Drones: war criminals or winged justice?

The problem with drones is that using them to kill people not on the battlefield per se doesn't fit neatly into our existing categories of "war" and "police work."

This may seem like a new problem, but it isn't. It's a problem that reappears every time the rules of the game(s) change.

Take the American Revolution. The Brits thought we were war criminals because we didn't always meet them on the field of battle--where their highly disciplined Redcoats could make up for the slow firing pattern of the flintlock musket by arranging to have one row firing while the next row was reloading, and the like.

So instead our soldiers would sometimes not meet them on the "field of battle" where the Redcoats had an advantage, but instead stow snipers in the trees along the routes back to the barracks or tents or whatever, and shoot them in the back as they passed by.

And many Southerners thought General Sherman was a war criminal because he attacked the South's ability to feed & otherwise supply its troops--in the process put many Southern civilians in starvation conditions.

To which accusation Sherman famously replied "War is hell." In the judgment of history, Sherman did the nation a favor because he cut off the South's army at the knees, shortening the war. And thus he even did the South a favor.

And the recent effort to grant women the ability to serve in combat featured the argument that women were already serving in combat--just not getting credit or advancement for it--because what and where is the battlefield today?

The "battlefield" is everywhere and everywhen anyone or any group waging war on our country and its people is preparing to attack us or actually attacking us.

War is no longer just between nation-states. With the Islamofascist movement, our enemy can be anywhere, with no fixed capitol to defend, no land to defend, which, if lost, means the enemy is defeated. 9/11 was planned in Hamburg Germany operationally, and in Afghanistan strategically, and carried out by Saudis for the most part.

Now when that planning is taking place in another country that controls all its territory, has diplomatic relations with us, and is board with our efforts to combat terrorists, then police work is usually the best way to nab them. That was the case with Germany--less so with Saudi Arabia for what should be obvious reasons.

However, Afghanistan was another case. The Taliban controlling it were no friends of us but they were just hosting the Islamofascists who attacked us--who, when defeated, just moved their base of operations elsewhere.

Then what? Our enemies are operating in countries that are either completely hostile to us or which are not in control of the territories where our Islamofascist enemies are operating.

That leaves us with three choices, basically:
1. Invade, in force, countries that aren't at war with us but in whose territory groups at war with America are operating.
2. Concentrate solely on defensive measures within our own territory and rely on other countries' police forces within their territory.
3. Carry out military incursions by special forces, drones and the like.

There's one other option: withdraw completely from all territory that Islamofascists want us out of, and/or convert en masse to Salafist Islam. I won't comment on this option further.

The people who call drone-based assassinations "war crimes" divide between those on the Left, who obviously want Option 2, and those on the Right, who divide between NeoCons who want Option 1 and Isolationists (like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul) who seem to waffle between Options 2 & 3 (though for many their real position appear to be simply opposing anything Obama does, even if he's doing exactly what their guy was doing just a few years ago).

The flaw in Option 2 is that Pakistan's police force mostly hates our guts and will do nothing to help us--in fact they'll mostly help our enemies; Iran's police force is actively helping terrorists who want to attack us and our allies; Somalia's police force doesn't control a lot of Somalia, and ditto for Yemen, and ditto for the Texas-sized north of Mali, and so forth.

So in the case of the places where Islamofascists who have declared war on us are mostly headquartered and operating training camps, Option 2 restricts us to police work within our borders. I doubt many Americans find that acceptable.

Nor do many Americans support going to a full war footing, with a draft and rationing and the whole WWII thing, which is what it would take to invade all the wild places where our enemies are--Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and more, simultaneously (since otherwise they'd just go where we aren't).

The notion that the Islamofascist declaration of war on America--on every single American citizen and every bit of our territory and assets--is exactly the same as a criminal gang planning a bank robbery--is ludicrous.

The problem isn't the drones, but the simple-mindedness of ideologists who think "war" still means what it meant during WWII (which it didn't even then, in fact). Not just simple-mindedness, but also the tendency of lawyers to think everything is a legal issue, as in "to a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

We are in a war not of our choosing, with an amorphous, shifting, many-headed enemy that is supported by a number of countries but is not those countries, and which can't be defeated via military invasion of any one or two or three or four of those countries.

It's a war of shadows. Our drones operate out of sight. Our special forces work in the night. They sometimes kill civilians because civilians are ALWAYS killed in wars--the wonder is that we kill so few civilians, and so many fewer civilians then if we were carpet-bombing the areas in question, and so many fewer than when we started out with drones some years ago.

Sometimes drone pilots will loiter over an enemy force for hours, waiting until they can get a clear shot with no civilians nearby. Many drones fly slowly and quietly at pretty high altitudes, with much longer dwell time airborne than manned craft can sustain.

And of course unlike the Islamofascist enemies, we don't target civilians as they do--and they murder vastly greater numbers of civilians that we do in drone strikes and special forces operations. But every time a drone strikes, the enemy publishes grisly photographs of dead babies on the Net, which they claim we killed instead of them. Sometimes--most times--they're lying, but Arab Joe Lunchboxes have zero training in critical thinking and mostly have been indoctrinated from birth to hate us.

So drones and special forces incursions in areas where police forces won't or can't collaborate with us are the least bad of our options.

Don't let anyone deny this without describing what they think we should do instead. I submit that most of what they propose is patently silly--and anachronistic as well.

Calling drone strikes "war crimes" is the same as the Revolutionary Era Brits calling us war criminals for shooting their soldiers--and those red and white uniforms were a great aid for targeting--from concealed positions by sharpshooters.

Nothing the folks whining about "war crimes" have to propose would even start to be effective, showing that they live in a world bounded by their limited imaginations.

The "war crime" would be our nation's government not acting to protect us--protect us from people who are not at war with our armed forces--they're at war with every single one of us.

Starving Somalis

Few show sufficient interest in understanding why a situation exists before they try to "fix" it. In computer science this is called GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out)--that is, when you apply logical processes to a mis-formulated problem, the results will not be useful, no matter how impeccable the logic.

As far as the famine in Somalia goes, pretty much all of the news coverage has failed to show any interest in why so many Somalis are starving, simply attributing it to drought.

Well, "drought" is our name for an area getting less rain than it had gotten previously. Except "previously" gets measured in decades--that is, a human timeframe, not centuries, the real timeframe for most climate cycles.

The plain fact is that Somalia contains more Somalis than Somalia can feed. That's what you get when the world's population quadruples over the last century or so--and even today is increasing by over 140 people EVERY MINUTE, even after deaths are factored in. And since more industrialized nations now have low birthrates, the statistical increase is vastly higher in the third world.

Moreover, the overpopulation itself contributes to climate change, as people chop down every tree for charcoal/firewood/huts, the topsoil washes off, and the herds of cattle and goats eat everything the locals didn't chop down, all resulting in desertification, which makes local climate drier.

No Somalis would be starving if Somalia's population were at a level Somalia could sustain.

But credible estimates now say that for Earth to sustain its current human population, we'd need 1.4 Earths.
So until you can come up with .4 more Earth to accommodate our race's fecundity, Somalia's only real "solution" is war, famine, disease, and starvation. Feeding Somalis with no thought to containing procreation only kicks the can down the road.

Yet humans continue to think at the level of chimpanzees, only reacting to what's under their noses, with no thought to causes or consequences.

Same goes for the conspiracy theorists who attribute the famine to Western sources (manipulating food prices etc.)--if Somalia weren't grotesquely overpopulated it wouldn't be dependent on foreign aid or theorized manipulations.

Now Western countries and NGOs are rushing to try to bring food to starving Somalis. Even if they do get past the paranoid Islamic fanatics who control much of Somalia, all this aid will do is contribute to future starvation and future aid attempts in an endless cycle, unless we address the root causes.

Solving the Somail pirate/poaching/dumping problem

Somali piracy isn't one problem. It's at least eight:

1. Seizure of passing ships and crew and holding both for ransom by Somali nationals, often bankrolled by foreigners in places like Dubai.

2. Illegal dumping of toxic wastes in Somali waters by foreign businesses in Europe and elsewhere.

3. Poaching in Somali waters by foreign fishing fleets, often using trawlers that destroy the habitats on the sea floor as well.

4. International law that doesn't adequately cover crimes committed in the territorial waters of failed states like Somali. Oh, and it currently forbids ships from keeping their decks floodlit at night!

5. Navies--very much including ours--that are primarily oriented towards conducting major wars against powerful nations.

6. Fundamental philosophical conflict between those who want to treat Somali piracy as a kind of war vs. those who want to treat it as a kind of crime--that is, do you shoot them or arrest them? And if the latter, where do you take them to be tried? Kenya has agreed to try pirates, but that seems like an ad hoc solution to many.

7. The land the attacks are coming from is no longer a country, but rather a patchwork of feudal holdings and theocratic enclaves.

8. The situation is rapidly becoming much worse as the 10s of millions of dollars of ransom money is going to buy more and more sophisticated arms and other materiel, and as the pirates become more adept at parasitizing the rest of the world and the local communities become more and more oriented around piracy. All this defies simple solutions, but Somali piracy has become so substantial it's actually damaging the world economy, and we have to act.

So here's my solution, which attempts to address all of these issues:

Just as our Army and Air Force are being dragged into the world of assymetrical warfare, so must the Navy. Even destroyers are too big to be used cost-effectively against Somali pirates.

We need several task groups of pocket carriers that fly fleets of small, inexpensive, unarmed UAVs (drones) with a smaller number of killer UAVs and some choppers. The UAV pilots can be located anywhere. For example, the Air Force's UAV pilots work in air-conditioned trailers in Nevada, even when flying missions in Afghanistan.

The task groups would also have the kinds of vessels the Coast Guard uses—far smaller than destroyers, armed with one or two missle launchers, a chain gun and one longer-range gun. These would be fast, light and economical to operate. If these could be equipped with hydrofoils they'd be really fast.

Secure an agreement from the Somali provisional government (there is one, more or less) to let the multinational force act as Somalia's coast guard, tasked with stopping piracy AND international poaching and waste dumping.

Use the UAVs to patrol the Somali coastline and territorial waters. Tell the Somalis that we will stop foreign poaching and dumping—-but we'll also use the UAVs to sink pirate skiffs and motherships, since no other method is cost-effective—-and, consequently, we won't be taking prisoners, since UAVs can't pick up survivors. Give the Somalis a month to get the word out before we start the operation. Pirate skiffs carry far more crew than fishing boats, so even without the guns being visible they're easy to spot. Heck, with gun-mounted UAVs we could even fire a shot across their bows to warn them to turn back if there's a doubt.

On the other hand, we'd use the Coast Guard-type vessels to board and confiscate all foreign ships poaching and dumping in Somalia's territorial waters, and use the sale of such vessels to defray the cost of operations.

Meanwhile we'd work with the UN to get the law of the sea updated to cover such situations and, based on our experience in Somalia, set up similar operations off the shores of other shaky or failed states that lack a Coast Guard.

Note that we can use UAV task groups—either with pocket carriers or land-based---to patrol our own coasts to defend against smuggling and suchlike.

Somali piracy

1. Right now Secretary of Defense Gates is talking about reconfiguring our military to be able to prosecute asymetrical war more effectively. In the case of the Navy, we need more small fighting vessels and not so many WWIII-appropriate giant multibillion dollar task forces.'

For operations like the one in Somalia we need a new class of very small aircraft carriers that only carry helicopters and UAVs (drones). They don't even need UAV pilots on board. They can be based anywhere in the US.

And we need Coast Guard-type military vessels. Even destroyers like the Bainbridge are overkill for situations like Somalia. Small, fast, seaworthy fighting boats with a couple of chain guns and ship to ship missile launchers (for motherships) would be perfect. We have to make it more cost effective to guard shipping lanes around the world, and the only block today is hidebound career officers in love with big airplanes and big boats and fighting other superpowers. We shake our heads at the Pakistani military's obsession with India while their own Taliban slowly take over their country. We're only a little better. Fortunately, Gates and Obama seem to have their eyes on the ball.

2. The pirates' claims to be be protecting Somali fishing from foreign trawlers is nonsense, since they're mainly taking nonfishing ships. However, it is true that foreign trawlers from Europe and Asia have virtually destroyed Somali fishing--as they've done off the coasts of every country with good fishing and no effective coast guard. We should demand a Law of the Sea that forbids nations from letting their ships pillage defenseless nations' waters, and also empowers UN-authorized naval forces to grab poachers, confiscate their boats, and try their crews in an international court.

We could kill two birds with one stone: interdict both pirates and poachers.

Another plus to patrolling with drones: they can't negotiate with pirates--just sink their boats. The best deterrent to piracy is darkness: pirate boats go out and they don't come back and no one (in Somalia) knows what happened. That's far more effective than warnings.

3. We have to forbid shippers from paying ransoms, and severely fine ones that succeed in doing so. This requires multinational cooperation, but we have to cut off the flow of money to Somali warlord coffers. Ditto arms, most of which are coming from Europe and China, not America, I'll wager.

www.blogzu.blogspot.com

— Ehkzu, Palo Alto, California

Somali Piracy--should we fish or cut bait?

We can't leave Somalia alone, notwithstanding Bush's blunders and regardless of whether you think America is the Great Shaitan or the world's last best hope for international peace--for the simple fact that Somali piracy is wreaking havoc on international shipping. 

The pirate's apologists can rant all they want about how it's all our fault and they're just peaceful fishermen forced into this. Whether we played a role in their turning to piracy or not, and whether they'd (re)turn to fishing after making hundreds of millions of dollars from piracy (yeah, right), they're a menace to navigation and must be stopped. 

The Somalis do have a legitimate grievance against many other nations: foreign trawlers have not only removed most of the fish Somalis used to catch but have also destroyed the fishes' breeding grounds (that's what trawling does). 

But to the no doubt disappointment of those who think America's to blame for everything, those foreign trawlers aren't American. They're Portuguese, Taiwanese etc. 

Yes, Somali piracy is doubtless symptomatic of other stuff, and I doubt that stopping the piracy will do anything to fix that other stuff, and I agree that the other stuff needs sorting out--perhaps with a UN mandate, since self-determination would only be possible if you disarmed the warlords' militias so that traditional Somali institutions could function again. 

But we can't wait for that other stuff to get sorted out. Nor is an unfleet of warships from various countries--some of which are countries the poaching trawlers come from--working out so well.

We need a unified command imposing order on Somali waters--one that would both stop the pirates and expel the foreign poachers. International law needs to be updated to explicitly enable captains of ships who capture pirates to try them on board, sentence them to death, execute them on the spot and dump their bodies in the sea. All the Somalis on shore need know is that pirates go out and don't come back. 

This is also a perfect area for new technology like UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). UAVs could patrol Somalia's long coastline and notify patrolling vessels when pirates set out in skiffs (easily recognizable) or in motherships (which could then be interdicted and boarded by warships and/or choppers).

The ships now being held by the pirates (almost always under the control of several warlords) must be boarded and retaken--all simultaneously in a large operation. Some crewmen will die, but it's worth it in the long run.

Many left wingers quail at the brutal realities of the world. They believe in a Star Trek universe where everything is solved by sweet reason. The irony is that to the extent that they get control of nations' foreign policies they often cause as much human suffering as right wing warmongers do.

International peace isn't a freebie. If you study history, you'll sea that it has only been brought about by a tough, dominant nation, often administered unfairly and brutally--but better than the chaos that's the only alternative. The Romans did it. Now it's our turn. Bush gave war a bad name, but that's not because war isn't the only answer sometimes. It was because he's a fool in the purest sense of the term.

None of what I've said justifies Bush's blunders. I'm just trying to deliver a wake-up call to those who let their ideologies swamp their ability to perceive things as they really are, for better and for worse.

Posting to The Guardian (UK) re: Somali pirates

So many posters here have so much to say about America, perhaps it's time for an actual American to weigh in. Better still, I'm in the group that represents a plurality of voters--that is, those who identify themselves as neither conservative nor liberal, but as moderate/centrist/independent.

When you talk about America doing this or that on the world stage, please note that we've just experienced 8 years of majoritarian rule by people who are essentially monarchists.

Majoritarians believe that if you got 50.001% of the vote you're entitled to act as though you got 100% of the vote--winner take all. Actually they believe you can act that way even if you got a minority of the popular vote, as long as you won--as happened in 2000.

So until the other side won a majority in Congress in 2006, 49% of American voters had no say whatsoever in the conduct of our government .

And since the 2004 election the vast majority of Americans have concluded that invading Iraq was badly botched, whether or not there was any initial justification. Ditto Somalia, to the extent anyone even realizes Somali exists.

Unfortunately our system of electing national legislators and a president has become skewed towards radicals of the left and right. The causes stem from the fact that as one of world's first democracies our electoral system is now about 200 years out of date, with entrenched forces resisting all attempts to update the system. If you want to understand the hurdles we face, look up Gerrymandering for a start.

The upshot is that while a majority of Americans are pragmatic and moderate, we tend to get governments which are neither, to both our and your disadvantage.

If you take advantage of the imploded dollar and visit America, you'll find it to be probably the most multicultural, accepting country on Earth--especially California, where I've lived all my life. For example, one neighboring family is a German physicist and his very dark-skinned African-Indian wife. They tried living in both Germany and South Africa, and only found complete acceptance here, both for themselves and their daughter.

Also please note that America just elected a Black president whose middle name is Hussein. In what other Western democracy has a comparable electoral event happened?

That said, allow me to comment on this article and the ensuing thread.

All large international problems--including Somali piracy--have complex historical roots and simpler immediate issues.

I'd compare it with forest fires. Such fires often stem from the buildup of duff on the forest floor due to indiscriminate firefighting and inadequate brush removal. That's a long-term problem which has long-term solutions. However, if the resulting conflagration threatens a community with thousands of inhabitants, government must stop the fire from reaching that community, regardless of how the fire was caused.

Thus we can argue about the causes of Somali piracy and the long-term solutions needed to address the problems that such failed states represent. Meanwhile, though, we have an immediate problem that threatens the peace and security of the high seas.

Bringing a quick end to rampant Somali piracy probably will do nothing to solve Somalia's problems. But that's a separate issue. Regardless of Somalia's internal issues, which are severe, Somali piracy must be stopped.

Those on this forum who downplay the importance of this problem fail to understand the foundations of civilization. It's not democracy, though I love living in a democracy. It's the fact that I'm sitting in my home typing on my laptop with my windows open to the world and my front door unlocked, because I live in a safe, peaceful neighborhood. That's what makes everything else possible.

Such stuff is so unexciting most people don't even notice how much they benefit from it--until it vanishes.

I've traveled extensively in the third world and seen how people live in countries where the police are not on your side, but are simply the armed guards of those who prey on the rest of society; where traffic rules exist but are not obeyed; where national parks are free-fire zones for poachers; where nothing that involves government happens unless you bribe everyone you deal with; where you're only physically safe if you live in a gated community and only venture out with guards accompanying you.

Whether you like the ships and the shippers and their cargo or not, we all benefit from them all being able to conduct their operations safely.

I'd advocate a high-tech blockade of Somali ports maintained by UAV reconnaissance drones backed by hunter/killer drones. All ships leaving port get boarded and searched. All small vessels carrying armed men--easily spotted with night vision optics on the drones--get sunk by hunter drones.

No one should advocate killing others lightly, and I don't. But failure to engage the enemy leads to more death in the long run, and by innocents, which counts for much more.

Pirates off Somalia

Currently pirates are capturing commercial vessels--including supertankers--at a rate of eight a month or more, and using the humongous ransoms ship owners are paying to finance motherships and teams of very well-armed pirates, along with support from local poo-bahs on land who want in on the loot.

The pirates got started with a legitimate gripe: foreign trawlers were clearing the seafloor of fish and everything else, leaving nothing for Somali fishermen. So some of them went after the trawlers. But now they're capturing anything worth capturing.

The shipowners would rather pay million-dollar ransoms than pay for putting squads of armed guards on their ships. But this isn't just their problem. The loot collected by the pirates is helping to protract the instability of Somalia, as warlords use it to extend their fiefdoms, and the black economy worldwide preys on the white economy--that is, legal trade.

We need to get the UN to declare the seas off Somalia a UN mandate until Somalia gets a real government, and authorize nations from India to the US to patrol the area. Many are now patrolling there but they don't know what to do with pirates even when they do capture them, and due to the reluctance of the shipowners to authorize force, they haven't tried to recapture ships the pirates have grabbed.

And now the pirates are venturing far beyond Somalia waters to capture ships, using motherships financed by previous fines.

The civilized world needs to forbid firms from paying ransoms and authorize warship captains to judge captured pirates on the spot, with the penalty being death at sea, after making sure the Somalis know this is what we're going to do. The UN mandate should also ban foreign fishing vessels from Somali waters and confiscate foreign fishing vessels found in those waters. Any Somali boat not from the Somali government and containing men with automatic weapons, RPGs or similar military ordnance should be considered a pirate vessel, with the vessel sunk and the men executed and buried at sea, without notice to the Somali mainland.

There's a huge area to guard--more than any navy can do. However, we can extend our reach greatly with UAVs equipped with night vision/infrared cameras (to spot human body heat). We could fly numerous reconnaisance UAVs at relatively low cost. When a pirate is spotted, Predator UAVs can be sent to the location to sink the boats, when found and ID'd as pirate vessels. The UAVs wouldn't patrol vast tracts of open sea--they'd patrol the Somali coast, following any vessels that set out from the Somali coastline.

The idea is that pirates go out to sea and never come back, and no one in Somalia ever finds out what happened to them. This would be the best deterrent.

Finally, we must retake captured vessels. That's the sort of thing Navy Seals are trained to do. The difficulties of patrolling such a huge area means that we won't be able to stop this problem unless we do this--unless we deny the enemy any victories.

Businesses are innately pacifistic. The shipowners won't want what I'm suggesting here. But civilization means guaranteeing the safety of citizens and of commerce. Without such a guarantee nothing else matters much.

Let's give Somalia its fish--and take our ships back.