Don't Fear Their Reapers

One of the most misleading ideas in
commentary on modern weapons and warfare is that of the karmic theory of new
weapons technology, particularly with regard to drones. Despite the many legitimate concerns about the legality, morality, and efficacy of targeted killing programs, commentators and analysts all too often engage in threatmongering about unmanned systems proliferation. We see it most often in
articles like this one by
Michael Ignatieff, or this
by Steve Clemons asking ominous questions such as “What Happens When
They Get Drones?” Adam has
noted similar veins of commentary about cyberweapons. These arguments are
doubly aggravating because they misunderstand both the nature of the platforms
they discuss and the logic of strategic behavior in international relations,
leading to a conclusion that cannot distinguish blowback or proliferation from karma, replacing what should be a debate centered on policy and empirical assessment with prophecy centered on instruments and unrealistic hypotheticals.



Many - and not just Clemons or Ignatieff -
have worried about the proliferation of military technologies, and for good reasons. Some advantages are structural, but technological advantages are dynamic and impossible to preserve. In the case of
drones, commentators and analysts have feared a coming “drone arms race” where
someday Americans might face rival fleets of foreign drones, and concerns that
U.S. policies policies of using drones to conduct targeted killings might
somehow result in rival powers unleashing it on us.



But what does the U.S. really have to fear
from Russian or Chinese drones, or a new norm of targeted killing? Whatever it
does, it certainly won’t resemble what we’ve meted out to the rest of the world
in the past decade, contrary to Ignatieff’s and others’ portentous warnings.
I’ll venture a bold prediction here: in our lifetimes, no foreign power will
ever deploy drones in a targeted killing campaign against the United States as
it has employed drones in Pakistan or Yemen. To believe they would first
requires misunderstanding the technology.



Firstly, drones capable of launching armed
attacks from over-the-horizon are not extremely cheap, they are
about as expensive as manned strike craft, as Winslow Wheeler has noted. Why AQ would want
to spend dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a drone when they could
furnish a martyr with a Cessna or bring in enormous quantities of operatives,
firearms, or explosives in for the same price is completely beyond me. We’ve
seen the face of the day when “the enemy has drones,” and it’s a nincompoop who
thinks he can collapse the Pentagon with RC planes, not a technothriller antihero.



Secondly, when rival states get drones, they
still won’t be able to conduct a targeted killing
campaign in the U.S. without massively enhancing their conventional power
projection. American drones operate from airbases in-theater, and they’ve never
operated in airspace that wasn’t either cleared of hostile air defenses or
under the control of a government granting tacit acquiescence to the strike
program. The U.S. would have no compunctions shooting down hostile drones or
laying waste to whatever facilities and governments were hosting or commanding
them. In other words, outside of the context of a broader conventional
operation against U.S. forces, it’s difficult to see the logic in another
country launching drone strikes against the U.S.



Even in areas where the geographic and
logistical constraints were conquerable, under what kind of scenario would a
hostile state be able to launch drone strikes against U.S. interests and simply
sit idly by and take it? To prevent America from retaliating would require
destroying its conventional military capability, which means a general war.
Drones do not create impunity. Diplomatic and military power to deter
retaliation or noncompliance create impunity



Nor is there really a sensible reason a
hostile power would need drones to conduct assassinations or bombings
inside the U.S., if they chose that policy. As for the norm of “targeted
killing,” many countries have used assassination as a method of dealing with
enemies of the state - whether they be terrorists, criminals, or even just
dissidents. Targeted killings predated drones, after all, and so have covert
attacks inside U.S. borders. Proxy, terrorist, and criminal groups have already
pioneered technologies and TTPs for killing Americans in foreign borders
without a conventional ground invasion - they’re the ones that al Qaeda, the
IRGC and Qods Force, the Soviet-era intelligence services, and others have been
using for decades.



Other countries have even assassinated
targets on American soil before - Pinochet’s DINA car bombed a Chilean
dissident in Washington, DC, and revolutionary Iran had a counterrevolutionary
activist shot in Bethesda. Why use drones when these simpler and more effective
methods exist? The era of irregular assassinations and bombings against U.S.
interests isn’t coming - it’s come and gone and come again, because drones are
just a means to targeted killing that happened to be convenient for a wealthy
superpower to employ against soft targets in permissive airspace, not the sine qua non of targeted killing itself.



The same conventional, geographical, and
logistical constraints that prevent hostile aircraft from running rampant
across the Western world, and the same prudential considerations that
discourage rival powers from wantonly assassinating American citizens inside
U.S. borders, will prevent drones from doing the same. Russia and China are far
more likely to employ these aircraft against hostile non-state actors rather
than fruitlessly dispatching them against the U.S. or its allies, except as
part of a broader conventional conflict. Drones could proliferate to Russia,
China, Pakistan, Iran, and whatever other states and Americans would never need
to fear Ignatieff’s ludicrous threat of “the same heaven-sent vengeance” it inflicts
upon foreign populations, because no power will ever have the geographical and
strategic superiority the U.S. maintains over weak states and the militants
operating within them.



There are merits to creating legal
frameworks that clarify the use of targeted
killings, but framing the problem
as controlling the technology is absurd. An arms control framework on drones is
a hollow thing, it protects Americans from weapons our enemies neither need nor
would use in any plausible scenario. Threat assessments from technology
proliferation should be based on plausible scenarios and strategic logic, not
Kantian assumptions of moral equivalence divorced from the context of how the
technology is actually used.