Leadership Actions On Drones Put Lives At Risk And Undermine U.S. Security

Exactly 21 years ago today U.S. military commanders first employed a weapon off a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA)/drone in combat—Predator MQ-1 tail number 3034, callsign Wildfire 34. Perhaps the Biden administration saw a certain poetic justice in choosing today to implement a new classified policy institutionalizing strict limits on counterterrorism drone strikes out of warzones.

As an air commander in multiple wars, including that opening night of the war in Afghanistan, I can attest there is nothing poetic or just about this new policy. Guidance that requires President Biden to add terrorists to a list for “direct action,” as well as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s new Department of Defense (DOD) Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, appear to be aimed at driving military policy back toward a zero civilian casualty standard. Additionally, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in February of this year on drone strikes signaled the committee leadership’s intent to also limit their use. In doing so, these policies and screeds call for restrictions that far exceed the standards of international law. We know from experience that such policies will prolong conflicts, rather than end them, and that longer wars inevitably cause greater civilian pain.

Clear proof of this last point occurred in Syria and Iraq during Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR)—actions against the Islamic State—between 2014 and 2021. Conditioned by years’ worth of limited, ultimately unsuccessful, combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, American commanders took a halting, circumspect approach when fighting Islamic State forces. At the direction of top civilian leaders, they prioritized avoiding collateral damage versus rapidly defeating the enemy. The irony was that this approach put far more non-combatants in harm’s way by allowing them to fall victim to the Islamic State’s brutality for a period of years versus months. Instead of employing air operations against key targets as a campaign at the opening of OIR to collapse the Islamic State’s war-making potential, they pulled their punches and allowed enemy forces to expand their territory and enslave those under Islamic State control.

Subsequent fighting by Islamic State ground forces was wholly indiscriminate, sometimes leveling entire towns. The approach was also less than effective, with the Islamic State still existing in many regions today. It did not have to be this way, but U.S. leaders made the mistake of trying to have it both ways—”immaculate war” with no civilian losses, and victory. That is impossible and the results were clearly catastrophic for the noncombatant residents of the region.

In counterterrorism operations, allies and partners depend on airpower to rapidly provide precision and lethality. Limiting the discretion of American commanders to achieve these effects rapidly and directly is counterproductive. Drones provide an unmatched capability to survey a region in question for extended periods of time and then employ precision kinetic power at the most effective time and place. U.S. service members, trained in the laws of armed conflict, use this situational awareness to make life-or-death decisions, with due regard to avoid unwarranted civilian casualties.

Of course, perfect employment of weapons is impossible as the fog of war lingers in every battlespace, especially when adversaries use tactics like human shields, deliberate integration in civilian neighborhoods, and total abrogation of the laws of armed conflict. A key part of their strategy relies on putting civilians in harm’s way to muddy our decision-making calculus. Secretary Austin’s new plan avoids discussion of such realities, instead placing total responsibility for civilian protection almost entirely on U.S. forces. These policies risk adding layers of bureaucracy, more lawyers, and second-guessing RPA crews who have the best situational awareness in most situations. Ultimately, this plan will incentivize men and women in uniform to stay out of trouble, not defeat the enemy—just like we saw in OIR.

From a strategic perspective, these policies could have the counterproductive effect of limiting the ability of the United States to counter terrorism networks on a global scale. U.S. forces may have left Afghanistan and Iraq, but the global terrorist threat isn’t going away any time soon. If the U.S. is going to drastically restrict RPA use, then one must ask what will the alternative force projection tools look like? A division of soldiers? Special operations forces on the ground? Manned aircraft flying hundreds of miles an hour with situational awareness far below that of an RPA? Each one of these options place more U.S. forces at risk, while risking destruction far greater than that yielded by a drone strike.

The U.S. also faces far more dangerous threats in addition to non-state actors and terrorists—China and Russia at the top end of the spectrum, as well as Iran and North Korea at the next tier. They are playing to win. Their end objectives are wholly opposed to the kind of world in which we want to live, that our citizens demand, and that a peaceful free order around the world requires. Nor are they immersed in a similar introspection the U.S. is engaged in today seeking to self-limit their offensive capabilities. If our top civilian leaders decide combat operations are required to deal with these threats, then we need to focus on war-winning strategies with rapid victory as the leading objective, not the kind of gradualism exemplified by one example where during OIR it took more time to scrutinize one target to ensure no civilians would be harmed than the duration of the entire first Gulf War in Operation Desert Storm (43 days).

In the context of major regional conflict—where the magnitude of threats, rapid execution timelines and distributed and decentralized nature of combat will not allow for the studied review Austin’s report directs—his plan has the potential of negating whatever advantage RPA technologies achieve by adding centralized bureaucratic and political decision layers at every U.S. warfighting echelon.

Not only would such additional layers slow down decision cycles, but they could also act as a deterrent, steering some military members to choose not to engage rather than be denied. Even more likely, the additional approvals would act to reinforce adversaries already frequent use of human, religious and humanitarian shields to protect their forces from direct attack. That does not mean that civilian harm should not be minimized. On the contrary, it reaffirms the importance of the training all U.S. military personnel undergo to ensure that when American military forces take lethal actions, they do so legally under the laws of armed conflict.

At the end of the day, drones are tools. They are some of the most precise strike means that exist in the Department of Defense, but that does little to shield them from self-imposed restrictions limiting their application. Paradoxically, unquestioned is the complete absence of Congressional hearings about two decade’s worth of mass ground occupation and the untold collateral damage as a result.

Some of the current national security leaders have their sights set on the wrong target. They are undermining some of our most effective, prudent warfighting tools at a time when we need to be developing them further. We need to empower our men and women in uniform to win decisively when engaged in conflict. Not only do we owe them this clarity, but it vastly reduces the risks to the innocent civilians in the regions in which we fight. That means embracing technologies like RPA, and their evolution to collaborative combat aircraft that will rely on artificial intelligence and autonomy to optimize their effectiveness while furthering capabilities to minimize civilian casualties. Our leadership should embrace these capabilities, not impede them.