract that it can include significant portions of a population. For example, absent clear evidence that demonstrates that a person killed in a strike was either not a military-age male or a military-age male but not an unlawful combatant, this person is automatically counted as an "enemy combatant" by the U.S. government (Scahill 2016, 157). This methodology obfuscates the true costs imposed by drones because it classifies ordinary, innocent civilians as enemies by default based on a small number of general characteristics.

Together, these factors contribute to a fundamental paradox regarding the use of drones to combat terrorism. The U.S. government justifies its use of drones as an efficient method for weakening and ultimately ending the threat of international terrorism while protecting members of the American military. The use of drones, however, creates and perpetuates terror among foreign populations. These terror-creating aspects of drones are often neglected, which understates their net effect on global terror.

A central reason for this neglect is that treatments of drones typically evaluate their use and effectiveness from the perspective of the drone and those who control it. This framing advances and legitimizes categories such as "valid targets" and "collateral damage" while downplaying, if not altogether ignoring, the perspective of those experiencing the presence of drones in their everyday lives. From the perspective of the target population, the damage done by drones is not "collateral" but rather blunt, brutal, and devastating harm caused by an external state violently intervening in their lives. Understanding this perspective is crucial because what is perceived as "combatting terrorism" by the intervening government is simultaneously viewed as an act of state terrorism by the target population.

We proceed as follows. The first section discusses the collateral damage from the perspective of the drone. Contrary to the common rhetoric that drones are the equivalent of a scalpel that kills targets with surgical precision, the evidence indicates that drone strikes cause harm to nontargets. This creates and perpetuates widespread terror because people living in areas targeted by drones constantly fear the possibility of surveillance and attack from above. The second section pulls together existing evidence of drone-created terror. The perspective in this section shifts from that of the drone to that of the target populace who live under the presence of drones. The final section concludes with a discussion of the implications.

"Collateral Damage," or the Maiming and Killing of Innocents

Nearly every argument for the expansion of the U.S. government's use of drones stems from the idea that they are believed to be a more efficient means of achieving the government's foreign-policy goals relative to the alternatives (see Hall 2015). Drones minimize the potential harm to members of the U.S. military, it is argued, while accurately targeting terrorists. When in office, President Barack Obama explicitly stated that drones are better at targeting and killing foreign adversaries. Drones "are effective," he said. "Dozens of highly skilled al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers and operatives have been taken off the battlefield.... [T]he primary alternative to [drones] would be the use of conventional military options.... Conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones" (Obama 2013). As this quote illustrates, the use of drones is typically compared and contrasted with conventional bombings assumed to be the relevant alternative.

A related argument is that drones reduce the costs of conflict in terms of reduced civilian casualties or "collateral damage." CIA director John Brennan, for example, stated that drones have "surgical precision--the ability with laser-like focus to eliminate the cancerous tumor called al Qa'ida, while limiting the damage to the tissue around it" (Brennan 2012). Harold Koh, the former legal adviser of the State Department, stated that "[b]ecause drone technology is highly precise, if properly controlled, it could be more lawful and more consistent with human rights and humanitarian law than the alternatives" (quoted in The Economist 2015). Other commentators have made similar claims, stating that "drones kill fewer civilians ... than any other weapon" (Saletan 2013) and that "[drones are] actually the most humane form of warfare" (Lewis 2013). In 2011, Brennan, at the time counterterrorism adviser to the president, stated, "[T]here hasn't been a single collateral death [in a year] because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the [drone] capabilities we've been able to develop" (quoted in Shane 2011).

As these statements suggest, the overarching idea is that the U.S. government can intervene in other societies and exterminate confirmed threats with precision while avoiding harming innocent civilians. (1) Moreover, it is claimed that drones are more effective than alternatives, with conventional bombing typically cited as the relevant substitute. The standard rhetoric and claims about drones raise a range of important issues.

For one, if we take the claim that drones are more accurate than conventional bombing as the appropriate comparison, it is not clear, ex ante, that the adoption of drones will result in fewer total deaths of innocent people. The economic logic underlying this claim is that drones reduce the price of an attack, which allows the military to move down the demand curve, increasing the quantity of drone strikes demanded. The result is that although the use of drones might reduce deaths in any single strike by substituting for another, more deadly alternative (conventional bombing), this reduction might be offset by an increase in the total death of innocents due to an increase in the overall number of drone attacks due to the lower relative price of employing drone technology to strike targets. (2)

In addition, presenting conventional bombing as an alternative to drone bombing is an artificially narrow dichotomy. If the U.S. government's foreign-policy goal is to eliminate individual enemy targets, then it isn't clear that conventional bombing should be presented as the appropriate alternative to drone bombing. The appropriate alternative should instead be something akin to special-operations missions against specific targets. (3) Drone...