How to think about drones
[The article is long, but I found it surprisingly even handed.]
"Any history of how the United States destroyed Osama bin Laden’s organization will feature the drone. Whatever questions it has raised, however uncomfortable it has made us feel, the drone has been an extraordinarily effective weapon for the job. The U.S. faced a stateless, well-funded, highly organized terrorist operation that was sophisticated enough to carry out unprecedented acts of mass murder. Today, while local al-Qaeda franchises remain a threat throughout the Middle East, the organization that planned and carried out 9/11 has been crushed. When bin Laden himself was killed, Americans danced in the streets."
"Don’t take my word for it. In the intelligence gathered at bin Laden’s compound, we found that he wrote, ‘We could lose the reserves to enemy’s air strikes. We cannot fight air strikes with explosives.’ Other communications from al-Qaeda operatives confirm this as well. Dozens of highly skilled al-Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers, and operatives have been taken off the battlefield. Plots have been disrupted that would have targeted international aviation, U.S. transit systems, European cities, and our troops in Afghanistan. Simply put, these strikes have saved lives."
"Ground combat almost always kills more civilians than drone strikes do. When you consider the alternatives, you are led, as Obama was, to the logic of the drone."
The key paragraph is here:
"Special Forces commanders, in particular, abhorred what they saw as excessive efforts to “litigate” their war. The price of every target the White House rejected, military commanders said, was paid in American lives."
Here are some others:
"The drone is new only in that it combines known technology in an original way—aircraft, global telecommunications links, optics, digital sensors, supercomputers, etc. It greatly lowers the cost of persistent surveillance. When armed, it becomes a remarkable, highly specialized tool: a weapon that employs simple physics to launch a missile with lethal force from a distance, a first step into a world where going to war does not mean fielding an army, or putting any of your own soldiers, sailors, or pilots at risk."
"The onslaught [of drone strikes] was effective, at least by some measures: letters seized in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden show his consternation over the rain of death by drone."
[Those who think that drone warfare is just a bunch of "cowboys" taking pot shots at "indians" need to read and heed this:]
"In the first part of the meetings, questions of legality were considered: Was the prospect a lawful target? Was he high-level? Could he rightly be considered to pose an “imminent” threat? Was arrest a viable alternative? Only when these criteria were deemed met did the discussion shift toward policy. Was it smart to kill this person? What sort of impact might the killing have on local authorities, or on relations with the governments of Pakistan or Yemen? What effect would killing him have on his own organization? Would it make things better or worse?"
This next supports my contention that we've almost lopped off the head of al-Qaeda a premise that is supported by the fact that recent attacks have been by so called 'Lone Wolves' rather than squads of terror cells.
"The number of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen fell to 88 last year, and they have dropped off even more dramatically since.
The decline partly reflects the toll that the drone war has taken on al-Qaeda. “There are fewer al-Qaeda leadership targets to hit,” "
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-killing-machines-how-to-think-about-drones/309434/?single_page=true
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