New York Times national security correspondent
Scott Shane has an opinion piece in today’s Sunday Times predicting an “arms race” in military drones. The methodology essentially looks at the US as the leader, followed by Israel — countries that have built, deployed and used drones in both surveillance and as weapons platforms. It then looks at the list of other countries that are following fast in US footsteps to both build and deploy, as well as purchase or sell the technology — noting, correctly, that the list is a long one, starting with China. The predicament is put this way:
Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.
“Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”
By asserting that “we’re” creating it, this is a claim that there is an arms race among states over military drones, and that it is a consequence of the US creating the technology and deploying it — and then, beyond the technology, changing the normative legal and moral rules in the international community about using it across borders. In effect, the combination of those two, technological and normative, forces other countries in strategic competition with the US to follow suit.
It sounds like it must be true. But is it? There are a number of reasons to doubt that moves by other countries are an arms race in the sense that the US “created” it or could have stopped it, or that something different would have happened had the US not pursued the technology or not used it in the ways it has against non-state terrorist actors. Here are a couple of quick reasons why I don’t find this thesis very persuasive, and what I think the real “arms race” surrounding drones will be.
