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Search: drones

21 Apr

attack aircraft cannot loiter long enough to develop the intelligence necessary to separate the targets from the civilians. Bring in the drones in a surveillance role. However, because the targets move so easily, it makes far more sense to use the drones as both surveillance and weapons platform, and strike directly from them. The precision targeting of the drones is likely to mean that they will be far more discriminating than regular manned aircraft. Of course, none of this is possible without having first suppressed air defense systems. Moreover, the...
21.04.11 | |

31 Jan

Jordan Response... Readers might note that future drones might engage in crop dusting, drones are used for law enforcement purposes (e.g., intel and chasing suspects), drones might become as small as a dragonfly, drones could (are they now?) be used for monitoring auto traffic and warning of accidents or slow downs, drones could be used for monitoring bad weather conditions, and so forth. Mark Kersten I'm rather wary of their idea when taken to it's logical conclusion in the context of the ICC: that witness participation and statements would be...
31.01.12 | |

22 Sep

government of the Seychelles to the United States to base drones there. The WP story emphasizes that the purpose is addressing piracy, which has slammed ocean-going traffic and especially tourism to the islands. These drones are for surveillance and would require discussion and permission from the Seychelles government to deploy armed drones from the island base, but clearly the possibility at least for discussion of armed drones at some point in the future is on the table, according to the Post story. The WSJ reporting by Julian Barnes (it also...
22.09.11 | |

25 Feb

new in that, but the legal basis for the United States to do so is different from the legal basis on which it is lawful to use drones and missiles from drones in a theatre of active armed conflict. The legal, normative, and moral arguments over drones, then, are not so much about hot battlefields, nor even largely about theatres of active armed conflict. The arguments are about the use of drones and targeted killing by the covert services, the CIA, beyond those confines. Understood that way, this is about...
25.02.10 | |

30 Dec

drone strikes are not intentional.” Wittes and O’Neill obviously have a point. No one can seriously believe that the U.S. wants to kill children with drones; the most that can be said is that the U.S. is willing to accept the possibility, if not inevitability, of such collateral damage, because it believes drones strikes are militarily necessary in the conflict with al-Qaeda. That is a distinction with a difference: it is indeed morally worse to kill someone because you want them to die than to kill someone without desiring their...
30.12.12 | |

28 Oct

evidence of the drones’ threat to bolster any attack it makes. On the other hand, is China overreacting to call those Japanese threats an “act of war”? I suppose that is technically true if one accepts that China’s drones are flying over Chinese airspace. Still, it is hard to imagine that downing a drone (where no one is hurt or killed) could have the same significance as downing a manned plane. I think Japan is trying to test China, and draw lines on matters that wouldn’t necessarily escalate into armed...
28.10.13 | |

28 May

a fine piece in Reuters last week, the conflict in Pakistan and the use of drones therein seems to be shifting, away from a focus on strategic high value attacks on leadership to something that looks much more conventional, the use of drones as just another air platform for attacking relatively low level fighters as they are grouping. And doing so against the Pakistan Taliban, in some sense as an air support arm in a new, or expanding conflict, of the US and Pakistan against the Pakistan Taliban. If that’s...
28.05.10 | |

03 Oct

...of foreign governments, and the studied silence of US allies (even as NATO, I’d add, has relied upon drones as an essential element of its Libyan air war). [T]he U.S. legal position may not satisfy the rest of the world. No other government has said publicly that it agrees with the U.S. policy or legal rationale for drones. European allies, who vigorously criticized the Bush administration for asserting the unilateral right to use force against terrorists in countries outside Afghanistan, have neither supported nor criticized reported U.S. drone strikes in...
03.10.11 | |

05 May

...it's much more simple than that. The compound was within 35km of Islamabad, and thus within the Pakistan air defense intercept zone for the national capital. The drones would have been insufficiently stealthy to get through, unlike the modified stealth choppers the SEALs used. Greg McNeal Josh, You raise an interesting issue. I did read elsewhere that drones might not have carried sufficient ordnance to do the job, as such stealth bombers were considered. (the editors cut that sentence out) But, under that scenario we would still run into the...
05.05.11 | |

20 Oct

...few years and provide a staging ground for CT targeted killing raids into Pakistan that otherwise do not have an easy launching pad. Something like the same kind of ground-level intelligence networks might be contemplated for Yemen, though it would presumably be a very difficult task. In any case, the right way to think about drones is not as drones, but instead as the deployment of intelligence-driven uses of force, whether human teams or drones, in which the drone is the last kinetic action of a long chain of mostly...
20.10.11 | |

22 May

Noticing President Obama’s big speech tomorrow at the National Defense University on US counterterrorism policy, Commentary Magazine has decided to release today my new essay, “The Case for Drones.” It will appear in the print journal in June, but has been posted with a free, open link on the website now. A couple of caveats for OJ readers, if you’re inclined to read it (close relatives of mine have declined on grounds they’ve heard me on this too much already). Commentary is a conservative magazine, and this is an argument...
22.05.13 | |

07 Feb

...legitimate DPH or combatant target -- very high, high, low? this is important with respect to contextual inquiry into reasonable necessity and proportionality under the circumstances; (2) are there alternatives (e.g., can one wait)?; are the civilians as such voluntary human shields?; and so forth. Also, yes, drones are merely platforms and it is important to consider what types of weapons are on the drones and being used. I disagree with Bobby when he states that it is routinely problematic to targets DPHs with weapons on a drone -- because...
07.02.12 | |