Drones, Computer Viruses and Blowback

Hugh Pickens writes "Michael Crowley writes that using drones rather than soldiers to kill bad guys is appealing for many reasons, including cost, relative precision and reduction of risk to American troops. But there's plenty of evidence that drones antagonize local populations and create more enemies over the long term than we kill in the short term. The failed 2010 Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, has said that about the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan, and the Washington Post has described how drone strikes may be breeding sympathy for al-Qaeda in Yemen. 'It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically and it is unpopular only in other countries,' says Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence until May of 2010. 'Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.' Now there's another component to the new warfare that threatens blowback: cyberwar. Like drones, cyberweapons are relatively cheap and do their work without putting American troops in harm's way. The blowback comes when those viruses get loose and inflict unintended damage or provide templates to terrorists or enemy nations that some experts think could lead to disaster and argue that cyberweapons are like bioweapons, demanding international treaties to govern their use. 'We may indeed be at a critical moment in history, when the planet's prospects could be markedly improved by an international treaty on cyberweapons, and the cultivation of an attendant norm against cyberwar,' writes Richard Wright. 'The ideal nation to lead the world toward this goal would be the most powerful nation on earth, especially if that nation had a pretty clean record on the cyberweapons front. A few years ago, America seemed to fit that description. But it doesn't now.'"

Re:Asymmetric warfare is a bad idea

[yoctology]

I respectfully disagree. When you give the opposition hope that resistance might prevail, you simply discourage their elements that counsel diplomacy or other political engagement over armed response. That is why you don't send a single officer to quell a riot.

Re:Drone Strikes are "Cowardly Attacks" to the Eas

[djl4570]

"Western Cowards killing our Countrymen with Aerial Toys".

Hypocritical whinging from zealots who hide in mosques, impose themselves on the homes of non combatants or hide in and attack from a civilian population. Veiled suicide bomber kills four French soldiers in Afghanistan [reuters.com]

Re:Elephant in the room

[10101001 10101001]

Ahem... Shotgun wedding. Seriously, what you're arguing almost amounts to it being justifiable for a government (admittedly, foreign in this case) to kill anyone who owns a gun. Isn't that precisely what the NRA, a very powerful and influence political force in the US, is precisely against? I mean, that's just sweet, sweet irony on the tallest order. I guess those sorts of rights, supposedly inherently to all people--and merely explicitly guaranteed in the Second Amendment--, don't count when it comes to "other" people...or the NRA just can't bother/afford to defend non-US citizens. :/

Never heard of NSA or signals intelligence?

[H0p313ss]

The U.S. has been engaged is what is now called "cyberwarfare" through "Active SIGINT" for decades, the only difference is people are catching on.

You are at best only killing "militant"

[aepervius]

You are at best only killing "militant" and at worst terrorist, what traditionally has been done using either proper police, or cloak and dagger (and gun),a nd to do that you use *bomb* and *missiles* remotely controleld from a military plateform. This is a hammer to kill a fly , sorry. This is by definition overwhelming force for the problem at hand. That the US military can use much more force than that, is a testament to your incredibly high military budget, and the fact that some (not you) use the argument to indicate you are going "soft" in the middle east is a sad sad conclusion that some peopel lost utterly the sense of perspective.

I respectfully disagree

[WOOFYGOOFY]

I know this view is sincerely held by people who have only the best interests of the US at heart. But look, you have to consider the real-world alternatives and likely consequences of those alternatives or your analysis is coming up short.

To be sure, the US would like to have a weapon that causes people to just drop dead, or better yet, be whisked into US jurisdiction for a proper trial. That magic weapon is not available to us, and drone strikes are the closet thing we have right now. We don't want collateral damage- i.e. dead people- and we spend billions on weapons systems research to make them smarter, more precise and more flexible for just this reason.

The people who hate us would hate us just as much if we intervened in any other way which was equally effective at stopping people who are actively planning to kill us. If we sneak into the country and kill them, they'd still hate us as much and be just as motivated to harm us. They'd just have a different back story when interrogated. Why did bin Laden hate us? Because he wanted to be the one in Saudi to protect it and expel Saddam from Kuwait. And there we were, on HIS holy sand, doing what HE was meant to do.

So are we going to decide that we shouldn't do anything until they show up here with the biological agent / terror plot / suitcase nuke? Because if that's your defensive strategy, as everyone form Clinton to Bush to Obama has realized once they've had a few daily briefs from the CIA, it's not going to work.

We have to intervene earlier in the pipeline. Terrorism is going to be an ongoing reality that we have to face and deal with. There are no really good options, only less bad ones.

The fact of war is some individual personalities are critical to the enemy. Sorry to say but even in terrorism there's a thing called talent. Drone strikes such as the one that took out al Awlaki or al-Libi are a huge win that sets the enemy back. Until we understand the roots of terrorism, and I am not saying that US foreign policy has always been benign (why don't all Iranians just automatically hate us? Because they don't. Not the young people. ), until then we have to face the fact that people want to kill us and we need to stop them before they can succeed.

We are working on weapons systems even more precise than drones. We COULD go the other way and turn NW Pakistan into a sea of glass. That's not who we are. Drone strikes piss people off and incite, anything goes, suicidal rage in people. That was always baked into the equation from the start. This is a war, and the enemy doesn't like seeing their side's heroes dying. This is not news.

I am all about looking giving a thorough, searching and honest look our own actions in the ME . I myself think we should be in Syria right now, tipping that scale, hard. I am deeply concerned with how the rest of the world will perceive our inaction on global warming.. This is something that could galvanize and unite our enemies and coalesce neutrals against us. It's a huge propaganda weapon we're turning on ourselves; a massive unforced error our guys will ultimately end up dying for. That's why it's an act of patriotism and in fact our duty to wage a cultural war on deniers and bring it to them.

Drones are not good , they're just better than all the alternatives right now, that's all.