Ethics of Drone Strikes: Just War, Moral Hazard, and Operators

Introduction: Drones in Modern Warfare

The increasing use of drones in combat has raised a number of distinct ethical issues. Drones are typically used to bomb foreign territory while their operators control them remotely, often from locations within the United States. Working with equipment not unlike a video game, operators fly drones into combat or ambush situations and carry out their missions from thousands of miles away. The ethical issues that arise include the impacts on the operators themselves, the impacts on the territories where drones are deployed, and the broader morality of war — which may be fundamentally altered by the use of weaponized drones.

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Michael Hayden (2016) argued that drones play an important role in modern warfare. His position holds that while flaws exist within the program, the program itself is necessary, and it would be better to address those flaws than to abandon drone use altogether. Several underlying principles are worth exploring. First, the United States has historically operated with a realist outlook in world affairs. As such, it uses its economic, political, and military power to achieve its objectives. This creates tensions with other nations and groups, and those tensions sometimes escalate into open conflict. The United States has therefore maintained the world's largest military to address the constant state of conflict in which it finds itself. The doctrine of realism rejects the idea of morality in international politics (Karpowicz, 2013). This rejection is necessary in part because there are many competing moral frameworks by which actions can be judged, and also because international politics is understood in terms of outcomes for each individual nation — if its outcomes are superior, the action is justified.

Hayden's central argument is that the objective of American political action is either to enhance America's interests or to ensure America's safety. The latter is more important because it satisfies the condition of maintaining a standard of existence rather than merely enhancing it. Threats to America's security must therefore be addressed, and this, Hayden maintains, is the role of the military. The specific technology the military employs is ultimately secondary; what matters is that the military performs its mission. Keeping America safe is interpreted as launching attacks on its enemies — sometimes in a punitive manner, sometimes in a pre-emptive one.

Under realism, the only valid measure of drone strikes is their effectiveness in performing a specific role. Hayden argues that drone strikes are effective because they often eliminate senior operatives who are actively planning threats against the United States, including attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. The actual impact of such targeted killings on preventing terrorist attacks can only be speculated, but the military holds that drone strikes have played a critical role in preventing such attacks and therefore regards them as effective.

Just War Theory and the Ethics of Engagement

Just war theory is central to the broader discussion of drone strike ethics. The theory is organized around three components: the justice of entering into war, justice in the conduct of war, and justice in the termination of war (Orend, 2005). These concepts are open to significant interpretation. Just war theory combined with political realism categorically positions a nation against its enemies. If those enemies are believed to pose a direct threat, the nation has just cause to act against them. There is no requirement for procedural justice — the nation may do what is necessary to secure its safety. Within the confines of realism, a great deal of war can be deemed just.

This is not to say that the ethics of entering into conflict with terrorist groups are settled. The terrorists in question are often in remote locations on foreign soil — in Pakistan, Yemen, and similar places. It is difficult to argue that they pose any direct, immediate threat to the United States from those locations. The self-defense argument therefore rests on one of two propositions. The first is that terrorist attacks planned in such locations often target areas in the United States or the West, making these individuals more of a threat than their geography might suggest. Furthermore, U.S. interests extend beyond the nation's territorial borders, and many strikes have been aimed at defending U.S. troops in these regions or the troops of U.S. allies. This position is more or less defensible on realist grounds.

The second proposition is that the individuals targeted in these strikes are terrorists whose defining mission is to commit violent atrocities. It is not merely that they are enemies of the United States, but that they are enemies of all decent people everywhere. This proposition is somewhat harder to defend, but it can be noted that there are very few moral codes in which killing innocents is considered acceptable. For most of the world, therefore, the individuals targeted in drone strikes are genuinely immoral actors — and this is at least worthy of military engagement.

The second component of just war theory concerns the rules of engagement. This is where the ethics of drones become considerably murkier than the ethics of war in general. Hayden does not accept that there is any noble way to wage war; rather, war is something to be fought with the objective of winning. To insert morality into warfare — as in the Geneva Convention — is, on this view, a distortion, because war is fundamentally about killing. Even if waging war with some rules to protect against civilian casualties or cruel deaths makes sense in principle, drone strikes are typically clean and instantaneous and would not ordinarily contravene ethical norms governing the killing of enemy combatants.

The question of civilian casualties is often raised in the context of drone strikes. There are many documented accounts of civilians being killed or injured. Even with the best available intelligence and surveillance, uncertainty remains about who is being hit and who may be nearby at the time. Coll (2014) outlines several such narratives of civilian harm. However, several counterpoints are advanced. First, a realist does not question the morality of the weapon; if the weapon lacks precision, that is a secondary concern as long as the objective is achieved. Second, all warfare involves civilian casualties, and drones are arguably more likely to limit them than conventional weapons and warfare. Third, the enemy specifically targets civilians, meaning that there is no expectation in this type of conflict of avoiding civilian harm on either side. If morality is to be applied, it should not be applied exclusively to one party.

Conclusion

By the ethical standards of the U.S. political and military leadership, there are few genuine moral quandaries regarding drone strikes — even those that result in civilian harm. However, many other Americans face a profound moral dilemma because of the question of agency: drone strikes affect their sense of identity as Americans. They also shape the way the rest of the world perceives the country. When no individual human being is visibly attached to an act of lethal force, the only entity to which moral consequences can be ascribed is the nation that carried it out.

There is moral hazard with drones that exceeds that of other forms of war at a distance. The drone operator is so physically and psychologically removed from the conflict that there is real risk they do not fully understand the consequences of their actions. This is especially true for operators who have never visited the countries where the strikes occur — they struggle to relate to those realities or to experience them as genuinely real. The physical detachment and absence of personal risk mean that the decision to strike can be made with a degree of ease that few other lethal decisions allow. This ease may cause drone strikes to be deployed more frequently than an equivalent conventional strike would be, which further compounds the ethical dilemma.

While the country's leadership seeks to dissolve the moral problem by appealing to just war theory and a realist worldview, the issue is not so simple for those who conduct the strikes, those who authorize them, or the large number of Americans who find that their positive sense of national identity is challenged by the ethical questions raised by drone warfare in remote corners of the world — particularly the use of pre-emptive strikes and strikes that harm civilians.

References

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