Drone Wars — Winning the Battle But Denying the Analytical Edge
A recent article from Dan Lawlor, highlights how the U.S. Drone program is one of the more controversial tools in the intelligence community’s collection. The current administration without any sort of trial, conviction or sentence continues to allow the use of drones to kill known and suspected terrorists overseas- and his article points to the contradictory accounting of how many innocents have been caught in the crossfire.
The character of the drone wars is changing, from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions to incalculable consequences for foreign policy. Until recently the use of armed drones was restricted to CIA-led operations. However, the military is about to acquire its own fleet of such vehicles. Daniel Goure from the Lexington Institute stated that “ the Air Force has announced that from this point forward it will only acquired the MQ-9 Reaper, the version of the Predator capable of carrying weapons. An Army variant of the same system, the Sky Warrior, is already in service. While the Navy is developing a program for unmanned combat aerial system (UCAS) that would be launched from aircraft carriers to conduct deep strike missions”.
While I am not arguing against the use of drones as a proven method of combating terrorism, the stark reality is that people die because of the decision to use or not use drones. Fred Kaplan in his piece for the MIT Technology Review, describes the effects of deploying drones in foreign countries as, “These strikes have provoked violent protest in those countries, alienating even those who’d previously felt no affection for jihadists and, in some cases, provided some support for the United States.” Similarly, Graham E. Fuller a former CIA operative wrote in a World Without Islam that years of political and emotional anger at U.S. policies and actions have caused much of the hatred against the west, and marvels as to how we were not attacked sooner. He explains, “as radical groups articulate grievances in our globalized age, why should we not expect them to carry their struggle into the heart of the West?”
At the strategic level this post begs the question of whether this policy diminishes “soft approaches” to win the “hearts and minds” in the Overseas Contingency Operations (aka Global War on Terrorism) since there are detrimental results for making likely causal linkages between one’s strategy and one’s goals. As a homeland security student and aspiring practitioner, I’ve learned that in order to pursue better policy we must understand the complex foundations of world views and agendas. According to Anders Strindberg from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security, “ If we do not recognize the dissonance between the values we hold and the actions we engage in, we hurt the counter-terrorist effort. Why? Because if we fail to go behind the simple labels and emotional-political shorthand in order to understand the actual parameters of the terrorists’ actions and our own GWOT, then we are hamstringing ourselves. We are denying ourselves an analytical edge in the struggle.”
Drones are an important foreign policy issue, with hotly debated pros-and-cons about its long-term effects on the nation’s interests abroad as well as domestically. This complex tool has two contradictory aspects: one has successfully eliminated in the short-term over 3,000 extremist operatives; while in the long-term it continues to breed the terrorists of tomorrow. As we continue down this path, let’s not continue winning the battle while denying the analytical edge.
