OBAMA 2.O / DRONE WARFARE
models the effective kill zone and
collateral injury and damage of a
proposed strike, can help. “You
use the full range of intelligence,”
said Army Brig Gen. Rich Gross,
who as legal counsel to the Joint
Chiefs of Staff reviews strike execution orders.
Counting the number of civilians killed in these strikes is notoriously difficult, given that strikes
usually take place in remote areas
that are often hostile to Westerners. The most careful accounting
is generally considered to be that
by the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism, which said between
558 and 1,119 civilians have been
killed in strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
In any attack, Gross told The
Huffington Post, “there’s a real
science involved with what type
of weapon system will be dropped
and the numbers of people you
would expect in that culture at
that time of day.” The art, he said,
is judging whether the military
benefit of a strike outweighs the
projected loss of civilian life, as
required by international law.
The recent use of “signature
strikes” or “crowd killings,” which
are said to target a group of unnamed and unidentified suspects,
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
appears to violate international
law even more egregiously.
There is also the issue of blowback. It doesn’t take a detailed
military analysis to recognize that
having drones constantly overhead promising instant death
isn’t popular in non-battlefield
strike zones like Pakistan, Yemen
and Somalia. Evidence gathered
by reporters and investigators in
North Waziristan and other sites
of drone strikes is that the anger,
fear and resentment the strikes
leave behind among civilians
seems to outweigh any potential
military benefit. Such devastating
strikes, which kill with no warning, “are hated on a visceral level,”
retired general and Afghan war
commander Stanley McChrystal
said recently. “The resentment
created by American use of unmanned strikes,” he added, “is
much greater than the average
American appreciates.”
“The argument that several
folks have raised is that when you
kill a terrorist, even if you kill no
women and children, no combatants, you’re still gonna enrage the
population, depending on how it’s
done,” said Gross. “That’s a consideration that policymakers always have to struggle with.”
Two other problems arise with
the drone program. One is copycats. Inevitably, weapons technol-