The Anatomy of the Drone Strike
Obama's drone war sparked outrage but much of the misinformation he publicly relied upon a decade ago is now becoming reality given advances in Hellfire's technology.
Roughly a year after his election in 2008, President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
Obama accepted the award in as gracious a way as may have been expected but reviews at the time were mixed and the criticism was stark. Commentators questioned the award being given almost pre-emptively – that is to say, before any meaningful peace-making had actually taken place.
It wouldn’t be long before Obama’s tenure took its shape and onlookers were introduced to what foreign policy would look like under his administration.
One facet of his take on the War on Terror included a heavy reliance on drone strikes in the middle east. This took many by surprise, and when it came to Yemen, and the American military effort there, many on the left were angered. Many also took exception to the civil rights issues at play when it came to rubbing out American citizens overseas with the powerful technology. Others lamented the great numbers of mistakes in targeting, in intelligence, and in the unintended killing of untold numbers of civilians, so-called collateral damage in military lingo.
Obama cited the increase in the technology’s adoption as a defense, but he certainly ushered in the drone strike era, let there be no doubt about that fact.
In the first year of his presidency, he executed more strikes than G.W. Bush had over the course of his entire eight-year term in office. More infuriating to many, Obama often downplayed the collateral damage and often played up the technology’s precision. In fairness, he did place safe guards and measures to limit how liberally and recklessly drones were being used in battlefields. Still, many argued that this had taken far too long.
There are obvious caveats to highlight here. Bush engaged in aggressive military action on the ground and in the air during his tenure. He oversaw the bloodiest parts of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama also did have somewhat of a point in that the technology itself was being taken up more and more during the period of transition between the Bush White House and his own.
While its true that careful thought around the implications of new technology typically lag behind its adoption, Obama’s statements at the time, and more importantly the drone war he oversaw, don’t exactly come across as evidence of reasoned or restrained use of the awesome power.
But despite Obama’s misinformation on the drone war, his claims have begun to align more with reality in the present day given changes to the state of the technology.
Late last month, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency collected a bounty dating back to September 11th, 2001, and indeed well before that sunny September day.
Just after 6 am local time in Kabul, Afghanistan, Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri, one of the 9/11 masterminds, Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man, and leader of al-Qaeda, was killed in a Reaper drone strike.
Al-Zawahiri was seated on a patio that he had tacitly become comfortable with in the upscale Kabul neighborhood where the house was located. Intelligence now supports the fact that the house was owned by a high-ranking Taliban official - a fact that surely reflects poorly on President Biden’s decision to up and leave Afghanistan just over one year ago.
Few within the popular press had much to say about this drone strike, despite the intense criticism similar strikes have come with in the past. The American appetite for revenge when it comes to 9/11 is in some ways insatiable.
This man was after all responsible in appreciable ways for the burning buildings in lower Manhattan, and for the men and women forced to jump to the hard concrete below – a final attempt to avoid the fire and smoke raging at their backs and on their bodies.
But this may not be the only reason why a media firestorm didn’t meet Biden and the CIA with respect to the operation. An important detail one cannot miss with respect to this drone strike is the technology itself and how it has changed. Previous iterations of the Hellfire missile relied upon the detonation of an explosive device. It was this form of the technology that Obama typically downplayed, highlighting the limited degree of collateral damage given how precise the homing systems were.
While much of that seems to have been nonsense at the time, the anatomy of next generation Hellfire missiles does come with some degree of control over collateral damage.
The innovation is a dual effort – fueled by the sheer momentum the missile hits its target with but also in relation to a devasting feature wherein seconds before impact the missile juts out six steel blades. There is no reliance on an explosive charge. While collateral damage will likely never be fully negated in these sorts of attacks, the exclusion of an explosive certainly makes this innovation more precise than its predecessors, and some would argue, therefore more ethically justifiable.
Many will still shy away from the drone war. Bring these felons and thugs to justice, try them before a court or tribunal, they will say. If this kind of thinking is mistaken it may because it underappreciates practical realities in wars of this kind.
As was observed in the Bin Laden raid, the targets of these strikes are not likely to take up handcuffs and walk away quietly. They have attempted to take out as many ground forces as they can during the exercise. They are very likely unafraid of death in such moments in ways that many will be unable to compute.
If that is generally true for these terrorists, and we have ample evidence to suggest it is, then technology like Reaper drones provide an out. We can safely dismantle the leadership of cancerous organizations like ISIS or al-Qaeda from an arms-length. It’s a practical solution to an impossible circumstance but one where western powers must take a side and plot a course of action.
And this is where Obama does score high grades – his focus on practical ends and meeting the moment. Obama knew the world for what it was – a beautiful but dark place. He knew that those in extremist leadership positions were hell-bent on radicalizing more followers and arming them not just with guns and swords but also with transformational ideas and dangerous ways in which to consume the world.
He knew that the kind of slick talking that made him President was not going to be a reliable tool in fighting extremists intent on flying planes into buildings at 900 kilometers per hour. The architects of these attacks were not miraculously going to shed the ideology that fueled this planning if we just minded our own business overseas. Obama’s own political decision to leave Iraq, and the subsequent rise of ISIS in the region, and what that meant for home grown terror in America and Europe, are results that simply speak for themselves.
Although he rarely if every explicitly stated it, Obama’s drone war, insofar as it was focused against extremists like al-Zawahiri, was an act of disregard aimed at those who say American interventionism in the middle east ultimately and causatively led to 9/11 or its sister atrocities.
There is no doubt room for a spirited debate on the edge cases associated with autonomous warfare. Strong intelligence and military restraint will protect the US from the ire of its detractors most when it comes to questions of civil rights or of extra-judicial killings.
At the end of the day, however, the American drone war, as it shifts in shape, and as it bobs and weaves, has an ethical place in the world. Targets like al-Zawahiri need to be dealt with in some way. There are others like him, and no doubt others will grow to replace him. But just like the impending doom of weeds in the garden, knowledge of their arrival doesn’t make planning for their demise any less logical or moral, given our love of the garden and given their will to destroy it.
Stealthier and lower cost options for targeted strikes are likely coming down the pike. Whether it’s a swarm of poison-filled nanobot flies or an even more precisely targeted drone strike, these kinds of advances should be viewed for what they are – unfortunate but necessary realities in the world in which we live. The goal should be making their use as measured, and yes ethical, as is possible.