Search: drones
26 Oct The Mary Ellen O’Connell and Benjamin Wittes Debate on Targeted Killing and Drone Warfare
...personel. I see no reason why they'd engage in such activity since it certainly isn't necessary (plenty of people within the military are trained to do these types of missions, and many have the secretest of top secret clearances). Private contractors, too, are trained to fly these drones but they don't function in a combat capacity either (they serve alternately as instructors, or get the things into the air, and then the drones are taken over by defense personel stationed elsewhere). Ian Henderson Noting that in any event, if the...08 Feb Lubell and Derejko on the Geography of NIAC
specific geographical area that would eliminate occasional flare-ups from the scope. These issues will be returned to in greater detail in later sections. Our focus is on the particular challenges raised to the geographical scope of armed conflict by the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as drones. Much has been written about drones from a variety of perspectives,4 and we do not intend to repeat all the debates. Instead, the aim of this work is to asses not the drones themselves, but rather to examine one of...03 Sep Washington Post Stories on the CIA and JSOC – and My Prediction of Harold Koh’s Legacy as Legal Adviser
...the target than conventional military operations would require — this is, after all, what makes it intelligence-driven targeted killing. In that particular aspect, covert action (again speaking loosely) ought to have standards that are higher than simply those that are and legally should be applied to that other use of drones – not targeted killing, but instead the targeting of a mass of combatants id’d as fighters crossing the Afghan border to fight Americans. (Drones have a role in both conventional warfare and special operations targeted killing, but the latter...
08 Oct Trump vs. International Law: Exploiting the Legal Gaps Left by the Obama Administration
...position to advocate for acknowledgement of the constraints that international human rights law places on a government’s use of lethal force, including outside its own territory. As Koh writes, the problem isn’t the use of drones technology, which can be used in rights-compliant ways. Drones may make it easier to kill certain individuals, but the problem arises when the US uses any sort of lethal force to target individuals that the US does not have clear legal authority to kill. Contrary to Koh’s argument, however, the law need not, and...24 Mar Drone Warfare and UAVs in House Subcommittee Hearing
...operations people on down hanging out there exposed. The drone warfare campaign embraced most thoroughly as a strategic matter – correctly, in my view – by the senior administration officials starting with the President is not the “hot battlefield” use of drones, in which they are essentially a substitute air support weapon for a manned system. It is, instead, the use of drones in a role unique to them, as a targeted killing mechanism for use in places far off of active battlefields. There are some questions raised about military...15 Jun DOD or CIA in Yemen?
...human teams. It is not solely a technology, the technology of drones, but instead equally or more dependent on an extraordinary intelligence effort at the ground level in order to identify targets. Drones, in their surveillance role, can be useful, but nothing substitutes for the ground level intelligence network. In that sense, the fear that critics sometimes have (that drones are a kind of weird mixture of globally ubiquitous surveillance-and-attack system that can strike anywhere around the world and at the same time a kind of flock of Predator ronin,...05 Apr Drone Warfare and the Koh Speech – A Roundup of Links
It’s not true that everything I do is about drone warfare, but it has taken a lot of my time lately and, of course, a lot of stuff is happening, both on the operational side as well as legal side. So here’s a little round-up of links, more or less at random. First, the New York Times has a front page article today, looking at the impact of drones on terrorist and militant activities in Waziristan. It is an interesting piece, not least because it acknowledges not just the effectiveness...19 Oct The Drone Wars
...value of a drone on the battlefield as anything more than a novelty. Once the war on terror started, and the value of drones became apparent to everyone. The Air Force jumped into the game and tried to muscle out the CIA. Unfortunately, almost immediately the Air Force drone program was caught in the inevitable Pentagon procurement death spiral where large numbers of a good enough system (predators/reapers) are sacrificed for fewer of a perfect-but as yet undeveloped system, see F-35. In the war on terror the drone's best asset...29 Oct A Cybersecurity Treaty? Adam Segal and Matthew Waxman Think Not
...as the way to regulate their use. That will likely work out fine in civil aviation and the use of drones. I’m sure states will eventually incorporate drones in ordinary civil aviation into protocols for air traffic control and transborder use, and might well show up in some form of aviation treaty or international rules. But it seems to me highly unlikely and indeed counterproductive to pursue treaty mechanisms for their use in armed conflict in its legal sense, or in uses of force that are outside of technical states...