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Drones as Force Protection in AfPak, and the Dream of Drones as Strategic Air Power

Adam Entous, Julan E. Barnes, and Siobhan Gorman have an outstanding piece of national security reporting on the front page of the weekend Wall Street Journal, "CIA Escalates Campaign in Pakistan: Pentagon Diverts Drones to Afghanistan to Bolster Campaign Next Door." This is a fine piece of journalism that integrates reporting from AfPak and Washington to present findings that are new to the public, and more than merely a deliberate leak to a leading reporter from a government official or a magazine story rather than hard news.  My congrats to what is emerging as a leading national security affairs reporting team at the news pages of the Journal.  (Update: Here is Greg Miller's account in the Washington Post, Sunday, front page.) (Note: I've made some lengthy revisions and additions to this post.  Also, I’m not so sure that the contents of this post count as international law, and I’m not sure that our international law readership especially cares about Anderson’s views on strategy, but I decided I should cross-post it from Volokh.  The link, if any, to law is that although we are used to analyzing things like drone attacks from the standpoint of the law of targeted killing and other legal categories, at least once in a while it might help to step back and consider the strategic categories first, and then work our way to the law.) September 2010 saw another sharp uptick in the number of drone attack missions in Pakistan.  The question behind the raw numbers is what strategic purpose they aim at.  One strategic mission of drone missions in Pakistan is counterterrorism aimed at Al Qaeda leadership.  This uptick in September 2010 points to a quite distinct function - rather than counterterrorism as its own mission, the purpose is, as article says in a telling quote, "force protection" for the US counterinsurgency troops in Afghanistan.  The articles details an increasing impatience of the US military and political leadership with Pakistan's government, and an increased willingness both to strike overtly using NATO military assets quite openly across the border, as happened in the last week, as well as to use CIA Predator attacks in the border regions. (Added: Moreover, the "force protection" use of drones described in these articles is distinct from stillanother strategic use of drones, one recounted in earlier articles in the last two weeks, talking about their use to disrupt the planning of attacks against European targets by groups such as the Haqqanis, regional groups thought to be seeking to use people with European or American passports to strike from Pakistan against Western targets; Mumbai shifted further west, so to speak.  As Woodward quotes someone in his new book, "Mumbai changed everything."  It is because of these overlapping but also separate and shifting roles for drones that it seems to me worthwhile to analytically distinguish them, as I do below.) But the CIA attacks are now on safe havens for Taliban who are part of the fight in Afghanistan but taking refuge in Pakistan.  Rather than simply a raiding strategy against terrorist leadership in Pakistan as an exercise in counterterrorism, it is now a raiding strategy against the safe havens as part of the Afghanistan counterinsurgency surge.  Hence the desire of the Pentagon to divert drone aircraft - which are in demand in Afghanistan for a variety of missions - from Afghanistan to attacks in Pakistan on bases that are seen as links for attacks on US forces. This is an important shift, or addition, to the role of drones in Pakistan.  (Added:  And of course it has always been part of the use of drones; I've hardened the analytic categories, so to speak, to make them clearer, but really it is a question not of something new, but of scaling up.)  The article makes note of something else, too - that drone aircraft can't be produced fast enough to meet demand for them in AfPak.  The article has excellent graphics, including a chart on numbers of attacks on a month by month basis, and maps. As it happens, this article is timely for me, as I am completing this weekend the draft of an essay for the Hoover Institution on a roster of strategic uses of drones.  In bullet point form, here is an analytic breakdown of categories, as I see them, of drone use.  (I'm not providing more than the bullet title, even though the result is overly-cryptic; the full essay will be available once finished and edited at Hoover's website or SSRN.  Also, if anyone is interested in my earlier published writing on drone warfare and the law, at SSRN's free downloads, see this book chapter, this lengthy piece in theWeekly Standard, and two pieces of Congressional testimony, here and here.)

Coded language

I am interested in the issue of "coded language."   As a protestant minister who preaches from sacred texts often using theological language concerning, for example, "sin" "redemption" "judgement," etc., am I to interpret that this theological language is "coded?"  It is, of course, in a way - for it is language that is full of meaning(s) - hence, meaningful.  Professor Marcus...

More on Incitement

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Freedom from Religion—Rights and National Security

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Freedom from Religion: Rights and National Security

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