Slashdot Mirror
The Drone War
There are plenty of human casualties in the Afghan conflict -- though few among Americans -- but the fight seems especially significant in terms of technology and military conflict.
The Predator spy plane and other unmanned drones and gunships (along with satellites, thermal imaging devices, X-ray scanners, etc.) not only search for the enemy, but fire guided missiles, drop powerful oxygen-sucking hyperbaric bombs, and guide bomb strikes from afar. There is no war in recent human history that involved so few humans, at least on one side of the conflict. The most staggering statistic out of Afghanistan might be that the first American combat casualty died nearly three months into the "war."
Before Afghanistan, conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without substantial numbers of ground troops. Even as the Afghanistan campaign began, pundits flooded cable talk shows asserting that air power alone wasn't enough, that there would be substantial human sacrifice. Both Desert Storm in Kuwait and Iraq and the Kosovo conflicts involved the growing used of so-called "smart" laser-guided weaponry, deployed with varying degrees of reliability. But those conflicts also involved either the use of enormous numbers of soldiers on the ground and were controversial in terms of the bomb's precision and effectiveness.
The Afghanistan campaign is a very different kind of fight. Early reports suggest the civilian casualties may be lower than in any other large-scale military operation in modern history. Although dangerous and complex for the military on the scene, it's hard to imagine a conflict more remote to the majority of Americans, asked to go about their business as usual.
Orwell's "Drone Wars" come very much to mind here. So does Sir Arthur Clarke's machine warfare and AI military stories. A handful of human soldiers guide and direct the increasingly sophisticated technological arsenal that has devastated the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda networks with stunningly few U.S. military casualties and American civilian casualties beyond September 11 and the anthrax attacks. The Taliban and their terrorist friends seem to have been totally unprepared for this variety of war, such a stark contrast to the Soviet's ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan just a decade ago.
It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level.
Winston Churchill repeatedly asked his countrymen for brutal sacrifices in World War II. In the new kind of American war, political leaders ask citizens only to keep shopping and traveling.
Military historians like John Keegan have recently argued that the devastating toll of warfare in the 20th Century makes conventional conflicts increasingly less likely. Once a means of expanding territory and amassing wealth, the brutish wars of the 20th Century have rendered both objectives hard to attain. Even before Drone Wars, artillery and aerial warfare along with nuclear weapons suggested that wars can't really be won in the conventional sense any longer; even the victors will suffer unacceptable losses. But drone warfare radically alters the equation. Technologically advanced civilian populations -- just as Orwell foresaw -- can send their technological surrogates off to battle one another while humans stay home to wait for the outcome.
A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea. Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery? War has recently seemed so terrible that civilized societies view it as a last resort. But American history is crammed with technological innovations that are neither discussed nor much thought out. Drone Wars might not appear so terrible. They might even become irresistible.
Cost... Sounds like a good enough reason not to fight for me.
... with another pointless article.
First of all, the Gulf War was as remote to Americans as this war is. Second of all, we have allies on the ground who have done the dirty work for us. Yes our air strikes are powerful, but don't think that these "drones" would have been half as effective without ground support. The closest we'll come to any sort of real drone war is the latest Star Wars movie.
...Jon Katz shows he's not qualified to comment on something. Notice his assumption about drones doing battle only with each other. We'll never see a war like that, as it wouldn't decide anything. At some point you have to physically move in a take control of fixed physical assets, which means people are involved. (Yes, it's possible that many, many years from now we'd have robots so advanced they could take over even this job, but that's deep in the SF realm for now.)
I think the best SF book about a technological proxy war, and of interest in evaluating the implications of drone warfare, is Lem's Fiasco. Though the real thrust of the book is the Fermi Paradox (and Lem has some very interesting ideas on that score, too), the planet "contacted" (if you read the book you'll see why those scare quotes are important) is in the final stages of a technological proxy war/drone war that has extended well out into the planetary system.
Actually with the advent of more and more innovative "less than lethal" weapons; everything from teargas and rubber bullets to tranquilizers, sticky-spray and bolo-net guns.
We may see the arrival of a technocracy who can effectively ignore the political demands of the masses because any violent unrest can be subdued without the massive loss of life and its consequent political fallout.
In past times one has been forced to negotiate with mobs, or unleash violence upon them which brings your image low in the opinion of the greater population. However if you simply spray a mob or a military enemy with a sleeping gas, and they all wake up in prison, the general population is less offended and you suffer no political fallout.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
It's a Good Thing for the soldiers, who don't get killed.
It's a Good Thing for the generals, who no longer have to order their men to die.
It's a Good Thing for the families of the soldiers, who no longer have to get The Letter from The Men In Dress Uniform.
About the only group of people it's bad for are the companies that make the flags that get draped on coffins.
Katz, if you wanna talk about how "drone wars" are somehow less moral than wars with casualties, I suggest you visit the Somme (60,000 on the first day, about 1.2 million casualties for the whole battle), or Ypres (400,000, and first use of mustard gas), or Verdun (750,000) any of the other WWI slaughterhouses.
If you don't like "smart weapons", look at the pictures from WWI where artillery shelling stripped the land of trees down to the ground - the closest thing I've seen to it was the aftermath of Mt. St. Helens. Nothing but mud and matchsticks that used to be trees, as far as the eye can see.
Better yet, find a WWI veteran and tell him that you think the techno-wars we fight today are somehow "worse" than the way he fought war.
Even from a wheelchair or hospital bed, I'll bet any one of them would gladly kick your ass all the way back to 1914.
The US strategy relied on the Northern Alliance (and later, other local Afghans). It became clear early on that air power alone could not do enough.
And the same thing happened in Kosovo. It wasn't until local Albanian rebels forced Serbian troops out that NATO air power won the war.
Large scale nulclear wars, though, would in a way be the most "humanless" wars. The US and USSR both planned for a war whose objective was to knock out the other side's missles: there's would make bigger explosions, ours were more accurate. Both sides put their nukes in hard to blow-up places. Some nukes required a direct hit, within a few meters, by another nuke to be destroyed. Of course, lots of people would die in the process, but only as collateral damage...
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Taliban forces used mines extensively. Al Qaida used remote-controlled vans to blow up US embassies.
It takes more than guns to control a people, it also takes control of information. Alas, they'll have that too...
Sorry international readers... some specific 'we' content pertaining to the USA.
Did we actually declare war?
That takes an act of Congress.
Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power To...
Clause 11: To declare War... and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water...
Of course, Congress hasn't formally declared war against anyone since World War II. Since then, the United States has engaged in military conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Our soldiers are fighting overseas. We feel as though we're at war at home, but we're not at war under the U.S. Constitution because Congress hasn't declared war.
All Congress did was approve the necessary budget items related to the Sept. 11th.
That being said, what do we do with all the 'detainees' in Guantanamo Bay? Does international law require us to be at war to hold them for any length of time?
pronoblem
I am reminded of a Star Trek (Original Series) episode about a completely computerized war.
Two planets had been warrior for centuries, perhaps millenia. Originally, they built great starfleets, rockets, atomic weapons, and launched them against their enemy planet. Thousands would die per attack.
Then they used their advanced computer networks to design new attack patterns, so they would build newer rockets, bombs, etc etc. On the other side, the computers would design new defenses, anti rocket, etc etc And vice versa.
So, with each new interation, the computers could calculate just how effective the new weapon would be, and calculate how many thousands of the enemy would die in the attack. And vice versa on the other side. For example, for every 100 missiles, 1 would get through, 20 square miles would get nuked, and 100,000 people would die.
Both sides could perfectly predict the results of their attacks before the attack even began, or even before the missiles were built to be used in the attack, they could tell by just the design. They could predict the enemy attacks also, perfectly, and could predict when and where their defenses would fail. The two enemies were locked at a stalemate.
So, the two planets made a decision... they would continue to fight the war, but instead of fighting with physical objects like missiles, the war would be fought entirely by computer. The computer would design new attacks and communicate the attacks to the enemy computer, where the enemy computer would make a defense calculation, predict the number of people dead, and the citizens would march themselves into suicide chambers to represent the losses without the mes of nuclear fallout and all that wasted manufacture.
And they did it, for additional millenia, until the survivors on both planets had forgotten what it was that they were fighting about in the first place.
But once they're all in prison, what then? A typical mass protest will consist of a few tens of thousands of people. If they're protesting on a single-issue point (eg. the truckers during Britain's recent fuel protest, or the farmers during Britain's Countryside Alliance campaign), chance are they're a key part of your infrastructure. You arrest all the truckers, and the whole country starves instantly! You arrest the farmers, the country starves a bit later (or food prices go through the roof). Meantime you've got to find food, accomodation and guards for 10,000 people. It's not a winning solution.
A mob is one thing - consider the anti-globalisation riots. But if the Million Mom March was broken up by police with teargas, how would that look? Non-lethal force doesn't necessarily mean that the enforcers look good - think of the images of the police training firehoses on protesters in the 60's. And even non-lethal force can go wrong - think of the flammable teargas used in Waco.
The non-lethal weapons being developed are designed to be used on individual opponents. You can't reasonably sticky-spray an entire crowd! Ditto the bolo-net only works on a single person. It's designed to give the police an option other than lethal force when faced by someone with a gun or a knife - this is also an important issue for peacekeepers in places like Kosovo, where shooting someone is likely to kick off a major incident at an international level.
Only gas is a reasonable mass-effect weapon. But even that has its downside - knockout gases are all lethal if inhaled in too great a quantity, and all that's required against it is a gas mask which can easily be home-made. If the police start routinely using gas on protesters, all protesters will routinely start using gas masks.
Grab.
wow, that's amazing... you've got a bunch of nations that really got their independance because the UK didn't want to go thru the expense of sending the Navy over to enforce their rule. that's not going to work when the oppressive government is at home.
First of all, we didn't declare war! The USA has only declared 5 wars in our history: the War of 1812, the Mexican War, Spanish-American War, WW I, & WW II.
Also, the US Navy Seals haven't been involved in Afghanistan, although they may be involved in other areas around the world.
And no US forces got into Afghanistan on Sep 12 that weren't there already. We don't have the assets in place to move that quickly. The first in were the Army Special Forces A-Teams in early October.
I think it is important to note that as war becomes more mechanized and human sacrifice is reduced, the governmental constituency, in the case of United States the enfranchised people, become less and less tolerant of casualties. One cause of this reduced tolerance is the widespread media coverage of any casualty which occurs.
Take a step back from the current wartime situation and look at a bigger picture. Take a statistical look at civil sacrifice as opposed to military sacrifice. Please understand that I am not trying to downplay military sacrifice and that I have the utmost respect for those who have volunteered to defend my nation, regardless of what feelings I may harbor towards the nation itself.
The government spares no expense in the development of techonologies which help to remove as much element of risk from the endeavors of the soldiers on and off the battlefield. For example, stealth bombers which cost hundreds of millions of dollars each after development costs to build cannot perform any function that traditional bomber aircraft cannot. They were developed for the sole purpose of reducing risk.
What is an analagous technology in the civilian realm? Take governors in cars. Such technology could greatly reduce risk by prohibiting drivers from exceeding dangeroulsy high speeds. Why don't we have them in all cars? Because we as Americans are willing to take on an increased risk to protect a civil liberty that isn't even legal: the liberty to exceed the speed limit. The speed limit is a rediculously hypocritical phenomenon in American legislation. The people of our nation enact legislation via our representative bicameral legislature, and therefore, our laws are what we want. But we all know that almost the entire constituency speeds not just occasionally, but each time they access our public highways.
I think reducing risk to human lives is a good thing. But why is it so much more popular with military technology than with civilian? Because of the media. If we were forced to look at pictures of the thousands of fatal car accidents that occur each day, we would demand technological improvements and maybe even drive more carefully; we would be willing to accept more inconvenience in our lives to protect them.
I suppose the media should be applauded, indeed, the film industry as well, for exposing the horror of conventional warfare to the constituency. This causes the taxpayers to realize that they do want to spend money to protect human life. It has also changed the way wars are faught: the public does not tolerate collateral civilian casualties, either.
I don't think the public realizes the disproportionate amount of money that goes to these military protections as opposed to the civilian ones. That's the primary problem with our apathetic constituency: the media has to shove problems in our faces before anyone cares about them.
For those who are religious, let us pray that all people are endowed with more than instinctual respect for human life. In an ethics class I took last semester, when we were studying relativism, we came to the rather dissapointing conclusion that the only respect for human life common to all humanity was the protection of life for the preservation of the species; this might not even apply to some who we might call terrorists.
Just my humble rantings.
And we also pay a yearly tribute in forms of gifts to her majesty (she's not my majesty!).
Some people call these multi-million dollars gifts "royalties" for using her head on our coins.
, Barry McCaffrey's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division mounted what may be the largest flanking maneuver in military history
IIRC, it was Gen. Schwartzkopf who later confessed that the exposed flank was so obvious, he thought it might be a trap filled with poison gas mines or even nuclear weapons. Fortunately, it wasn't.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Unwittingly, though, you've highlighted perhaps the fatal flaw in Katz's argument (beyond the fact that it's ten years too soon): no numbers of drones will ever change one fundamental premise of warfare, namely that aircraft can never capture or hold territory. Until drones can walk, attack and defend, infantry and armor will still be the mainstays of armed forces.
No, but drones can uterly obliterate territory such that it is no longer worth holding on to -- and that is what US airpower has been doing in Afghanistan.
During the European expasionist phase of several hundred years ago owning as much territory as possible was necessary as so much of the economy was based on ownership of natural resources. The global economy has reduced that requirement considerably, the US does not need to accumulate large amounts of new territory to survive -- and their military capabilities should reflect that.
In most any modern conflict all that is needed is a small piece of territory to use as a refueling or resupplying site & a place to launch drones from.
dan.The fact is: most of the UN members are bunch of representatives from non-democratic governments.
You mean, like Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, South Africa (post-apartheid), to name some of them? Yes, these are all a bunch of undemocratic dictatorships! How DARE they vote for a resolution condemning torture.
So, I guess you support the U.S.'s decision not to support the resolution that would have banned torture...does that mean that you condone the use of torture?
BTW, the US has also blocked a U.N. resolution that would have defined what IS terrorism, even though the U.S. military manuals do define it as the use of force OR threat of use of force against civilians in order to attain political goals. Of course the U.S. would never agree to this, since it would put an end to their use of "low-intesity conflicts" around the world...
UN is a non-fucntional body. It is a mirage.
It is mainly so because of interference from the US. The fact is that the US, as the world's last superpower, would not allow any other authority but its own. Great way to make friends with the rest of the world, guys!
How can you have China, for example, in the Secutiy Council?
Easy, China is a nuclear power. That's how they got in the security council in the first place.
The same China that is non-democratic, that abuses its own citizens, that is a nest of corruption, that holds foreign land under military rule, that excludes foreign nationals to have rights...
That one exactly. You forgot to add: who's had "Most Favored Nation" status with the U.S. for quite a few years, now! The U.S. routinely supports foreign dictatorships, as long as they fall in line with american national interests. You're so keen to mention realpolitik, you should know this by now!
Note that the fact that it's happening doesn't make it right, and doesn't mean that we shouldn't denounce it. Don't underestimate the power of public opinion...after all, it's pretty much all that we have left as private citizens...
How do they dare (how do you dare) to support resolutions against democratic countries and elected governments?
Again, you ignore the fact that most democratic countries and elected governments voted in favor of these resolutions, and that the U.S. was usually isolated in voting against (although Israel nearly always votes with the U.S.). In any case, a resolution should be based on its merit, regardless of who supports it. The one I mentioned condemned torture - that doesn't seem too difficult of a moral choice, in my view. But perhaps you have a different view of this...
In the US you have the right to critisize your Government. You can vote them off from office if you do not like them. You can demonstrate against government policy. You can sue the government. Try that in a random country from the UN Council.
Yes, it's great for a citizen to be able to be able to criticize the U.S. government...though if you do that right now you could possibly lose your job or be labeled a traitor...
In any case, the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on democracy. The U.N., whatever its faults may be, also remains an essential part of world diplomacy. One shouldn't dismiss it in such a way, even if one can lament about it's usual lack of effectiveness.
Chances are that, just thinking about this will be a sure passage to torture, inprisonement and possibly death.
Which is exactly what the resolution that the U.S. opposed was about. That, in addition to its cozying up with such brutal regimes as China, Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, etc. makes it an accomplice to crimes against that democracy you seem to nominally cherish.
Be real. Accept the fact that realpolitik rule the world. This is not an utopy. This is Real Planet Earth, not a Star Trek Federation of some sort.
Oh, but I do understand the workings of realpolitik! I have often debated with idealistic PoliSci student about how you need to understand how the world works before trying to change it. You, on the other hand, seem to think that there's nothing we can do except exercise a nearly-meaningless right to vote once every two years or so...As I said, just because governments (even the U.S.'s) are corrupt, doesn't mean we shouldn't denounce corruption and injustice, and strive to make this world a better place. Otherwise, we might as well all just give in and renounce democracy altogether!
Being real doesn't necessarily mean becoming a cynic. The important thing is that the U.S.'s foreign policy is unjust, and concerned only with American interests. This creates a world where it is increasingly isolated, its allies going along more out of fear than respect. That is not a healthy situation.
Reminder: find a new sig