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Drones, Computer Viruses and Blowback
Hugh Pickens writes "Michael Crowley writes that using drones rather than soldiers to kill bad guys is appealing for many reasons, including cost, relative precision and reduction of risk to American troops. But there's plenty of evidence that drones antagonize local populations and create more enemies over the long term than we kill in the short term. The failed 2010 Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, has said that about the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan, and the Washington Post has described how drone strikes may be breeding sympathy for al-Qaeda in Yemen. 'It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically and it is unpopular only in other countries,' says Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence until May of 2010. 'Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.' Now there's another component to the new warfare that threatens blowback: cyberwar. Like drones, cyberweapons are relatively cheap and do their work without putting American troops in harm's way. The blowback comes when those viruses get loose and inflict unintended damage or provide templates to terrorists or enemy nations that some experts think could lead to disaster and argue that cyberweapons are like bioweapons, demanding international treaties to govern their use. 'We may indeed be at a critical moment in history, when the planet's prospects could be markedly improved by an international treaty on cyberweapons, and the cultivation of an attendant norm against cyberwar,' writes Richard Wright. 'The ideal nation to lead the world toward this goal would be the most powerful nation on earth, especially if that nation had a pretty clean record on the cyberweapons front. A few years ago, America seemed to fit that description. But it doesn't now.'"
This is just an extension of what people really object to: the US coming to their country and killing people. You were not invited, you kill civilians and there is no justice or consequences. You develop drones to make this even easier.
I'm not sure why US commentators can't see this. Imagine if every now and then a Pakistani drone blew up a random wedding or accidentally killed some people trying to do their weekly shopping in your neighbourhood. Wouldn't that annoy you?
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You are both right, it depends on the definition of overwhelming. You don't sent tanks and machine guns to put down a riot, because in doing so you will (and rightfully so) create enemies who don't care about their own lives anymore and whose only reason for existing from then on is to damage you in any way possible - as much and as frequently as possible. We call those people terrorists these days, but they are not necessarily interested in terror, just vengeance. You are much less likely to get that kind of result from sending an over-sized squad of policemen with rubber batons, so in that sense overwhelming force isn't necessarily so bad compared to sending an under-sized squad of policemen. Though it still can be, since the police (or any other group of humans) is inevitably going to behave in inexcusable ways if you make it so that they know they cannot get themselves into a bad situation no matter how much they provoke the people they have been sent to manage.
There's a school of thought that says "rules of war" are inherently stupid, that whenever we go to war we should kill as many people as possible by whatever means we have available, that prisoners should be treated harshly and civilians as disposable. When used in reference to our current wars, this usually goes along with some Internet Tough Guy posturing about how wimpy liberals don't understand that the world is full of bad guys who want to kill us, blah blah blah.
But the Iraqis who surrendered en masse in Desert Storm (you know, the Iraq war we actually won) did so in large part because they knew they'd be treated well when they did so. Yes, they were shell-shocked, but remember that the Iraqi army of the day was hardened by years of grueling WW1-style combat against Iran -- they could have kept fighting, and would have done so if they'd believed there was anything to be gained by doing so. I know; as a medic I had a good perspective on the guys on the other side (there were far more Iraqi wounded to treat than American or other Allied soldiers.) And in the more recent war, the insurgency picked up steam with every atrocity. A similar pattern was seen in Vietnam, and probably in every guerilla war in history. Big, technologically advanced occupying powers always think that they can use a steamroller to intimidate the populace into submission, and they're always wrong. Inevitably, they end up creating more enemies than they kill, until their only choice is either to go home or "make a desert and call it peace."
It's worth noting that Sherman, who popularized the phrase "war is hell" (and earlier made the more precise statement "war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it") and who is largely remembered today as the boogeyman who burned his way across the South, actually took care to minimize civilian casualties, made sure that displaced populations had the means to feed themselves, and was punctilious about the care of prisoners. Had the technology been available to him, I'm sure he would have been happy to use drones to find and destroy Johnston's army, but I'm equally sure he would have rejected out of hand the idea of using them against civilians. Smart guy, he was.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Good points. A fundamental question after 9/11 was "Why do they hate us?" The knee jerk response was "They hate us because we are free and wealthy and they hate freedom and wealth". But a truer answer is more likely "They hate us because we fund their oppressors and so have contributed to their relative unfreedom and poverty".
The biggest issue with all this is that advanced technologies of abundance like robotics, networked computing, nanotechnology, nuclear, aerospace, biotech and so on must be used from a perspective of abundance. Such technologies, like Bucky Fuller talked about, could create universal abundance for all of humanity -- and then some, as we spread into the solar system and to the stars, But, people are often using such technologies of abundance from the perspective of scarcity and so they are adapting advanced technology to fight the last century's wars over perceived resource scarcity. Thus we have ironies like people creating nuclear missiles to fight over oil fields, rather than using advanced materials and knowledge about how the atom works to make clean cheap energy for everyone (whether via nuclear means or solar panels or hot or cold fusion or whatever). I wrote a related essay here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
The same is happening with the misguided energy going into creating stuff like Stuxnet, especially given that what goes around comes around, and now everyone has access to Stuxnet as a prototype platform to build even worse stuff. Obama's escalations of the drone wars and the cyber wars just adds more ironies to his Nobel Peace Prize.
Still, ultimately, "war is a racket", and that racket sadly drives much of US foreign policy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
In general, everyone globally needs to totally rethink our collective economy and geopolitics for new 21st century realities. That will happen eventually because we can't survive the way we have been going on. It's only a question of how long until that change in mindset happens and how much suffering the world experences (including from nucelar war) until then. Here is another related website:
http://anwot.org/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The US is using targeted, small scale means to attack people we don't like. I won't claim it's perfect, or that we don't kill people we shouldn't.
But "overwhelming force"? Hardly. We're not leveling entire cities with fleets of a hundred bombers. We're not turning the entire nation into a glass parking lot. We're not even attacking the nation at large, but trying (again with admitted imperfection) to surgically attack specific elements within it. We're even trying to befriend and assist other segments of the population.
The US is capable of using far, far, far more overwhelming force than it is doing.
Respectfully, I couldn't disagree more. Strategy and, to some degree, tactics have not changed fundamentally since Alexander. Technology has altered the way that strategy is applied, and changed how tactics are implemented, but the fundamentals remain the same. Military doctrine, if by that you mean a sort of understanding of the role of various elements of the military and their proper application, tends to change as technology alters capability. Even so, it doesn't change that much.
Consider the role of armored cavalry (by which I mean everything from mounted knights to modern tanks). It has always played the traditional role of cavalry. It screens moving columns, light cavalry scouts ahead of a main army, heavier cavalry breaks defensive lines. Whether you're talking about lancers or tanks, the role is basically the same. It is as true today as it was four hundred years ago that cavalry is only effective when it support infantry. Equally true is that infantry is the basic unit of warfare. You've gotta have boots on the ground to occupy territory, and you have to occupy territory to control it. If you call asymmetrical warfare by it's more traditional name, i.e. guerrilla warfare, you will see that it hasn't changed much, either. Whether you're talking about American revolutionaries harassing British troops during the Revolutionary War, or insurgents in Iraq detonating IEDs, asymmetrical warfare is the only way a smaller, weaker combatant can fight against a stronger, larger combatant. And even then, the goal isn't to defeat the enemy, but to make occupation more trouble than it's worth.
The only real thing that changed after WWII was the geopolitical structure of the world, and even that wasn't something completely alien in the history of international relations. To claim that the only warfare left is asymmetric warfare is to propose that all future conflicts will be between a state and a non-state actor, or between two dramatically mismatched states. I think that such a viewpoint ignores the potential for interstate conflict between rivals in the near and distant futures.
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I know this view is sincerely held by people who have only the best interests of the US at heart. But look, you have to consider the real-world alternatives and likely consequences of those alternatives or your analysis is coming up short.
To be sure, the US would like to have a weapon that causes people to just drop dead, or better yet, be whisked into US jurisdiction for a proper trial. That magic weapon is not available to us, and drone strikes are the closet thing we have right now. We don't want collateral damage- i.e. dead people- and we spend billions on weapons systems research to make them smarter, more precise and more flexible for just this reason.
The people who hate us would hate us just as much if we intervened in any other way which was equally effective at stopping people who are actively planning to kill us. If we sneak into the country and kill them, they'd still hate us as much and be just as motivated to harm us. They'd just have a different back story when interrogated. Why did bin Laden hate us? Because he wanted to be the one in Saudi to protect it and expel Saddam from Kuwait. And there we were, on HIS holy sand, doing what HE was meant to do.
So are we going to decide that we shouldn't do anything until they show up here with the biological agent / terror plot / suitcase nuke? Because if that's your defensive strategy, as everyone form Clinton to Bush to Obama has realized once they've had a few daily briefs from the CIA, it's not going to work.
We have to intervene earlier in the pipeline. Terrorism is going to be an ongoing reality that we have to face and deal with. There are no really good options, only less bad ones.
The fact of war is some individual personalities are critical to the enemy. Sorry to say but even in terrorism there's a thing called talent. Drone strikes such as the one that took out al Awlaki or al-Libi are a huge win that sets the enemy back. Until we understand the roots of terrorism, and I am not saying that US foreign policy has always been benign (why don't all Iranians just automatically hate us? Because they don't. Not the young people. ), until then we have to face the fact that people want to kill us and we need to stop them before they can succeed.
We are working on weapons systems even more precise than drones. We COULD go the other way and turn NW Pakistan into a sea of glass. That's not who we are. Drone strikes piss people off and incite, anything goes, suicidal rage in people. That was always baked into the equation from the start. This is a war, and the enemy doesn't like seeing their side's heroes dying. This is not news.
I am all about looking giving a thorough, searching and honest look our own actions in the ME . I myself think we should be in Syria right now, tipping that scale, hard. I am deeply concerned with how the rest of the world will perceive our inaction on global warming.. This is something that could galvanize and unite our enemies and coalesce neutrals against us. It's a huge propaganda weapon we're turning on ourselves; a massive unforced error our guys will ultimately end up dying for. That's why it's an act of patriotism and in fact our duty to wage a cultural war on deniers and bring it to them.
Drones are not good , they're just better than all the alternatives right now, that's all.