All war is assassination--just delivered on an industrial scale

FEATURE: "The Drone War," by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedmann, The New Republic, 3 June 2009.

All these drone killings, because they focus on high-value targets, raise the issue of assassinations, so sayeth the authors.

Officially, the USG does not assassinate, at least as far back as the Church Committee investigations that led Ford and Carter to sign presidential directives disallowing the same. But Reagan went after Qaddafi and Clinton went after al-Qaeda leaders with regularity.

And now with the drones, because they're so discreet (or at least attempt to be), we find ourselves launching missions with the expressed goal of getting THAT bad guy, and Bergen and Tiedemann say that means we're moving back into assassinations without a proper public debate.

Back in PNM, I made the argument (as I did thousands of times in the brief) that conflict had downshifted from System to State to Individuals, so our interventions were more and more devolving into round-up-the-bad-guy drills, starting with Panama (Noriega), Haiti (bad actors), Somalia (the warlord focus), the Balkans (when we started going after Milosevic cronies in a very pointed fashion, using a variety of means), driving out the Taliban/al Qaeda leadership (Afghanistan) and then the deck of cards in Iraq.

In short, we haven't waged wars against states--as in nations and their people--for a long time. We mostly do police work on behalf of the global community--as in, rounding up the bad actors. With the Powell Doctrine, you went in with big force, grabbed whomever, and left, not trying to fix anything.

Now, after 9/11, we stick around, and our lists tend to grow in size and working space, increasingly drawing us into situations where we target and kill individuals in other peoples' states. It is a very direct action version of the International Criminal Court: the Core's self-declared (and actual) military champion taking on bad actors in environments where the local legal/state system is incapable.

In this strategic environment, then, the targeting of individuals is the norm, meaning we've taken a lot of the industrial out of mass conflict and boiled it down, with plenty of high technology, to the essence of warfare in the modern age: the killing of bad actors operating within dysfunctional political/social/economic environments.

Simply put, in a small, connected world, the frontier must be eliminated, because bad actors with systemic ambitions will tend to hide there, beyond the nets.

You can call this assassination if you like, but that term only reflects the way we've glorified and built-up our non-state opponents. Assassination as we generally have used the term has pertained to the disutility of killing other government's national leaders. That really hasn't changed--witness the big effort we went through with Saddam before hanging him (or enabling the successor government to do so).

To use the term "assassination" here is to symmetricize the conflict in a bad way--i.e., granting legitimacy to those who do not deserve it.

Tagging drones in this respect is misleading. They simply represent technological advance, the downshifting of conflict to individuals, and our desire to avoid losses in very tough landscapes.

Comments

[Louis Heberlein]

Bush 1 in Gulf War 1 used F117 to take out key folks in Saddam's establishment. Later he used various stealth aircraft to try to take out extremist leaders in Balkans intramural. The media said that was a lucky byproduct of last generation technology toys of Cold War.

Drones keep getting both bigger (for bang) and smaller for close in stealth. Earlier efforts to target extremist leaders required Special Ops boots on the ground or local buddies of CIA to give us target focus and timing ... as far as unclassified media sources indicate. The mix of stories about developing ground surveillance from space and high altitude is balanced by stories of how AQ, Taleban and tribes suspect spies among themselves and their buddies. Both interpretations can help us.

A lot of the Iraqi bad guys understood the potential for high tech targeted air attacks. But the Afghan and Pakistan militants were more traditional tribal in culture, and also operate in rural terrain more suitable for these type spot air tactics. That's probably why they are now trying to slip into Pakistan main cities to get low visibility.

[Hugh]

The drones started out as reconnaissance aircraft much like manned aircraft started out in WWI. After some battlefield R&D they both became offensive weapons. I tend to think of our drones as snipers with wings.

[David Sutton]

Kings of Wear had an interesting post about this matter a few weeks ago.

For me it boils down to a moral vs practical argument. Certainly the cold blooded stab in the back, wet work type killing does have moral grey shades surrounding it. But placed against the practical issue of, as Tom points out the downsizing of the industrial side of conflict, then that moral argument, to my mind, pales in insignificance.

If the option is killing one or ten vs killing thousands than fuel up the drones and get the boys from Pope and Bragg tooled up.



http://kingsofwar.wordpress.com/2009/04/25/assassination-norms/