There’s an interesting article in the Atlantic recently which covers the debate over drones (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/its-come-to-this-debating-death-by-autopilot/274753/), questioning whether they should be regulated as a new class of weapons.
When I was a teenager I happened to read a book (http://www.amazon.com/Giving-Up-Gun-Reversion-1543-1879/dp/0879237732), which stayed with me for a long time. It told the story of how feudal Japan dealt with a terrifying new military technology, in this case, firearms. As a quick recap: The Japanese around 1500 were a people constantly fighting each other in a form of clan warfare, the era of the Shoguns. Into this internecine picture came Portuguese traders bearing the fruits of European technology, the most important of which, to the militarized Japanese eyes at least, were firearms. The Japanese, fighting all the time as they were, quickly adopted, and even improved on, this new technology. The problem which arose wasn’t that more people started dying in battle, however, but rather that suddenly the elite of Japan, the samurai, could be felled by a single peasant. Driven by an ingrained code and centuries of tradition of fighting with sword, and gaining honor and thus status by defeating other samurai, the Japanese elites were loath to personally adopt firearms. To their mind, these new weapons were just a better way to mow down the ranks of illiterate peasants who were conscripted by their feudal lords to make up the numbers every time they decided to campaign against one another. That samurai themselves started getting killed, not by other samurai in honorable hand-to-hand combat, but by some social inferior from a distance, was a shock to the system which threatened the entire social order.
What to do?
Clearly, no feudal lord would voluntarily give up firearms on his own. His rivals would just take advantage and defeat him at the earliest opportunity. At the same time, peasants were losing their fear of their “betters”, which threatened all the samurai and shoguns alike. So, an existential threat to an entire culture and way of life, at least for the elites. In order to save face for all concerned, the emperor issued an edict requesting all firearms in the country to be turned in, in order to melt down the metal and create the largest known statue of Buddha. Here was a way for Shoguns to simultaneously disarm and step back from a technology which threatened them all, while saving face. Apparently it worked. Japan remained gun-free until Commodore Perry arrived in the mid-1800s. Social order was restored, peasants became frightened of their betters again, and Shoguns and samurai could go on enjoying an exalted social status.
At about the same time I read that book, in the early 1980s, the world was still threatened by nuclear weapons. That was the existential threat of the era, one that threatened not just a social order, but humanity itself. At the time, there were massive protests in Germany and the UK about American proposals to place medium-range nuclear missiles there. The reason was that the Soviets were known (They made no real secret about it), to be planning the invasion of Western Europe by conventional forces so massive that the American and allied militaries could not hope to withstand them.
Unless we used nukes.
And while the Germans especially were concerned about being the second place after Hiroshima and Nagasaki to have their cities and countryside leveled and irradiated, overall they agreed that it was indeed better to be dead than red, and we put in our missiles. The soviets dithered over whether or not to invade, their military expenditures grew unsustainable, the system grew rotten, and eventually collapsed, and we won the cold war. That’s a simplistic storyline, but broadly true.
It would be fair to say that nuclear weapons were the new military technology that proved so great a threat that they made the entire social order tremble. If the soviets would’ve invaded, we would’ve gone nuclear, they’d probably have retaliated, we would have retaliated, and then, just because of the logic of mutual destruction, we would’ve gone all out: if I’m gonna get wiped out, I’m taking you out too, and everybody dies in the ultimate zero-sum calculation.
Then in a thousand years the cockroaches take over.
The important point here is that nukes were scary not just to the ordinary soldiers who would’ve been vaporized in the first couple of strikes, but that they directly threatened the elites of both sides. Dr. Strangelove notwithstanding, living in a cave for a couple centuries as the only alternative to fighting isn’t very appealing to anyone, even delusional generals, politicians and tycoons (Or apparatchiks).
We now live in a world which, to my mind at least, is far less frightening. Nuclear reduction treaties have been successful in reducing stockpiles (Incidentally saving both sides tons of money in maintenance, research and upkeep), and a future is in sight where, while total disarmament might be too utopian, nuclear weapons number in the mere dozens. Enough to be a deterrent to any crazies out there, but not enough, if used, to End Humanity As We Know It.
Drones (unfortunately?), do not meet this test of existential threat. By which I mean, they do not threaten elites. They don’t change the calculus of decision makers, who have, post-cold war, gone back to being primarily obsessed with palace intrigues of various kinds (“How can I score points on talk shows and protect my bureaucratic turf,” or, in other places, “How can I keep the ear of his most exalted majesty/president for life?”) rather than this or that weapon. For this reason alone, I don’t believe attempts to regulate them out of existence as a class of weapon will meet with much success. They’re simply too easy to use.
Unfortunately the other side has drones too, ones which are much cheaper to manufacture and which are arguably as “smart”. People. Or to be more precise, zealots. What is a suicide bomber, after all, but a means of delivering explosives to a certain place at a certain point in time? However, while a suicide bomber costs nothing but the cost and investment in time of brain-washing and the minimal cost of the explosives themselves, drones are orders of magnitude more expensive. More importantly, while drone strikes might seem “surgical”, they carry extremely high ancillary costs in terms of our moral authority.
This is always a tricky thing to discuss, because there is always an immediate knee jerk reaction from realpolitikers (Basically, those who think the world is red in tooth and claw and might makes right) about anything as soft and fuzzy as morality. But it matters. It matters because, without thinking that the US was a better alternative than the USSR, Germany would never have agreed to host our missiles back in the eighties. It matters because without moral authority (Or, to use the current preferred term, soft power), “they” would have been more successful in converting others to their cause. In an very concrete sense, we couldn’t have won the cold war without it, and we’d all still be threatened with nuclear annihilation.
It is hardly the case that the other side in our current shadowy-ish conflict is better. A so-called religious person who sends some poor slob off to kill as many innocent people as possible just to advance some nonsensical ideology, and incidentally gain more personal power, is worse than despicable. But the perception of power cuts both ways for the US. We have an outsize military and security apparatus,which means that any strike, any at all, against us can be used as a symbolic victory. The perception of relative weakness can be as useful for our enemies as the perception of strength can be a problem for us.
Drones compound our problem of strength when we start using them for other than extremely urgent and vital strikes, which is what’s happened since we started using them against low level targets, just because we can. It’s one thing to send a missile from a drone to kill the commander of a terrorist network. It’s quite another to use a drone to kill somebody who might or might not be a threat, but, well, the wing commander or mission operator is new and wants to “get some”. Or worse, using drones to do the bidding of foreign governments, killing a regime opponent who poses no threat to the US but does to the foreign elite. It’s especially bad if that elite is unsavory to begin with, and the guy we take out might actually epitomize some legitimate grievances. Sure, a realpolitik kind of person would say we need to keep the people in power on our side, even if they’re unsavory. But that is a pernicious, not to say short-sighted, analysis. If an elite is distrusted by their own people, and we do their bidding, what happens? We no longer seem to be the enemy, we just actually made ourselves the enemy. In reality. And not just for the crazies out there, but for sane, normal citizens who want a better life than what their rulers are giving them. The kind of people who would never strap on a suicide vest themselves, but might start giving money to whatever the local cause might be. Or who would provide a safe house, or distribute and forward propaganda. Without the support of those normal people, terrorist movements whither and die.
This is why morality matters. Our morality, matters.
This is also why it’s frustrating to discuss, because what the adherents of realpolitik don’t seem to realize is that being moral isn’t just a good in and of itself, it’s also smart. Not to say you don’t shoot a guy pointing a gun at you if you have the chance, but you don’t shoot someone because he may or may not have a gun that he may or may not point at you at some time in the future.
Drones are pernicious because they keep the wielder completely out of harm’s way, and thus provide no real disincentive (Unless you count internalized reasoning like that in the previous paragraph) to their use. It is the military version of financial moral hazard. If you’re playing with other people’s money and you’re rewarded only if you win but pay no penalty if you lose, why not bet the house? Fiduciary responsibility? What’s that? Which is one big reason why we keep having financial crises. While that is a topic for another post, the same psychology applies. If you can sit ten thousand miles away and have a target, and have every incentive to blow away that target, but no real incentive not to, what do you do? Especially if your rules of engagement and operations in general are protected, bizarrely, by more stringent secrecy laws than those that apply to manned combat missions. Why on Earth wouldn’t you blow away every single target every single chance you get? Again, this individual incentive to do something ignores the public cost in terms of our standing with rational, normal people everywhere.
Drones are in the final analysis merely another weapon of war. The debate, such as it is, has moved on, unfortunately I think, from when and how they should be used to how they might be made better, and whether humans should be in the loop at all. This is a red herring, because the question isn’t whether they can be made better (of course they can), but within what rules and tactics, and to serve what strategy. It is too late to try to turn back to only manned equipment, and in any case it would ignore the real benefits that drones provide not just as flying assassins but for surveillance and reconnaissance, including non-military, humanitarian, uses.
We should, as a nation, discuss not just the tool, in this case drones, but the ends. What do we try, or hope to, accomplish? A war on terrorism is unwinnable. There will always be cowards ready to use others to destroy the lives of innocents. How can you “win” at preventing murderous scumbags from having reprehensible thoughts and acting on them? But we should not stoop to that level, just for the sake of doing something. When we remove the disincentives to assassinate we lose a significant part of what we are and should be fighting for, and we lose our standing in the eyes of those who could either harm or help us. Instead of debating the technology, we should debate the programming. Autonomous military vehicles will be here soon. Technology can’t be stopped in this case because it provides no existential threat, unlike nuclear weapons in the past century or firearms in feudal Japan, so a future ban is extremely unlikely.
But an autonomous vehicle will only do what it’s programmed to do. Having a human in the loop will not change the decision-making process to any appreciable degree unless there is a strong disincentive to use force in the first place. As we’ve seen recently with the use of drone strikes against less and less important targets, we have instead incentivized killing as its own end.
Instead, concentrate of international standards of drone design which emphasize graduality of escalation, with lethal violence being disincentivized unless certain, truly threatening or vital, conditions are met. What are those conditions? How can they be incorporated in an autonomous system? What programming checks or protocols will ensure such rules are unhackable or otherwise remain uncorrupted? How can we verify that others follow those rules if we do? What are the enforcement mechanisms for not playing by those rules?
That’s the debate.
We’ve had success in reducing nuclear stockpiles. Many countries (Shamefully, not yet the US) have agreed to ban land mines. Cluster bombs are next, rightfully so, in the sights of those who think and care about these things. Drones are just another technology the military uses to achieve their ends. What are those ends, and how can we assure those aren’t subverted? It’s a questions for technologists and moralists both.