Legal, Moral, and Pragmatic Contentions
Against Drone Warfare
7 November 2018
On Sunday, November 4, 2018, Lisa Ling and I presented a seminar at First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo on the use of weaponized drones by U.S. Military and Clandestine forces. This report recaps some of the ethical and diplomatic dilemmas and violations proceeding from drone warfare. As such, this report repeats most (and more) of what was presented on diplomacy, technology, and ethics, and omits repeating Lisa’s extemporaneous contributions, except where noted.
We began the seminar by listing primary arguments in favor (PRO) of weaponizing drones and employing them in military theaters:
1. It is alleged that creating the military use for drones will lead to job creation and economic development for both the traditional military-industrial complex and new commercial actors such as Google, which is working on automatizing drone weapon strikes through the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
2. Drone warfare automates casualties in peripheral and foreign populations and tends not to result in American domestic observers seeing its combatants in body bags. This argument states that because of this bias against American casualties, there is popular domestic support for mechanized drones taking on an increasing portion of battlefield operations.
3. Drones are “cheaper” to weaponize than other delivery systems. This claim is controversial as the complexity, contracting, and application of AI to drone systems goes forward, costs are exploding. Cheaper drone delivery systems are being developed for non-state actors, including criminal cartels, multinational corporations, and terrorists. It stands to reason that some of these latter devices can and will be weaponized.
4. Drone warfare is non-transparent and therefore does not rise to a level of publicity and public scrutiny that brings controversy: because of its foreign deployment, governmental secrecy, and issue complexity. Militarized drones do not readily present to U.S. audiences the ethical and legal dilemmas, including domestic and foreign traumas (see below).
5. Drones deliver weapons with laser-like (because laser-guided) geographic precision (which does not translate into combatant precision).
6. Drone warfare seems futuristic. Plays well with audiences with a utopian technological fascination and/or gaming inclination.
In addition, like many technologies, drones can assist humanitarian missions by transport and communication.
There are far more critical and contrary ethical and diplomatic rationales for arguing against the deployment and expansion of weaponized drones in battlefield or clandestine operations. These rationales can be categorized as moral, diplomatic/legal, pragmatic, and religious. There are overlaps in these categories.
I. Moral arguments against employing weaponized drones.
Drone-delivered lethal attacks depersonalize warfare. While this may cut down on domestic combatant deaths, there are two major moral dimensions to this automatization of killing. First, drone operators who carry out protocols to launch a killing operation from a drone platform may develop “moral injury.” Moral injury (MI) “involves feelings of shame, grief, meaninglessness, and remorse from having violated core moral beliefs related to traumatic experiences.”[2] It is important to note how many drone operators become intimately involved in their targets’ lives. In order to gain evidence and predict where their targets may show up geographically before or at a given kill time and date, the drone operator may surveille the target for weeks or months, witnessing the most intimate details of their potential target’s lives. When the time to execute a drone-delivered weapon strike, the drone operator participates in a killing more personal and psychologically intimate than traditional battlefield strikes on unknown combatants. Moral injury is behind some of the current epidemic of veterans’ suicides in the post-9/11 military services. Despite this initial intimacy, continued use of drone weapon strikes inside an observed population results in lowered empathy by the drone operator/observer. Moral injury in weaponized drone operators manifests in trauma or lowered empathy, or both in a complex sequence.
The second moral objection to the battlefield use of drone weapon delivery systems is that they create systemic “moral hazard” in the decision to initiate or expand battlefield operations. Moral Hazard is the ethical dilemma that results when one’s personal risks and rewards do not match the system’s or greater society's. Because they are presumed safer than manned operation, weaponized drones create the incentive to expand zones of lethal combat because the risks to the decision maker by that expansion are reduced or negated by geographic distance. A drone targeting operation may be carried out at a base in Nevada, but the explosion happens half the world away in the middle east. Moral hazard occurs because decision makers do not bear the full or even traditional cost or risk of their decisions to blow someone up thousands of miles away. The seeming ease of these military operations adds a second vector of moral hazard, by incentivizing the expansions of war zones. Taking human decision-making and allowable discretion under the Army Field Manual out of Standard Operating Practice and instead making those killing targets subject to AI and automatization preempts a soldier’s ordinary prerogative to disobey an unlawful targeting. This automatization of killing and targeting decisions outside of human oversight increases moral hazard in these weaponized drone systems.
Other ways drone warfare depersonalizes and dehumanizes monstrous decisions to explode human beings from the clouds (or from the sea): the use of weaponized drones lowers the threshold for committing deadly violence. Drone platforms promote secrecy, increase fear in isolated and marginal foreign communities, and change the culture and the spirituality of those communities through constant skyward surveillance. Zubair Rehman, a 13-year old Pakistani said five years ago, “I no longer love blue skies. I prefer grey skies. The drones don’t fly when the skies are grey."[1a] Now the drones fly even when the sky is overcast.
II. Diplomatic/Legal arguments against employing weaponized drones
We’ve already considered that weaponized drone platforms lead to the moral hazard of enticing military and clandestine services to expand battlefield zones outside of existing theaters and even national borders. This expansion of battlefield operations infringes on traditional diplomatic means to contain war zones.
More distressing are the ways that weaponized drones are deployed in ways that violate international law. Legal scholar Marjorie Cohn, contributor to Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, notes that the traditional targeting of suspicious activities by drone-enabled surveillance is now being replaced by grossly broad targeting of men of military age, which are termed “signature strikes.”
These signature strikes violate the “principle of distinction” which under international humanitarian law governing the legal use of force in an armed conflict, belligerents must distinguish between combatants and civilians. There are at least three humanitarian and legal objections to signature strikes. First, the technology of facial recognition of potential combatants is biased against darker skin. Brown- and black-skinned individuals have different shadowing characteristics compared with lighter skinned individuals, making the facial recognition technology less discriminating inside the former groups. It is a simple, but immoral, operational move to begin to target all men of military age in dark-skinned populations rather than awaiting conclusive identification of a known combatant. This principle of distinction becomes routinely violated. As of 2013, for which we have the last government documentation (as the U.S. government has moved toward increasing non-transparency and non-accountability in the drone warfare operational programs), Sen. Lindsey Graham noted that 90% of drone targeting were civilians, out of a total at the time of 4700.
While Google’s Project Maven in development with the Department of Defense has been put on seeming hiatus, its application of Artificial Intelligence to automate facial recognition with the trigger to launch a kill strike against that face—the person—advances the potential for increasingly gross violations of the principle of distinction.
Signature strikes have also been justified as reprisal for past terroristic activity, and as a pre-emptive necessity to prevent further loss of American life. Both reprisal and preemption violate international law. Although traditional international law required there to be “an imminent danger of attack” before preemption would be permissible, the George W. Bush administration argued in its 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) that the United States “must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.” It contends that “[t]he greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.”[3]
“A state seeking to exercise [pre-emptive] force in self-defense would need to demonstrate necessity [--] to demonstrate that the ‘necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.’ In other words, the state would need to show that the use of force by the other state was imminent and that there was essentially nothing but forcible action that would forestall such attack.”[4] Yet just this demonstration of “necessity” has been forgone by recent US administrations and their military applications of weaponized drones.
A second international legal convention requires the state using force in self-defense is obliged to respond in a manner proportionate to the threat. Yet last week, President Trump stated that he considers rock throwers at US forces to be employing a threat equivalent to shooting a gun or rifle at those forces.[5] This response is disproportionate to the threat, and any application of a targeted drone weapon strike that responds to a minor threat with a killing action violates the principle of proportionality. The current American administration seems ready to violate this principle as it expands CIA and military drone strikes around the world, including expansion in the Middle East and into African theaters. If the U.S. or a proxy ally such as an African warlord or in Palestine applies force in self-defense, it would then be obliged to respond in a manner proportionate to the threat. Targeting stone-throwing youth with a killing action is a war crime as it violates the principle of proportionality. The technological innovations enabled by drone-delivered weaponry further reduces the inhibitions on military forces to maintain the principle of proportionality and disestablishes accountability to these legal standards by transferring process from a human chain of command to an automated system.
A third violation of international law engaged by the development and expansion of weaponized drone systems is the violation of the presumption of innocence under the Geneva Convention to which the U.S. is signatory. Any targeting of families (as in the obliteration of wedding parties reported in Yemen and Pakistan by allied drone strikes) or innocent male or female civilians of military ages based on the principle of preemption violates the presumption of innocence. American battlefield policy has moved from demonstrating “necessity” to kill a drone-surveilled target, and thus relaxes the standard for demonstrating hostility and intent to kill in its targets. The Trump administration has recently pledged to target the families of “terrorists” by drone warfare, which is a war crime.
As we’ve noted, drones promote warfare at the expense of diplomacy by expanding war zones. Use of drones in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen also delegitimize those governments that allow US freedom of drone operations, both targeted surveillance and killing. Moreover, the effects of the weaponized drone program are not transparent to Constitutional and public oversight; President Trump has eliminated justification of “imminent threat” in the program’s targeting. The 2018 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) has increased classification of enemies subject to Drone targeting, has negated necessity of determining “near certainty” regarding classifications, and has eliminated as the first priority the capture of hostile combatants (vs. killing them from the sky), again violating the Geneva Convention.
"Since drones allow the U.S. to kill suspected enemies without directly putting U.S. lives at risk, policy-makers may feel free to pursue perpetual wars without paying any political cost." Drone warfare has made killing diplomatically and politically cheaper.
III. Additional objections on religious and justice grounds to weaponized drones
Drone warfare enhances human sinfulness and tendency to lethal tyranny. Justice issues indicated by drone warfare include the fact that drone warfare is used primarily against poorer countries--and against marginalized and indigenous groups within those nations. It is worth repeating that the technology involved in facial recognition discriminates against black and brown skins because the shadowing on those faces is less resolvable by drone optics filtered through the atmosphere at elevated altitudes.
I also point out that Drone Warfare violates the image of God endowed to all humans by this discrimination, as well by the reduction of the human functionings of freedom and mobility within drone-surveilled and terrorized populations. That immobilization brings about a disconnection with natural creation compared with traditional cultural adaptations--and compared with richer populations not yet surveilled and terrorized from the sky.
Drone warfare violates the Gospel when it expands war operations to non-combatants and areas. President Trump has claimed authority under Article 2 of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) to conduct hostilities regardless of geography (through AUMF definition of who is constituted a “terrorist.”) Additionally, the Talmud and Torah of the Jewish tradition require gathering information on your enemies' intent to attack you before engaging an attack against them, supporting the Just Use of Force tradition in Christianity and modern principles of legality.
IV. Pragmatic objections to Drone warfare
The 2018 AUMF expanded the clandestine services use of and role in militarized and weaponized drone operations. The CIA, previously prohibited from operations employing drone-guided killing, is now engaging in drone operations both in declared war zones and outside, such as in regions in Africa. While the Department of Defense must account for casualties in war, including those incurred as a result of drone killing and injury, the CIA is exempted from this accounting of results to Congress and the public. Since the George W. Bush administration concluded, later administrations employing this AUMF expansion have increased civilian casualties by a multiple of 80. Trump eased restrictions in Somalia (5/30/17) against civilian targeting, including of non-combatant family members of designated enemies.
Drone warfare technologies and infrastructures are not less expensive than conventional battlefield tactics, though they are becoming less so with continued deployment and experimentation. And we are warranted in suspecting that eventually what will be used against enemies will be used in the U.S. by its enemies--by terrorists (such as suggested by security breaches illustrated in overflights of French nuclear power plants [6]), by criminals and drug cartels, and by the expansion of its technologies into domestic militarized policing. It is inevitable there will be blowback of drone weaponry against the U.S., though Lisa Ling argues that the highest layer of the Internet is controlled by U.S. military concerns which postpone some of this potential for blowback.
Weaponized drones are subject to unforeseeable technological malfunctions. Ling claims they are not hackable because of the military’s control of internet systems involved, but others claim that weaponizing Big Data with A.I. (such as was [and IS?] underway at Google’s Project Maven) suggests the targeting by metadata will increase false positives and broaden the pervasive risks of these technologies domestically and abroad. Recent data suggests that 99% of AI identifications are false positives.
Another pragmatic objection to Drone Weaponization is its environmental costs and effects. As the technology becomes more miniaturized and cheaper, drones become a throwaway asset with material pollution of common lands, water, and air resources a result.
Weaponizing drones is part of the process of globalizing warfare. There are currently no multilateral rules governing their application. They are relatively easy to deploy outside war zones and to sovereign countries not involved with hostilities with the US and/or its allies. The globalization of warfare includes the weaponizing of more and more technologies and the expansion of the application of lethal force throughout the globe. This globalization and expansion of weaponization founded in the early application of deadly drones bring about a dystopian, Hobbesian vision of unlimited, ongoing, and increasingly deadly, widespread, and chaotic battles.
V. What Can Be Done? Recommendations for political action and citizen resistance
1. Better protection for whistleblowers, per Lisa Ling, including justice for Reality Winner who is incarcerated for whistleblowing. Whistleblowers are the public’s only viable way to hold this super-secretive and expansionist program accountable.
2. Better accounting for casualties, esp. non-combatants, universally applied to all government and clandestine agencies.
3. Develop international legal structure and rules: Ban autonomous killer drones
4. Don’t deploy lethal drones outside of warzones
5. In developing rules for engagement: Recognize that drones will be used against the U.S.—including domestically
6. Reducing use of drones reduces propaganda applied for terrorist recruitment
7. “Whatsoever you do, you do to the least of my brothers.” Protect the vulnerable: do not shift risks from soldiers to civilians
8. Anticipate how robots will be used in the future, not just in past
9. Write to Congress to roll back the 2018 AUMF (Sens. Corker/Caine sponsors):
a. Which included no limitations on hostilities directed against Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Afg, Iraq, Syria
b. President can add countries with secret information/authorization, just needs to assert “terrorist action”
c. no expiration date, subject to 2/3 congressional veto
d. Presumes President has authority to act—reducing oversight and accountability
e. violates U.N. Charter
10. Repeal 2001 AUMF (per Rep. Barbara Lee):
a. Write to Congress
11. Work politically for and institute a cabinet-level “Department of Peacebuilding” (Lee) that can act as a counter to the vast military-industrial-clandestine vested interests in government which seek to resolve all diplomatic dilemmas primarily through lethal force.
12. Search Wikipedia “Department of Defense contractors” for a list of involved multinational corporations per Lisa Ling to boycott or divest from the producers of the hardware and software.
13. See the heralded documentary National Bird (available on Netflix and elsewhere) which features Lisa Ling, and which the Washington Post reviewed as “artful, profoundly unsettling.”
14. Join Interfaith Network on Drone Warfare on Facebook and/or Twitter to include their information releases and calls for action in your regular newsfeeds.On Sunday, November 4, 2018 Lisa Ling and I presented a seminar at First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo on the use of weaponized drones by U.S. Military and Clandestine forces. This report recaps some of the ethical and diplomatic dilemmas and violations proceeding from drone warfare. As such, this report repeats most (and more) of what was presented on diplomacy, technology, and ethics, and omits repeating Lisa’s extemporaneous contributions, except where noted.
We began the seminar by listing primary arguments in favor (PRO) of weaponizing drones and employing them in military theaters:
1. It is alleged that creating the military use for drones will lead to job creation and economic development for both the traditional military-industrial complex and new commercial actors such as Google, which is working on automatizing drone weapon strikes through the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
2. Drone warfare automates casualties in peripheral and foreign populations and tends not to result in American domestic observers seeing its combatants in body bags. This argument states that because of this bias against American casualties, there is popular domestic support for mechanized drones taking on an increasing portion of battlefield operations.
3. Drones are “cheaper” to weaponize than other delivery systems. This claim is controversial as the complexity, contracting, and application of AI to drone systems goes forward, costs are exploding. Cheaper drone delivery systems are being developed for non-state actors, including criminal cartels, multinational corporations, and terrorists. It stands to reason that some of these latter devices can and will be weaponized.
4. Drone warfare is non-transparent and therefore does not rise to a level of publicity and public scrutiny that brings controversy: because of its foreign deployment, governmental secrecy, and issue complexity. Militarized drones do not readily present to U.S. audiences the ethical and legal dilemmas, including domestic and foreign traumas (see below).
5. Drones deliver weapons with laser-like (because laser-guided) geographic precision (which does not translate into combatant precision).
6. Drone warfare seems futuristic. Plays well with audiences with a utopian technological fascination and/or gaming inclination.
In addition, like many technologies, drones can assist humanitarian missions by transport and communication.
There are far more critical and contrary ethical and diplomatic rationales for arguing against the deployment and expansion of weaponized drones in battlefield or clandestine operations. These rationales can be categorized as moral, diplomatic/legal, pragmatic, and religious. There are overlaps in these categories.
I. Moral arguments against employing weaponized drones.
Drone-delivered lethal attacks depersonalize warfare. While this may cut down on domestic combatant deaths, there are two major moral dimensions to this automatization of killing. First, drone operators who carry out protocols to launch a killing operation from a drone platform may develop “moral injury.” Moral injury (MI) “involves feelings of shame, grief, meaninglessness, and remorse from having violated core moral beliefs related to traumatic experiences.”[2] It is important to note how many drone operators become intimately involved in their targets’ lives. In order to gain evidence and predict where their targets may show up geographically before or at a given kill time and date, the drone operator may surveille the target for weeks or months, witnessing the most intimate details of their potential target’s lives. When the time to execute a drone-delivered weapon strike, the drone operator participates in a killing more personal and psychologically intimate than traditional battlefield strikes on unknown combatants. Moral injury is behind some of the current epidemic of veterans’ suicides in the post-9/11 military services. Despite this initial intimacy, continued use of drone weapon strikes inside an observed population results in lowered empathy by the drone operator/observer. Moral injury in weaponized drone operators manifests in trauma or lowered empathy, or both in a complex sequence.
The second moral objection to the battlefield use of drone weapon delivery systems is that they create systemic “moral hazard” in the decision to initiate or expand battlefield operations. Moral Hazard is the ethical dilemma that results when one’s personal risks and rewards do not match the system’s or greater society's. Because they are presumed safer than manned operation, weaponized drones create the incentive to expand zones of lethal combat because the risks to the decision maker by that expansion are reduced or negated by geographic distance. A drone targeting operation may be carried out at a base in Nevada, but the explosion happens half the world away in the middle east. Moral hazard occurs because decision makers do not bear the full or even traditional cost or risk of their decisions to blow someone up thousands of miles away. The seeming ease of these military operations adds a second vector of moral hazard, by incentivizing the expansions of war zones. Taking human decision-making and allowable discretion under the Army Field Manual out of Standard Operating Practice and instead making those killing targets subject to AI and automatization preempts a soldier’s ordinary prerogative to disobey an unlawful targeting. This automatization of killing and targeting decisions outside of human oversight increases moral hazard in these weaponized drone systems.
Other ways drone warfare depersonalizes and dehumanizes monstrous decisions to explode human beings from the clouds (or from the sea): the use of weaponized drones lowers the threshold for committing deadly violence. Drone platforms promote secrecy, increase fear in isolated and marginal foreign communities, and change the culture and the spirituality of those communities through constant skyward surveillance. Zubair Rehman, a 13-year old Pakistani said five years ago, “I no longer love blue skies. I prefer grey skies. The drones don’t fly when the skies are grey."[1a] Now the drones fly even when the sky is overcast.
II. Diplomatic/Legal arguments against employing weaponized drones
We’ve already considered that weaponized drone platforms lead to the moral hazard of enticing military and clandestine services to expand battlefield zones outside of existing theaters and even national borders. This expansion of battlefield operations infringes on traditional diplomatic means to contain war zones.
More distressing are the ways that weaponized drones are deployed in ways that violate international law. Legal scholar Marjorie Cohn, contributor to Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, notes that the traditional targeting of suspicious activities by drone-enabled surveillance is now being replaced by grossly broad targeting of men of military age, which are termed “signature strikes.”
These signature strikes violate the “principle of distinction” which under international humanitarian law governing the legal use of force in an armed conflict, belligerents must distinguish between combatants and civilians. There are at least three humanitarian and legal objections to signature strikes. First, the technology of facial recognition of potential combatants is biased against darker skin. Brown- and black-skinned individuals have different shadowing characteristics compared with lighter skinned individuals, making the facial recognition technology less discriminating inside the former groups. It is a simple, but immoral, operational move to begin to target all men of military age in dark-skinned populations rather than awaiting conclusive identification of a known combatant. This principle of distinction becomes routinely violated. As of 2013, for which we have the last government documentation (as the U.S. government has moved toward increasing non-transparency and non-accountability in the drone warfare operational programs), Sen. Lindsey Graham noted that 90% of drone targeting were civilians, out of a total at the time of 4700.
While Google’s Project Maven in development with the Department of Defense has been put on seeming hiatus, its application of Artificial Intelligence to automate facial recognition with the trigger to launch a kill strike against that face—the person—advances the potential for increasingly gross violations of the principle of distinction.
Signature strikes have also been justified as reprisal for past terroristic activity, and as a pre-emptive necessity to prevent further loss of American life. Both reprisal and preemption violate international law. Although traditional international law required there to be “an imminent danger of attack” before preemption would be permissible, the George W. Bush administration argued in its 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) that the United States “must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.” It contends that “[t]he greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.”[3]
“A state seeking to exercise [pre-emptive] force in self-defense would need to demonstrate necessity [--] to demonstrate that the ‘necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.’ In other words, the state would need to show that the use of force by the other state was imminent and that there was essentially nothing but forcible action that would forestall such attack.”[4] Yet just this demonstration of “necessity” has been forgone by recent US administrations and their military applications of weaponized drones.
A second international legal convention requires the state using force in self-defense is obliged to respond in a manner proportionate to the threat. Yet last week, President Trump stated that he considers rock throwers at US forces to be employing a threat equivalent to shooting a gun or rifle at those forces.[5] This response is disproportionate to the threat, and any application of a targeted drone weapon strike that responds to a minor threat with a killing action violates the principle of proportionality. The current American administration seems ready to violate this principle as it expands CIA and military drone strikes around the world, including expansion in the Middle East and into African theaters. If the U.S. or a proxy ally such as an African warlord or in Palestine applies force in self-defense, it would then be obliged to respond in a manner proportionate to the threat. Targeting stone-throwing youth with a killing action is a war crime as it violates the principle of proportionality. The technological innovations enabled by drone-delivered weaponry further reduces the inhibitions on military forces to maintain the principle of proportionality and disestablishes accountability to these legal standards by transferring process from a human chain of command to an automated system.
A third violation of international law engaged by the development and expansion of weaponized drone systems is the violation of the presumption of innocence under the Geneva Convention to which the U.S. is signatory. Any targeting of families (as in the obliteration of wedding parties reported in Yemen and Pakistan by allied drone strikes) or innocent male or female civilians of military ages based on the principle of preemption violates the presumption of innocence. American battlefield policy has moved from demonstrating “necessity” to kill a drone-surveilled target, and thus relaxes the standard for demonstrating hostility and intent to kill in its targets. The Trump administration has recently pledged to target the families of “terrorists” by drone warfare, which is a war crime.
As we’ve noted, drones promote warfare at the expense of diplomacy by expanding war zones. Use of drones in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen also delegitimize those governments that allow US freedom of drone operations, both targeted surveillance and killing. Moreover, the effects of the weaponized drone program are not transparent to Constitutional and public oversight; President Trump has eliminated justification of “imminent threat” in the program’s targeting. The 2018 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) has increased classification of enemies subject to Drone targeting, has negated necessity of determining “near certainty” regarding classifications, and has eliminated as the first priority the capture of hostile combatants (vs. killing them from the sky), again violating the Geneva Convention.
"Since drones allow the U.S. to kill suspected enemies without directly putting U.S. lives at risk, policy-makers may feel free to pursue perpetual wars without paying any political cost." Drone warfare has made killing diplomatically and politically cheaper.
III. Additional objections on religious and justice grounds to weaponized drones
Drone warfare enhances human sinfulness and tendency to lethal tyranny. Justice issues indicated by drone warfare include the fact that drone warfare is used primarily against poorer countries--and against marginalized and indigenous groups within those nations. It is worth repeating that the technology involved in facial recognition discriminates against black and brown skins because the shadowing on those faces is less resolvable by drone optics filtered through the atmosphere at elevated altitudes.
I also point out that Drone Warfare violates the image of God endowed to all humans by this discrimination, as well by the reduction of the human functionings of freedom and mobility within drone-surveilled and terrorized populations. That immobilization brings about a disconnection with natural creation compared with traditional cultural adaptations--and compared with richer populations not yet surveilled and terrorized from the sky.
Drone warfare violates the Gospel when it expands war operations to non-combatants and areas. President Trump has claimed authority under Article 2 of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) to conduct hostilities regardless of geography (through AUMF definition of who is constituted a “terrorist.”) Additionally, the Talmud and Torah of the Jewish tradition require gathering information on your enemies' intent to attack you before engaging an attack against them, supporting the Just Use of Force tradition in Christianity and modern principles of legality.
IV. Pragmatic objections to Drone warfare
The 2018 AUMF expanded the clandestine services use of and role in militarized and weaponized drone operations. The CIA, previously prohibited from operations employing drone-guided killing, is now engaging in drone operations both in declared war zones and outside, such as in regions in Africa. While the Department of Defense must account for casualties in war, including those incurred as a result of drone killing and injury, the CIA is exempted from this accounting of results to Congress and the public. Since the George W. Bush administration concluded, later administrations employing this AUMF expansion have increased civilian casualties by a multiple of 80. Trump eased restrictions in Somalia (5/30/17) against civilian targeting, including of non-combatant family members of designated enemies.
Drone warfare technologies and infrastructures are not less expensive than conventional battlefield tactics, though they are becoming less so with continued deployment and experimentation. And we are warranted in suspecting that eventually what will be used against enemies will be used in the U.S. by its enemies--by terrorists (such as suggested by security breaches illustrated in overflights of French nuclear power plants [6]), by criminals and drug cartels, and by the expansion of its technologies into domestic militarized policing. It is inevitable there will be blowback of drone weaponry against the U.S., though Lisa Ling argues that the highest layer of the Internet is controlled by U.S. military concerns which postpone some of this potential for blowback.
Weaponized drones are subject to unforeseeable technological malfunctions. Ling claims they are not hackable because of the military’s control of internet systems involved, but others claim that weaponizing Big Data with A.I. (such as was [and IS?] underway at Google’s Project Maven) suggests the targeting by metadata will increase false positives and broaden the pervasive risks of these technologies domestically and abroad. Recent data suggests that 99% of AI identifications are false positives.
Another pragmatic objection to Drone Weaponization is its environmental costs and effects. As the technology becomes more miniaturized and cheaper, drones become a throwaway asset with material pollution of common lands, water, and air resources a result.
Weaponizing drones is part of the process of globalizing warfare. There are currently no multilateral rules governing their application. They are relatively easy to deploy outside war zones and to sovereign countries not involved with hostilities with the US and/or its allies. The globalization of warfare includes the weaponizing of more and more technologies and the expansion of the application of lethal force throughout the globe. This globalization and expansion of weaponization founded in the early application of deadly drones bring about a dystopian, Hobbesian vision of unlimited, ongoing, and increasingly deadly, widespread, and chaotic battles.
V. What Can Be Done? Recommendations for political action and citizen resistance
1. Better protection for whistleblowers, per Lisa Ling, including justice for Reality Winner who is incarcerated for whistleblowing. Whistleblowers are the public’s only viable way to hold this super-secretive and expansionist program accountable.
2. Better accounting for casualties, esp. non-combatants, universally applied to all government and clandestine agencies.
3. Develop international legal structure and rules: Ban autonomous killer drones
4. Don’t deploy lethal drones outside of warzones
5. In developing rules for engagement: Recognize that drones will be used against the U.S.—including domestically
6. Reducing use of drones reduces propaganda applied for terrorist recruitment
7. “Whatsoever you do, you do to the least of my brothers.” Protect the vulnerable: do not shift risks from soldiers to civilians
8. Anticipate how robots will be used in the future, not just in past
9. Write to Congress to roll back the 2018 AUMF (Sens. Corker/Caine sponsors):
a. Which included no limitations on hostilities directed against Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Afg, Iraq, Syria
b. President can add countries with secret information/authorization, just needs to assert “terrorist action”
c. no expiration date, subject to 2/3 congressional veto
d. Presumes President has authority to act—reducing oversight and accountability
e. violates U.N. Charter
10. Repeal 2001 AUMF (per Rep. Barbara Lee):
a. Write to Congress
11. Work politically for and institute a cabinet-level “Department of Peacebuilding” (Lee) that can act as a counter to the vast military-industrial-clandestine vested interests in government which seek to resolve all diplomatic dilemmas primarily through lethal force.
12. Search Wikipedia “Department of Defense contractors” for a list of involved multinational corporations per Lisa Ling to boycott or divest from the producers of the hardware and software.
13. See the heralded documentary National Bird (available on Netflix and elsewhere) which features Lisa Ling, and which the Washington Post reviewed as “artful, profoundly unsettling.”
14. Join Interfaith Network on Drone Warfare on Facebook and/or Twitter to include their information releases and calls for action in your regular newsfeeds.On Sunday, November 4, 2018 Lisa Ling and I presented a seminar at First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo on the use of weaponized drones by U.S. Military and Clandestine forces. This report recaps some of the ethical and diplomatic dilemmas and violations proceeding from drone warfare. As such, this report repeats most (and more) of what was presented on diplomacy, technology, and ethics, and omits repeating Lisa’s extemporaneous contributions, except where noted.
We began the seminar by listing 6 primary arguments in favor (PRO) of weaponizing drones and employing them in military theaters:
1. It is alleged that creating the military use for drones will lead to job creation and economic development for both the traditional military industrial complex and new commercial actors such as Google, which is working on automatizing drone weapon strikes though the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
2. Drone warfare automates casualties in peripheral and foreign populations and tends not to result in American domestic observers seeing its combatants in body bags. This argument states that because of this bias against American casualties, there is popular domestic support for mechanized drones taking on a greater portion of battlefield operations.
3. Drones are “cheaper” to weaponize than other delivery systems. This is a controversial statement as the complexity, contracting, and application of AI to drone systems goes forward, costs are exploding. Cheaper drone delivery systems are being developed for non-state actors, including criminal cartels, multinational corporations, and terrorists. It stands to reason that some of these latter devices can and will be weaponized.
4. Drone warfare is non-transparent and therefore does not rise to a level of publicity and public scrutiny that brings controversy: because of its foreign deployment, governmental secrecy, and issue complexity. Militarized drones do not readily present to U.S. audiences the ethical and legal dilemmas, including domestic and foreign traumas (see below).
5. Drones deliver weapons with laser-like (because laser-guided) geographic precision (which does not translate into combatant precision).
6. Drone warfare seems futuristic. Plays well with audiences with a utopian technological fascination and/or gaming inclination.
There are far more critical and contrary ethical and diplomatic rationales for arguing against the deployment and expansion of weaponized drones in battlefield or clandestine operations. These rationales can be categorized as moral, diplomatic/legal, pragmatic, and religious. There are overlaps in these categories.
I. Moral arguments against employing weaponized drones.
Drone-delivered lethal attacks depersonalize warfare. While this may cut down on domestic combatant deaths, there are two major moral dimensions to this automatization of killing. First, drone operators who carry out protocols to launch a killing operation from a drone platform may develop “moral injury.” Moral injury (MI) “involves feelings of shame, grief, meaninglessness, and remorse from having violated core moral beliefs related to traumatic experiences.”[2] It is important to note how many drone operators become intimately involved in their targets’ lives. In order to gain evidence and predict where their targets may show up geographically before or at a given kill time and date, the drone operator may surveille the target for weeks or months, witnessing the most intimate details of their potential target’s lives. When the time to execute a drone-delivered weapon strike, the drone operator participates in a killing more personal and psychologically intimate than traditional battlefield strikes on unknown combatants. Moral injury is behind some of the current epidemic of veterans’ suicides in the post-9/11 military services. Despite this initial intimacy, continued use of drone weapon strikes inside an observed population results in lowered empathy by the drone operator/observer. Moral injury in weaponized drone operators manifests in trauma or lowered empathy, or both in a complex sequence.
The second moral objection to the battlefield use of drone weapon delivery systems is that they create systemic “moral hazard” in the decision to initiate or expand battlefield operations. Moral Hazard is the ethical dilemma that results when one’s personal risks and rewards do not match the system’s or greater society's. Because they are presumed safer than manned operation, weaponized drones create the incentive to expand zones of lethal combat because the risks to the decision maker by that expansion are reduced or negated by geographic distance. A drone targeting operation may be carried out at a base in Nevada, but the explosion happens half the world away in the middle east. Moral hazard occurs because decision makers do not bear the full or even traditional cost or risk of their decisions to blow someone up thousands of miles away. The seeming ease of these military operations add a second vector of moral hazard, by incentivizing the expansions of war zones. Taking human decision-making and allowable discretion under the Army Field Manual out of Standard Operating Practice and instead making those killing targets subject to AI and automatization preempts a soldier’s ordinary prerogative to disobey an unlawful targeting. This automatization of killing and targeting decisions outside of human oversight increases moral hazard in these weaponized drone systems.
Other ways drone warfare depersonalizes and dehumanizes monstrous decisions to explode human beings from the clouds (or from the sea): the use of weaponized drones lowers the threshold for committing deadly violence. Drone platforms promote secrecy, increase fear in isolated and marginal foreign communities, and change the culture and the spirituality of those communities through constant skyward surveillance. Zubair Rehman, a 13-year old Pakistani said 5 years ago, “I no longer love blue skies. I prefer grey skies. The drones don’t fly when the skies are grey."[1a] Now the drones fly even when the sky is overcast.
II. Diplomatic/Legal arguments against employing weaponized drones
We’ve already considered that weaponized drone platforms lead to the moral hazard of enticing military and clandestine services to expand battlefield zones outside of existing theaters and even national borders. This expansion of battlefield operations infringes on traditional diplomatic means to contain the expansion of war zones.
More distressing are the ways that weaponized drones are being deployed in ways that violate international law. Legal scholar Marjorie Cohn, contributor to Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, notes that the traditional targeting of suspicious activities by drone-enabled surveillance is now being replaced by grossly broad targeting of men of military age, which are termed “signature strikes.”
These signature strikes violate the “principle of distinction” which under international humanitarian law governing the legal use of force in an armed conflict, belligerents must distinguish between combatants and civilians. There are at least three humanitarian and legal objections to signature strikes. First, the technology of facial recognition of potential combatants is biased against darker skin. Brown- and black-skinned individuals have different shadowing characteristics compared with lighter skinned individuals, making the facial recognition technology less discriminating inside the former groups. It is a simple, but immoral, operational move to therefore begin to target all men of military age in dark-skinned populations rather than awaiting conclusive identification of a known combatant. This principle of distinction becomes routinely violated. As of 2013, for which we have the last government documentation (as the U.S. government has moved toward increasing non-transparency and non-accountability in the drone warfare operational programs), Sen. Lindsey Graham noted that 90% of drone targeting were civilians, out of a total at the time of 4700.
While Google’s Project Maven in development with the Department of Defense has been put on seeming hiatus, its application of Artificial Intelligence to automate facial recognition with the trigger to launch a kill strike against that face—the person—advances the potential for increasingly gross violations of the principle of distinction.
Signature strikes have also been justified as reprisal for past terroristic activity, and as a pre-emptive necessity to prevent further loss of American life. Both reprisal and preemption violate international law. Although traditional international law required there to be “an imminent danger of attack” before preemption would be permissible, the George W. Bush administration argued in its 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) that the United States “must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.” It contends that “[t]he greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.”[3]
“A state seeking to exercise [pre-emptive] force in self-defense would need to demonstrate necessity [--] to demonstrate that the ‘necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.’ In other words, the state would need to show that the use of force by the other state was imminent and that there was essentially nothing but forcible action that would forestall such attack.”[4] Yet just this demonstration of “necessity” has been forgone by recent US administrations and their military applications of weaponized drones.
A second international legal convention requires the state using force in self-defense is obliged to respond in a manner proportionate to the threat. Yet last week, President Trump stated that he considers rock throwers at US forces to be employing a threat equivalent to shooting a gun or rifle at those forces.[5] This is a disproportionate response to the threat, and any application of a targeted drone weapon strike that responds to a minor threat with a killing action violates the principle of proportionality. The current American administration seems ready to violate this principle as it expands CIA and military drone strikes around the world, including expansion in the Middle East and into African theaters. If the U.S. or a proxy ally such as an African warlord or in Palestine applies force in self-defense, it would then be obliged to respond in a manner proportionate to the threat. Targeting stone-throwing youth with a killing action is a war crime as it violates the principle of proportionality. The technological innovations enabled by drone-delivered weaponry further reduces the inhibitions on military forces to maintain the principle of proportionality and disestablishes accountability to these legal standards by transferring process from a human chain of command to an automated system.
A third violation of international law engaged by the development and expansion of weaponized drone systems is the violation of presumption of innocence under the Geneva Convention to which the U.S. is signatory. Any targeting of families (as in the obliteration of wedding parties reported in Yemen and Pakistan by allied drone strikes) or innocent male or female civilians of military ages based on the principle of preemption violates the presumption of innocence. American battlefield policy has moved from demonstrating “necessity” to kill a drone-surveilled target, and thus relaxes the standard for demonstrating hostility and intent to kill in its targets. The Trump administration has recently pledged to target the families of “terrorists” by drone warfare, which is a war crime.
As we’ve noted, drones promote warfare at expense of diplomacy by expanding war zones. Use of drones in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen also delegitimize those governments that allow US freedom of drone operations, both targeted surveillance and killing. Moreover, the effects of the weaponized drone program are not transparent to Constitutional and public oversight, President Trump has eliminated justification of “imminent threat” in the program’s targeting. The 2018 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) has increased classification of enemies subject to Drone targeting, has negated necessity of determining “near certainty” regarding classifications, and has eliminated as the first priority the capture of hostile combatants (vs. killing them from the sky), again violating the Geneva Convention.
III. Additional objections on religious and justice grounds to weaponized drones
Drone warfare enhances human sinfulness and tendency to lethal tyranny. Justice issues indicated by drone warfare include the fact that drone warfare is used primarily against poorer countries--and against marginalized and indigenous groups within those nations. It is worth repeating that the technology involved in facial recognition discriminates against black and brown skins because the shadowing on those faces are less resolvable by drone optics filtered through the atmosphere at elevated altitudes.
I also point out that Drone Warfare violates the image of God endowed to all humans by this discrimination, as well by the reduction of the human functionings of freedom and mobility within drone-surveilled and terrorized populations. That immobilization brings about a disconnection with natural creation compared with traditional cultural adaptations--and compared with richer populations not yet surveilled and terrorized from the sky.
Drone warfare violates the Gospel when it expands war operations to non-combatants and areas. President Trump has claimed authority under Article 2 of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) to conduct hostilities regardless of geography (through AUMF definition of who is constituted a “terrorist.”) Additionally, the Talmud and Torah of the Jewish tradition requires gathering information on your enemies' intent to attack you before engaging an attack against them, supporting the Just Use of Force tradition in Christianity and modern principles of legality.
IV. Pragmatic objections to Drone warfare
The 2018 AUMF expanded the clandestine services use of and role in militarized and weaponized drone operations. The CIA, previously prohibited from operations employing drone-guided killing, is now engaging in drone operations both in declared war zones and outside, such as in regions in Africa. While the Department of Defense must account for casualties in war, including those incurred as a result of drone killing and injury, the CIA is exempted from this accounting of results to Congress and to the public.
Drone warfare technologies and infrastructures are not less expensive than conventional battlefield tactics, though they are becoming less so with continued deployment and experimentation. And we are warranted in suspecting that eventually what will be used against enemies will be used in US by its enemies--by terrorists (such as suggested by security breaches illustrated in overfights of French nuclear power plants [6]), by criminals and drug cartels, and by the expansion of its technologies into domestic militarized policing. It is inevitable there will be blowback of drone weaponry against U.S., though Lisa Ling argues that highest layer of Internet is controlled by U.S. military concerns which postpones some of this potential for blowback.
Weaponized drones are subject to unforeseeable technological malfunctions. Ling claims they are not hackable because of the military’s control of internet systems involved, but others claim that weaponizing Big Data with A.I. (such as was [and IS?] underway at Google’s Project Maven) suggests the targeting by metadata will increase false positives and broaden the pervasive risks of these technologies domestically and abroad. Recent data suggests that 99% of AI identifications are false positives.
Weaponizing drones is part of the process of globalizing warfare. There are currently no multilateral rules governing their application. They are relatively easy to deploy outside war zones and to sovereign countries not involved with hostilities with the US and/or its allies. The globalization of warfare includes the weaponizing of more and more technologies and the expansion of the application of lethal force throughout the globe. This globalization and expansion of weaponization founded in the early application of deadly drones brings about a dystopian, Hobbesian vision of unlimited, ongoing, and increasingly deadly, widespread, and chaotic battles.
V. What Can Be Done? Recommendations for political action and citizen resistance
1. Better protection for whistleblowers, per Lisa Ling, including justice for Reality Winner who is incarcerated for whistleblowing. Whistleblowers are the public’s only viable way to hold this super-secretive and expansionist program accountable.
2. Better accounting for casualties, esp. non-combatants, universally applied to all government and clandestine agencies.
3. Develop international legal structure and rules: Ban autonomous killer drones
4. Don’t deploy lethal drones outside of warzones
5. In developing rules for engagement: Recognize that drones will be used against U.S.—including domestically
6. Reducing use of drones reduces propaganda applied for terrorist recruitment
7. “Whatsoever you do, you do to the least of my brothers.” Protect the vulnerable: do not shift risks from soldiers to civilians
8. Anticipate how robots will be used in future, not just in past
9. Write to Congress to roll back the 2018 AUMF (Sens. Corker/Caine sponsors):
a. Which included no limitations on hostilities directed against Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Afg, Iraq, Syria
b. President can add countries with secret information/authorization, just needs to assert “terrorist action”
c. no expiration date, subject to 2/3 congressional veto
d. Presumes President has authority to act—reducing oversight and accountability
e. violates U.N. Charter
10. Repeal 2001 AUMF (per Rep. Barbara Lee):
a. Write to congress
11. Work politically for and institute a cabinet level “Department of Peacebuilding” (Lee) that can act as a counter to the vast military-industrial-clandestine vested interests in government which seek to resolve all diplomatic dilemmas primarily through lethal force.
12. Search Wikipedia “Department of Defense contractors” for a list of involved multinational corporations per Lisa Ling to boycott or divest from the producers of the hardware and software.
13. See the heralded documentary National Bird (available on Netflix and elsewhere) which features Lisa Ling, and which the Washington Post reviewed as “artful, profoundly unsettling.”
14. Join Interfaith Network on Drone Warfare on Facebook and/or Twitter to include their information releases and calls for action in your regular newsfeeds.
[1] Unless where otherwise noted, the factual assertions in this report were presented at the San Francisco Bay Area Interfaith Conference on Drone Warfare held at the Pacific School of Religion Chapel, Berkeley, CA on Saturday, April 28, 2018 from 10 am to 4 pm. Speakers included:
-Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. The former president of the National Lawyers Guild and a criminal defense attorney, legal scholar, political analyst and social critic.
-Richard Killmer, Executive Director of Interfaith Network on Drone Warfare, formerly ED of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture
-Professor Maryann Cusimano Love, Catholic University (DC) and a principal of US State Department Working Group on religion and diplomacy.
-Rep. Barbara Lee (D. Oakland)
-Lisa Ling, former technical sergeant in the U.S. Air Force.
[1a] Abad-Santos, Alexander. “This 13-Year-Old Is Scared When the Sky Is Blue Because of Our Drones.” The Atlantic. Last modified October 29, 2013. Accessed November 2, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/saddest-words-congresss-briefing-drone-strikes/354548/.
[2] Koenig, Harold G., Nagy A. Youssef, Donna Ames, John P. Oliver, Ellen J. Teng, Kerry Haynes, Zachary D. Erickson, et al. “Moral Injury and Religiosity in US Veterans With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 206, no. 5 (May 2018): 325–331. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29494381 accessed 11/2/18.
[3] Arend, Anthony Clark. “International Law and the Preemptive Use of Military Force.”
The Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Washington Quarterly 26 (2003): 89–103.
https://www.academia.edu/815528/International_law_and_the_preemptive_use_of_military_force accessed 11/2/18.
[4] Ibid
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/02/us/officials-dismiss-shooting-rock-throwing-migrants-trump-invs/index.html
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/world/europe/unidentified-drones-are-spotted-above-french-nuclear-plants.html More recently: https://abcnews.go.com/International/greenpeace-intentionally-crashes-drone-french-nuclear-power-plant/story?id=56343027
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/02/us/officials-dismiss-shooting-rock-throwing-migrants-trump-invs/index.html
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/world/europe/unidentified-drones-are-spotted-above-french-nuclear-plants.html More recently: https://abcnews.go.com/International/greenpeace-intentionally-crashes-drone-french-nuclear-power-plant/story?id=56343027
since this was published, a rare article on drone warfare has been published, including some statistics, at https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-hidden-toll-of-american-drones-in-yemen/
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