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And now, battles with hardly any rules

EDITORIAL | The new fog of war

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 05, 2012|By Linda J. Bilmes

DEFENSE SECRETARY Leon Panetta recently announced a new Pentagon strategy: fewer troops, and a 30 percent increase in the US fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), such as Predator drones. In an age of unconventional warfare and an increasingly cash-strapped military, this approach has obvious appeal. Drones are much cheaper than boots on the ground; they avoid putting American troops at direct risk and allow us to target enemies wherever they may be. By using unmanned weapons, the argument goes, we can avoid the kind of protracted, costly wars that have been so disastrous in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The perceived low risk to our own forces makes it much easier to launch armed attacks. But in the absence of declared war, it is not clear who is in charge or accountable. Robotic warfare has enabled the United States to dramatically expand the number of covert, unofficial attacks we carry out - without any formal declaration of war, explicit congressional authorization, or budgetary oversight. Unlike a decade ago, we now have the technical ability to fight “mini-wars’’ in multiple locations. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 it had only about 60 unmanned aircraft. Today we have more than 7,000, as well as 12,000 ground-based robots.

The Pentagon runs a “regular’’ drone program to protect US troops in established war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. But there is also a vast unofficial CIA-run program that targets suspected enemies around the world. Because there is no formal declaration of war, the CIA is not required to disclose anything about where it operates, how it selects targets, or how many people it has killed. The budget for these operations is highly classified.

Without any formal congressional authorization, the legal basis for drone warfare is also murky. Under the UN Charter, to which the United States is a signatory, member states are permitted to defend themselves from an armed attack but prohibited from choosing war as a method to settle disputes. Predator drones alone have flown more than 80,000 missions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia. When do these operations constitute a war? In Pakistan, we have launched double the number of strikes that we deployed (using manned bombers) in the opening round of the Kosovo War. By the old standards, the CIA’s operations in Pakistan would be viewed as war.