Drone Warfare: Lets talk Ethics

The historic Trump – Kim Jong Un Singapore summit was a welcome breather for peace lovers all over the world, coming after months of child-like war mongering and posturing between the President and commander of the world’s most advanced military arsenal, and the Leader and commander of the words most reclusive State.

By Tech. Sgt. Erik Gudmundson, Public Domain, Link

It leaves us with a good measure of confidence that maybe we are not that close, at least not yet, to a military showdown that would certainly change the world. The summit was in many ways timely, and is hopefully, with the promise of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, in the wider context, a timely reminder of the necessary checks to military technological advancements we should put in place.

Of course if it were in the old days, we would have simply ignored the Trump – Kim squabble with a wave of the hand, or maybe even asked them to solve their differences in a personal bout somewhere in Nevada, or wherever the h*ll they would both agree to, or at the very worst, to a cowboy like duel in some open Singaporean grassland.

But now we can’t, can we? Technology has made sure of that, and Trump and Kim can simply sit back in some air conditioned room with binoculars and computers, and give orders that somewhere in some far off country, results into tears and destruction and everything bad you can associate with war. This advanced, has warfare become from since the days of the early man, I am moved to reflect on the current technological advancements in warfare.

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Am I my brother’s keeper?

Man’s being is explained by two classical schools of thought: creation and evolution. To whichever you subscribe, one fact remains, namely that man has waged war from the onset of setting foot on the world stage. The story of creation tells of his first acts of disobedience against his creator, of rebellion, and then of conflict against his fellow man, among kinsmen and between communities. You know how the story goes: a quarrel between two brothers ends with history’s first recorded murder. And the poignant repudiation of responsibility – Am I my brother’s keeper?

Evolutionary science follows an identical script, telling of how man had to adapt to his surroundings, it narrates of how over thousands of years, only the fittest of his kind survived. Indeed, archaeological history dates us back to the days of his earliest migrations and settlements, of his earliest conquests, the first of which, according to some archeologists, was genocide, the systematic eradication of the Neanderthals from the face of the earth.

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The spoils

It follows that man’s innate aggression has been engine to his dominance over all the other species on earth, and now of communities over other communities, nations over other nations. It is following from this context, in the bid to extend, to perpetuate that dominance, that many a modern nation has invested a huge chunk of its resources, human and material capital, to weapons’ development.

One can with hindsight, maybe even with foresight, reliably say that much of our sociological and technological advancements from since the dawn of recorded history, including our future exploits are the spoils of warfare, both directly and indirectly borne of war efforts. The requirement to ease communication and have the advantage over its enemies, for example, inspired and led the Germany Reich to launch the public radio in 1923.

Fast forward to the 21st century and despite our faith and belief in the moral and ethical development of the human race, man’s taming evolution from the basic animal instincts of his earliest versions, you only have to look around you, read the dailies, listen to the radios, and watch television to see how much war is still rampant. I don’t have to tell you of the effects, the losses and the deprivations everywhere war rears its ugly head.

From the massacres and genocides of Africa’s civil conflict areas – hear Rwanda, and Sudan to the Congo - the calamitous mongering in the Korean peninsula, the decapitations in the Arab interiors, to the destabilizations of foreign nation aggression in places such as Iraq, Libya and now Syria, War, one can say, remains very much a part of the human eco system as the escapement remains a part of the clock. Only this time, man using the sophistication of technology, has become better and more adept at it.

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Evolution in Warfare

In a nutshell really, the art of warfare in terms of mobility and range, precision, speed and effect, more than any other area of human life, has thus far seen arguably the greatest technological advancements of our historic and present age.

By Michael Wuensch, on Pixabay CCO License

What started with the simple whack of Cain’s stone gave way to the hunters spear and javelin, and then the bow and arrow of the Boer warrior. Along followed the skinning knife and it gave way to the sword of the Japanese samurai, then the catapult which gave way to ballistae and cannons alongside the gun powder and the bullet, and now the bomb.

By U.S. Army - Infantry Magazine, July-August 1981, Vol. 71, No. 4, Page 23, Public Domain, Link

In sync with such advancements slipped through the antique age of chariots, perhaps best symbolized by ancient Egypt, then the evolution into cavalry the pinnacle of which was muskets and the mounted knight in shining armor up until the machine gun, the armored Russian war tank which gave way to mechanized infantry and Armored Personnel Carriers (APC’s), long range artillery up until Modern America led development of chemical, biological (read Nagasaki and Hiroshima!) and now nuclear weapons cum supported air power of the 21st century, and God knows what else we haven’t yet experienced but is lying and biding its time in some weapons armory in Moscow, in Washington or in Seoul.

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Enter the Drone

Effectively, we now live in an age of Air power, whose development is conspicuously premised on making them unmanned as much as possible. It is at this point, and following from its advancement, that drone warfare comes in. Its technology spells a chilling picture of the first fundamental shift in the art and science of warfare. I say fundamental because throughout all war history, only the equipment and not the principle of war fare have changed. With drone warfare however, both the equipment and the principle change.

By U.S. Air Force photo by Paul Ridgeway - Public Domain, Link

The drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), an aircraft without a human pilot aboard but remotely controlled either by an off board human operator or autonomously by onboard computers. According to Aleksandar Fatic writing in his paper: The ethics of drone warfare: "The use of drones has changed this basic structure of effectivity which had marked traditional military ethics since the battles of Achilles."

Until it was first used by the CIA for a military strike against Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden (who as later turned out was not in the scene) on 4th February 2002 in Afghanistan, drones which we had known until then, as restricted to surveillance, had taken on a new military dimension. Successive US administrations would authorize hundreds more of drone strikes.

The bush administration officially as we know, authorized 50 drone strikes, Barrack Obama authorized a record 506 strikes over the course of his presidential tenure, and one of Donald Trump’s first acts as POTUS was to authorize three US drone strikes in Yemen.

What started as a flying camera for surveillance is now a weapon for deadly strikes. And it continues to evolve in its capabilities. Until recently, we had single predator or reaper drones operated from a video game like system interface, by a human pilot (s) hundreds of miles away. But today we have ‘swarm drones’.

In 2016, the US successfully conducted a ‘swarm drone’ test of 106 drones, nearly doubling China’s previous test of 67 drones in what is slowly building up into a global ‘swarm-drone’ arms race as other countries adopt the drone initiative.

Perdix Swarm Demo, by US Navy Creative Commons attribution licence - reuse allowed

Unlike single predator drones which have a pilot on the ground, albeit hundreds of miles away, making and effecting judgments, controlling and making its decisions, swarm drones (Perdix drones) represent a further and more advanced evolution. They are able to communicate autonomously between and amongst themselves, and to use collective decision making to coordinate and effect movement to and against targets without human judgment and direction. Overall, drone warfare however it is evolving, is now touted as the third revolution in warfare after gun powder and nuclear arms.

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Ethics whither?

The pre-drone warfare age, to which we can clump and classify all warfare history until now, was characterized by proximity, some sort of meeting ground duels to which was central the human element. Drone war fare is the reverse. That is what I mean by a change in principle. To take away the human element, to put hundreds of miles between the victim and the aggressor, to eliminate the physical idea of a battle field or more conspicuously, to make it a one side experience, is to change the psychology and metrics, socially, economically and even politically, of war as we know and approach it.

It begs the fundamental question: is drone warfare ethical? It is the submission of its proponents that it is, provided bureaucratic and legal measures are followed prior to engaging drones in an attack.

Ethics by Nick Youngson, Link CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

But is it? And the answer, without beating around the bush, for me is NO a thousand times. How can a technology that takes away the human prerogative to make human life and death decisions be ethical? How can a video game mounted knight of shining armor whose exploits nonetheless lead to real life destruction of human life and property, whose emotionless trails are paved with widowed mothers, orphaned children, broken families, tears and pain, and suffering, be ethical?

The ethics of war (if there is any such thing) must rely on human judgment, and human judgment is a function of human conscience, of event proximity and experience. Otherwise you cannot properly evaluate the a war situation, correctly judge how far to step away from the fire, how much fire to counter with, if you cannot connect to the consequence of that fire, and are not in the vicinity and potential reach of the fire flame. You cannot make a proper life and death decision much less against another person/group, if you are disconnected from the pain or its likelihood.

History is ripe with examples of many ‘heartless’ and ‘reckless’ crimes of war perpetuated by men, moreover present and part of the battle field exchange, how much more does that become easy and swift, for a physically, and emotionally disconnected man hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away in some safe predator drone control room in Texas sipping coffee with one hand and with the other, pressing buttons whose impact is felt somewhere in Iran, far from himself, his family and friends?

There in front of a spotless computer interface, does not the target in Pakistan cease being a human individual but rather a screen object, a projection zoomed in and out for clarity and accuracy to be terminated and whose blood bath is almost a wonderful sight to behold in the animated confirmatory red spat screen dot? And this, besides dangers borne of poor/error prone human judgment in the split-second war circumstances where decisions are required to be made and effected.

As if that is not bad enough, swarm drones now eliminate the human operator all together from field engagement decisions. The drone technology is now or is being driven to a point of autonomy, where despite claims to the contrary, it is being constructed, to make life and death decisions otherwise until now the preserve of the human element of war. If this is not cause for us to stop and reflect on how far and how much we are looking to cede to technology our human responsibilities, then I don’t what else is. Indeed, how we can even still talk of ethics in regard to this obvious rape of our human moral and ethical consciousness is itself perplexing?

This advancement, suffice to say, is a further complication of our failure to keep our technological development vis-à-vis war capabilities, ethically sensitive. What for example happens if an autonomous drone gets its target wrong and instead of killing a ‘terrorist’ kills an unarmed civilian? Who is to blame? Who is to answer? Is it the coder who got it wrong? Is it the flying drone of a machine? Is it the government that ordered the hit? Who is the government? This is how abstract, and inconclusive the chain of responsibility is, it leads to counter-productive legal and ethical quagmires.

Speaking of legal quagmires, some justify drone warfare by asserting that they will only be used upon being authorized say by the head of state, in line with well-established legal procedures and consistent to the postulates of the Geneva Convention. But of course that too is nonsense, and a shortsighted perpetuation of the Nazi-like mentality. To legalize drone strikes is to trivialize and diminish the ethical implication of loss of human life due to drone strikes; it is to dehumanize the victim in a manner reminiscent of how Nazi Germany constructed, asked and answered the ‘Jewish question’ using gas chambers.

Legal and bureaucratic procedures not only dehumanize the target, but above else, sanitize the conscience of the individual. It shifts blame, frees him from guilt, from personal responsibility. Accordingly, the control room pilot is given the leeway from which to effectively adhere to and carry out a drone strike kill order simply because it is legally sanctioned by the stroke of a lawyer’s pen or is an order from the President, despite it being obviously immoral in his personal human judgment. That is how the third Reich convinced and brain washed the likes of Adolf Eichmann to override their individual moral obligations and perpetuate recorded history’s greatest shame.

"Obeying an order was the most important thing to me...." Adolf Eichmann infamously and unrepentantly maintained to the end, declaring matter of factly in one of the sessions during his trial in Israel: "Where there is no responsibility,” he said, “there can be no blame and no guilt.”

Another really big part of the moral problem with drone warfare is that it offers the leeway for governments and leaders to fight whoever and whenever they find fit without the risk of a domestic political fallout. Until now, the requirement to send combat soldiers to the war front face to face with direct danger came with political consequences especially if, and it always does, many of them returned in body bags. With drones however, governments are able to attack remotely, diminishing the likelihood and numbers of causalities and thus eliminating any such likelihood of a poliitcal controversy.

This way, drone warfare undermines democratic accountability because as Douglas C. Lovelace, JR, the Director Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War College Press observes in his forward to James Igoe Walsh and Marcus Schulzke's 2015 Report:"The Ethics of Drone Strikes: Does reducing the cost of conflict encourage WAR?

“Casualty aversion, the civilian public’s discomfort with sustaining military casualties and resistance to costly military operations, is a powerful constraint on when and how wars are waged in democratic societies”

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Final thoughts

In Drone warfare, the operator and/or the military in general, does not need to have courage, which means cowards and reckless but technological adept men and women get to be involved; two, no willingness is asked of the operator to make sacrifices for the cause they fight for as drone strikes confer no direct fire risk to soldiers, thus making them emotionally and psychologically distinct from the victims in such a manner as makes killing a routine experience.

Three, drone strikes are technological tasks to the operator who, disconnected from the war atmosphere, does not have justice as a factor in his or her work. When by the press of a button, he/she fires a missile, it is as though he is playing a video game. The immediate awareness of justice or injustice doesn’t factor in his decision making. Lastly, to conduct drone military offensives does not need one to have virtues, nor the feeling of being part of the military moral community. Exempt from the conventional military drills that instill physical endurance and discipline, Drone operators are in a way desensitized to extreme violence, making them more capable of perpetrating the same without remorse.

Looked at from whichever angle, drone warfare is unequivocally unethical. This is not to suggest a blanket stop to drone technology, far be it for me to suggest so, i think that drone technology should continue in such areas as look to save rather than to destroy human life, such as in the health industry, aerial photography, agriculture, deliveries etc.

Those are my thoughts, the end to which i will cap with the chilling warning of an open letter from AI and Robotics researchers, including the likes of Elon Musk:

"Unlike nuclear weapons , they (autonomous weapons such as drones) require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc:

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Drone Warfare: Lets talk Ethics | Ecency