A number of ideas have been put forward to mediate the amount of innocent victims. Technology philosopher Christine Boshuijzen cites technologically impaired military officials as a reason for civilian deaths. Doctoral student Dieuwertje Kuijpers calls for more democratic accountability for the CIA. Artificial intelligence professor Gustzi Eiben wants to improve drones’ face recognition and tracking software. Computer scientist Arnoud Visser claims the remedy is to fully automate the whole killing process by programming drones with algorithms governing the acceptable margins of error. These changes might very well reduce innocent deaths. Drone warfare would be far more efficient. But is efficiency really the goal?

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La necessità di espandere la guerra con i droni potrebbe dar luogo a quelle innovazioni che gli specialisti invocano. Secondo loro, l’obiettivo sarebbe la riduzione delle vittime civili. Questo attenuerebbe la voglia di vendetta e rappresaglia.

L’obiettivo è nobile. La parola “nobile”, infatti, non potrebbe descrivere meglio la situazione. Nel 1139, papa Innocenzo II emise una bolla che vietava l’uso della balestra al fine di proteggere la nobiltà europea. A quei tempi, la funzione principale della nobiltà europea era di mettere una forza militare costosa e ben addestrata al servizio dei monarchi. La balestra era un’arma economica, facile da usare e molto potente. Con una settimana di addestramento, un semplice contadino poteva uccidere un cavaliere protetto da una pesante armatura. L’idea che un esercito di contadini potesse decimare forze ben più addestrate fu giudicata anti-cavalleresca. Il bando della balestra fu dunque, nel vero senso della parola, “nobile”.

Similmente, quando si trova davanti forze che adottano strategie e tattiche nuove e diverse dal solito, il potere è pronto a bollare il nemico come incivile. I gruppi di militanti, contadini nel vero senso della parola, non rispettano le teorie della guerra legittima, ritualizzata della Nato. La guerra con i droni è considerata una risposta civile che dà legittimità all’intervento americano banalizzando la natura orribile della guerra stessa. Il fatto, però, è che si continua a terrorizzare le popolazioni locali con attacchi indiscriminati. E il rimedio proposto non è la cessazione della guerra, cosa giudicata impensabile e sconveniente, ma il miglioramento della sua esecuzione.

Sono state fatte tante proposte per limitare le vittime innocenti. Christine Boshuijzen, filosofo che studia la tecnologia, cita le scarse conoscenze tecniche degli ufficiali come causa dei morti civili. Dieuwertje Kuijpers, studente di dottorato, chiede una maggiore responsabilità democratica per la Cia. Gustzi Eiben, che insegna intelligenza artificiale, vorrebbe migliorare i software di riconoscimento facciale e tracciatura dei droni. Arnoud Visser, informatico, pensa che il rimedio sarebbe l’automazione totale di tutto il processo di uccisione, ottenibile programmando i droni con algoritmi in grado di ridurre il margine di errore a livelli accettabili. Molto probabilmente, questi cambiamenti porterebbero ad una riduzione delle morti innocenti. La guerra con i droni sarebbe molto più efficiente. Ma è l’efficienza il vero obiettivo?

Pensate a quanto potrebbe crescere l’arroganza dei militari se avessero il drone perfetto. Con la possibilità di regolare minutamente le relazioni di potere regionali con attacchi di precisione, chiunque anche vagamente sospettato di intenzioni terroristiche potrebbe essere assassinato immediatamente con il tocco sterilizzante e civilizzante di un bottone. Uno sguardo vendicativo in direzione della bandiera a stelle e strisce e la possibile recluta terroristica verrebbe subito individuata e trattata come si deve. Gli algoritmi potrebbero anche decidere quali giovani sono maturi per il reclutamento tra i terroristi e ordinare la decimazione immediata di questi dati numerici.

In questa guerra dei droni, se si vuole andare nella direzione giusta, il prossimo passo è l’abolizione immediata. L’aristocrazia, le élite, combattono queste guerre a distanza contro piccoli gruppi di individui che collaborano tra loro formando reti che cambiano continuamente alleanze. Il campo d’azione di questi individui è la vendetta spicciola, la diatriba tribale, l’estremismo religioso e l’instabilità politica. La soluzione è ovviamente la fine dell’interventismo militare e l’abolizione dello stato bellico.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Their goal is noble. In fact “noble” couldn’t be a more apt descriptor. In 1139 Pope Innocent II issued a bull forbidding the use of crossbows in order to protect the position of nobility in European society. The prime function of European nobility at that time was to supply royalty with expensive and well-trained soldiers. The crossbow was a cheap, easy to use, and powerful weapon. With a week’s training a mere peasant could kill a heavily armored knight. The idea of peasant armies decimating skilled forces was deemed void of chivalry. The crossbow’s ban was, literally, “noble.”

When faced with opponents adopting new and different strategies and tactics, the powers that be are quick to declare their opponents uncivilized. Militant groups, peasants in every sense of the word, don’t comply with NATO’s chivalrous, ritualized just-war theory. Drone warfare is seen as a civilized response which legitimatizes the US’s involvement by downplaying the horrible nature of war. Yet the terrorizing of local populations through indiscriminate drone strikes continues. The proposed remedy for this horror is not to cease war — that would be unthinkable and unprofitable — but merely to improve upon its execution.

A number of ideas have been put forward to mediate the amount of innocent victims. Technology philosopher Christine Boshuijzen cites technologically impaired military officials as a reason for civilian deaths. Doctoral student Dieuwertje Kuijpers calls for more democratic accountability for the CIA. Artificial intelligence professor Gustzi Eiben wants to improve drones’ face recognition and tracking software. Computer scientist Arnoud Visser claims the remedy is to fully automate the whole killing process by programming drones with algorithms governing the acceptable margins of error. These changes might very well reduce innocent deaths. Drone warfare would be far more efficient. But is efficiency really the goal?

One can only begin to imagine how a perfect drone feeds the military’s hubris. With the imagined ability to micromanage regional power relations through precision strikes anyone even slightly suspected of terrorist aspirations could be assassinated quickly at the sterile and civilized push of a button. A vengeful glance in the direction of the star-spangled banner and subsequent terrorist recruitment would be easily spotted and dealt with too. Algorithms might even decide which youths are ripe for terrorist recruitment and allow for immediate decimation of these datapoints.

The correct next development in drone warfare is its immediate end. The aristocracy, the elites, are fighting long distance wars against small groups of individuals cooperating in networks of ever changing allegiances, petty vengeance, tribal grudges, religious extremism, and political instability. The clear solution is non-interventionism and abolition of the warfare state.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Guerra “Civilizzata” Significa Guerra Permanente.

A full exit from the area is the only ethical and practical course of action. There is no moral justification for the further killing of Afghans to prop up a local state. This is especially true of a state as corrupt as the Afghan one, but it would apply to any state. On the practical side of the equation, it isn’t safe to keep making enemies via military occupation. The U.S. government endangers countless people by doing this.

Drone strikes are particularly noxious. They allow for easy remote control killing of suspected enemies of the state anywhere in the world. There are very few obstacles placed in the way of these death machines. Radicals are preferably the ones leading the charge against these killer devices. We left-libertarians can lead the way in opposing the death and destruction created by these monsters.

In the absence of ground troops and drones, the U.S. can still maintain control through a local client regime. This proxy force can wreak plenty of death and destruction too. It is preferable to be resolute in our opposition to both forms of control or occupation; both deserve condemnation for furthering coercive power exercised against Afghans and anyone else who happens to walk into territory claimed by the Afghan state. Power will not stand down without a determined opposition. We left-libertarians can take the lead in furthering that opposition.

What are the implications of continued U.S. drone strikes for the domestic front? At home, we can expect the importation of drones as a method of control. They can be used to surveil people anywhere on Earth. Such invasions of privacy are unacceptable and represent the growth of unaccountable concentrated power. This power will be exercised against all who displease the ruling class in some way or another. The time to fight back is now.

The state’s expansive military power is a threat not only to world peace, but the lives of those in the “homeland” too. The present superpower status of the U.S. does nothing but foment empire. We know that empires wreak death and destruction on a massive scale. Let’s put an end to the U.S. one.

The map compares the drone campaigns waged by the Bush and Obama administrations. Its description contends that “Obama has ratcheted up his predecessor’s tactic of deploying unmanned aircraft into Pakistan and Yemen to kill supposed terrorists …”

In replies to that tweet, I suggested that the alleged “five to one” increase in drone attacks comes not from a difference in policy between the two administrations but from an increase in drone production and deployment capacity. In other words, if W could have conducted as many attacks, he would have.

The number of drones in service over time corroborates my analysis. As of 2009, “… the total number of military drones has soared to 5,500, from 167 in 2001.” As of this year, the US drone fleet has grown to 7000 and Pentagon officials want $5 billion from Congress to buy more.

That comes to a 130% increase, but not all of those are attack drones. I am not sure exactly which models would qualify as such, but I think we can safely assume that the Predator and Reaper models constitute the bulk of them. In 2009, the Air Force owned 195 Predators. In 2010, that number increased by 137% to 268. In 2007, the Air Force owned nine Reaper drones. In 2010, 57 Reapers. That’s roughly a six to one increase.

So, not only do we see an increase in drone capacity, but we also see an enhancement in capability, as 2011 marked the last Predator delivery and its succession by the Reaper, which can deliver more ordinance and has longer range. And I think we can safely assume that the military has come into more attack drones by now. This six to one increase in Reapers obviously exceeds the five to one increase in drone attacks under Obama, and it does so for practical reasons.

Firstly, workers with the training to operate these drones were in short supply, at least as of 2009.

Secondly, it would appear that drone attacks don’t take place without some sort of diligence in terms of target selection. Or, perhaps we can just chalk it up to a shortage of targets. The Disposition Matrix should eventually fix that.

These drones do not and cannot come into the possession of the military at the whim of any president. Large military contracts take time to fulfill and contractors rarely deliver on schedule. And that comes on top of decisions and investments made well before Obama’s inauguration.

So, we ought not to draw a conclusion pertaining to Obama’s war policies and how they compare to W’s in terms of viciousness. Rather, these administrations share a more fundamental policy of class preservation, of maintaining the status quo. The defense contractor and military elites depend on their budgets and must constantly buy and deploy new toys to perpetuate that funding, and thereby their purpose as a class.

What we have often heard before from military-first proponents, that we must devise new weapons and procure more of them in order to preempt and counter our enemies’ countermeasures, does not work for drone warfare as we currently wage it. These proponents cannot make that excuse this time around. The likes of al-Qaeda have no means to counter drones beyond employing better operational security and adhering to it more strictly. What we have is simply blatant rent-seeking behavior.

If you found my previous arithmetic somewhat tenuous, that’s okay. I never intended to establish a strong correlation between the size of the attack drone fleet and the number of attacks. Obama simply has more attack drones at his disposal as well as a more developed means of producing them than his predecessor, so what else would he do? I suppose that if he really wanted, he could either let the drones sit idle or devote them entirely to the humanitarian/rescue missions that the industry never fails to mention in its public relations material.

But relegating to either fate an attack drone, something engineered as a weapon, would make it pointless. And that is one of the greatest threats to authority, that the people should realize that its stately investments are pointless, that the emperor wears no clothes. In one of my favorite films, Cube, the characters debate over the purpose of the terrible machination in which they find themselves trapped. One of them provides a succinct and chilling answer: “Because it’s here. You have to use it or admit it’s pointless.” Sadly, I have yet to hear a more apt analysis for Obama’s escalation of drone warfare.

If only the drones were slim and rectangular with rounded corners! Then Apple would move heaven and earth to shut them down.

US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta quickly condemned the action caught on tape. Yet what shows a more callous disregard for life: What these Marines did or Panetta’s recent re-authorization of calculated drone strikes in Pakistan?

A detailed study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism finds that between 391 and 780 civilians have been killed by drone strikes since 2004, including 175 children. Drone attacks have increased under US president Barack Obama’s command, with 259 strikes since he took office. Tariq Aziz, 16 years old, was killed by a drone within 72 hours after he attended an anti-drone strike conference. His 12-year-old cousin was also killed in the October 2011 attack (“Bureau reporter meets 16-year-old three days before US drone kills him,” November 4th, 2011).

This is not “Obama cleaning up the mess Bush got us in.” This is murder as a pillar of the Obama administration’s policy. Saying that it isn’t important or that it’s okay because these people might harbor militants is saying that the lives of the villagers are not important. If they are dismembered by explosions or crushed in their own homes after a nearby blast, that’s their problem. If they are terrorized by the constant prospect of sudden death from the sky, that’s just fine.

The drone attack policy treats the lives of bystanders as unimportant compared to any risk to American lives in missions that minimize the risks of those bystanders. Or maybe Pakistani lives are just less important than the resources such missions would require. It is a devaluing of the lives of people who happen to live elsewhere. This understandably stirs hatred toward the United States and the people who live here.

Nationalism and the operation of the state devalue human life. The “others” who aren’t supposed to matter are the ones violence is projected upon. In varying degrees, people attacked by police, immigrants who disappear into detention centers, and people in the way of military power projection are subject to violence the state regards as legitimate.

The desecration of corpses is an expression of disregard for human life that is not easy to hide or spin. Maybe that is why the government is investigating the men in this video, yet threatened to shoot the messenger when WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video. The pilots who giggled about shooting into a van being used to evacuate wounded people, showing complete disregard for the children they shot, have not been punished. But the soldier who allegedly leaked the video was put in solitary confinement for 10 months and threatened with execution.

The development of massive and diverse movements against established power is promising for the future of human life, liberty, and dignity. They can call out the crimes of governments and make the political environment less friendly toward oppression. They can undermine politicians’ sources of power by dispersing state power and developing and defending better options outside the system. The status quo is killing people.