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NationofChange / Op-Ed
Published: Friday 28 September 2012
“Put bluntly, are they helping us to win wars, or are they essentially prolonging wars that are ultimately unwinnable?”
Are Drones Keeping Us in a Losing Cause Longer?
There's little question that unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are helping to save the lives of U.S. and NATO troops in places like Afghanistan while aiding in the killing of terrorist suspects in regions largely inaccessible to ground troops.
But the bigger question is whether drones are in any way decisive to the war effort. Put bluntly, are they helping us to win wars, or are they essentially prolonging wars that are ultimately unwinnable?
So far, it appears that drones aren't decisive. They're merely instrumental. They're instrumental in keeping us in a losing cause. They keep our military's casualty rate at a "sustainable" level, low enough so as not to rankle the folks back home, while they give us an illusion of progress in the sense of a body count of suspected militants killed.
But is sustainability a good thing if you're sinking deeper and deeper into a quagmire? Is killing "militants" a good thing if in the process you alienate and terrorize the people, turning them against you and sowing the dragon's teeth of further militant action and more war?
Think here of the Vietnam War. Had we had drones in the skies over the Ho Chi Minh trail, surely we'd have seen with greater clarity the Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) coming. Surely we'd have killed more VC while losing fewer U.S. troops, at least in the short term. But would this technological advantage have translated into victory in Vietnam? Or would we have sunk even deeper into the Vietnam quagmire, bugging out not in 1975 but in 1985?
In our military's general embrace and praise of drones, we need to be careful not to lose sight of the larger realities of war. New weapons that keep us in a losing cause longer are nothing to praise. Weapons that generate resentment and blowback among peoples we say we're trying to win to our side are nothing to embrace.
In our eagerness to lower the immediate cost of war to ourselves, we may very well be elevating the long term costs of war both to ourselves and to others. But our military has great difficulty seeing this precisely because our focus is so tactical, so focused in the weeds. Much like our numerous drones, we focus on small slices of the battlefield, losing sight of the bigger picture, the larger battlespace, the reality that winning a war requires something more than a discrete set of killing operations.
Drones, in other words, are reinforcing the U.S. military's tendency to favor tactics and short-term expediency at the expense of strategy and long-term effectiveness. How long will it be before drones become merely a crutch that keeps us hobbling along in a losing cause? Or are we already there?
8 comments on "Are Drones Keeping Us in a Losing Cause Longer?"
September 29, 2012 8:28am
Drones allow cowards to sit in front of a computer screen and play soldier and kill real people while sipping their cup of coffee and doing the daily crossword. Nice!
September 29, 2012 6:25am
Drones are keeping us in this war longer, in fact forever. They are not keeping us safer, because they create far more new insurgents than they eliminate. They are not effective because for every 100 people killed, only 2 are 'high level targets.' The strikes are not 'surgically precise.' They are not 'targeted killings of insurgents,' because we have no idea who we are killing. These are hideous war crimes and it is terrorism perpetrated by the United States upon mostly (98%) innocent children and women.
This article is part of the spin propaganda that the MSM is using to mislead the people of the United States.
These statements are based on many studies over the past several months mostly done by the Bureau of Investigative Journalists. The most recent study just released this week is from Stanford/NYU.
Stop the madness and Get Us Out. This only profits the war corporations that control both major parties.
September 29, 2012 6:27am
See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/25/study-obama-drone-de...
September 28, 2012 9:20pm
The article, and the comments following are all interesting.
I would just say though that i don't think it's right the blame the military as i think the author does in the next-to-last paragraph. The military is, after all, definitely under civilian control.
The party to be blamed for our endless and expensive wars is the "main stream media" (MSM). It is entirely under their control; the NYT is in a very real sense just as responsible for Iraq as Bush. And having means like drones which minimize our casualities removes perhaps the final check against the MSM. Afghanistan will remain a forgotten war, and the commentators on the MSM will not connect our bankruptcy with the wars they sponsor.
September 28, 2012 3:33pm
The issue isn't really drones, but rather whether ‘the cause’ indeed is inherently a losing one. In this regard Mr Nau makes a necessary sort of distinction between two kinds of wars; I will state it a bit differently. In some overseas wars - e.g. WW2 - the USA adopts a clear and sustainable political objective (‘the cause’) and moreover goes all out to achieve it. In other wars - Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc. - the objective is left unclear or is allowed to keep shifting (‘mission creep’), or will not be sustained (after the USA leaves), or anyhow the USA (maybe for good reasons) lacks the will to go all out to achieve it. This second kind of war is inherently a losing cause. No matter what your technology, drones or other, you cannot win a war where either you haven’t figured out what victory is supposed to mean, or victory anyhow is unsustainable, or you don’t allow yourself to fight hard enough.
Drones or no drones, once the USA got Osama out of Afghanistan the USA mission there ‘crept’ to a new goal which inherently is a ‘losing cause’: it is unsustainable, or anyhow is far too costly to impose given the meager - if any - net benefit. Contrary to presumptions of European and American ideologues and policy wonks, Afghanistan arguably has never really needed ‘nation building’. Afghanistan for centuries has done quite OK without being strongly centralized. Afghan regional and tribal leaders have been dissed as ‘warlords’, but that epithet does not change the fact that the nation has existed for centuries quite tolerably as a sort of federation of regions and tribes.
September 28, 2012 3:11pm
Well, then, stop calling it a war and call it something thing else. Have drones killed terrorist? Yes, lots, and much more than we could have being on the ground simply because drones can be on location much longer and cover more area than manned craft and ground troops.
Robotics is here to stay, for better or worse, and that goes for drones too. I'll be convinced we should stop using drones once I see stats and facts that doing the same job drone do, using troops and manned craft, causes less collateral damage.
Moreover, wars that are not winnable should not be fought, regardless of the technology used to fight them.
September 28, 2012 1:56pm
World War 2 is so long ago few remember what war is, vs. police action. Police action is when you engage the enemy only when they are engaged in hostel action and is generally unwinnable; war is when you totally engage the enemy wherever they go with all available resources, destroy the enemy's ability to resupply and leave the enemy no refuge.
Afghanistan became a police action from the start when (perhaps for the first time in history) the enemy's sponsor was declared an ally and recipient of military and financial aide.
In the execution of this police action, drones are the least expensive form of interdiction, with a remarkably low collateral damage history. Any loss of innocent life is regrettable, but in criticizing it, please compare it to what any other military action creates.
I have difficulty imagining that the people working and living in close proximity and in support of the drone targets were ever close to becoming American supporters.
Nation building is is messy, expensive and rarely appreciated, but that is what we are doing in Afghanistan. Perhaps if we used correct terms the debate could be more honest.
September 28, 2012 9:39am
During the Vietnam War, enough bombs were dropped on North Vietnam to move 20% of the surface area of the entire country. An unknown, but enormous area was sprayed with defoliants (leaving residue which persists in the environment to this day) or other chemicals. If massive carpet-bombing and quasi-chemical warfare did not put an end to the war, why would drone strikes do so? I suspect that, as is happening now, rather than declaring an end to hostilities, the United States would have merely looked that much harder for new targets.