Drones and Targeted Killing by Marjorie Cohn

Author:Marjorie Cohn [Cohn, Marjorie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566569897
Publisher: Interlink Publishing

9

DRONE WARFARE AND JUST WAR THEORY

Harry van der Linden

INTRODUCTION

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones, have been used by the United States in conventional war situations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Their most controversial purpose has been their use, especially by the Obama administration, in the targeted killing of suspected terrorists in non-battlefield settings, notably in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan and Yemen.1 Targeted killing of civilian “militants” can also take place through cruise missile strikes, manned aircrafts, and “boots on the ground” (as is illustrated by the killing of Osama bin Laden), but targeted killing by drones has several distinct advantages for the United States.

Unlike targeted killing executed by counterinsurgency troops, drone targeted killing poses few risks to the lives of US soldiers because the teams that launch and recover drones are typically hundreds of miles away from the search and strike area, while the teams that fly the plane (consisting of a pilot and a sensor operator controlling the cameras), together with their supporting teams of data analysts, etc., are thousands of miles away in the United States, watching or searching for their target until the optimal moment has arrived to unleash the missiles. Moreover, drones are considerably cheaper strike platforms than manned aircrafts and can stay in the air much longer (over twenty hours). And, like cruise missiles, drones do not turn the target area into a battlefield where humans face one another as enemies, but they are superior to cruise missiles in terms of a much shorter strike time so that the killing can be executed on the basis of a last-moment assessment of the intended target.2 Accordingly, it not surprising that most US targeted killings have been executed by remote-controlled aircraft.

The targeted killings by the Obama administration show that drones enable war to be fought in a fundamentally new way. My main aim here is to argue that drone warfare poses moral problems and risks of such nature and magnitude that we should support an international ban on weaponized drones and, certainly, that we should seek an international treaty against drone systems that operate without the remote-control link; namely, autonomous, lethal UAVs (and killer robots in general). My argument will develop in two steps.

First, I will articulate some moral objections to drone warfare on the basis of a just war theory analysis of the Obama administration’s targeted killings. To make my analysis manageable, I will focus on the drone targeted killings executed mostly under Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) supervision in the FATA, but, on the whole, the analysis also applies to the drone killings in Yemen.

The CIA drone campaign in Pakistan peaked in 2010 with 128 strikes and 751 to 1,109 “militant” and civilian casualties, and ceased as of January 2014, at the request of the Pakistani government in order to facilitate its peace talks with the Pakistan Taliban, one of the main armed groups operating in the FATA.3 The respite in drone strikes might become permanent, but this would not

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