What I find really odd is how similar a drone strike is to a terrorist attack. A military convoy is being attacked by a remotely controlled IED, you can retaliate by sending a drone to blow up some pre-defined target. Maybe it is a fitting weapon for the twenty-first century, to put back some symmetry in asymmetric wars. The next logical step is the use of drones to perform terrorist attacks. It is easy to envision an eternal low intensity war with objectives being remotely destroyed by both opponents. It muddles further the blurry line, if any has ever existed, between regular and irregular warfare.
I think you're getting caught up in semantics here, but you're also groping towards a critical realization: Drone strikes, by all accounts, seem to fit the definition of terrorist attacks.
Noam Chomsky certainly thinks so. He had this to say [1] in 2013:
"Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history: the drone assassination campaigns, which are just part of it [...] All of these operations, they are terror operations. You are generating more terrorist operations.
"People have a reaction” when they lose a loved one to an American drone strike, he added. “They don’t say, ‘Fine, I don’t care if my cousin was murdered.’ They become what we call terrorists. This is completely understood from the highest level.”
Some of them are effectively terrorist attacks. If anyone remembers that drone strike against Wedding convoy in Yemen. It's exactly the same if someone would bomb a wedding in US that had some military officers there.
I wish I could remember who made this comparison (I'm guessing it was Jeremy Scahill?), but I agree with the idea that the primary hallmark of terrorism is the feeling of utter powerlessness to respond or defend yourself, making drone warfare just as terrorizing as a suicide bomber.
I remember when Maryland residents lived in constant fear of going outside for a few weeks in 2002, due to a pair of uncaught snipers [1]. If I lived in Yemen, I would feel that way 100% of the time.
To be really clear about the definition of terrorism from when anarchists were proud to be called terrorists: "terrorism" is an action during a conflict that is meant to defeat the opposition by creating fear, rather than by removing its physical ability to resist.
Example: If a street gang occupies your neighborhood, you and your neighbors could remove them by 1) taking up arms and confronting them until they take enough casualties that they they have to retreat or surrender, or 2) kidnapping a straggler once every week or so, skinning him alive, recording it on videotape, and hanging him from a lamppost with the videotape around his neck.
1) is an attack on the ability to fight, 2) is an attack on the will to fight.
So IMO Scahill is getting to the essence of it in your reference here.
The primary hallmark of terrorism is targeting civilians (as opposed to military or infrastructure targets such as trains or refineries or factories). If a drone is used to attack a factory or a military target that is not terrorism. If a drone is intentionally used to attack a civilian, non-infrastructure target (eg, a wedding) then that is terrorism.
I think "terror" can't help but be about perception, regardless of legal definitions. If only a single attack per year kills a civilian through accident, yet it is dramatic and publicized every time, it can still lead to a reaction of public terror, even if it is a less likely cause of death than slipping in the bathroom. Suicide bombers and UAVs are equally capable of creating this mass psychological effect; intent (both real and perceived) is a secondary factor.
I agree, but "we" (western media, etc.) tended to call attacks on the occupation forces terrorism, too. The pretense was the war was "over", so the occupation forces were there for law and order, not war, so attacks on them were criminal/terrorist/etc. vs. "legitimate warfare".
Pressure/etc. detonated IEDs are sort of a grey area, honestly, as are military landmines, cluster munitions where you know a large fraction will become UXO, especially in civilian areas, and inaccurate area attacks like WW2 airstrikes.
actually "we" called those attacking the coalition and Iraqi military "insurgents".
Plenty of actual, Iraqi civilian targets were killed by Al-Qa'ida in Iraq and other terrorists with car bombs, suicide bombers, hostage takings etc.
The distinction is pretty clear between the two, I think if you are accusing media of whitewashing all Iraqi insurgents under the banner of terrorism you should back it up.
I enter into evidence: Fox News 2001-2009, if not 2009-2014 too.
The actual terms used in Iraq by the US Military varied, too, from "insurgents", "Anti-Iraqi Forces" (irony, when it was Iraqis attacking the US..."), "foreign fighters", "former regime elements" (even when they were foreign and/or people Saddam had persecuted), Iranian-sponsored militias, etc.
I think the argument is that the semantics really only matter to who's making the definitions. If you're a civilian and you live in fear that you or a family member may be the casualty of an unprovoked bombing, be it by insurgents, terrorists, or drones, the distinction is irrelevant.
Terrorists often hit military targets as well (Khobar towers, Beirut Marine barracks, etc.). Throughout most of "the troubles" the IRA targeted the military or police, should they not have been considered terrorists?
The techniques of terrorists (say: car bombings) are shockingly little different in practice from drone strikes. Sure, certainly the intent is very different, but the result is nevertheless a disturbingly high death toll for innocents. And that should concern us a fuck of a lot more than it does today.
The IRA, INLA and their equivalents on the other side of the sectarian line such as the UVF were always considered terrorists here in the UK.
[NB That's not to say I can't understand the violent reaction of the members of the Nationalist community - even if I am appalled by what they often chose to do]
Pulling up some quick numbers, the IRA (more properly the Provisional IRA) killed roughly 1600 people over 3 decades of operation during the troubles, with about 60% of those deaths being of military/police and slightly more than 600 killings of civilians.
During Obama's administration alone (6 years) more than 2400 people have been killed by US drone strikes, nearly 300 of them civilians (89% "terrorists"/military). Certainly that is a better ratio than the IRA, but the fact that we are willingly waging such a devastating war with significant "collateral damage" (in another 6 years or so we will have killed as many civilians as the IRA did) with so little public debate or oversight should be chilling to anyone.
> Terrorism is the indiscriminate targeting of civilians.
Source? Debating the definitions of words is often silly, but I think it's worth pointing out that 1) the definition of "terrorism" isn't broadly agreed upon, and 2) the definition you're using is more narrow than peoples'. The definition that searching google gives is "the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims", which drone attacks certainly fit into.
More generally, it seems that condemning vague things like "torture" and "terrorism" accomplishes very little, because people will simply use different definitions of the terms to skirt the condemnation. So we have to condemn specific things that are wrong, like waterboarding and drone strikes.
The definition that searching google gives is "the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims", which drone attacks certainly fit into.
I think the point is that drone strikes (targeting angry people with guns and bombs) are meaningfully different than someone blowing themselves up in a a crowded market or mosque (targeting people whose religion is slightly different from his or her own).
You can say they're the same because they're "the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims", but there's something of a different quality to those political aims that warrants a distinction.
>2) the definition you're using is more narrow than peoples'.
Most people's definition of terrorism is "any violent act committed by a Muslim without clear monetary gain," so this definition is actually much more general.
>"the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims"
War, then?
As you said, though, debating definitions is a waste of time.
Whoops, missed a word: "more narrow than many peoples'".
I disagree with you that "most people" use the definition you claim, but of course neither of us have any data and we both think the debate is silly anyway.
Maybe you're right, but terrorism has really no clear cut definition. I am pretty sure I have never heard a suicide bomber detonating in a military base being described otherwise than "terrorist".
My father was in the RAF during WW2 (not in Bomber Command though) and I've often wondered about the morality of what our country did then - the best defense I've seen of the strategy was that unlike for the Nazis the indiscriminate killing of civilians was never a goal in itself for the Allies but something that was a means to the end of finishing the war.
Note that although that's probably the best argument, I'm still not completely satisfied with it.
"Civilian" targets can become valid military targets. For example, if an enemy force forms a line of resistance within an urban or suburban area, then it is legitimate to attack and destroy that area. A civilian area that is not occupied by an enemy force is not a legitimate target, and attacking it constitutes a war crime.
The Law of Armed Conflict exists because you can't stop war from happening, especially if you aren't willing to fight a war yourself to stop it.
It's also worth pointing out that war/conflict are not the same thing, the definition of who is protected during a conflict is much broader than members of the armed forces during a formal war.
Sure, but "war crime" is a phrase with a particular history and usage that means something more specific. Even opposing sides in war often agree on some boundaries.
A terrorist attack is defined by the object of the attack, not the method of the attack. Attacking civilian targets is terrorism. Attacking military targets and infrastructure, and especially in the case of attacking infrastructure when the fewest civilians would be killed (eg, nights or Sundays) is not terrorism.
Thus, the use of drones, against terrorists (those who would attack civilians) or enemy combatants (those who target military or infrastructure targets) is certainly not terrorism. OTOH, if drones were deliberately (and not accidentally) targeting civilian, non-military, non-infrastructure targets, that would be terrorism.
Eliminating terrorists with drones is going to minimize the number of terrorist attacks just as eliminating terrorist with sniper rifles, or bombing.
I am speaking as someone who nearly escaped a terrorist attack in Israel (Jerusalem BMW attack).
The trouble is, for most of the population over there, they feel like they could easily be the (mistaken/accidental) target of one of these. Living with a drone circling one's life inspires fear in both civilians and terrorists.
I'm not sure they qualify as that, but there are certainly people that believe that Robert McNamara was a war criminal [0]:
"""
“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals.”
“What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he asked. He found the question impossible to answer.
"""
IIRC both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because it would hurt japanese military the most. Back in those days a plenty of civilians died anyway during regular bomb raids.
But yeah, to some extent is probably was a terrorist attack.
That's the excuse that was given, but the regular bombings had been systematically doing precision raids during the day and indiscriminate firebombing during the night for months at that time. They were running out of significant cities to bomb well before Hiroshima, to the point where they'd started firebombing much smaller cities with no air defences or military presence to speak of as well - some of which were almost entirely obliterated.
One of the interesting aspects is how the mere existence of cheap drones will need to alter defence. Consider that for a terrorist group, once they've demonstrated the willingness to use drones, they can drastically increase the cost in defending against attacks by using very cheap fakes.
A government targeted with drones would not dare take the risk of finding out the "wrong way" whether or not the incoming drone is loaded with explosives, or is a cheap toy. Now imagine a steady stream of hundreds of cheap toys, with one every now and again loaded with explosives.
Say (just to pull random numbers) that a real "homemade" drone costs $10k/piece, and a fake one drops down to $100/piece and you can send out 101 w/one real for the cost of 2 real ones. Yet the cost of defending against the attack has gone up 100-fold.
In World War II bombings targeted civilians, and were designed in such a way to inflict firestorms and terror. By body count alone drones and IEDs are quite tame.
Note that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not even the most brutal bombing runs on Japan that summer.
Two firebombing runs on Tokyo alone killed more people than the atomic bombs, and by the time of Hiroshima, almost every major city in Japan had been hit, some almost totally burned out.
The firebombing of Japan was so brutal that the Japanese supreme war council didn't even bother to convene until three days after Hiroshima - when the Soviet Union entered the war. Apart from being a new type of bomb, Hiroshima did not stand out as a substantial escalation.
In particular the 2008 terrorist attack at the Taj hotel in Mumbai, wherein the attackers were directed by controllers in Pakistan via cell phone and VoIP always struck me as the horrifying equivalent of a terrorist poor man's drone.
The report raised warnings that other countries might adopt the same rationale as the United States has for carrying out lethal strikes outside of declared war zones. Using an example of a current crisis, it said that Russia could use armed drones in Ukraine under the justification that it was killing anti-Russian terrorists and then refuse to disclose the intelligence that served as the basis for the strike.
“In such circumstances,” the report asked, “how could the United States credibly condemn Russian targeted killings?”
Targeted killings are wrong, but Russia isn't doing this anyway.
They still send in troops/police that try to disarm suspects, because the Russian population in some regions would feel oppressed if they started assassinating suspects without a trial and they don't need a new Chechnya.
And outside of Russia they intervene much less militarily than the US is doing right now. (compared to the US, Russia's interventions are almost nonexistent)
Even if you make the assumptions that killing terrorists is always a good thing, that it is possible to accurately identify terrorists, that it is possible to kill them without collateral damage, etc... How do you know if they are honest about their intentions? Just take Putin's word for it?
Well, at times there will be collateral damage when targeting terrorists just as when targeting other enemy combatants. Sure, Putin's (or any other's intent) is a different matter, but on the whole, any country should be allowed to use drones or any other technology to target individuals who target their civilians (eg, terrorists) as well as their military and infrastructure. What they do not have the right to do is target civilians with drones.
> any country should be allowed to use drones or any other technology to target individuals who target their civilians (eg, terrorists)
According to Russia, this definition have in several instances included regular Ukrainian troops, who according to the Ukranian government, is fighting terrorists/insurgents that are targeting Ukranian civilians on Ukrainian territory. See how this gets messy quickly, when either side have completely different versions of events?
The "we need to protect our civilians (even if they live in a different country, were born there, and have never been our citizens) against individuals who are targeting them" argument is one of history's oldest excuses for going to war. Sometimes it may be justified, but it also very often conveniently ignore that the "targeted civilians" may themselves have been insurgents or terrorists or infiltrators who were legitimate targets.
It's a popular excuse whether or not it is true, because assuming your attacks go well, it gets very hard to find out the truth when everyone involved has been conveniently killed.
Imagine Russia blows up some people in Ukraine and claims they were terrorists, but the evidence is too secret to share. How should the US respond? Just congratulate them and move on?
If it's an armed conflict between two groups of people who both consider themselves "citizens" of their locale and another country steps in, is it their right to decide which are the citizens and which are the terrorists?
I have read reports from Doctors Without Borders and other sources that the Israelis kill about ten times the number of Palestinian children than the Palestinians kill Israeli children. I don't want to get into a political flame war here, but the facts seem pretty solid in my opinion on which side is harsher to civilians. A little off topic, but a a very good friend who is an Israeli is very critical about his government for just this reason.
Like US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have regrettably killed children as well but again not by intent, Israelis have killed children, but certainly not with intent. If you're going to point out the number of children killed by Israelis indirectly by combat then you should do the same of US troops.
However, Palestinians have deliberately targeted Israeli children.
In each of these cases and many others, Palestinians are deliberately targeting children.
It is really upsetting when different groups and people single out Israel when the US and other countries do exactly the same thing as Israel. Israel is attempting to defend its citizens against terrorists to the best of its ability just as the US is trying to defend its citizens to the best of its ability.
Thanks for providing those examples, I looked at all of them. In your opinion though, is the ten to one ratio cited by Doctors Without Borders and other organizations valid, or invalid? Honest question.
Good point about US actions. A little off topic, but I strongly support the US closing most foreign military bases, staying out of the middle east and other places around the world unless allies or US interests are directly invaded. The days of my country being the world's only military super power should have ended long ago - certainly before our invasion of Iraq.
On the topic of the middle east: Europe is obviously a lot closer to the middle east that the US and I would support the idea of Europeans placing peace keeping observers in Israel, Palestine, and generally around the middle east. Sort of the same way that Canada, the US, and Mexico all have a stake in what happens in our area of the world (North America). Does that make sense to you?
That's a silly conclusion, since the US has been engaged in essentially non-stop war since at least WWII (with a developing national security state based on that permanent war footing), most of which didn't involve drones.
Drones certainly lower the political cost of war, but they aren't something that "risks" war without end, they are something developed and deployed in an environment where "war without end" was already the established reality.
There is plenty of unique things about this new type of long-term warfare:
a) every operation is conducted in total secrecy
b) most of it is executed remotely, or occasionally via Special Forces commandos on the ground when drones can't get the job done
c) they are (apparently) based off of a 'kill-list', which is essentially an assassination list
This is very different than the decades of conventional warfare the US traditionally engaged in, using troops and engagements openly talked about to the public (even if it's after the fact).
It is only comparable to the CIA operations in latin america in the 1980s.
> There is plenty of unique things about this new type of long-term warfare:
No, there aren't.
> a) every operation is conducted in total secrecy
Within the drone program, which is largely a secrete component of an overt global military anti-"terrorism" campaign, sure. But having a major secret component of an overt effort isn't new or unique since the inception of the drone program, its been a regular part of the post-WWII permanent war.
> b) most of it is executed remotely, or occasionally via Special Forces commandos on the ground when drones can't get the job done
Yes, the technology for precisely targetted remote attacks is new, though using whatever remote attack capability was available isn't. So, yes, technology advances.
Obviously, use of Special Forces is not new.
> c) they are (apparently) based off of a 'kill-list', which is essentially an assassination list
Assassination as a tool of state policy by the US in the covert portion of its permanent wars isn't a new product of drones, either.
I agree with you, but there is another view here: much of our military spending is really to serve the purpose of forcing the US dollar as the reserve currency rather that SDRs or even a partial gold standard (i.e., require a percentage, perhaps 10%, of money to be backed by gold). The books Currency Wars and The Death of Money make a pretty good case for this.
To quote Walter White: We are not in danger, we are the danger. And would we want it any other way? Could we as a nation accept being second best at the delivery of death and destruction?
Every other nation on the planet accepts being second (or third...or 197th) best at that, and very few of those seem to see it as a particular problem.
A good time to listen to or reread Eisenhower's 1961 speech warning of the Military-Industrial Complex.
"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions."
Thanks for bringing this up. I also like to highlight another part of the same speech:
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist."
I'm glad someone said it, but I have the feeling that if anyone could have slowed or reversed the national infection, Eisenhower would have been that person. (It would have been unreasonable to expect of Truman, anyway.) It makes me wonder if Ike actually even considered the MIC a problem during most of his presidency, or whether perhaps it was only when they stopped taking his calls as a lame duck that he had his epiphany.
It's easy to blame him, but he had surprisingly little power to stop it. The President (then, as now) could point it at any target he wished, but could do little to shut it down.
Congress is where the true power lies. They could, with a single vote, shut down any and all of it. Blame them.
Or, if you rather, blame yourself for voting the wrong people into Congress.
It's really a cop-out to blame the voters. We're never going to be as well-informed, persuasive, or powerful as a five-star general who is also a re-elected President. (No one will ever be that well-informed, persuasive, or powerful.) Eisenhower could have ordered projects, divisions, and fleets mothballed and sent the money back to the Treasury, and the media couldn't have incited any riots about it. Do you think Obama has that option now? Prior to WWII in this country the phrase "standing army" was one of derision.
At this point, the only way to stop these particular pigs from feeding at the trough would be to destroy the trough. That will happen eventually, but you might not enjoy it.
Cries of "we're too stupid, save us from ourselves!" are unlikely to ever be answered with acceptable solutions.
> or powerful as a five-star general who
You have all the power in the world. You don't seem to know it. Maybe that's the problem.
> Eisenhower could have ordered projects, divisions, and fleets mothballed
No, Congress could have done that. Not Ike. He might have tried, and he would have been cockblocked. Too much money in it. Do you think the coast states would have wanted fleets mothballed with their economies tanking soon afterward?
> Prior to WWII in this country the phrase "standing army" was one of derision.
Why isn't it now? Why when I mention the idea that I think having a standing army is bad now, people treat me like a kook?
The truth is, you want to have a standing army. You vote that way. You get neurotically worried if someone like me suggests that maybe we don't need a navy at all (but how would we save the poor oppressed people of X with our bombs and collateral damage?!!?!).
> At this point, the only way to stop these particular pigs
You might want to re-read your comment. Upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7949955), I've already made the unnecessary-military argument you're struggling to articulate, and I mentioned the "standing army" phenomenon here because Eisenhower's voters had lived most of their lives in that intellectual climate. It's clear that he could have relied on that built-in skepticism in a way that no leader today could.
Now I'm "a pig" because I'm a little skeptical of the tired Eisenhower hagiography one always reads in these threads? Just face it, your hero didn't save us. Anyway the MIC is just a specific example of a general trend with this nation. You might even like some of the other examples: the War on Drugs, the War on Immigrants, the War on Fat, etc. If a system always does the same thing, one expects that system to keep doing that thing. "Voting" isn't somehow external to the system under discussion.
Nobody claimed stupidity. Well-informedness is a matter of security clearance.
> You have all the power in the world. blah, blah, blah
Why hide behind ambiguous vitriol? If you actually have a point make it.
> Eisenhower could have ordered projects, divisions, and fleets mothballed.
Executive orders give the POTUS extraordinary powers during war-time and times of national emergency. Entire wars have been fought upon executive order. Do you want to discuss specifics or just continue being nasty to people you're talking to? See http://www.veteranstoday.com/2009/01/29/obama-could-issue-an...
> You're the pig.
Classy. What particular item of conversation makes you say that to the person you're responding to? I didn't see anything that could have provoked that.
The Military-Industrial Complex is often brought up in the context of US capitalism, but was quite relevant to the USSR. In that case, a giant chunk of the country's economy was taken up for military production. The military commanders, KGB, and all of those employed by the USSR's Military-Industrial Complex had a strong interest in justifying their continued existence.
To be fair, one could also consider the media a leg of that stool. After all, has any journalist or pundit challenged the assumption that the goat-and-beard enthusiasts are as dangerous a threat as the Soviets were? Before that, did anyone challenge the assumption that the Soviets were as dangerous a threat as the Nazis were? The narrative is inescapable.
For a significant proportion of the Cold War the United States wildly exaggerated (by multiple orders of magnitude) the strategic threat posed by the Soviets:
Few here work for the Military Industrial Complex, so you ought not expect many downvotes.
But many if not a majority do work for the Advertising Content-Industrial Complex, and any critique of said complex does bring on the downvotes[1][2]. Occasionally, under articles that attract ACIC dissenters, such critique will garner support[3].
Unconditional surrender is what terrorist organizations want, and they will wage war without end until they achieve it.
The problem with peace is that it is symmetrical. Everybody has to agree to peace before it will happen. War is asymmetrical. It takes only one entity (including, at the limit, one person) to make a war, even if everybody else wants peace.
No, it takes two. Countering violence with violence is not always the only solution. Sometimes sustained violence in response (war) is the the way to go, sometimes it just escalates the original violence into something far worse and far harder to unwind. For example, and as the OP states, we may be generating far more "terrorists" than we are killing.
We humans often fail to see this because we are so myopic and vengeful. We suck at seeing the big picture and taking the long view.
The other is that it will cause large segments of society to not trust the beneficial uses of this type of technology. When everything flying over head is a threat what can you say of your quality of life?
Similar to how the co-opting of vaccinations in very much the same countries has lead to killing of doctors who only come to help.
We are teaching a whole new generation to fear technology and it may take another to fix that.
Where is the line between war and security drawn? Terrorism can't be "defeated" like an advisory in a traditional war, it's more of a mindset. Therefore one could argue that adequate security should continuously identify and address threats to the state. Does this mean we're in a continuous war? I don't think the semantics matters.
It might be interesting if it were possible to declare war against an organization, as opposed to a sovereign nation. The conflict between Western nations and Al Qaeda is complicated by the fact that it doesn't fit into previous models of military conflict, and there seems to be a reluctance to update those models. It would also be useful if a nation were required to control activities within its borders and not empowered to respond militarily to border violations in pursuit of combatants.
Drones aren't too much different than normal airplanes doing bombing runs or any mission where a general sits back while troops/drones/missiles/robots kill the target you specified.. There is definitely a sense of, "pick a target, push a button, wait until he blows up" which the world needs to evaluate before allowing.
I think there is a limit to putting real robots on the battlefield, humans will always be necessary. It's always been possible to get the support of citizens and sometimes foreign government support by having real humans in the field doing humanitarian work. This cannot be replaced by dumb robots, a human face will be required to work with machines or else they will always be seen as inferior and untrustworthy.
I could see the US Government eventually having ATLAS style robots with tablets / large screens for faces, kind of like robocop but the soldier would just be remote controlling the robot.
Drone wars are a new continuous flow, always on, Kanban killing process.
Probably get some sort of Office 360 interface so we can kill from home. Maybe a new version of Python called KillScript that has some Hebbian learning libraries built in. TFIDF says it is a good time to be average.
The Israeli's have saved many lives with drones both for reconnaissance and for targeting terrorists. I don't think they would be using drones for killing terrorists if it proved ineffective. It is hard to understand why drones are saving Israeli lives but not American ones.
