Drones, Predators and Reapers: The Ethics of Unmanned Armed Aircraft

A MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle prepares to land after a mission in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. The Reaper has the ability to carry both precision-guided bombs and air-to-ground missiles

One aspect of modern warfare which has gained growing attention in recent years is the role of unmanned aircraft in combat situations, and their substantial part in an international trend towards remote combat.  British RAF remotely-controlled ‘Reapers’ (currently the RAF’s only armed unmanned aircraft), for instance, have used their weapons in Afghanistan 123 times in the first ten months of 2010.  Earlier this year, David Cameron promised to increase the number of RAF Reapers in Afghanistan from four to nine, at an estimated cost of £135m.  Indeed, today has seen The White House approve the use of missile-armed Predator drones to help Nato target Colonel Gaddafi’s forces in Libya – the planes are themselves flown via remote control by operators in the US.

Yet, whilst these so-called drone aircraft are not restricted in use to the military, it is their direct involvement in civilian deaths which has brought them increasingly under closer scrutiny.  For many, the idea of a military vehicle controlled remotely thousands of miles away (the Reaper is similarly operated by RAF personnel based at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, US) is deeply unsettling.

Furthermore, as Richard Norton-Taylor and Rob Evans’ recent article in The Guardian highlights, the development of armed autonomous machines raises a multitude of complex moral and legal issues.  Indeed, as the geographical and psychological distance between soldier and target widens, the difficulties over moral responsibility and justification increase.

It is with this background of growing controversy over the use of unmanned aircraft that an internal report has been released by the Ministry of Defence, entitled ‘The UK Approach to Unmanned Aircraft Systems’; drawn up last month by the ministry’s internal thinktank, the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC), based in Shrivenham, Wiltshire.  The report acknowledges the range of complex legal and ethical issues that the employment of automated drone aircraft create.  For example, as the report asks, “is a programmer guilty of a war crime if a system error leads to an illegal act?  Where is the intent required for an accident to become a crime?”.  For these reasons the report recommends that, “the UK must establish quickly a clear policy on what will constitute acceptable machine behaviour in future”.

In particular, the report acknowledges people’s concerns with the speed with which the technology is developing, and the likelihood that, as a consequence, armed systems will acquire more autonomy.  As the report notes, there is a “school of thought that suggests that for war to be moral (as opposed to just legal) it must link the killing of enemies with an element of self-sacrifice, or at least risk to oneself”, automated drones, therefore, severely weaken any initial moral justification.

However, the MoD report admits that, “there is a danger that time is running out”, asking if, in fact, “debate and development of policy [are] even still possible, or is the technological genie already out of the ethical bottle, embarking us all on an incremental and involuntary journey towards a Terminator-like reality?”.

Related articles:

Computer Simulation and the Philosophy of Science

By Eric Winsberg, University of South Florida (September 2009)

The Price of Life and Peter Singer

What is a life worth? It is difficult to understand what this question even asks. Does it ask; What kind of thing, or what amount of a certain kind of thing, could satisfactorily replace a human life? This does not clarify the original question so much as point out what it is that makes it initially so hard to grasp. That is, it is implicit in the question that it is possible that a life can be ‘worth’ something at all which, taken in the sense of a given life being replaceable by something of commensurate value, appears to be a mistaken assumption. Or is the second question just misleadingly worded? If we were to ask instead what kind of thing a life is worth giving up for, then the possible contexts in which one might be inclined to agree that the loss of a life can be justified by the certain good that it may bring about begin to come to mind.

Bacha Posh and masculine civil spheres

Last week Jenny Nordberg published a fascinating piece on the Afghan practice of Bacha Posh.  Much of Afghanistan’s civil culture is close to full-blown gender apartheid.  This creates serious trouble for families that have no sons.  Their daughters can’t attend schools, don’t have access to most jobs, can’t leave the house without a male escort, and so are unavoidably unproductive in the family.

To deal with this problem there’s a practice called Bacha Posh, by which families can effectively re-assign the gender of one of their daughters.  They can decide, one day, to start dressing up a daughter as a boy, and then everyone treats her as a boy. 

What is to be understood about war!?

In a times on- line article from today, General Sir Richard Dannat claims that Prime Minister Gordon Brown has not understood until fairly recently the significance of the war in Afghanistan. The article states that the General was critical of how the Government had handled war-related questions, like equipment-shortages and other failed forms of financial backing. As irritating as this criticism might seem, it is not as unflattering for Gordon Brown as it migth sound. I can understand that Gordon Brown cannot understand the war. Who ever really does? Theoretically, it is sensible to free Afghanistan of the Taliban. But for many people it is not really logical that so many soldiers are killed. And it is not clear why? For democracy? A greater good? A humanitarian ideal of freedom? Since the war started in 2001, the “why?” question has become manifold and more and more complicated to answer. The wikipedia definition of war is that it is a “reciprocated, armed conflict between two or more non-congruous entities, aimed at reorganizing a subjectively designed, geo-politically desired result.” A definition that probably helps neither Gordon  Brown nor us. War is not a logical behaviour. As much as war historians are trying to argue its logic. Plato’s ideal state was based on the Good. And the beautiful. Not on war and conflict. No wonder Gordon Brown does not understand the sense in war. Neither do most of us. In Antiquity or today.

Related Articles:

Are Human Rights Essentially Triggers For Intervention
By John Tasioulas, University of Oxford
(Vol. 4, December 2009)
Philosophy Compass