http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/hellfire-morality-and-strategy?utm_source=freelist-f&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20130219&utm_term=gweekly&utm_content=readmore&elq=52db274bf4f14ffbb5951687d03bb97
more to come
Airstrikes by unmanned aerial vehicles have become a matter of serious dispute lately. The controversy focuses on the United States, which has the biggest fleet of these weapons and which employs them more frequently than any other country. On one side of this dispute are those who regard them simply as another weapon of war whose virtue is the precision with which they strike targets. On the other side are those who argue that in general, unmanned aerial vehicles are used to kill specific individuals, frequently civilians, thus denying the targeted individuals their basic right to some form of legal due process.
the mistake/errors/misinfo starts early, in the first paragraph. First of all, a missile fired from a drone isnt any more accurate than a missile fired from a manned aircraft. secondly, The author (George Friedman, its his company) conflates a few arguments against the way drones are employed into one single strawman.
the benefit of drones is stated more correctly later by Friedman himself, so we dont need to go into that. the arguments against drones are as follows: while a drone itself has greater loiter time than a manned aircraft, the operator of a drone has significantly diminished situational awareness. this lack of awareness contributes to a far greater likelihood of killing people other than the target, or misidentification of the target (both of which used to be considered very bad things that shouldnt occur, but now are just a part of life under the evil empire). this brings us to targeting. the main reason drones are unpopular is the targets that drones are used to strike, or perhaps the way those targets are selected. generally speaking, in a war, soldiers are only allowed to kill individuals who have committed a hostile act or demonstrated hostile intent. soldiers are also allowed to kill enemy combatants, because allegiance to a belligerent party, in that party's armed forces, is pretty much a demonstration of hostile intent towards the counter-belligerent. well nowadays you can blast someone with a missile from a flying robot under circumstances when hostile intent, hostile actions, or combatant status has not been established according to the old standards. obviously, the answer is that due to changes in circumstance, new standards for hostile acts/intent and combatant status have to be developed. the kicker is that none of the people who are paying for this "terrorist extermination service" are privvy to those rules of engagement (roe). of course not, because its secret lol. so the opposing argument is that: it used to be ok to kill people only when they became a threat. now you say its ok to kill people when they couldnt possibly pose a threat, because the nearest americans are sometimes hundreds of miles away. what changed, besides the technology, and why isnt there more of an effort from what was promised to be "the most open Dministration in history" to disclose who and why when individuals are being extrajudicially assassinated?
Unlike a manned aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles can remain in the air for an extended period of time -- an important capability for engaging targets that may only present a very narrow target window. This ability to loiter, and then strike quickly when a target presents itself, is what has made these weapons systems preferable to fixed wing aircraft and cruise missiles.
this belongs in your lede, George.
What makes unmanned aerial vehicle strikes controversial is that they are used to deliberately target specific individuals -- in other words, people who are known or suspected, frequently by name, of being actively hostile to the United States or allied governments. This distinguishes unmanned aerial vehicles from most weapons that have been used since the age of explosives began. The modern battlefield -- and the ancient as well -- has been marked by anonymity. The enemy was not a distinct individual but an army, and the killing of soldiers in an enemy army did not carry with it any sense of personal culpability. In general, no individual soldier was selected for special attention, and his death was not an act of punishment. He was killed because of his membership in an army and not because of any specific action he might have carried out.
I'm pretty sure that snipers, riflemen, pikemen, dog handlers, and special operators have all been tasked with missions involving the targeted destruction of individuals since long before unmanned aerial vehicles had weapons, or even existed in military form. if a rifleman shoots at "an army" instead of an individual, he is a poor rifleman. I'll also mention (again) that our complaint isnt with the targeting of specific individuals, it is with the reasoning used to identify an individual for assassination, and the lack of regard for the lives of innocents (the killing of whom is euphemistically referred to as "collateral damage".
Another facet of the controversy is that it is often not clear whether the individuals targeted by these weapons are members of an enemy force. U.S. military or intelligence services reach that conclusion about a target based on intelligence that convinces them of the individual's membership in a hostile group.
we also feel that if killing is to be done as some sort of service to us, the American people, we are entitled to access the intelligence and the analytical process that were used to arrive at this determination.
The counterargument is that the United States is engaged in a unique sort of war. Al Qaeda and the allied groups and sympathetic individuals that comprise the international jihadist movement are global, dispersed and sparse. They are not a hierarchical military organization. Where conventional forces have divisions and battalions, the global jihadist movement consists primarily of individuals who at times group together into distinct regional franchises, small groups and cells, and frequently even these groups are scattered. Their mission is to survive and to carry out acts of violence designed to demoralize the enemy and increase their political influence among the populations they wish to control. The primary unit is the individual, and the individuals -- particularly the commanders -- isolate themselves and make themselves as difficult to find as possible. Given their political intentions and resources, sparse forces dispersed without regard to national boundaries use their isolation as the equivalent of technological stealth to make them survivable and able to carefully mount military operations against the enemy at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.
The primary unit is the individual, and the individuals -- particularly the commanders -- isolate themselves and make themselves as difficult to find as possible. Given their political intentions and resources, sparse forces dispersed without regard to national boundaries use their isolation as the equivalent of technological stealth to make them survivable and able to carefully mount military operations against the enemy at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.
emphasis mine. clever George, he strawmanned the opposition to drones as "individual targeting as opposed to group targeting" then defined the enemy as a group composed of individuals that cant be targeted as a group. this is intended to distract from the real opposition: why and how did you conclude that these individuals needed to be killed? why do you keep this decision process secret? secondly, refer to the above bolded part of the quote. now observe the retired former intelligence officer who cannot decide is alqaeda is hierarchical or not. you know what, maybe you guys do need to take a breather and rethink this whole thing.
Friedman talks a little bit about the rules of war, its not really worth a response because he is adhering to precedent and explaining why jihadis arent entitled to legal protections. he also talks about ww2 which I do want to get into. but its dinnertime. perhaps later.
clever George, he strawmanned the opposition to drones as "individual targeting as opposed to group targeting" then defined the enemy as a group composed of individuals that cant be targeted as a group.
nice (this whole write up). he wants us to think that al qaeda is a non-heirarchical military organization that is still categorically the same as an old military - ultimately challenging the criterion of 'heirarchical' when we think of military organizations. This leads us to the concpet that we must target individuals who appear to be leaders or people of influence (he might just want to admit that it is heirarchical) because we cannot get them for specific actions. this convoluted reasoning leads him to say that individuals can be targeted without specific actions being attributed to them.
this whole article is upsetting in this way.
this is definitely aimed at persuading people of the legitimacy of indiscriminate targeting of our formers assets or their descendants even if they only talk about it. After all, them's fightin' words.
"Al qaeda," when used by someone in conversation, is a red flag that the person is firmly under the grip of the CIAs 'persuasion' campaign. Arab scholars can name the various groups that the West ignorantly labels "al qaeda" and they are none international in their ambtions and are all based on their own tribal hermenuetics. Targeting them under the consideration that one is targeting "al qaeda" is itself a vast generalization in which one cannot possibly attribute particular actions to them. How can they when they aren't even sure which tribe; which motivation; which intention led to the attack? And this gives them the psychological captial of, when they announce on CNN that "al qaeda" did the bombing (or whatever), blanketing several groups, all but one of which will not be involved, and assimilating people into thinking that the targets for it can only be as described above. But, as you pointed out, Freidman might just not care about his language. This has all of the effects we have described, in terms of people's perceptions of events, whether the author intended it or not.
Lucas Troy: "It's all just secrets and lies, man."
Sterling Archer: 'Uhh, yeah, it's espionage."
Stratfor very rarely publishes things that I assume are not propaganda. I can think of two instances - their coverage of the mexican cartels is appropriate and insightful and the secret satellite launch last summer (it was a new type of gravitational weapon hence its classifed mission but televised launch) - that I thought "damn, that was worth reading."
you don't pay for Stratfor do you? i'd have bought the book they advertised about the mexican cartels, but they don't sell indivudal publications and I wasn't paying 160 bucks for it and a subscription that isn't worth the effort to debunk it...