In trying to look "objectively" at whether drones make it too easy or likely to wage war, and ending up firmly nowhere on the issue -- I think Carpenter has missed the obvious.

When you are safe in a hangar in the United States, controlling a drone with a joystick instead of worrying about the Taliban shooting you down, YES!, it does reduce the risk and therefore increase the likelihood that the solution will be used. Decisions to use lethal force are always influenced by risk assessment, and drones reduce, if not eliminate, risk. Using lethal force increasingly becomes an option.

And the figures on the Obama administration's use of drones proves it.

Screw the nuance. Use your frigging noggin!

The author finally arrives at his conclusion in the penultimate paragraph and it is the 90% solution. What isn't stated is why the drones are an acceptable use in one scenario and yet not practiced for similar problem sets across the globe. Somewhere deep in the psyche of the people preparing the intelligence on which the lethal strikes are authorized is a lack of empathy for the populace that will bear the burden of collateral damage. While it may be blithely stated that the world is a better place without a particular bad actor, it is ignored that a miniscule amount of security for Americans overrides a ton of grief for some poor family in the hinterlands of Pakistan.
Freedom is not free, but it is not bought with money either. It is won by dedicated souls who will give up hearth and home and accept risk to their lives to demonstrate why America is admired, not feared.

I largely agree with the substance of the article, except for the claim that the status of the drone's operators is irrelevant. U.S. drones are operated by civilians, not military personnel, and consequently bear different liabilities than those in the military, particularly international law and susceptibility to international indictment. This is surely a relevant factor in the contentious nature of drones.

I appreciate the general tone of this article; until I read it, I'd been firmly in the 'anti-drone' camp. You've caused me to re-think, or at least to bring more attention to bear on the specifics of drone use, military robotics, the history of military use of technologies, etc.

I do appreciate the weight you put on the human side of the issue. Civilian deaths are common in modern warfare; one might say that military strategies and technologies since WWII have been designed purposely to cause as many civilian deaths as possible. It's been a long time since war was defined as two armies meeting on a battlefield.

If surveillance drones are being utilized to provide accurate information to the troops on the ground in an attempt to prevent unnecessary civilian deaths, they could be a very good thing.

You've succeeded in causing me to think more deeply about this topic; that can only be a good thing.

During the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland the Provisional IRA made a practice of targetting off duty and unarmed members of the security forces. Under most interpretations this would be a breach of the laws of armed conflict and was treated as a criminal offence by the authorities. At the start of operation "Cast Lead" the IDF targetted a passing out parade of unarmed police cadets and claimed that it was a legitimate military target. Discuss!

Talk about your inherently indiscriminate weapon. The next computer program without a bug will be the first one.

Drones have certainly caught the public's imagination, as they are mistaken for robots. But robotic weapons have been in use for quite some time. Think of the V2 ballistic missile: it was actually a crude robot with self correcting guidance with regard to the targeting data it was given. And it was used against civilians, who determine the economic/industrial capabilities of a nation, not to mention the political will to continue warfare. Today, cruise missiles have the capability to automatically loiter over a target, such as a runway, until conditions are right to strike. If the runaway has already been hit, the missile will approach its secondary targets without input from a pilot or ground tech. [There are certainly more examples. Cyberwarfare?]

In further discussion of civilian casualties, is COIN doctrine not sustained aggression against a civilian population to bring it into compliance with the force's own objectives. Congruently, insurgents use terror against civilians to discourage cooperation with the enemy. Modern warfare is basically two sides beating the hell out of the indigenous population. Strategically, civilians are the target of war efforts, soldiers and terrorists are tactical and expendable. Conventions and protocols suggesting otherwise are to shield the actors from the true, indiscriminate savagery of actual warfare,to prevent break-down of discipline, prevent the ranks from cannibalizing each other. After all, more than a century ago, Kurtz replied, "Exterminate all the brutes," revealing the true nature of war.

I haven't seen the term Nintendo Effect anywhere before this article(I even searched online for a reference). Before coining this term, I think it may be best to use Xbox effect or joystick effect. Calling it the Nintendo effect is like giving the name to someone who is influenced by movies to commit violence the Pixar effect

Make the argument that drones don't put our guys in "enough risk" to be a creditable weapon of war to a Marine whose MRAP just blew up from an IED and raises his creditable weapon to see no enemy for miles...and that was the third time it happened in the last week.

It's war and with war comes adaptations. The Taliban and Al Queda can't take on a large force, saw a weakness in our methods of movement, made a weapon to counter our advantages using our weakness, and boom. We did the same, seeing that Taliban and Al Queda agents ran over the border, we flew surveillance, realized these guys were alot more comfortable in their boots over the border, changed our munitions from 500 pounds to 250 pounds for a more precise hit, strapped them on to the those surveillance drones run by an agency that doesn't actual recognize their existance, and boom.

Look, civilians die everyday from IED strike and they die probably in good percentage of drone strikes but it's a warzone and people die in war. Whether that war is worth those deaths is another argument that does not involve drones, we can only hope.

I think a lot of these misconceptions are brought on by the media. I mean a lot of people will believe what they are reading and I think that these 4 misconceptions are basically the conceptions that the media gives them. Which is a worldwide brands of being a super slick killing machine that is controlled by a small remote Control.

There's even a few video games I know of them, a couple very popular, where you can use drones to do exactly that - silently and easily kill.

The conception that since drones are so easy to use it makes war more likely is ridiculous. Whether it's a power stricken country, a poor country, a wealthy affiliate, a poor affiliate, or whatever the case - if you're going to war you're going to war. Yea a drone may make it easier to win but it's not going to cause war - that's crazy.

I definitely think it's the presses fault for these 4 misconceptions - along with many other misconceptions that likely go along with drones. People can only know what they are told - and like I said many people believe what they're told unfortunately.

As a member of ICRAC and coauthor of its Berlin Statement http://www.icrac.co.uk/Expert%20Workshop%20Statement.pdf I have particularly emphasized the autonomous lethal robot question which you zero in on in your point #1.

We need to draw a bright red line now and say that we will not allow a future in which machines are set loose to decide when and where and against what or against whom to apply lethal violent force. We must assert, without need of scholarly justification, that it is a human right not to have one's life or death decided by a machine, no matter how "intelligent."

However, this is not to say that the use today of remote-controlled killing machines should not be a matter of concern or should not be subject to national and international legal restrictions. In particular, the profligate use of drones to carry out "targeted killings" -- a euphemism for a once-banned policy of official assassination -- risks creating an increasingly lawless world in which no one is safe from what could become quite insidious lethal technology. As Malcom X put it, "the chickens come home to roost."

You zero in on this in your point #4, but you argue that the fact that so many of these attacks are being carried out using drones is "irrelevant." It seems to me that in fact the use of drones is now acting to shield these actions from scrutiny as extrajudicial assassinations and violations of the national sovereignty of states we are not at war with. The fact that a drone is used becomes the overarching qualitative categorizer of the action, and we have rapidly been conditioned to see the drone weapon as an arrow in the quiver of the President which he is entitled to use when and where he sees fit.

To ask whether drone strikes kill more or fewer innocent people than strikes by manned bombers misses a deeper question: Exactly how did bombing become OK, and do we want to OK a new kind of wanton killing?

Teleoperated weapons also represent a new technological frontier of the arms race, and such weapons should be subject to both qualitative and quantitative arms control limitations in order to prevent this from leading to destabilizing competitions and dangerous preemptive postures.

Given the seriousness of this issue, to quibble with the use of terms like "killer robot" in reference to teleoperated weapons, or to argue that the important issue of autonomous lethal decisionmaking should be isolated from concerns about the use and proliferation of drones today, seems overly pedantic. We need to build broad public engagement with this issue, and I daresay that the public views teleoperated robots as robots and drones as robot weapons. Isn't that, after all, what your analysis of op-eds reveals?

Furthermore, to insist that teleoperated weapons have nothing to do with autonomous weapons would be to ignore the way the line is progressively blurred as technology advances and autonomous lethal decisionmaking moves stealthily forward.

UAVs today are strongly enabled by the onboard computers that allow them to be controlled from halfway around the world despite communications delays, in some cases by point-and-click with a mouse. The planes basically fly and land themselves. Increasingly, automated systems will cue operators and assist in identifying targets. The military is seeking to have multiple drones operated by a single "warfighter," and talks about moving from "human in the loop" to "human on the loop."

While I believe it is possible to draw a clear line by insisting on the responsibility of an individual human soldier for every individual lethal action, it will be impossible to do this without addressing the "slippery slope" and "grey area" arguments which are increasingly cited as proof that fully automated lethal decisionmaking is inevitable.

Wait, let me ask the common people in Waziristan...

Drones (and platforms alike) in my opinion are actually pretty useful since they allow military personnel to get close to targets without the risk of being attacked (and injured) and it also allows them to scale things a lot better hence improving precision.

War stats usually mean little and don’t paint an accurate picture of what’s happened on the ground so when people say ‘drones kill civilians’ I think they are just making a dumb general statement; drone attacks def kill less civilians that carpet air strikes or any other conventional warfare method.

That being said there’s a lot of room for improvement...

Tragedy hasn't happened yet. And nothing about drones makes it inevitable. The menace at the heart of the unmanned weapons revolution isn't robots. It's us.

Unfortunately, this is untrue. I have a cousin who is a drone controller, early on he would fly only one drone at a time and would study targets for a while before his CO went up the chain of command and it could sometimes take hours before the order to fire was given karmaloop codeThey also used to pass up on many targets because the vehicle had driven into a civilian area and they didn't want collateral damage.

Recently a new system was introduced where he switches back and forth between three drones that he flies simultaneously. The decision to shoot no longer requires hours of studying the target and high level approval, his direct CO gives the order to shoot after looking at the screen with the entire process only taking a few minutes.

Since Bush Administration officials were not legally pursued for violating their oath of office, Constitutional violation is now established as a legal precedent. Since no power on Earth can enforce the Geneva Conventions against the corporate gangsters running the world, both documents are now dead letters.

What we need is a new Geneva Convention and a new Constitution, rewritten to confirm what is legal and what is not. The first, international; the second internal to the U.S.

Ideally, the two would be identical; much more humane than the U.S. Constitution as currently drafted and much less tolerant of war than the Geneva Convention.

Otherwise, we got Bush-Era chaos where anything goes if you are stupid and sociopathic enough to dare do it. That will last forever, or until the Earth is a sterile cinderblock, whichever comes first.

Take a situation in which there is a high level terrorist (HLT) who at the end of the day returns to his home with his wives & children. A drone strike distroys the house and kills him and several of the wives & children. Civilian deaths, yes, but I put the blame on the HLT "hidding" among civilians.

Now if you have a home across the street and it is blown up by mistake, that indeed involves civilian deaths. But that is totally the fault of the drone operators/chain of command.

Very nice and fair article with a horrifying lede. Having been a regular reader of one of the authors in other places, I expected a very different article after that lede. I was pleasantly surprised.

There have been autonomous weapons at sea for quite some time now, and I'd be surprised if that were a not a few very carefully deployed on land. These are the CIWS. You basically turn them on and release them and stand back.

Having a hard time wrapping my head around all the criticism of remotely piloted vehicles. If you have a relatively low-costing technology, that has zero risk to its operators, and is far more accurate than those weapons used before it, thus actually reducing the risk of collateral damage and casualties, why would you not rely heavily on it? Seems to me what we have here are people with strong feelings against the war using RPAs as another means of arguing against the war. If we didn't have RPAs I bet these same people would be arguing against the use of helicopters or A-10s or whatever other asset would be used to take out high value targets in a populated area.

You have a professor who understands, at least, debating tricks. Possibly at best, also. I regret her influence over student Lina Shaikhouni.

Their points:

Misconception No. 1: Drones Are "Killer Robots".

Not a misconception at all, the Massachusetts duo point out. That's exactly what they are. They also do other things, but that doesn't make the main point a misconception, a C&L notion..
Misconception No. 2: Drones Make War Easy and Game-Like, and Therefore Likelier.
This C&L formulation overlooks the idea that using drones over foreign populations in the absence of American troops makes deaths of American troops negligible, and perhaps entirely absent. This makes war easier to defend to the public, because it keeps down the flow of honored dead coming home under American flags. That's proving an easy option for those who want to keep the war going. It doesn't, we see, avoid higher US death tolls in Afghanistan, so it's not quite easy enough.

Misconception No. 3: Drone Strikes Kill Too Many Civilians.

At this point, C&L abandon all decency. Nobody is counting how many civilians killed by drone strikes, they point out, ergo nobody knows how many there are -- and this makes the whole issue of killing too many civilians irrelevant. A squalid argument.
We know from recent history that no matter how many civilians the US military kill in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they always understate it by putting forward numbers smaller than reality.
"It's hard to single out drone [deaths]," C&L write, "when we know so little about whether they kill more or fewer civilians than manned aerial bombing or ground troops would in the same engagements." Since C&L don't know how to do this, no reason to think it can be done.
Too many civilian deaths is too many, and the alternatives in the paragraph above are dishonestly presented.
Do the math: let's say, because it's true, that a drone bomb kills a person thought to be a Taliban militant, and let's be charitable and accept that as correct. Let's say also that nine civilians are killed. How can we ever establish whether this 9:1 ratio would have changed in a ground engagement or a piloted bombing? It's a dishonest proposition.
But why is it so hard to see whom the drone strikes kill? Are the drones not equipped with cameras to take after-strike photos, and is there no post-mission analysis of such images? Hard to believe in a drone able to pinpoint one bad guy for a bomb, but not the effect of the bomb, once dropped. I'm sure Human Rights Watch and sundry other organizations would examine such photographic evidences, if offered them.

Misconception No. 4: Drones Violate the International Law of Armed Conflict.

C&L make the point that no, they don't -- at least as they interpret those laws. Their interpretation includes saying bombs are weapons, drones aren't. This is as sensible as saying rifles aren't weapons, too: the weapons are the bullets.
In further logic-chopping, C&L point out that the Hague and Geneva conventions allow for a significant amount of injury and harm both to combatants and civilians. They ask only that harm to combatants be as humane as possible and that harm to noncombatants be minimized.

Here's the C&L attempt at a Catch 22. They already posit that the number of civilian dead don't matter because nobody's counting them. With this accepted, the whole idea that harm to civilians should be minimized just flies out the window.

"It is hard to argue," they continue, "that remotely controlled drone-fired missiles are any more unnecessarily injurious than bombs launched from the air by human pilots." One four-letter word for that is smug. Others come to mind. This is another meaningless comparison.

In any case, C@L close, we shouldn't be worrying our little heads about this whole issue of whether not drone strikes kill too many civilians -- the Pentagon line. "The legal debate over drones needs to refocus on what drones are being used for, not on the nature or effects of the weapons themselves," they offer.

Goebbels would have been proud. The drones are being used for bombing people and it seems likely they kill far too many civilians (and likely, not enough Taliban leaders). Why do C&L want to rule that understanding out of bounds without mathematical or scientific proof to the contrary?

Who is Going to Pay for The Global Interventions? The Status Quo Partisan Politics Must End.

Instead of engaging in distracting partisan politics with the status quo politicians that have ruined America, we need to focus on the mortal economic and social dangers that we are now facing because of the ruinous policies of these politicians.

We have to end the wars and occupations immediately and all foreign affairs, including foreign aid and military alliances. Europe and Korea among many other countries are rich enough to defend themselves. We now have 3 Muslim wars, plus NATO and the rest of the military waste, all follies are financed by debt that we will be forced to pay.

In my blog, I expose that over 50% of the total USA military forces are war contractors and that 2/3 of their employees are foreigners. We have wasted $5 Trillion dollars fighting Osama's war strategy to bankrupt America as they did the Soviet Union by bringing it into permanent war in the Muslim world. The war contractors and the other special interest groups are making profits from trillions of debt dollars that we'll be forced to pay.

America cannot afford to spend debt money on global empire dreams. The 2011 national debt, national current account balance and other economic indicators show that America has a negative net worth of -$58 Trillion. This is the truth that globalists are concealing and is the inevitable result of the globalist export of America's industry to Communist China and other cheap labor countries plus all the ruinous policies of the two globalist controlled parties that now require that the Federal government must beg and borrow $1.65 Trillion a year to add to the present national debt of close to $15 Trillion.

TEN Generations of Americans cannot pay the 2011 national debt, but the politicians still borrow and spend. 47% of American households are too poor to pay income taxes. The American industrial base is only 9% of the economy. There are not enough taxpayers to support a globalist government that is fueled by debt. Get the truth from my blog. I have a 28 point program to rebuild the American industrial base and to create energy independence.

Roman Gil
http://roman-gil1.blogspot.com

If the various terrorist groups would stop their attacks against Western targets then the drone attacks against them could stop.

If the cowardly terrorists men would stop hiding among women and children, then the deaths of those women and children would stop when the terrorists are found and killed.

I much prefer the US use unmanned drones to seek and kill terrorists than to put young US kids into uniforms, ship them to foreign countries and risk their lives to hunt down and kill the terrorists.

And no, I don't care how many of those who harbor the terrorists are killed along with the terrorists if it saves the life of one young US soldier.

And Mr. Gill, while I agree with most of what you say, do I need to remind you that the war on Afghanistan was started when their government help terrorists attack the US and the war in Iraq was started based on lies told by George Bush.

Instead of involving us in a war with Iraq, Bush should have used those bombs to level the country of Afghanistan and then left the country to rebuild itself after we destroyed it in retaliation for it's support of the attack on us.

We need to end the senseless policy of spending our limited resources to rebuild countries after they force us to destroy them.

Iraq is an exception as we had no real reason nor excuse to invade that country.

Blaming these wars on Obama is wrong, however he is due blame for falling into the trap of continuing them instead of starting an immediate withdrawal of our troops when he took office.

EdSeward