While its original purpose was to bust up Soviet tanks in the first volleys of World War III, it has evolved into the favored technology for targeted assassinations in the global war on terror. ...
In the previous few years, the U.S. military had developed a number of “precision-guided munitions”—products of the microprocessor revolution—that could land within a few meters of a target. Wohlstetter proposed putting the munitions on Foster’s pilotless planes and using them to hit targets deep behind enemy lines—Soviet tank echelons, air bases, ports.
Nice idea but it would not have worked. Mind you, they turned out to be great for counter-insurgencies. Now that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are being ended as far as our participation is concerned, we find that the drones so useful in those campaigns aren't useful in high-intensity conventional combat.
The reason the drones worked in counter-insurgency is that they combined persistent surveillance with precision and low-yield explosives. We could identify and kill targets without less chance of collateral damage either from killing a civilian instead of an actual target or also killing nearby non-targets. And the enemy lacked the ability to shoot them down.
In a conventional war, long-range missiles and strike missions with conventional aircraft (and the secret F-117 which was actually a light bomber) are far more likely to survive to launch weapons at deep targets than sputtering drones that every anti-aircraft weapon could shoot at--and the Soviets had lots of automatic weapons suitable for that mission. I'm relieved we never had to rely on armed drones to stop a Soviet armored invasion of West Germany. And we certainly won't be using slow drones against any other conventional foe with any expectation that they'd survive use.
Mind you, I've been of two minds about the drone campaign. I don't find them uniquely awful weapons, so they should be used like any other weapon to achieve our objectives. But I also worried early on that their use might not achieve enough to make up for provoking anger at air strikes in Pakistan.
I've been pleasantly surprised that a backlash has taken so long to develop. But if it is developing (and isn't just Taliban information operations), we should consider restraining their use since using the weapon is a means and not an end. Petraeus was absolutely right when he wrote:
Retired general David Petraeus, in his 2006 U.S. Army field manual on counterinsurgency, made a similar point: “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to the recruitment of 50 more insurgents.”
Even so, as Petraeus noted, sometimes a commander has to fire the weapon regardless of the possible backlash; sometimes the target is too important, the threat too dangerous, to pass by.
If using drones to kill is ineffective--or worse, counter-productive--it's time to put them away. If I trusted the administration more on matters of national defense, it would be easier to believe we've reached that tipping point. As it is, I'll always wonder if we are simply responding to left-wing drivel about how evil drones are.
Oh, and don't send them against conventional ground units, of course.
