Pushback against weaponized drones and targeted killing, at least as undertaken by the United States, is increasing now that President Obama has been reelected, and presumably anti-drone campaigners are looking for ways to bring pressure on his administration's policies before they are set in strategic, operational, and logistical cement - as likely they would be after eight years under a Democratic administration. This NGO advocacy campaign has intense support among UN special rapporteurs - for counterterrorism and human rights, for example, and extrajudicial execution - as well as some, and perhaps considerable support among the US's European allies. I've been meeting informally with various European government officials and diplomats who are trying to get a sense of the intersection of US government legal, policy, and strategic view. These European officials strike me as both circumspect and unhappy with the policy and legal rationales offered by the administration in its various speeches.
The situation is complicated by the fact that the UN and our European allies - indeed, everyone with a defense budget to speak of - are acquiring drones (or at least seeking access to them, in the case of the UN), both surveillance drones and, at least in some cases, weaponized drones. According to
AFP, the UN is seeking surveillance drones to monitor the DR Congo-Rwanda conflict - the UN hopes that the United States or France, or perhaps other countries, will make them available:
UN officials stress that there could be no speedy deployment of drones in DR Congo as MONUSCO would need equipment and training. But it would be a major first in UN peacekeeping operations. A previous plan to get drones into DR Congo was dropped because of the cost, But the price of the technology has come down with so many countries now using unmanned planes for battlefield reconnaissance and espionage. "The UN has approached a number of countries, including the United States and France, about providing drones which could clearly play a valuable role monitoring the frontier," a UN diplomat said, on condition of anonymity." Clearly there will be political considerations though," the diplomat added. The UN plan is only to have surveillance drones, but the spying capability of the unmanned aerial vehicles worries a lot of countries.
France might be willing to do so, but it also has to consider other possible missions - such as a possible deployment of drones to support ECOWAS military action to oust Islamist insurgents who have seized territory in Mali. But of course, these are all surveillance missions - not weaponized drones. Perhaps drone use by the UN or France or other NATO allies will remain purely as surveillance - but perhaps not. In the hands of UN forces in DR Congo, maybe the drones will be surveillance UAVs only. But France has not ruled out weaponized drones in Mali, so far as I know, if some intervention takes place, and I would be surprised (
really surprised) if it did rule them out. And there are good reasons to believe that if there were serious fighting by ground forces in Mali, the states supplying the troops fighting on the ground would demand that NATO countries supplying air assets use them in weaponized form to protect their ground troops. (Greg McNeal also
comments at his Forbes column.)
