Drones: The ethics of remote killing

The U.S. military is flying into dangerous ethical territory, said W.J. Hennigan in the Los Angeles Times. In what is perhaps an inevitable escalation in drone warfare, the Navy is testing an advanced drone aircraft that flies not only “without a pilot in the cockpit, but without a pilot at all.” Unlike the unmanned aircraft used in combat today—which are operated remotely, often by crews in the U.S.—the X-47B will be guided only by onboard computers. The robotic drone remains experimental, but “the prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control” raises uncomfortable questions. Who is morally responsible, for example, if an autonomous robot blasts a group of civilians with a Hellfire missile? The field commander in whose area the drone was operating? The manufacturer? The programmer who wrote the drone’s software?

Don’t expect any answers from President Obama, said Joshua Foust in TheAtlantic.com. The administration has just announced that the military will dramatically ramp up its use of drones as part of the president’s strategy of moving to smaller and cheaper “covert actions in place of bigger, overt wars.” But this cut-price defense policy isn’t without costs. In Pakistan, drone strikes have killed as many as 2,500 people, fueling anti-American hatred and further destabilizing an already volatile country. Drone warfare is also causing damage here at home, by eroding our democracy, said Peter Singer in The New York Times. The Constitution wisely requires Congress to declare war, so that it’s not one man’s decision. But drones have given the president unilateral authority to take military action in places like Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia—while Congress applauds, or says nothing. And since drones enable the president to kill people abroad without sending “someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way,” they’ve made war politically painless—and thus, too easy.

Drones may be the latest in military technology, said David Bell in The New Republic, but they’re not fundamentally different from any weapon that kills the enemy from a distance. Indeed, “using technology to strike safely at an opponent is as old as war itself.” With the invention of gunpowder, muskets replaced lances and pikes. In World War I, the Germans developed cannons that could lob 200-pound shells over 80 miles. Bombs and missiles came next. The real issue here is political, not technological. “It’s not the drones you should fear, but the politicians who order them into battle.”

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