Predator strike sparks debate on UAV employment
Wired’s Danger Room reports that a Predator strike that killed 25 people in Pakistan has served as the starting point for a debate on a possible moratorium of using UAVs as strike platforms.
This is as much a moral as a political/military point of argument, as the wildly variant comments on Wired’s article indicate. The fundamental question arising (yet again) is whether strikes on a population amongst which enemy guerrillas are hiding are likely to demoralize the locals and thus make them reluctant to support the enemy, or instead harden their resolve and make them even more supportive to the insurgency. This is a recurring phenomenon in counter-insurgency operations since before WW2 and is likely to repeat itself in the future.
UPDATE: The director of the CIA claims that UAVs are the sole effective means of interdicting AQ operations in Pakistan.
What do you think?
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5 Responses to “Predator strike sparks debate on UAV employment”
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Tough one D. On the one hand its nice to see some results with the hunt for Al Q but on the other civilian casualties are a horrible price to pay.
Just read PW Singer’s Wired for War and it really summed up many of issues for employing robots/UAV’s etc. Great read for anybody interested in this stuff.
The whole idea of using UAVs or targeted killings/kidnappings is based on “prompt justice”: step out of line and you’re dead/captured, behave well and you’re OK. Once the justice part goes down the drain, the only thing that remains is terror, and unless we’re talking about Masada or Saipan the “pain threshold” for a nation is 5 to 20 percent of the population IIRC.
Looks like UAVs are not part of the solution, need more Pashtu collaborators (police) on the ground.
Well the story goes most take their firing queues from actionable intelligence and assuming many of the aircraft appear to be based in Pakistan, the locals must have some input into the decision making process. Have no doubt that other agenda’s do come in to play.
HG had a great post on some of this
http://hgworld.blogspot.com/2009/05/riskless-war-losing-high-ground.html
Was not talking about undercover agents, but local paramilitary. (Think Kadyrov’s Chechen troops).