Drones and Support for the Use of Force by James Igoe Walsh & Marcus Schulzke

Author:James Igoe Walsh & Marcus Schulzke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Drones and Moral Hazard

This chapter’s first expectation holds that the technological capabilities of drones will lead individuals to believe that their battlefield objectives are more likely to be met with drones than with other types of military force. To assess this expectation, we analyze responses to a question included in the survey experiment with a representative sample of American adults introduced in detail in chapter 3. Recall that this experiment randomly assigned respondents to read a news story describing a planned attack on terrorist compounds. The respondents read stories that described the attack as being conducted by drones, air strikes, or ground troops. They then answered questions measuring their responses to the news article. One of these items asked respondents to indicate how likely the attack would be to achieve its military objectives. Responses fell on a seven-point scale ranging from “extremely likely” to “extremely unlikely” and are summarized in figure 3.4. Our first expectation in this chapter is that the percentage of respondents expecting the attack to have a higher chance of success would be considerably greater for those who read about drone strikes than for those who read about an air strike or a ground invasion. This is clearly not the case. The distribution of responses is remarkably similar across the three conditions, and a statistical test indicates that there are not significant differences among the three groups of respondents. This suggests that, on average, the public does not attribute clear or obvious advantages to drones over other types of military force.44

To gain more traction on this issue, we also conducted a survey experiment designed to assess the degree to which individuals fell victim to moral hazard when considering the utility of drone strikes, using respondents recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.45 Our experiment builds on work by Aaron Hoffman and his colleagues. They show that existing experimental and public opinion studies of military success systematically overstate support for the use of force. The reason is that these works typically do not discuss alternatives to American military action. Experiments follow a pattern of presenting respondents with a range of military options to choose from but do not provide information about what nonmilitary options are available or how likely these are to succeed. The public, they suggest, generally assumes that military operations are pursued when nonviolent methods of conflict resolution have failed. As Hoffman and his colleagues put it, this type of experiment prompts participants to believe that Page 121 →“force is a last resort—to be used only after other feasible alternatives are exhausted.” Omitting diplomatic alternatives signals that they are unavailable and that some kind of military response is required.

They conduct a series of studies demonstrating that when respondents are informed about the existence of viable alternatives to the use of force, support for military action declines.46 Conversely, when the information about alternatives is not mentioned or when the prospects of diplomatic success are low, the support for war is similar to that found in experimental designs that only include military options.

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