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.

Libya reveals much

 
The limited war being waged in Libya reveals several truths:

1. As I said in my last post, UAVs could have made this operation vastly cheaper and more capable.
A Tomahawk missile costs over a million dollars. Using one to take out something that isn't a million dollar target doesn't make sense. A UAV dropping smart bombs could do the same job for so much less--and with even less warning.

2. The bottleneck isn't the technology. It's the military top brass and their patrons/future employers in private industry, with a titanic vested interest in expensivo manned weapons systems and cruise missiles. The problem with UAVs is that they don't make as much profit for military contractors and they don't give pilots enough glory. Landing a plane on a carrier under combat conditions, at night, in rough seas, is one of the bravest, most skilled things I can imagine a human being doing.

Another is a President standing up to those promoting the status quo and getting our armed forces the tools and training they really need--including UAV carriers and aircraft.

That this foot-dragging is a real problem is borne out by a comment on my last post quoting Aviation Week about military aviation top brass disdaining UAVs.

3. President Obama should use the Libya incident as an excuse to light a fire under the military to greatly expand UAV roles and to hasten the development of UAV carrier systems. There's plenty of money to be made here by military contractors--just not as much.

4. For Libyan-type operations we especially need the UAV equivalent of the A-10 ground attack aircraft. Its rapid-fire cannon could kill tanks as fast as it could do attack runs on each one.

The US Navy should have had the tool Obama needs in Libya--long ago

Part of President Obama's problem is that he should have had a tool that Navy foot-dragging has denied him: UAV carriers.

Our assault carriers--much smaller than the big ones you always see on TV--are designed for choppers and Harriers, so they don't have a catapault. UAVs could fly off them just fine, and we've had the technology to mate assault carriers with UAVs for a long, long time. But flyboy top brass don't like planes without people inside them.

But imagine if we had just one assault carrier off the Libyan coast with a complement of reconnaissance and hunter/killer UAVs. Then we could make Libya a no-fly zone without risking live pilots and without having to bomb anti-aircraft emplacements (UAVs are so stealthy it's really hard to hit them--and if they do, no American pilot is lost or captured.)

Reconnaissance UAV circling high overhead can spot Qaddafi's mercenary-piloted choppers and fighter/bombers and hunter/killer models could do the rest.

We wouldn't even have to announce a policy, but just do it on the down low, like we do in Pakistan. We can even take them out on the ground when no one's inside them.

Tanks can be hit the same way. And one thing about using mercenaries--they're a lot less willing to die for you. Once aircraft and tanks start disappearing, we don't have to get them all.

That's if the Navy had done its job instead of lavishing most of its attention on manned fighters and giant carriers. Assault carriers with UAVs are far less, well...romantic.

Afghanistan--do we stay or do we go?

According to the Left, we should high tail it outa there stat. According to the Right, we're honor-bound to bitter end it. The former viewpoint got another of those Vietnam=Afghanistan essays in the Washington Post recently, titled "From Vietnam to Afghanistan: Not winning hearts and minds." My comment:

This article makes the Left's brief for leaving Afghanistan, and in general for the complete hopelessness of us fighting insurgencies anywhere, anywhen--at least by military means.

The problem is that he's built his elaborate exegesis on sand.

That is, ideologues never discuss--except to dismiss--the downside of their side's position, while going on endlessly about the downside of the other side's position.

That's propaganda, not debate.

No sane person thinks we have a bright, shiny, low cost solution to Afghanistan.

Every single option available to us has terrible downsides. The President knows this, and generals like Petraeus know this.

There's no reason to take the opinions of the author and his allies in the Leftosphere seriously until or unless they advance a proposal of their own (criticizing others' plans does not a plan of your own make), along with a comparative discussion of the pros and cons of the contrasting positions.

Otherwise you're just being a Monday morning quarterback.

One example: UAVs (known by the antiquated term "drones" to many). The insurgents have IEDs, which we have yet to counter as effectively as we'd like). We have UAVs, which, like IEDs, strike out of nowhere, and have killed civilians along with our enemies.

That part isn't comparable with IEDs, since Salafist Muslims believe it's OK to kill anyone, any time, anywhere (including in mosques), if they think it advances their overall cause.

So they rejoice in killing civilians, while we regret it and do our best to avoid it.

This distinction is lost on the Left, which instead parrots the Islamofascists' talking points. (Pretty ironic, since the Islamofascists would happily murder every one of these leftists out of hand.)

Of course every weapon is only as effective as its targeting. Mistargeted UAVs don't achieve our goals, exactly like mistargeted anythings don't. But you don't abandon a potent weapon because it has been misused on occasion. You improve the targeting, and we have.

Their use in Pakistan has been the source of many Pakistanis railing against us. They think it's cheating somehow (unlike IEDs and 12 year old suicide bombers, apparently).

Well, news flash. The ones who hate us hated us long before the first armed UAV took off on it maiden flight.

And I'll bet that Al Queda's leadership hiding out in Pakistan's Pashtun country no longer feel safe. I would advise Muslim women not to marry such men if they want to live to a ripe old age.

War always makes many people hate you. Heck, there are many Southerners who are still fighting the Civil War in their minds, and that was a century and a half ago.

That doesn't mean "war is never the answer." It does mean you shouldn't go to war lightly, or wrongly (as we did with Iraq).

Neither of those things is the case in Afghanistan. And the difference between its erstwhile Taliban government and that of Germany when/where 9/11 was being planned, was that Germany's government was not complicit. Afghanistan's was.

BTW yes we could have won in Viet Nam, though not in the way 99% of Right wingers think. For the answer, read "On Strategy: a Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War" by the brilliant military thinker Col. Harry G. Summers, who fought in Vietnam himself.

His book shows how we systematically violated every single principle of war that Von Clausewitz advocated (and most military thinkers agree with), BTW, so conventional right wingers may not draw all that much comfort from it. Summers goes at it from a strictly military viewpoint, not that of a politician.

Unlike the author of this article, Summers' thinking went beyond the fact that he was being shot at.

In the novel "Catch-22" the hero Yossarian concludes that WWII was a plot to kill him, since when he flew over Germany the Germans shot at him, and when he returned the Allies sent him back over Germany.

That's the level of thinking of Leftists in the Oliver Stone school of philosophy. "I went to war. People shot at me. War is bad."

We're in a terrible situation in Afghanistan. It was tough enough to start with. Then possibly the worst Commander in Chief in American history dug us into a hole rivalling the one BP dug in the Gulf.

And time after time Congress allocates money to huge, fabulously expensive military systems even the military doesn't want, while giving short shrift to the recruitment, training, and retention of soldiers (and care of them after their service ends if they've been wounded).

And the Air Force dragged its feet on UAVs for sentimental aging flyboy reasons.

The only thing I can think of that would be even worse than staying in Afghanistan is pulling out.

Mainstream newspapers need real military columnists

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote a column on military procurement titled "Behind the battle over the F-35 fighter engine." My comment:

The Washington Post needs at least one columnist who isn't a political partisan AND who has a technical background that includes military science.

This column makes that need obvious, because Ms. Parker doesn't know what she's talking about, and applying what she does have expertise in--Beltway shenanigans--is not sufficient to paper over her lack of understanding of the underlying facts.

Congressmen vote for unneeded military projects because big government contractors make sure to subcontract subsytems in every state, and every congressional district if they can.

So their support for a project only tells us that a subsystem is/will be built in their district.

There is a strong argument for supporting multiple military suppliers of things like jet engines, but not to have multiple engines for one aircraft for one purpose.

Our military needs a variety of aircraft. So spread the enginemaking across several manufacturers. Don't, as another savvy commentor said, create chaos in the parts supply train with different subsystems for the same use in one project.

As for the F-35 itself--as another commentor said, we barely need the thing. Maybe someday China or someone else will truly challenge us in nation-to-nation war, and we should maintain our technological edge for such a circumstance.

But for the foreseeable futures--decades--what the military needs more than anything else is:

1. Highly trained troops with the ability to speak a little of at least one in-theater language and know a bit about the local culture.

2. A new rifle with the accuracy of an M-16 and the reliability of an AK-47.

3. UAVs, UAVs, UAVs, and pilots and mechanics and everything else for them--big ones that can carry bunker busters, smaller ones with machine guns, strategic reconnaissance ones, little hand-launchable recon ones, and ones in between, and more.

The Air Force slow walked UAVs because the generals are ex-flyboys. Time to catch up.

4. Navy UAV carriers with matching UAVs that have the reinforced landing gear and folding wings needed. A couple of these could put an end to Somali piracy, and do so cost-effectively.

And in general we need technology and human resources that help us fight insurgents who main weapons are roadside bombs and terrorizing locals.

All of these come far, far before a second F-35 engine. But Boeing, Northrop et al don't manufacture highly trained soldiers, so no one's lobbying for what our military really needs--or turning congressmen into their shills.

UAVs and international law

International law lags behind international war. That's the problem with drones.

International law defines war as armed conflict between nations. The rest is crime.

Only now we're in a protracted armed conflict with an amorphous non-state entity, some of it directed by Al-Qaeda, some operating independently (recruited by the Internet or by radical clerics), some operating semi-independently.

By international law all these people are simply criminals.

They aren't. Nor are they some country's soldiers. That makes them "unlawful combatants." As such they are not covered by the Geneva Convention, which regulates armed conflict between countries. That doesn't mean we can do whatever we feel like to them, but appeals to the Geneva Convention are irrelevant.

They aren't members of any country's military, but they operate within counties, some of which knowingly harbor them, others of which don't willingly harbor them, but also don't actually control territory in which they operate. And of course some of these terrorists operate in failed states or quasi-failed states.

In countries we have extradition treaties with, which have effective police forces, and which actively cooperate with the USA in anti-terrorist operations, we can pursue terrorists operating there using internal security operations, including police forces.

But there are other countries where only some or even none of those conditions apply. If terrorists believe they can operate there with impunity, of course they will.

Now under current international law, under such circumstances many legal-minded people believe our hands are tied--that even if we know where particular terrorists are in such countries, we mustn't do anything about it.

Additionally, some of these countries actually want us to kill them, because the terrorists threaten those countries' governments as well. Yemen is an example of this.

I believe we have every right to defend ourselves, and that this defense is neither purely military nor purely police-based. It's a bit of both.

And this is where UAVs come in. With proper intelligence they allow us to wage what might be called "warlets" inside other countries where it's appropriate. In these circumstances it would be extremely impractical to try to kill the terrorists with ground forces, or to depend on the country's police to catch them.

Our quasi-war with these quasi-organizations requires us to use things like UAVs. As Sandra Day O'Connor said, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact."

Those who oppose UAVs are people who are still fighting Hitler. For them, anything that doesn't protect the rights of every human being on Earth should not be done, even if not doing so allows a terrorist to kill many people--possibly including Americans, where there is no other practical way to stop them. And anything that doesn't put every individual human's rights far, far above our collective rights to self-defense means we're a police state exactly like Nazi Germany.

Like far right wingers, such people live in a black & white world, with Good and Evil and nothing in between.

It's really funny seeing such people try to deal with President Obama, since he's sending in the UAVs in force to kill our enemies. The far lefties who voted for him are appalled, while the right wingers who fervently believe he's "soft on terror" because he's a Democrat simply cannot mentally accommodate the fact that the President is more warlike in reality than President Bush II was (especially if you agree with me that we invdaded Iraq instead of doing the job right in Afghanistan.)

We should include pirates as unlawful combatants, and kill them on sight using UAVs off the coast of Somalia among other places. However, we should only do this if we also prevent foreign trawlers from fishing in Somali waters.

Operating lawfully is a Good Thing. But the law must be interpreted in a way that maps to current reality. And we mustn't let history cripple our understanding of the present. Remember, history in fact never repeats itself exactly. Every new situation is just that--new.

Do drones help or hinder the war on terror? Do we need a national conversation on drones?

The left is up in arms (so to speak) over drones--particularly armed ones. They say drones set back the war on terror, alienating the people we're trying to protect with indiscriminate killing.

Certainly the jihadis are up in arms (not so to speak) over drones--and their propaganda machine is in full cry trying to stop them, since drones are killing the leaders who normally stay out of harm's way as they send their forces into battle.

Note that I'm talking about "forces" and "battle." But I'm not talking about war. Because there is no such thing as a "war on terror"--that's a nonsense term coined by propagandists. Wars are conducted against states. But here our enemy is a loose confederacy of non-state actors, some with state support, some not, all working under the aegis of militant Islam. Their goal is an Islamist empire run by them. Their enemy is, among others, evey living American citizen.

We can't fight this amorphous non-organization with armies, except in special cases. Nor are local police departments equipped to deal with such international groups.

So we're waging a new something--call it a quasiwar, perhaps. And that requires new tools, including what many tag as "drones." The military prefers "UAVs" (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). Drones were radio-controlled aircraft used as targest in figher pilot training mainl

The need for public debate isn't so much for UAV technology pro and con as to educate our public about the nature of this quasiwar, which 8 years of Bush did little to illuminate.
What's really needed regarding UAVs is a vastly better propaganda effort to show Muslims how many innocents Islamofascists expressly target. It's not collateral damage for them, as innoncents killed are for us. Innocents are the target for them. That's a crucial difference, and we need to do a vastly better job of talking about that.