Medicine, Conflict and Survival
ISSN: 1362-3699 (Print) 1743-9396 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmcs20
Drone warfare Peter Karamoskos To cite this article: Peter Karamoskos (2015) Drone warfare, Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 31:2, 125-127, DOI: 10.1080/13623699.2014.980053 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2014.980053
Published online: 15 Dec 2014.
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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fmcs20 Download by: [University of Pennsylvania]
Date: 06 November 2015, At: 00:01
Medicine, Conflict and Survival
125
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Drone warfare, by John Kaag and Sarah Kreps, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2014, 200 pp., £45.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7456-8098-9; £14.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-7456-8099-6; £9.99 (e-book), ISBN 978-0-7456-8535-9 The technology underpinning unarmed aerial vehicles, or drones, has been a prime focus of mainstream media. Media reflects and indeed, shapes public perceptions. This is inherently so with drones where ‘Kill TV’ and ‘Predator porn’ abound, in carefully scripted media releases in conventional media, and viral-bound video uploads in social media and cyberspace by governments and the military eager to portray this technology in a favourable light – and from a distance. There has been much less interest in the ethical, legal and political dimensions of this rapidly expanding form of warfare in the mainstream media. Although there is considerable academic coverage, it is often piecemeal and lacks coherence. ‘Drone Warfare’ by political scientist, Sarah Kreps and philosopher, John Kaag attempts to address these shortcomings. A compact book, it is nevertheless comprehensive in its scope, covering the underlying technology, the scale and geographic spread of drone warfare, and its tactical strengths and weaknesses. However, where this book excels is in its outstanding coverage of the ethical, legal and political domains of this form of warfare. Neither author claims to be a peacenik or a ‘realist’ disciple. Instead, they claim the ‘just war’ middle ground, gradually building an argument for the importance of international agreements and treaties to oversee the use of these weapons. They convincingly argue that their use often breaches international humanitarian law and the laws of armed conflict, facilitates war unbounded by time and place outside of declared war zones, and blurs the lines between assassinations and legitimate war targets (not helped by the CIA’s paramilitary functions). Even more concerning, drone warfare creates scenarios where the means of war dictate the ends (if we can kill a suspected militant with little cost to us, why not? Why bother about imminence and handwringing about the scale of the perceived threat?). Killing based on behavioural traits of targets (signature strikes) as opposed to kills based on the known identity of the individual creates an ethical and moral slippery slope of questionable strategic or even tactical merit. Shielding the public from the costs of warfare through obviating risks to military personnel has reduced domestic political checks in the use of drones, argue the authors. This leads to, and is aided and abetted by, weak and inadequate executive, judicial and legislative oversight. This undermines peace and liberal democracies. Leaders can respond to the electorate’s demands to minimize costs inherent in certain foreign policies by either adopting peaceful strategies or belligerent ones that are the least costly, such as with drones. Unfortunately, to a nation with the biggest hammer (and largest drone fleet as the USA has), it is tempting to consider all problems as different sorts of nail, with the belligerent option for dealing with them dominating.
Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 00:01 06 November 2015
126
Book reviews
Does the use of drones offer strategic advantages? There are certainly tactical advantages, making the killing process easier and at lower cost to the attacker. However, the immediate tactical advantage often comes at a strategic cost, rather than benefit. Decapitation strikes rarely lead to a group’s demise. Considerable evidence demonstrate that leaders are readily replaced, and that propaganda and recruitment is rarely if ever compromised and indeed, might be enhanced. Civilian casualties associated with strikes create even greater resentment and provide the rationale for further recruitment and delegitimization of the complicit government in the targeted area. More fundamental, however, is that a counter-terrorism strategy is doomed to failure in the long run without addressing the economic and political reasons underpinning why individuals resort to terrorism. The most enlightening section in the book is that covering the ethics of drone warfare. The authors warn against ‘technological rationality’, whereby expediency and tactical effectiveness conveys the illusion of moral legitimacy. On the contrary, such situations call for greater moral deliberation, not less. Technological advances do not enable an inherently immoral act to be morally acceptable, and we should not be seduced into conflating expediency with morality. It is the ‘decision to act’ which calls on our ethical faculties, before we consider the method. Making it easier to kill can never make it more just, and indeed, makes fighting unjust wars even easier, often with a complicit public which turns a blind eye to actions which pose little cost to them. The term ‘banality of evil’, which the writer Hannah Arendt used to describe how evil acts during the Holocaust were not necessarily facilitated by ‘evil’ people but by ordinary people gradually being habituated and failing to challenge such conduct. The lesson is invoked to warn against the scope of drone warfare, and the gradual erosion of government accountability for unethical behaviour. The gradual erosion of civil liberties goes hand in hand with the ‘banality of evil’ as emergency security laws enacted ostensibly for our protection from terrorist threats lead inexorably to a security state increasingly remote from its citizens. The proliferation of drones increases the scope for their use by both state and non-state actors. Israel has overtaken the US as the largest exporter of drone technology, and is worryingly not a member of either the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) or the Wassenaar Agreement – the two main international control regimes attempting to govern their use. China exploits its total disregard for any controls by making a point of exporting attack drones with no end-user agreements to prohibit their onward sale to third parties. The authors do recognize the advantages of drones in their ability to minimize bloodshed in a just war. They are pragmatists and not abolitionists. However, the heart of their thesis is that drawing attention to the dangers of assuming drone technology frees us from consideration of the costs of warfare. The human costs are very real for the targets, and the moral and indirect costs are substantial and undiminished for those who give legitimacy for their use.
Medicine, Conflict and Survival
127
These costs, especially moral costs, might not be readily acknowledged or evident until much later – but often too late to mitigate them.
Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 00:01 06 November 2015
Peter Karamoskos University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia [email protected] © 2014, Peter Karamoskos http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2014.980053
Global health diplomacy: concepts, issues, actors, instruments, fora and cases, edited by Ilona Kickbusch, Graham Lister, Michaela Told, and Nick Drager, New York, Springer Science+Business Media, 2013, 370 pp., £93.50, ISBN 978-1-4614-5400-7 (Print); 978-1-4614-5401-4 (Online) This edited book was published in the spring of 2013, at a time when global summits did not focus as much on health as they may have done in the preceding years. This was partly due to the absence of imminent health threats or crises, partly down to the much-expected fall-off of health issues on foreign policy agendas after a peak around 2009 following the coming into force of new International Health Regulations and the H1N1 outbreak. The intent of the book’s 22 chapters is to highlight all aspects of the concept of ‘global health diplomacy’ (GHD) and to delineate the challenges and opportunities offered by this new concept and buzzword. Offering a definition of GHD has proved to be a difficult task in the past; the editors consider global health diplomacy to be ‘a means whereby issues affecting health that cannot be resolved by one country or agency working alone are addressed together’ (v). Its format is very much handbook-oriented, providing guidelines and learning points at the beginning, and questions at the end of each chapter, making the book very accessible. In the introductory chapter, the authors divide the contributions into four main sections: (i) Global Health Diplomacy Agenda and Process (Chap. 2–6); (ii) Perspectives and Approaches (Chap. 7–11); (iii) Global Health Fora (Chap. 12–17); and (iv) Global and Local Links (Chap. 18–22). A commonality between all authors can be found in the assumptions that ‘international health cooperation has been integral to the development of diplomacy in the last century’ (11); that ‘health was one of the first trans-boundary challenges which employed a new diplomatic mechanism’ (12) and that ‘public health was one of the earliest fields of international cooperation’ (38). Global health is a field that confirmed the emergence of a multipolar world and showcased the increasing variety of actors involved in global governance beyond traditional sovereign states. Global health diplomacy accordingly involves the participation of all these actors in norm-production, reflecting the distinctive features of global health diplomacy as opposed to ‘traditional’ diplomacy.
ISSN: 1362-3699 (Print) 1743-9396 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmcs20
Drone warfare Peter Karamoskos To cite this article: Peter Karamoskos (2015) Drone warfare, Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 31:2, 125-127, DOI: 10.1080/13623699.2014.980053 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2014.980053
Published online: 15 Dec 2014.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 179
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fmcs20 Download by: [University of Pennsylvania]
Date: 06 November 2015, At: 00:01
Medicine, Conflict and Survival
125
Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 00:01 06 November 2015
Drone warfare, by John Kaag and Sarah Kreps, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2014, 200 pp., £45.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7456-8098-9; £14.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-7456-8099-6; £9.99 (e-book), ISBN 978-0-7456-8535-9 The technology underpinning unarmed aerial vehicles, or drones, has been a prime focus of mainstream media. Media reflects and indeed, shapes public perceptions. This is inherently so with drones where ‘Kill TV’ and ‘Predator porn’ abound, in carefully scripted media releases in conventional media, and viral-bound video uploads in social media and cyberspace by governments and the military eager to portray this technology in a favourable light – and from a distance. There has been much less interest in the ethical, legal and political dimensions of this rapidly expanding form of warfare in the mainstream media. Although there is considerable academic coverage, it is often piecemeal and lacks coherence. ‘Drone Warfare’ by political scientist, Sarah Kreps and philosopher, John Kaag attempts to address these shortcomings. A compact book, it is nevertheless comprehensive in its scope, covering the underlying technology, the scale and geographic spread of drone warfare, and its tactical strengths and weaknesses. However, where this book excels is in its outstanding coverage of the ethical, legal and political domains of this form of warfare. Neither author claims to be a peacenik or a ‘realist’ disciple. Instead, they claim the ‘just war’ middle ground, gradually building an argument for the importance of international agreements and treaties to oversee the use of these weapons. They convincingly argue that their use often breaches international humanitarian law and the laws of armed conflict, facilitates war unbounded by time and place outside of declared war zones, and blurs the lines between assassinations and legitimate war targets (not helped by the CIA’s paramilitary functions). Even more concerning, drone warfare creates scenarios where the means of war dictate the ends (if we can kill a suspected militant with little cost to us, why not? Why bother about imminence and handwringing about the scale of the perceived threat?). Killing based on behavioural traits of targets (signature strikes) as opposed to kills based on the known identity of the individual creates an ethical and moral slippery slope of questionable strategic or even tactical merit. Shielding the public from the costs of warfare through obviating risks to military personnel has reduced domestic political checks in the use of drones, argue the authors. This leads to, and is aided and abetted by, weak and inadequate executive, judicial and legislative oversight. This undermines peace and liberal democracies. Leaders can respond to the electorate’s demands to minimize costs inherent in certain foreign policies by either adopting peaceful strategies or belligerent ones that are the least costly, such as with drones. Unfortunately, to a nation with the biggest hammer (and largest drone fleet as the USA has), it is tempting to consider all problems as different sorts of nail, with the belligerent option for dealing with them dominating.
Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 00:01 06 November 2015
126
Book reviews
Does the use of drones offer strategic advantages? There are certainly tactical advantages, making the killing process easier and at lower cost to the attacker. However, the immediate tactical advantage often comes at a strategic cost, rather than benefit. Decapitation strikes rarely lead to a group’s demise. Considerable evidence demonstrate that leaders are readily replaced, and that propaganda and recruitment is rarely if ever compromised and indeed, might be enhanced. Civilian casualties associated with strikes create even greater resentment and provide the rationale for further recruitment and delegitimization of the complicit government in the targeted area. More fundamental, however, is that a counter-terrorism strategy is doomed to failure in the long run without addressing the economic and political reasons underpinning why individuals resort to terrorism. The most enlightening section in the book is that covering the ethics of drone warfare. The authors warn against ‘technological rationality’, whereby expediency and tactical effectiveness conveys the illusion of moral legitimacy. On the contrary, such situations call for greater moral deliberation, not less. Technological advances do not enable an inherently immoral act to be morally acceptable, and we should not be seduced into conflating expediency with morality. It is the ‘decision to act’ which calls on our ethical faculties, before we consider the method. Making it easier to kill can never make it more just, and indeed, makes fighting unjust wars even easier, often with a complicit public which turns a blind eye to actions which pose little cost to them. The term ‘banality of evil’, which the writer Hannah Arendt used to describe how evil acts during the Holocaust were not necessarily facilitated by ‘evil’ people but by ordinary people gradually being habituated and failing to challenge such conduct. The lesson is invoked to warn against the scope of drone warfare, and the gradual erosion of government accountability for unethical behaviour. The gradual erosion of civil liberties goes hand in hand with the ‘banality of evil’ as emergency security laws enacted ostensibly for our protection from terrorist threats lead inexorably to a security state increasingly remote from its citizens. The proliferation of drones increases the scope for their use by both state and non-state actors. Israel has overtaken the US as the largest exporter of drone technology, and is worryingly not a member of either the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) or the Wassenaar Agreement – the two main international control regimes attempting to govern their use. China exploits its total disregard for any controls by making a point of exporting attack drones with no end-user agreements to prohibit their onward sale to third parties. The authors do recognize the advantages of drones in their ability to minimize bloodshed in a just war. They are pragmatists and not abolitionists. However, the heart of their thesis is that drawing attention to the dangers of assuming drone technology frees us from consideration of the costs of warfare. The human costs are very real for the targets, and the moral and indirect costs are substantial and undiminished for those who give legitimacy for their use.
Medicine, Conflict and Survival
127
These costs, especially moral costs, might not be readily acknowledged or evident until much later – but often too late to mitigate them.
Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 00:01 06 November 2015
Peter Karamoskos University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia [email protected] © 2014, Peter Karamoskos http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2014.980053
Global health diplomacy: concepts, issues, actors, instruments, fora and cases, edited by Ilona Kickbusch, Graham Lister, Michaela Told, and Nick Drager, New York, Springer Science+Business Media, 2013, 370 pp., £93.50, ISBN 978-1-4614-5400-7 (Print); 978-1-4614-5401-4 (Online) This edited book was published in the spring of 2013, at a time when global summits did not focus as much on health as they may have done in the preceding years. This was partly due to the absence of imminent health threats or crises, partly down to the much-expected fall-off of health issues on foreign policy agendas after a peak around 2009 following the coming into force of new International Health Regulations and the H1N1 outbreak. The intent of the book’s 22 chapters is to highlight all aspects of the concept of ‘global health diplomacy’ (GHD) and to delineate the challenges and opportunities offered by this new concept and buzzword. Offering a definition of GHD has proved to be a difficult task in the past; the editors consider global health diplomacy to be ‘a means whereby issues affecting health that cannot be resolved by one country or agency working alone are addressed together’ (v). Its format is very much handbook-oriented, providing guidelines and learning points at the beginning, and questions at the end of each chapter, making the book very accessible. In the introductory chapter, the authors divide the contributions into four main sections: (i) Global Health Diplomacy Agenda and Process (Chap. 2–6); (ii) Perspectives and Approaches (Chap. 7–11); (iii) Global Health Fora (Chap. 12–17); and (iv) Global and Local Links (Chap. 18–22). A commonality between all authors can be found in the assumptions that ‘international health cooperation has been integral to the development of diplomacy in the last century’ (11); that ‘health was one of the first trans-boundary challenges which employed a new diplomatic mechanism’ (12) and that ‘public health was one of the earliest fields of international cooperation’ (38). Global health is a field that confirmed the emergence of a multipolar world and showcased the increasing variety of actors involved in global governance beyond traditional sovereign states. Global health diplomacy accordingly involves the participation of all these actors in norm-production, reflecting the distinctive features of global health diplomacy as opposed to ‘traditional’ diplomacy.
