{"id":363014,"date":"2010-02-25T09:15:51","date_gmt":"2010-02-25T14:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/opiniojuris.org\/?p=11453"},"modified":"2010-02-25T09:15:51","modified_gmt":"2010-02-25T14:15:51","slug":"drones-as-strategic-airpower-and-the-light-cavalry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/363014","title":{"rendered":"Drones as Strategic Airpower and the Light Cavalry?"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Kenneth Anderson <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

David Rittgers, a Cato legal analyst and former Special Forces officer, has an\u00a0excellent op-ed in today\u2019s Wall Street Journal on the use of Predator drones<\/a>. \u00a0He cautions, on the one hand, against reflexively regarding drone attacks as nonjudicial execution or, really, functionally different from other weapons that soldiers might use \u2014 as well as cautioning against the idea that Congress or courts could somehow micromanage the use of these weapons. \u00a0On the other hand, he cautions against thinking that the problem of drones is that the US should be seeking to capture rather than kill because of the loss of intelligence; he notes that operationally, there are many reasons why capture is very often infeasible. \u00a0It\u2019s a good piece, measured and sensible, and I highly recommend it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been quiet around here in the last little while as I, too, have been writing about Predators and targeted killing \u2014 expanding and moving beyond\u00a0my\u00a0book chapter<\/a> from last year\u00a0\u00a0on this topic. \u00a0Barring some big news on health care or some such, the Weekly Standard<\/em> will be running a piece from me next week arguing something I\u2019ve developed at Volokh Conspiracy and here at OJ blog: \u00a0first, that the administration\u2019s lawyers need to step up to the plate and defend targeted killing using Predators and, second, the proper legal basis on which to defend it to the full extent undertaken by the Obama administration is the international law of self-defense, rather than simply the law of armed conflict, targeting combatants.<\/span><\/p>\n

In another piece coming soon (this one a book chapter in a Hoover Institution online collection of essays from the Hoover Task Force on National Security and Law), I will be arguing a further step in this \u2014 one which relates to Rittgers WSJ op-ed. \u00a0Underlying much of the argument over drone warfare is a submerged factual and normative frame about who, what, and where. \u00a0Rittgers, for example, is drawing upon his extensive experience as a Special Forces officer, and reserve judge advocate, with three tours in Afghanistan, to point out that it is a mistake and really not possible to micromanage military operations in the field. \u00a0Nor is the use of a missile fired from a drone in battle significantly different from a missile fired from a manned aircraft, or a helicopter, or some other\u00a0place.<\/p>\n

Critics who call the practice extrajudicial execution, however, are frequently focused upon another scenario. \u00a0The version of it analytically furthest from the hot battlefield scenario is a CIA directed drone missile strike upon a target in a compound far away from any theatre of active fighting, such as AfPak \u2014 someone in Yemen or Somalia, to take the obvious examples. \u00a0From the critics\u2019 standpoint, it is a bit of bait and switch to defend drone missile attacks on the basis of their use on a hot, active battlefield, or even in a general theatre of conflict \u2014 for which, the critic will note, one might or might not include the \u201cPak\u201d part of \u201cAfPak\u201d \u2014 and then turn around and say, therefore, a CIA attack in Somalia is similarly okay. \u00a0From the critics\u2019 view, even if the theatre of conflict use by uniformed military is okay on traditional military targeting terms (and for the human rights monitors, it likely is not \u2014 or, more precisely, permissible in principle, but somehow not in any particular circumstances), that is not the same as the CIA\u2019s global reach. \u00a0From the critics\u2019 point of view, that is, what goes on operationally at ground level in Afghanistan somewhat misses the point. \u00a0From my view, too, what needs to be defended as legal policy by the United States is not principally that use of drone attacks \u2014 that is not at that point so much questioned, although perhaps I am too sanguine about it \u2014 but instead the CIA, covert action as a category, and targeted killing outside of the traditionally understood idea of \u00a0a zone of armed conflict.<\/p>\n

This is one of the reasons that I regard the proper legal basis for Predator targeted killing to be the law of self-defense \u2014 it is what the Obama administration really intends, if it is not to fall back into the idea of a \u201cglobal\u201d war on terror, and yet\u00a0also<\/em> intends to preserve the traditional sovereign legal right to strike at non-state actor terrorists in their safe havens, if the relevant state cannot or will not deal with them. \u00a0The President and Vice President have said repeatedly \u2014 and in so doing, merely re-stating what ever president has asserted since transnational terrorism rose as a threat to Americans \u2014 that the US will take the fight to the terrorists, and pointedly said wherever that is and that terrorists will not be allowed safe haven, and that the US will strike on the basis of the terrorists\u2019 intentions. \u00a0Nothing new in that, but the legal basis for the United States to do so is different from the legal basis on which it is lawful to use drones and missiles from drones in a theatre of active armed conflict.<\/p>\n

The legal, normative, and moral arguments over drones, then, are not so much about hot battlefields, nor even largely about theatres of active armed conflict. \u00a0The arguments are about the use of drones and targeted killing by the covert services, the CIA, beyond those confines. \u00a0Understood that way, this is about drone warfare as a form of strategic airpower. \u00a0The attempt to dominate from the air on a global, or at least potentially extensive geographic, basis using unmanned airpower. \u00a0Not all of this is about counterterrorism or the use of smaller and more discriminating, person-specific weaponry. \u00a0The Israelis officially unveiled their massive, airliner sized drone aircraft, the purpose of which is presumably to be able to strike at nuclear facilities in Iran \u2014 not about targeted killing, but the classic projection of strategic airpower.<\/p>\n

Again, one way of understanding the strategic frame is as strategic airpower \u2014 leveraging military capital over labor through drones, with the intention of developing a counter-raiding capability that extends over an ever greater geographic range, whether for large-weaponry anti-facility attacks or small-scale anti-individual targeted killing. \u00a0Strategic airpower has long been a holy grail \u2014 but it has never worked quite as successfully as each new iteration hopes. \u00a0The \u201clight footprint\u201d strategy based around counterterrorism, over the horizon drones and missiles, might or might not be a winning strategy; it might be, rather, that counterinsurgency through boots on the ground and denial of territory for safe havens is required, as many have believed in any sustained guerrilla conflict. \u00a0I don\u2019t know the answer to that question; the administration\u2019s long delay in determining its Afghanistan strategy was presumably, at the most abstract level, about answering exactly that. \u00a0What is clear is that\u00a0whether<\/em> pure counterterrorism without on-the-ground counterinsurgency,\u00a0or<\/em> counterinsurgency to control territory and population, drones are going to be important.<\/p>\n

Put another way, particularly as they are used outside of the active counterinsurgency theatre of AfPak, drones, with sophisticated surveillance gear but also missiles, act as the lightest of light cavalry. \u00a0They probe, surveil, and engage in pinprick attacks, behind enemy lines, far beyond one\u2019s own lines. \u00a0When the CIA engages in targeted killing against some Al Qaeda operative in Somalia, from a strategic perspective, it is a combat raiding strategy by very light cavalry indeed. \u00a0But it is so far beyond one\u2019s own lines, as it were, that from a\u00a0legal<\/em> standpoint, I would place it beyond the legal \u201carmed conflict\u201d altogether and treat this combat raiding use of force, as a matter of law, as an exercise in lawful self-defense.<\/p>\n

But this will get discussed (in numbing detail, I\u2019m afraid) in the Weekly Standard piece. \u00a0How\u2019s this for my proposed title \u2014 likely to be shot down by an editor with better taste than me \u2014\u00a0Predators over Pakistan, Lawyers over Langley<\/em>? \u00a0 :mrgreen:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Kenneth Anderson David Rittgers, a Cato legal analyst and former Special Forces officer, has an\u00a0excellent op-ed in today\u2019s Wall Street Journal on the use of Predator drones. \u00a0He cautions, on the one hand, against reflexively regarding drone attacks as nonjudicial execution or, really, functionally different from other weapons that soldiers might use \u2014 as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-363014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363014\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}