Why targeted killing? And why is robotics so crucial an issue in targeted killing?

(Given the recent Obama administration review of the Predator campaign in Pakistan, I thought it would be a useful thing to put this discussion on the table.  Welcome Instapunditeers, and thanks Glenn for the Instalanche!  You might also want to check out the ComplexTerrainLab's discussion among academics of PW Singer's Wired for War, here.)

Why targeted killing? And why the insistence that it will increase in utility as it is partnered with high-technology, stand-off platforms such as Predator drone aircraft? Why the emphasis on targeted killings and robotics? There is a fundamental strategic rationale lying behind the policy trend.

The United States has found the limits of how extensively it can wage full-scale wars with its military; even if wanted to take on more wars, it has logistical and political limits. In addition, the United States has discovered that full-on war is useful principally against regimes. Full scale, large scale war of the kind waged in Afghanistan and Iraq is useful primarily for bringing down a regime that, for example, might harbor or support terrorists, or which might be believed to be willing to supply terrorists with materials for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Full-scale war has a crucial strategic place in national counterterrorism policy, but by its nature that role is about states and regimes fundamentally.

Large-scale military operations are less useful directly against transnational terrorists, however, who are few in number, dispersed across populations and often borders, disinclined to fight direct battles, and more efficiently targeted through narrower means. The fundamental role of war in counterterrorism is to eliminate the regimes that provide safe haven to terrorist groups; terrorist groups can be strategically understood as an extreme version of a guerrilla organization engaged in a strategy of logistical raiding – in which civilian morale and resulting manipulation of political will is the logistical target. Logistical raiders typically need a safe base to which to retreat, and full-scale war is most useful in eliminating such safe bases and convincing other regimes not to provide them. But it is not usually an efficient way of going directly after transnational terrorist groups themselves.

Law enforcement utilized outside the United States, on the other hand, has also discovered its outer limits. Many debates are still to be had over the rights of alleged terrorists once in U.S. custody. Even so, whatever they are, few would argue that going out to ‘arrest’ terrorists in, for example, Pakistan’s tribal zones is a winning policy or a serious option. The same is true in Somalia and other places, and it will be true in other places in the world in the future.

Moreover, the political costs for any U.S. administration taking and holding detainees are now enormous. Once you hold them, over time they will likely be accorded quasi-Constitutional protections by the courts, at least some version of habeas corpus. Politically, the most powerful institutional incentive today is to kill rather than capture them. The intelligence losses of killing rather than capturing in order to interrogate them are great. But since the U.S. political and legal situation has made interrogation a questionable activity anyway, there is little reason to seek to capture rather than kill. And if one intends to kill, the incentive is to do so from a standoff position, because it removes messy questions of surrender.

All this speaks to the advantages to the U.S. government of targeted killing of terrorists or persons seriously believed to be terrorists, and it also speaks to the advantages to the US government from using stand-off robotics technology to perform these attacks. But the humanitarian advantages of ‘targeted’ killing are enormously important as well, and ought to be on the table. This is particularly so given that targeted killing has come in for a barrage of criticism, legal and ethical, much of which seems motivated by the fact that it can be more discriminate than full scale military assault; the fear seems to be that it makes violence too easy to undertake. The same criticism is offered of the evolution of robotic technology that increasingly allows targeted uses of force without having to risk one’s own personnel. Not using one’s own personnel allows a party to attack without the fear of counterassault that might increase the need to use greater amounts of force and cause greater collateral damage – but it also, so it is sometimes argued, thereby reduces the inhibitions on the decision to use force.

Why this should be a downside for US strategic counterterrorism policy is not entirely evident, but clearly some critics are disturbed by it. Much of the criticism amounts to a very contemporary restatement, aimed against the targeted killing that evolving robotic and surveillance technology might permit, of a very old argument against the idea itself of the introduction of humanitarian standards in conflict (one that stretches back at least to the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)), that humanitarian standards by their promulgation would reduce the disincentives to war.

Whatever the critics say, however, is unlikely to sway US strategic policy, under the Obama administration or anyone else subsequently. The humanitarian benefits of precision targeting are far more obvious than the more remote and abstract suppositions of their humanitarian costs. Their direct policy consequence is to introduce greater discrimination in targeting than full-scale military assault and large-scale war permit, through targeted killing using high technology. There is a clear humanitarian advantage favoring the use of targeted killing over full-scale war. Advancing technology allows for more discrete surveillance and therefore more precise targeting that is finally better able to minimize collateral civilian damage.

The result is a strategic incentive for targeted killing, for Predator strikes, and for increasing the quality of technology to make targeted killings both more precision targeted and more standoff. Precision targeting and standoff delivery are each independently desirable and, in combination, considerably increase the incentive. The Obama policy team did not quite run on a policy of targeted killing – but it did run on a policy of taking the fight to Al-Qaeda in Pakistan in a targeted way.
The Obama administration is right about this – right about the logic that presses toward targeting standoff killing as a necessary and available and technologically advancing part of counterterrorism. It is also right about it as a moral and humanitarian proposition in the law and policy of the use of force. It is a conclusion that is correct as well as for foreseeable future administrations, even if administrations naturally prefer to couch it in softer terms.

None of this alters the equally impeccable strategic logic underlying the use of law enforcement mechanisms in some circumstances. Nor does it alter the logic behind other forms of intelligence activities such as surveillance or financial interdiction, or even the use of open, full-on war. The strategic logic for toppling a regime in pursuit of counterterrorism during the next ten or twelve years can by no means be ruled out. But these are not disjunctive policies. They all can and should work together. But targeted killing is likely to increase as a policy preference as full-scale wars decreases in number and intensity.

The paradox, however, is that although the strategic logic for targeted killing increases in persuasiveness, the legal space for it and the legal rationales on which it has been traditionally justified are shrinking. It has been shrinking in ways that might surprise members of Congress and the Obama administration. And it is at risk of shrinking still further through seemingly innocuous, unrelated legal policy actions that the Obama administration or Congress might be inclined to take in support of various political constituencies, usually related to broadly admirable goals of human rights and international law.

U.S. law, in domestic law since the original Cold War legislation establishing the CIA in 1947 at least, and in the US view of international law, accepts a legal, political, and policy space for the use of violence by political decision not in the course of large scale, open armed conflict governed by international humanitarian law, and not in the course of judicially supervised law enforcement operations, either. ‘Violence by political decision’, in peacetime outside of open armed conflict under international humanitarian law, was a space of activity accepted and considered vital to national security throughout the long decades of the Cold War. Only in certain narrow times and places was the decades-long conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies a ‘hot’ war, open and large-scale armed conflict, clashes of armies. Political violence in the Cold War was often covert, often denied, but it was authorized and endorsed by US domestic law, although it was frequently a violation of the law of states where such activity took place and unsurprisingly was sometimes, too, a source of grave diplomatic and other friction.

This category of force is an obvious means by which to confront non-state transnational terrorists outside the territorial United States. It is especially true outside the territory of states where effective mechanisms exist for arrest, detention, investigation, trial, and punishment, or alternatively extradition, of suspected terrorists. Regimes that have allied themselves to terrorist organizations – the Taliban in Afghanistan – might be toppled. Failed states might require large-scale military action in order to block the use of territory as a safe haven by terrorist groups. But as a strategic matter, actual attack on a physically small number of terrorists embedded among civilians is often best served by attacks made as physically precise and discrete as surveillance and targeting technology allow.