We hear a great deal about drones, particularly armed ones, but it is rare to see an analysis of how difficult it is to operate without them. A French report published in the wake of the rescue mission in Mali is illuminating. The operation highlighted the growing role of an al Qaeda affiliate that calls itself al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM).
The Mahgreb is the vast desert region of Africa stretching south from the Mediterranean. Most of it was once French colonies, and for decades France has helped local governments defend themselves. For example, in the 1980s French forces assisted the government of Chad in repelling a Libyan attack. The Mahgreb is now increasingly important to the world as a source of energy (in Mali AQIM was attacking foreign workers at a BP [formerly British Petroleum] site). Its vast empty spaces may, it is feared, become a refuge for al Qaeda and its friends analogous to Afghanistan before 9/11. Such refuges are generally described in terms of training camps. Possibly the most important point about a refuge is that terrorists working there know who their recruits are. The mere existence of a system of face-to-face identification makes it difficult to infiltrate these groups. Infiltration feeds the natural paranoia of terrorists and is probably the single best way to destroy them.
France operates UAVs, but not armed ones. Without them, its airborne fist in Mali consists of six Mirage fighters. They carry a lot more ordnance than a UAV but have nothing like its endurance, which is what matters most in the vastness of the Mahgreb. The territory involved is far larger than France. It is so large that the two French surveillance UAVs spend half their endurance merely flying to and from the area of interest. A single fighter can spend no more than two or three hours over that area. The fighter patrols are supported by two tankers.
This is not classical air warfare, which focuses on fixed targets revealed by reconnaissance. In such warfare, what matters is how well an attacker can survive in the face of anti-aircraft weapons. Ideally the attacker spends almost no time over the target. That is why endurance over a target area is rarely quoted as a measure of tactical aircraft performance. However, in Mali as in Afghanistan, the targets that matter are fleeting. In Mali most often they are the individuals leading the AQIM operation. They can often be spotted by the UAVs, based on other forms of intelligence, but that does no good unless a fighter happens to be on station—which cannot be nearly often enough. This is, incidentally, much the same situation as in close air support, in which the targets pop up at random times and do not remain in place for long. The difference is that the targets of close-air support fire are hardened enough to require more ordnance than the average UAV can possibly carry.
In both cases the issue is, however, the same: something airborne has to be available when the target pops up. As the French example shows, the further away it is, the less time the airborne attacker can spend anywhere near the target. Manned aircraft have the additional limitation that pilots become fatigued, so their performance declines with distance from a base. This limitation was obvious when the British tried to support the Libyan resistance using Tornado fighter-bombers flying out of the United Kingdom. That they would have done much better with carrier-based aircraft, which could have spent much more time in the combat area, may explain why the British government now considers its decision to eliminate the Royal Navy’s carriers an unfortunate mistake.
The United States has negotiated a basing arrangement with nearby Niger, and it seems likely that armed American UAVs will soon be deployed in support of the French in Mali. AQIM is a global problem, and the U.S. government is pledged to pursue al Qaeda and similar terrorists. Our involvement of course raises the perennial problem of whether strikes by armed UAVs (rather than, say, by soldiers on the ground or by tactical aircraft) are somehow a new and questionable form of warfare. That issue has been raised most recently by many on the German left in response to a report that the German Defense Ministry now plans to deploy armed UAVs.
The UAV Conundrum
There seem to be two main arguments against UAVs. One is that they are typically used against particular individuals rather than against the mass (if that is the right word) of enemy personnel or the installations supporting the enemy. Such attacks on individuals are said to contravene the laws of warfare. A second is that because their operation never risks pilot casualties, it somehow makes warfare less painful for the government using the UAVs. The latter argument was highlighted when the U.S. Air Force boasted that it was controlling Predators from a comfortable base in Nevada, reducing attacks on terrorist leaders to something more like a video game. An additional argument, which seems to be particularly forceful in Germany, is that the UAVs that begin as military tools could end as a means of government surveillance of the German population.
Both of the first two arguments have some validity, but ultimately fail. It is certainly true that UAVs are used to hunt particular individuals. It is not clear how to deal with a guerrilla or terrorist force without hunting down its leaders. Nor is it clear why attacking those leaders is significantly different from wartime sniping (assuming, as we and al Qaeda do, that we are at war). If troops could be moved instantly into position, those same leaders could be captured and perhaps tried as criminals, but generally that is impossible. From a moral point of view, moreover, it is difficult to understand why the U.S. or French government would prefer to risk our troops’ lives in order to capture enemy leaders, when we have a much less expensive (in blood) way to deal with them. Incidentally, if it is difficult for the French to keep a single Mirage airborne over central Mali for two or three hours, it is not clear exactly how they or we could possibly keep even a squad of soldiers in place waiting to pounce.
Ultimately the argument is that by attacking the leaders instead of the followers, we strike a valuable enemy resource. As experienced leaders are killed, the enemy is more likely to falter and to commit errors that make our own operations more effective. At some point individuals may be less eager to take dangerous leadership positions.
The Lesser of Two Evils
For the U.S. government, moreover, UAV strikes are probably the only viable way to deal with the problem of sanctuary. No government, however friendly, can prevent enemy combatants from fleeing into its territory. The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is particularly porous, largely because the Pashtuns on both sides do not consider the border itself to be legitimate. The Pakistanis have mounted military operations on their side, but those are unlikely to be effective in a territory whose inhabitants largely sympathize with our enemies. Intelligence gathering is a different proposition, and it can support UAV strikes. The strikes themselves have made the United States quite unpopular: A Pakistani once told me that now the United States can kill anyone it decides is a terrorist. In effect the UAVs have made terror two-sided. This is not a happy situation, but it may be the only way to convince people to reject al Qaeda.
As for morality, although the UAVs certainly do kill innocent people from time to time, they kill many fewer than the alternative methods of conventional air attack and ground assault do. Al Qaeda kills a lot more innocent people in its effort to frighten populations. Unless we hunt down its leaders, it will continue to do so with impunity. Which is the greater evil, that in pursuing al Qaeda leaders who kill regularly we accidentally cause small numbers of innocent deaths, or that al Qaeda will be left free to kill vast numbers of innocent people—often by bombing public places—by completely random attacks? Obviously, morality should never be a matter of numbers. However, war is a brutal process. If we are to fight wars, we have to think seriously about which of various evils is worst. It seems fair to say that the fewer innocent people we kill, the less unacceptable what we do is.
The issue of wars becoming too easy to fight is a deeper one. A government can certainly develop a taste for what it sees as an inexpensive way to fight. This issue came up during the brief time the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. The reality is that although operating UAVs does not carry direct human costs for us, it is by no means the whole story of the war against al Qaeda. Whatever success we are enjoying in Afghanistan comes from a combination of work with the population on the ground—which is hardly cost-free—and direct attacks on the Taliban. The Taliban cannot be canceled out altogether by attacking its experienced leaders. Rather, the attacks on the leaders make our other efforts more effective.
For that matter, the apparently cost-free attacks directed from Nevada were never so. The intelligence operation revealing that those driving that particular car happened to be senior Taliban came from enormous efforts on the ground, often conducted at great risk to the individuals who gained the information on which the strike was based. We tend to ignore that human cost because we forget that intelligence gathering is a larger and larger component of the current war against al Qaeda and its associates (and because the process itself is so secret) while in past, more conventional wars, the intelligence component was a much smaller part of the overall effort.