Two recent developments in the news cycle deserve our attention as related issues, despite that most probably aren't seeing them that way: one, the shooting of the prolific 'American sniper' Chris Kyle; two, the contestation of the legality and ethics of US drone strikes. In a single news program you can hear Kyle, a decorated Navy SEAL with 160 kills to his name (that we know about), referred to as a 'hero' numerous times, before the story shifts to how potentially awful it is for the US to use drone strikes as instruments of war.
This is a curious discrepancy in language to describe two instruments of war, both known for their deadly precision. When a human kills on the 'field of battle' (if even from the kind of distance from which snipers attack), he's a hero; when a human pilots a machine from thousands of miles away, it's an ethical and legal conundrum. But surely this isn't just a question of distance.
I have serious ethical issues with drone attacks, particularly when they strike US citizens of whichever ideological persuasion whom the government owes due process rights. I worry about what happens to the way we think about and experience the taking of life when we're able to put such distance between the killers and the killed. I also have concerns, largely out of my own ignorance of the specifics, about the ability of those engaged in drone attacks to make last-second adjustments, as a human sniper might, upon discovery that the target is not what it seemed.
One the whole, though, I understand drone attacks as just another instrument, just another extension of a much more troubling problem. The ethical and legal conundrum of drone strikes is presently centered on issues of due process rights, accuracy, and the covert nature of carrying out such acts of war not necessarily as acts of war, but as covert operations under CIA command. In other words, the 'off the books' nature of so many drone strikes rightly freaks people out; but are these drone strikes really so fundamentally different, in terms of their motivations and the processes by which they're sanctioned, than our more 'conventional' military actions, like the deployment of a sniper like Chris Kyle?
The current administration may be sending drones into Pakistan and other countries with which we're not technically at war; but weren't we doing this long before drones?
The problem, as I see it, is that the US has been operating under poorly defined parameters of war for a long time now. The decision, under the Bush administration, to invade Iraq, and to make enemies of pure abstractions such as 'terror' and 'evil' was already done on extremely shaky legal ground. These decisions already made the US enemy an amorphous and moving target, rather than a specific state, a specific nation, or even a specific organization (al-Qaeda has been a primary target, but not the only target under the broad banner of 'terrorism'). Accordingly, while we send human troops like Kyle all over the world to fight an undefined enemy, despite the grey areas that every regional expert on North Africa or the Middle East or Central Asia acknowledge are substantive and real), we shouldn't be surprised that more of our military actions have shifted over to CIA command, covert operations, and drone attacks.
This may be the inevitable 'new frontier' of modern warfare; but the question I have stands: why are we so concerned about drones when we've been doing with humans what drones do for over a decade now?
