Do drones make war too easy?

Hi, I’m Ryan Jenkins, a philosophy professor at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. We often say that necessity is the mother of invention and nothing heightens the feeling of necessity like military conflict. That’s why, unsurprisingly, war has been a major driver of technological change throughout history, and militaries have often been quick to adopt any innovation that they thought might give them an edge in conflict. And yet new technologies of warfare are often controversial. Take an example of a technology that has been used by the United States hundreds of times in recent decades: the “drone”, or remotely piloted aircraft. These airplanes can be used for surveillance or can be armed with missiles to carry out “targeted killing” or assassination missions. All while being controlled from far away, keeping their operators safe. This program began under President Clinton, and was accelerated under later presidents, carried out largely in secret. The program of drone strikes is one of the most controversial recent additions to US foreign policy. But is there anything special about drones that makes them fundamentally different as a weapon of war? Yes, drones cause so-called “collateral damage” when civilians are killed accidentally in a drone strike. But most methods of killing cause collateral damage. And some data suggest drone strikes may actually be more accurate than other methods of waging warfare. Yes, drone pilots can suffer PTSD from operating drones, but so do soldiers in battle. Surely, operating a drone is safer than being on a battlefield. If we are worried about the potential harm to soldiers themselves, then we ought to prefer using drones over putting “boots on the ground.” Many of the popular criticisms of drones fail to show that there is something different and uniquely, intrinsically bad about them. But what about the general unease we feel that there is something wrong with making war “too easy,” or more like a “video game” than real life? We can call this the “threshold argument” against drones: because drones make war so easy, they make war less costly. That is to say, they lower the “threshold” to war. How do drones make it “cheaper” to go to war? First, drones lower the political cost of going to war, since we are no longer risking the lives of our soldiers to carry out a mission. Second, drone strikes lower the psychological cost of going to war, because they are so distant from our everyday lives. Lastly, using drones quite literally lowers the economic cost of going to war since drones are cheaper than many other weapons we would otherwise use. And as war becomes cheaper and easier, it might become more common. Would this be a problem? Well, some wars, like humanitarian interventions, ought to be fought but are not the world failed to act to prevent genocide in Rwanda or Darfur not long ago, for example, in part because it was seen as too costly. Lowering the cost of these kinds of wars makes the world better. So, it seems like there’s a missing premise here: We have to argue not just that drones make war more common, but that more war would be bad. To make this argument, we have to think that most wars that are fought are bad wars. In fact, that turns out to be reasonable. If the only just cause for war is response to an unjust attack, like an invasion, then at most only one side of a war can have a good reason to fight. Resisting that attack or invasion. But then, even the side that does have a good reason to fight often does other things in war that are wrong, like commit war crimes or crimes against humanity, using weapons or tactics that are forbidden or otherwise offend the conscience of humanity. In fact, it is hard to find many wars that have been fought over the last few centuries that were obviously, unimpeachably good wars. Stopping the Nazis in World War II was a good war, but the United States' wars in Vietnam, Korea, the invasion of Iraq, not to mention America’s dozens of other military adventures in the last few decades were seriously problematic. And even in World War II, the United States and the Allies regularly targeted civilians on purpose. So, more war might very well mean more unjust war. But even if it doesn't lead to large-scale wars like World War II, or the Vietnam War, it might lead to a "new normal" that is just as troubling. The widespread use of drones could lead to a constant low-boil of warfare. Estimates are hard to come by, but in the last few years with the drone program, America has launched several hundred, perhaps over a thousand drone strikes, and we’ve killed over a thousand people. Yet those killings don’t get much coverage at all, in part because US soldiers’ lives are not at risk. Those deaths, many of which were civilians, become just part of the background noise of life in the US. Because the American public bears so little cost for these ongoing drone attacks, they overwhelmingly support the use of drone strikes. But perhaps we should find it troubling that the United States is the only country in the world where more people approve of the drone strike program than disapprove. And yet, if we look at the history of warfare, we might think that this is just one more step in the long trend of removing warfighters further from the battlefield. First, we fought hand-to-hand with sticks and stones. Then it was bows and arrows. Soon, it was gunpowder and canon. All of them allowing the soldier to be further from their targets. Drones, which are operated remotely, are just the latest, and perhaps ultimate, innovation in this long technological trajectory. But is there a point at which war becomes too cheap, or too easy? Can it become so easy that it’s tempting to engage in immoral wars, and does more war, by itself, mean more unjust war? Well, what do you think?