The Ethics of Drone Warfare

The Ethics of Drone warfare

War! A lot of people think war is mainly about killing people and marching into territories, without thinking twice about the consequences of the choice made. On the contrary, during a battle, whether an easy or impossible situation, it’s all about making the least bad decisions. And that is when drones come in hand. Combat drones and to be more specific are armed and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), which has no pilot on board and is controlled from a remote terminal. This mean of fighting, is becoming very reliable and recommended in the past late years, but had also raised a lot of questions. Although some might disagree, I believe that drone warfare should be integrated in military strikes.

Drone attacks have military advantages more than conventional ones do. According to Groue (2012), these unmanned systems can be deployed in mid-air for a long period of time over unfriendly areas, in stealth mode until the location of the target is definite. Bradley J. Strawser, a former Air Force officer and an assistant professor of philosophy at the Naval Postgraduate School, claimed that “All the evidence we have so far suggests that drones do better at both identifying the terrorist and avoiding collateral damage than anything else we have.”(as cited in Shane, 2012, para.4).  Mainly in combat or any precise strike there are always innocent lives taken or put at risk, while drone attacks are really effectual in lowering that risk. For example, let’s say if a kid wanders into range, it wouldn’t be a problem because a missile can be diverted before seconds of striking the designated target. Drones can stalk a specific target for a period of time (for about 18 hours) before engaging it; they can identify terrorists more accurately than air or ground troops can. As for collateral damage, Avery Plaw, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, did a study in which he recorded drone strikes over the past two decades. He found that the highest percentage of civilian deaths was 20 percent but, even this high-end count was considerably low with respect to conventional conflicts which ranged between 33 and 80 percent (as cited in Shane, 2012, para. 9-11). As you can see, drones are basically more efficient and safer than military conventional ones.

In addition to the combat eminences, drones are also more economical. In nine years the pentagon has spent about five billion dollars manufacturing these planes (“Warfare and The Man” 2011). If you take a look at the hundreds of billions of dollars as a military budget spent on training a military pilots or a group of soldiers, not to mention the case of losing them, it’s a quite good bargain. Moreover, “It takes a team of about 180 military personnel to run and service a ‘Predator’” which means that there are no jobs lost but actually more available and at even a lower risk on their lives (“Warfare and The Man” 2011). On the word of McKinnon (2013), this means drones are less costly in terms of dollars and lives, so less money spent on war (para. 4). Hence, that money saved can be used for human needs, such as, in education, health care, and even foreign aid. Similarly, in these remote based strikes, there is no soldier returning with “posttraumatic stress, none back with limbs missing” (McKinnon, 2013, para. 5). This points out that there is less cost spent on healing the wounded and organizing psychotherapy sessions, just another plus added to the list. To sum up, drone warfare is more economic in terms of manufacturing them and putting soldiers’ lives out of harm’s way than conventional army combat.

However, the opponents of drone warfare believe that this “art” of combat encourages unnecessary killings. Shane (2012) argues that during the presidency of Obama, hundreds of terrorist suspects were killed and only one taken into custody, which generates a question whether drones have become an alternative for capturing terrorists rather than an accurate aerial strike (para. 16). In addition to that, some believe that these suspects have not been terrorists and were not allowed to have a fair trial to defend themselves. Nevertheless, and according to the author of “Drones and the Man”(2011), a study carried out at the New America Foundation revealed that in seven years 80% of the drone victims have been militants and also in line with the Pakistanis’ intelligence, 95% of them were confirmed terrorists (para.4). Subsequently, due to its ability to monitor a target for long hours, most of these strikes were carried out at recognized terrorists. Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born jihad terrorist who declared himself as an enemy of state and called for a violent jihad against the US, “ceded his rights to the protection of our legal system”(McKinnon, 2013, para.7). Accordingly, most of these airstrikes were carried out on confirmed terrorists who have already given up their constitutional rights which leaves no room but to eliminate the threat when possible.