The Psychological Tolls and Moral Hazards of Drone Warfare
Two new books shed light on what remote warfare does to military operators, the standing of the U.S., and societies abroad.
On what would be the last day of his life, Zemari Ahmadi, an employee of a U.S.-based NGO, was being watched by a remote crew piloting a Predator drone above the skies of Kabul, Afghanistan. As Ahmadi went about his work, running a series of errands across the city, the drone operators, though they did not know his identity, were making plans to kill him.
A series of innocuous actions, like Ahmadi loading water containers into his car, were interpreted in the minds of the operators watching as sinister preparations for a suicide bomb attack. After surveilling Ahmadi for several hours, the drone operators issued a death sentence, firing a Hellfire missile at his car as he drove up to his home, just as three children were rushing out to greet him. A total of 10 people, all civilians, were killed in the attack that the U.S. military had initially insisted had targeted a terrorist working with the Islamic State.
[. . .] Freed from the traditional reciprocity of war, in which both sides put their lives on the line, drone operators have become more like judicial executioners: putting people on trial on the other side of the planet without due process and meting out death sentences by remote control. Armed drones have become a staple of modern American warfare, placing operators at a historically unprecedented remove from danger. At the same time, they have exposed those targeted, whether combatants or civilians, to a form of violence that they can neither defend themselves against nor surrender to.
The U.S. pioneered this style of warfare but is no longer alone in using what are technically called unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. Other countries, including U.S. rivals, are ramping up their own drone programs, signaling that this style of killing at great distance is likely to become a defining feature of war in the 21st century.
Understanding what this means is the task of two recent books,
> “Asymmetric Killing: Risk Avoidance, Just War, and the Warrior Ethos” by Neil Renic, an international relations scholar at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg in Germany, and
> “On Killing Remotely: The Psychology of Killing With Drones,” by Wayne Phelps, a retired U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[. . .] Phelps approaches drone warfare as a military insider. He is mainly concerned with reducing the stigma against drone operators within the military hierarchy and finding ways of making the process of remote killing psychologically easier. He suggests creating greater social distance between operator and target, using technical language to describe the people involved, and breaking up tasks so that the person doing intimate, pattern-of-life surveillance on an individual is not the same person pulling the trigger or observing the target’s family in grief in the aftermath. . .Embedded in Phelps’s analysis in “On Killing Remotely” is the assumption that targeted killing with drones is just another evolution in how human beings have created advantages for themselves in combat, comparable to the bow and arrow, cannon, sniper rifle, bomber plane, and ballistic missile.
> That assumption is put to the test in Neil Renic’s “Asymmetric Killing.” Renic argues that drones establish a “radical asymmetry” of violence unlike anything created by prior weapons. The utter lopsidedness of the violence, where one side is completely free from danger and the other at their total mercy, calls into question whether what is happening is a war at all — or something more sinister.
In countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, the U.S. has carried out thousands of strikes in the absence of a meaningful U.S. ground presence. The people being killed on the ground in these strikes usually do not, and indeed cannot, pose any conceivable threat to Americans [. . .] The concept of war as a legal and morally regulated activity was historically built on an assumption of mutual risk and danger among those taking part. That dynamic simply no longer exists when one side is fighting only with robots from the other side of the planet. While prior technological advances may have reduced the structural threat between combatants, drone warfare is the first time that one side has made themselves absolutely immune to violence.
What emerges in place of war as a situation of mutual risk is simply an unending series of executions carried out from the skies. The task of the people carrying out many strikes is less about overcoming an enemy in battle than issuing moral judgments and death sentences against individuals who pose no conceivable threat to the U.S. and whose customs, circumstances, and even identities are often unknown to them. To use a chilling metaphor, Renic argues that killing through drone strikes outside of active combat situations is less like war, as traditionally defined, and more like “a creative process of disinfection.”
In cases where drones are targeting high-level terrorists who are directly planning attacks against the U.S. or where they are supporting friendly ground forces in combat, the strikes are more justifiable, according to traditional moral schema. These are not often the circumstances of drone strikes. . .
If drone warfare, whether autonomous or not, is to have any moral component at all, it must include some accountability for the innocent people regularly killed in strikes like the one that ended the life of Zemari Ahmadi. Periodic apologies aside, moral responsibility toward the tens of thousands killed, maimed, or deprived of their loved ones over the past 20 years has been in short evidence.
“That is not enough for us to say sorry,” Emal Ahmadi, Zemari’s brother, told reporters in the aftermath of the drone strike. “The U.S.A. can see from everywhere. They can see that there were innocent children near the car and in the car. Whoever did this should be punished. It isn’t right.”
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