The ways to kill and die in war—or the technology used to assist in that killing and dying—are constantly changing. In previous eras, the hot new technologies of their day—crossbows, machine guns, submarines, aircraft, and nuclear weapons—prompted religious thinkers, scholars, and political actors to argue that everything or nothing about the nature of war had changed, that the weapons were or were not “better” in military or moral terms, and that their use had somehow to be either expanded or controlled.
Armed drones (remotely piloted aircraft) are perhaps the hot new military technology of the post-9/11 era. U.S. drone strikes outside of declared battlefields in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia have been declared either wonderfully precise and effective or dangerously destructive of civilian lives, counterproductive, illegal, and unethical. Accordingly, there are many popular and now more than a handful of scholarly analyses of the technology, ethics, military effectiveness, and history of drone warfare and its connection to related questions, such as political accountability for secret programs, the ethics and legality of targeted killing, “collateral damage,” and the “war on terror.” (There is less controversy about drone use in the declared war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Syria and little or no controversy about the use of drones for surveillance.)
This volume covers many of these issues. The editors, Peter Bergen and Daniel Rothenberg, say that their goal is to “encourage and enable an in-depth discussion of drone deployment and its broad implications for the changing nature of war and politics” (p. 5). They have largely met their goal.
Given the complexity of questions raised by drones at the tactical and strategic level, Drone Wars is appropriately diverse in the professional background of contributing authors—from professors of law, ethics, and religion to activists, journalists, retired military, and former policymakers. While most of the contributors are Americans, many of the essays are skeptical of the claims of U.S. officials and drone-use advocates that the strikes are surgically precise, effective, and legal. As Peter W. Singer argues in his chapter, new technologies sometimes promote “flawed” (p. 217), or at least confused, thinking about the issues raised by emergent technologies. The chapters later in the book further the analysis between technology and ways of thinking and acting.
This volume is an outstanding introduction to the issues raised by the U.S. use of drones and about related issues in contemporary war. Specifically, the two chapters by Bergen and Jennifer Rowland, and the chapters by Sarah Holewinski, Christopher Swift, Noreen Shah, Rosa Brooks and Megan Braun, are particularly insightful. That is not to say that the other chapters are not well written or informative; all of the chapters included in this well-edited volume deserve their place.
The strengths of this work are many, and it is likely to be very useful for teaching about the issue of drones. One strength, for example, was the attempt to include the perspective of practitioners and people who live in the region where drone strikes occur.
A second strength is the inclusion of diverging perspectives on different issues to do with drone strikes. Three stand out. The first is whether the use of drones for targeted killing outside of war zones poses questions of law, doctrine, or politics that are unique or essentially the same as other technologies and tactics. For instance, Rosa Brooks argues that drones are not unique (p. 233), while Braun suggests that they are (p. 253). Second, several authors argue that drones are more precise and yield fewer civilian casualties than other methods of war, whereas others note that the counts of civilian casualties are imprecise, so that it is not possible to say that they yield fewer civilian casualties than other uses of force (e.g. Holewinski). Third, it is unclear that the drone strikes are strategically productive—they kill very few militant leaders, and may or may not kill more militants than are being recruited because of the strikes.
A third strength of the volume is the overlapping discussion of the legal issues raised by drones within international humanitarian law and human rights law. Since the authors do not always agree on legal issues, the differences in interpretation are instructive.
There are also a few problems with Drone Wars. First, I found it to be a bit disorganized. The chapters were organized into parts “on the ground,” “law of war,” “policy,” and “future of war,” but the discussion was actually somewhat disjointed. For instance, the chapter “No One Feels Safe” by the pseudonymously named “Adam Khan” appears in the part on the future of war, but it might have come in the section that covers the day-to-day impact of the drones “on the ground.” The discussion of changing technology was sprinkled throughout the volume, and it would have been useful to put Singer's criticism next to the chapters by Konstantin Kakeas, Brad Allenby, and Rothenberg.
Second, and much more important, there were some issues that deserved more systematic coverage. Specifically, while several authors mentioned oversight, I longed for more attention to the issue of congressional and judicial oversight of the drone strategy. The most focused discussion of the Congressional role is in the chapter by Shaw (pp. 166–176). William Banks’s chapter, “Regulating Drones,” also addresses the issue of oversight in his larger focus on the legality of drone strikes. However, a separate chapter or two on oversight would have been useful. I would also have liked to see more attention on the question of civilian casualties. Several authors dealt with this question at some length and great clarity—notably Bergen and Rowland (pp. 17–23) and Holewinski (pp. 49–54)—but I wish there had been a chapter or two devoted specifically to the questions of civilian casualties and militant deaths.
Third, several authors asserted or mentioned the costs of drone strikes and drone technology, but the economics of drone strikes is a much more complicated issue than it appears. There is a widely held view that drone strikes are cheaper than conventional strikes, but it is not so simple. I would have liked to see an attempt made to tally up the costs of the procurement of armed drones and weapons, the cost of fuel for operations, the costs of U.S. and war-zone bases, and the personnel required to operate and maintain the drones. Some of these costs are “black budget” (secret), but many are not.
These are ultimately concerns, however, that belong on a wish list for the perfect volume for the purposes of teaching and research. The overall strength of this work more than compensates for what is not there. The tendency in some other accounts is to treat drone strikes for targeted killings apart from U.S. strategy in the war on terror. It is part of a fascination with tactics at the expense of a holistic understanding of the larger context of the war and its causes and consequences.
This volume helps put drone strikes into their larger context. Indeed, some chapters were incredibly insightful in that regard. For example, Swift's analysis of the impact of drone strikes on Yemen, in part based on interviews, illustrates the complexity of the drone strikes as a tool of targeted killing. He notes that the “fact that AQAP [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] ranks swelled to nearly 1,000 fighters between 2009 and 2012 strengthens claims about the connection between drone strikes and indigenous radicalization.” But he adds that “AQAP typically recruits through economic inducement rather than popular resentment” (p. 79). Swift's interviews thus suggest an opening for further research. Could economic incentives draw youths away from militancy? Do drones impede economic activity? What is the relationship between tactics and strategy?
In sum, we need to know more. Drone Wars is both an excellent introduction and a useful resource for those who are already steeped in the issues.
