American Counter-Terrorism: Part 1 - Drone Strikes

We're in the age of splits: American politics has become so vitriolic that both sides not only disagree but seem to vehemently hate each other; police shootings, and by that I mean both parties being shot, has furthered a racial divide (well, in the U.S. specifically); the UK leaving the EU hoping to stimulate their GDP through DIY self-reliance, causing the PM, AKA David Cameron, to step down ASAP; but most importantly is the age old battle between east and west, sparking the worst tragedies. Terrorist attacks are becoming disturbingly common, and the world can only change the lighting on buildings in solidarity so quickly.

The response from the United States, the self-proclaimed police of the world, is to bomb the enemies with precise missile strikes from unmanned aircraft because, yes, we live in the future. The bombings happen frequently, most often with little to no media reporting, and a public that knows little beyond the fact that they are indeed blowing things up and that they're probably killing the right people.

"No! More drones!"

or...

These people drone on and on.

Drones have come out of a time where warfare isn't what it used to be. No longer can a country defeat another simply by having more men and greater firepower. If that were case, considering the size of the U.S.'s arsenal, we would possibly be having Trump running for World Emperor rather than president. Instead, they're fighting not against a unified country but smaller forces working within it, making the victory much more complicated. If Vietnam taught America anything it's that you can't win off strength alone. The result is an American turn to technology to do their bidding.

The purpose behind drone strikes is fairly simple. America has grown weary of war, and no one wants more "boots on the ground". They want as little American blood spilt as possible, and drone strikes seem to be that solution. Attacks can occur without any risk to friendly forces, they can be swift and massively destructive, and the prospect of being just about anywhere and having no warning before being suddenly deleted from the planet is surely a worrying one for any who would poke the American bear. To ensure that they hit exclusively the right targets Obama released policy guidelines stating they'll only hit "continuing, imminent threat[s] to the American people" and that the strikes will only happen with "near certainty" that no civilian casualties will occur. Honestly, at the core this sounds darn near perfect. Minimal risk, low civilian casualties, and surgical strikes that knock out exactly who you're gunning for. The problem is that's not really how it goes down.

In 2015 information was leaked to the website The Intercept about the drone program in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. It showed the manner in which drone strikes were carried out, the casualty counts, how the targets are vetted, and how often drone strikes occur. The results were not what one would call inspiring.

Wait, there are drones with guns on them too?!
Is this one real? Wikipedia wouldn't lie to me,
would it?

Civilian casualties can be as high as 90%. Operation Haymaker, a series of drone strikes in Afghanistan, killed over two hundred between January 2012 to February 2013, but only 35 of those were intended. One study states that unmanned aircraft are ten times more likely to kill civilians than traditional methods. Now, a simple google search will look as if those are incorrect statistics, but there's a reason behind it. If it's a male of the right age among the dead they're labeled "enemies killed in action" regardless of a lack of evidence against them, skewing the statistics. Essentially they don't know all that much about the people around their target but they get a post-mortem decree of guilt by association. This works out beautifully for the government: it allows them to put out at least relatively pleasant sounding statistics; there's a good chance that if the men killed are hanging out with terrorists they are terrorists themselves; and they can justify their drone strikes if they use words like "enemy combatant" even if they're not sure if there's truth behind it. However, this gets a lot of blowback from human rights groups and international bodies because most of those killed in drone strikes have not received a proper judgement. The information on them is limited (in part due to the strangling of information from drone strikes, as I'll explain later). The judicial process has basically come down to "you're near someone that's bad, so you're bad". But, to be fair, it's war. I'll give my thoughts on it in the third blog of this series.

So let's say it hits the target - called a "jackpot" if it's successful - what happens then? Unfortunately, strictly killing terrorists causes problems in and of itself. Drone strikes leave no chance for captures, which means that interrogations are all but impossible. Information on the ground is a critical component, and with a lack of prisoners coming in knowledge is in short supply. Dead terrorists can't speak, can't make deals, can't really do much of anything except serve as a martyr.

Ah, drone classic. Like most young men I know how these
look because of Call of Duty.

At this point you must be wondering how the targeting can be so unreliable, and if you're like me, you're surprised at just how often it hits civilians instead of who is being intended (or both). The reason being is it all comes down to fairly unreliable data. As it turns out, they're not really doing what you would expect them to do - spot a terrorist, say "bomb him with the aerial death robot" and then move on to the next. Instead, it's more like "this is probably that guy's cellphone, and we haven't seen him use it in a while but it's his cellphone so he's probably there with it, so bomb that." Really, they're not bombing people - they're bombing phones, specifically their SIM cards. The information comes through "metadata", which is essentially cell phone records and who they're linking them to. This of course lends itself to a whole world of problems, from people lending out their phones, to leaving them somewhere, to terrorists getting smarter and having sometimes as many as sixteen separate SIM cards to throw the Americans off the trail. (We'll delve more deeply into how they find out who is a terrorist, but that'll have to wait until the next blog.)

So what we've established here is drones are far from surefire. Well, in the sense that it might not always work as intended, but they are surefire in the sense that they'll certainly annihilate what you lock them on to. They have high civilian casualties, prevent the use of interrogation techniques, and it's reasonable to say that they're fueling the fires of hatred. However, it helps keep the numbers of soldiers on the ground and in danger to a minimum and specific known terrorists can be taken out quickly and effectively.

Right or wrong, their use is not only increasing, but skyrocketing. Obama has made drone strikes a commonplace part of his foreign policy in spite of railing against it as a senator, claiming there needs to be judicial process and that America can't be an executioner. He took what Bush laid out and then stepped it up. Unfortunately, the drone strike process is simply not as clear-cut as we would like it to be.