 Okay, good evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the next National Security College public lecture. The latest in quite a series we've been putting together since the inception of the college. By way of introduction for those who don't know, the National Security College is a joint venture between the Commonwealth and the Australian National University, working back to a range of executive, professional development programs and academic programs in conjunction with both the Commonwealth and the ANU. Part of that is a series of public outreach lectures, and that's what we're at tonight. My name is Marco Neal. I'm one of the lecturers at the National Security College. I'm currently on succumbent from the Australian Department of Defence. Just by way of admin, before we start, if there's a need to evacuate the building, it will be through the doors that you entered at the rear, out through the foyer, into the front of the building, out on the Sid Street and the Sydney and the Roundabout. Could I ask if you have any phones, blackberries, or any other similar electronic devices that you'd have switched them to solid and to return them off? From time in the war, soldiers have always wondered what is over the hill. They wanted to know what is there, what the threats are, what the train looks like, and ideally to have a bird's-eye perspective of the battlefield. And truly, since time in the war, it's probably been a soldier's dream to be able to reach out from a safe position and inflict calm upon the enemy once they do locate them on that remote, far side of the hill. An equally desirable is the ability to do this with accuracy, persistence and precision. First the development of the balloon and then the main aircraft went a long way to achieving some of these things. But even then, not without difficulties. These difficulties include amongst other things. Things as diverse as cost, persistence and survivability. But arguably, the development of unmanned drones has gone a long way to addressing many of these, notwithstanding the ongoing problem with the weather, which we still haven't been able to admit a way around. And the use of drones has come a long way in a relatively short period of time. My own military career is illustrated and I was reflecting on this the other day. When I was in Somalia in 1993, we didn't have any drones. The current CDF in the battalion commander of the first battalion probably would have quite liked to have had the abilities modern commanders have that drones offer when he was in his unit was pursuing bandits through the camel form by the province. And I move forward to my most recent deployment in Iraq where the use of drones was now persistent and pervasive and frequently lethal as a feature of that conflict and through to this day in the current ongoing operations in Afghanistan, where Australian troops now contest with regard to almost as unthinkable to operate without them. Now whilst Australian drones are not armed, Australian troops undoubtedly do gain some ancillary benefit from the use of armed drones that our allies operate in Afghanistan. But these drones and their use isn't without problems, questions with ethics, morality and legality. And to deal with that today, my colleague Christian Enamark will speak to us on the topic of predators, reapers and post-heroic war. Christian is an associate professor at the National Security College. He has honors degree in politics and law from the University of Sydney. He completed his PhD here at the Australian National University in 2006 looking at the topic of disease and security. He has taught courses on military ethics for some years and has been published in internationally peer-reviewed academic journals. Prior to joining the National Security College, he taught at the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney. And he has an article four coming later this year about drones and miscarriage issue in the journal Asian Security. Christian, I'm going to reverse the audience on the topic of predators, reapers and post-heroic war. Thanks very much Mark. Since I arrived at the college in February, my colleague Mark O'Neill has been an excellent sounding board for discussions of matters military. But I hasten to add that he's not to be blamed for anything I'll be saying tonight. I'd like to also take this opportunity to thank my colleague Ash for his organisation of tonight's seminar. Thank you all of you for coming along tonight. For the last several years, members of the US Armed Forces have been carrying out airstrikes using unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, cloakwilling known as drones. They've been doing that against targets inside Afghanistan and drones flying over Pakistan are reportedly operated by officers of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. And most recently US drones have been deployed in Yemen, Libya and Somalia. Now at the outset, let me make an important distinction between the unarmed drones that Mark mentioned which are used for surveillance and reconnaissance and armed drones that are actually used to kill an enemy directly. The latter, so-called hunter killer drones are the subject of our consideration this evening. So this seminar explores the question of whether or how the use of hunter killer drones like the Predator and the Reaper is changing the character of war. The character of war is shaped by more than just strategic, operational and technological considerations. There are also other dimensions which help us to define what war is, help us to describe how war seems to be changing. Historical, legal, ethical and social dimensions needing to be considered also. Drone technology enables risk-free killing and as such it poses a fundamental challenge to traditional notions of what it means to be a combatant and the status of war as something that's morally distinguishable from other forms of organised violence. Now throughout history, new military technologies have occasioned debate over the changing character of war, stirrups, the longbow, the crossbow, the submarine, the tank, machine gun, gunpowder generally. In the case of drones, the newness, if anything, is about the users of force rather than at least in addition to the amount of force or the means of applying it. So the longbow was outrageous not just because of its strategic power but because a peasant armed with that weapon could defeat an aristocratic knight on horseback. The advent of nuclear weapons afforded or required room for greater civilian involvement in military decision making because strategies had to be devised to avoid war as well as or rather than to win it. And now we face with a drone operator who kills without experiencing any physical risk and thus requiring none of the courage that for millennia has distinguished the warrior's profession from all others. And my main message tonight is that by focusing too much on the immediate military advantages of armed drones, we risk not affording adequate consideration to possible long-term disadvantages. We need to acknowledge the risk that the bad effects generated by risk-free drone strikes without way the good effects. So we'll be touching on some fundamental issues concerning the character of war tonight. And as citizens of a democracy this is the concern for both military professionals and civilians alike. This is of concern to Australia, the issue of hunter killer drones, along with every other country in the world. We pay close attention to shifts in the military behavior of the world's superpower, the USA. We have a close alliance with the US, the premiums we pay on our strategic insurance policy range from political and diplomatic support to military cooperation in distant lands, military activities in theaters where drones are or could be deployed. Australia has its own small-scale drone capability. What might the future hold if, when and under what circumstances, an Australian drone operator would use that drone to fire a missile and kill? Because we need to debate the operational, ethical and social issues raised before the advent of an Australian hunter killer drone and the outcome of that debate may preclude or hasten such a development. And indeed discussing this issue of hunter killer drones serves to flush out a lot of broader concerns about the relationship between civilians and military professionals. A relationship which is too often characterized by mutual misunderstanding and suspicion. So a number of themes I'll be considering tonight. First, very briefly, the rather controversial notion of post-heroic war. Secondly, I'll give you a quick survey of the state of hunter killer drone technology. And for the most part I want to linger on the drone operators themselves and their status as killers in war and ask some sociological questions about the identity and purpose of the military profession. And lastly I'll ask you to join me in speculating a little bit about the future of civil military relations, the future of unmanned war. And we can ask the question, is the rise of the hunter killer drone to be seen as an aberration or does it herald a transformation in military affairs? So first to post-heroic war. Heroic in the sense that someone, a nation that is, can be consumed by a heroic effort. A heroic effort by an entire nation motivated by the need to survive and or advance an idea. Determination, altruism on a grand scale. A nation acting in a heroic fashion as distinct from individual acts of heroism and courage by individual members of the military, which we will certainly come to later. The term post-heroic war can be traced back at least as far as the 1995 article in Foreign Affairs Magazine by the American military historian Edward Lookwack. In past wars that were fought for great grand purposes there was an implied willingness to accept a large number of casualties. And Lookwack explains that that sort of fitted in well with the demographic situation of pre-industrial and early industrial societies where infectious disease was a much greater element of day-to-day life. And people knew that they would lose a certain number of or could lose a certain number of their children. They had large families. The notion of losing a youngster in combat however tragic was back then somehow fundamentally less unacceptable than it is for today's American and Australian families. So children form a greater part, they do form a greater part of the family's emotional economy as Edward Lookwack would put it today. But over the course of the 20th century which eventually saw the ending of conscription in the West there grew a greater and greater gulf as between military values and civilian values. Death was being banished as the overriding preoccupation of society, infant mortality declined, life expectancy increased, peace became a settled expectation of civilian populations. And this idea of martial sacrifice and the idea of a noble death in combat became for ordinary civilians an extreme destiny, something implausible and exotic so unfamiliar was it all to we civilians. And so today the concept of post-heroic war implies an ideal of low rates of mortality amongst friendly military personnel and possibly even civilian population and enemy personnel as well. And proponents of post-heroic war are very attracted to the possibilities of great accuracy and precision that are afforded by military technologies and in particular the promise of air power. And throughout the 1990s air power seemed uniquely suited to the kind of post-heroic wars in which the United States was said to be involved. Wars for limited aims fought with partial means for marginal interests. The US military historian Elliot Cohen said of air power it is an unusually seductive form of military strength in part because like modern courtship it appears to offer gratification without commitment. And America's obscenious appetite for post-heroic warfare traces its origins back to the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the trauma institutionally for military professions of the Vietnam War arguably endures at least in part to this day. Various authors have identified symptoms of a US preference for post-heroic war such as the rapid withdrawal of US troops from Somalia in the mid 1990s after the Black Hawk Down Disaster and an apparent unwillingness by the United States to send ground troops to stop genocides in the Balkans and were wonder also in the mid 1990s. The zenith of post-heroic warfare arguably was the 1999 triumph by NATO in the skies over Kosovo. And so determined with the NATO Kosovo campaign command is not to lose any NATO pilots bomber aircraft had to remain above 15,000 feet and thus beyond the range of Serbian anti-aircraft fire. And this produced a raft of literature about post-heroic war riskless warfare and the the great age of air power. But was this to endure? Does this notion of post-heroic warfare survive the advent of the war on terror which has been described by so many of our political leaders as a truly heroic effort? And following the 11th of September 2001 attacks it was certainly not the case that the United States relied only on limited use of air power. It used the full spectrum of its military capabilities. And for those of us in the 21st century who have grown accustomed to peace the human and economic costs of the war on terror must seem large possibly even heroic in scale. Meanwhile in Pakistan a very different kind of war is being waged if it can be called a war at all. It's a drone war large scale and yet supposedly secret in which one side can apparently kill with impunity. As the United States and its allies tire of the heroic effort of prosecuting and funding their global war on terror are we seeing a return to post-heroic warfare? We will come to that question later on. So just a few words now about hunter-killer drones themselves. In his 1989 book The Rise of American Airpower Michael Sherry observed that the airplane was never viewed solely as a weapon but also is the instrument of quote a whole new dimension in human activity, uniquely capable of transforming man's sense of time and space, transcending geography, releasing humankind from its biological limits. Historically however military uses of aircraft have generally not seen humans released from the physical requirements of on-board control. Piloting an aircraft is usually meant being present therein and that presence has often entailed a high degree of risk. So among combatants in the Allied forces during World War II for example bomber crews generally had the highest casualty rates. Also those in an unarmed aircraft flying for a non-lethal purpose say for reconnaissance purposes they also experience risks such as enemy fire or mechanical failure. So to take Sherry's observation further it would seem that a true and complete cementing of so-called biological limits is to use aircraft in a way that does not endanger the user. And indeed that idea has its origins at least in the 1950s where aircraft that carried sensors and other intelligence gathering equipment became increasingly unmanned controlled by operators situated safely on the ground. These early drones were stingless unarmed like their male Honubi namesake they had a limited range they could only stay up for a short period of time and they were highly prone to communications and control problems. An early version of the Predator made its debut in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s gathering information for US military commanders on serve air defences refugee flows and so on. The use of drones for information gathering did spare pilots from the risks associated with this activity but at that time manned aircraft were still the dominant means of exercising air power. In 1995 the United States flew 500 manned missions over five days to rescue Captain Scott O'Grady after his F-16 fighter jet was brought down over Bosnia and so not only was the use of manned aircraft in that particular conflict risky it was also expensive. Now eventually just as the pilots of early aircraft decided it would be a good idea to drop a grenade out of their open cockpit eventually their temptation to arm the Predator proved too strong and so the Predator evolved into a hunter killer drone and since 2002 the Predator has been equipped with two hellfire missiles that can strike at a range of up to eight kilometers. The newer faster and larger Reaper aircraft which was the first purpose built hunter killer drone can carry 14 hellfire missiles as well as laser guided bombs. Both these aircraft are flying over Pakistan. Now they're able to do so because Pakistan and Afghanistan are benign air environments but in that space they do importantly provide US and allied personnel with a constant eye in the sky around the clock staying off for hours at a time and as the quadrennial defense review report noted in February of last year unmanned aircraft systems such as the Predator and Reaper have proven to be invaluable for monitoring activities in contested areas enhancing situational awareness protecting our forces and assisting in targeting enemy fighters. Now that latter capability is what we're going to be focusing on this evening and it was highlighted by US President Barack Obama himself in a speech to the White House correspondent's dinner on the 1st of May last year. During his speech he purported to protect his young daughters from the amorous attentions of some young male pop stars who were in attendance and so the president joked quote the Jonas brothers are here they're out there somewhere Sasha and Malia are huge fans but boys don't get any ideas I have two words for you predator drones you will never see it coming this was certainly the case on the evening of the 5th of august 2009 when a drone strike killed by Tula Mesud the leader of the Pakistani Taliban allegedly also the mastermind of the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto now on that evening 5th of august 2009 Mesud lay on the rooftop in his father-in-law's house in a tiny village in the northwestern area of Pakistan known as South Waziristan it was close to the border with Afghanistan with him on the rooftop where his wife his father-in-law Mesud was a diabetic he was at the time receiving a leg massage as well as an intravenous drip to treat dehydration and stomach problems but these problems would prove as nought to compare to what would come next suddenly the house was engulfed in famous two coal-fired missiles slammed into it Mesud was killed instantly along with 11 other people among his wife father-in-law mother-in-law and seven bodyguards the missiles that killed Mesud and those around him had been fired from a reaper hovering undetected about two miles above the house the missiles had probably been assembled and loaded onto the drone at a hidden airbase in southern Pakistan possibly by employees of XE services a US-based security company formerly known as Blackwater the repo which is pictured here is manufactured by the California form from General Atomics it's 11 meters long wingspan 20 meters weighs a little over four and a half tons and can fly at a maximum altitude of 50,000 feet for 30 hours there's a round mounting under the nose of the drone known as the ball and in that there are two television cameras one for seeing during the day and an infrared camera as well there is also inside the ball aid laser a sorry a radar device that facilitates viewing through clouds and smoke and dust and crucially a laser designated to lock onto any targets now importantly for us the decision to kill by two minutes soon and the pressing of a button to make it happen reportedly took place 11,000 kilometers away at the Langley Virginia headquarters of the CIO and the person who via satellite communications remotely operated the drone and fired the missiles is probably either a CIA officer or a former member of the US military under contract to the agency he or she would have been sitting at a console with a keyboard a steering device resembling a joystick and three television screens one of the screens would have live feed from the drone's camera another screen would have technical data on how the drone was going and also a third screen which would have a GPS generated navigation map and for hours or possibly possibly even days prior to that missile strike on the soot the operator the drone operator and others at Langley would have been watching live close-up video footage of that house in south of zirastan now that drone strike on the 5th of august 2009 was actually the last of 15 that has specifically targeted me soot but there is no data on how many deaths if any resulted from the previous 14 attempts on his life what's curious about the drone more of course is that officially it's a secret and yet it's so large scale and so well reported and US intelligence officials are regularly quoted in the media drones are also being used in Libya Yemen and Somalia but those last three countries only came online in the drone war this year alone in early June of 2011 just a couple months ago the Australian Army Lieutenant Marcus Case who was a 27 year old who had been operating a Heron drone in Afghanistan out of Kandahar he died when a CH-47 Chinook helicopter he was traveling in crashed it's important to recall and remember that in the ordinary course of his duties as a drone operator Lieutenant Case would not have left the ground so let's now turn to consideration of what it's like to be a drone operator and how a drone operator sits as against other kinds of military professional in the United States there has been a switch and as of 2009 the US Department of Defense is training more drone operators than fighter pilots how are we and how are our enemies to regard this new generation of military aviators who experience no risk and of us not required to exercise courage but do our opinions about such matters even count a few words about where this might be seen in terms of the values of the military profession as a whole I guess it is because the military serves because they strive to embody noble ideals ideals that the civilian population either doesn't know or care about it's because of these things that our warriors are admired and respected we cheer them when they march through the streets we honor the veterans we mourn our military professionals when they die in battle and there are certain conceptual elements that are common to military cultures across time and space across cultures desirable qualities in warriors and these include physical courage endurance strength and skill and crucially honor and a warrior culture is one that celebrates martial training and skill national service and above all demonstrated valor in combat and so courage is a basic concept underpinning military cultures across all services in the United States and across all militaries around the world back in the era era of heroic war Theodore Roosevelt wished for his own sons to be tested in battle in the great war and he confided to a friend that he hopes that his sons might even be wounded or lose a limb so that that would be an enduring mark of their valor it remains the case today that values such as honor duty courage and self-sacrifice are the basis of a covenant that binds soldiers together and also binds them to the society that they serve the British political scientist Christopher Coker has remarked that war like religion defines our humanity because it demands of some that they surrender the instinct of self-preservation in the present to make life better for us in the future indeed at the funeral service of Australian commando sergeant Todd Langley last month his commanding officer said that Langley quote gave up his tomorrows for our today's unequivocally and so let's turn to this issue of courage in the face of risk Aristotle wrote that the courageous man is one who is fearless in the face of an honorable death or of some sudden threat of death and that it is in war that such situations chiefly occur for Napoleon courage was the second most important quality of a soldier after endurance and ability to put up with hardship that great student of the polyonic warfare Prussian Major General Calvin Klasich wrote of boldness this noble impulse with which the human soul raises itself above the most formidable dangers is to be regarded as an active principle peculiarly belonging to war and in all of this lies that crucial position of courage in the ethos of the military profession John Stuart Mill argued that a regime of freedom requires men and women who value freedom enough to risk their lives in its defense could he have envisaged that the defenders of freedom would be able to do this without assuming physical risk because arguably risk taking is the defining and indispensable characteristic of the warrior ethos in no other profession is killing and being killed integral to the purpose of that profession arguably also it is self-defense within conditions of reciprocal risk which is the indispensable foundation for the internal morality of warfare warfare is something distinguishable from other forms of organized violence and so this is why in 2002 the philosopher Paul Kahn wrote about the so-called paradox of riskless war because he argued that without the imposition of mutual risk warfare is not war at all the premeditated organized killing that takes place must be called something else so we have this issue about mutual self-defense how important is it that that be a factor the military historian martin van crevel wrote that war does not begin when some people kill others instead it starts at the point where they themselves risk being killed in return and numerous other authors have written about what is essentially a contract that a soldier has a license to kill granted in exchange for being willing to be killed and it's on this point that we need crucially to distinguish between the reduction of risk and the elimination of risk and could it be that if you remove a warrior completely from risk and fear via for example an unmanned system you in so doing create for the very first time a complete and perfect break in that ancient connection between war and risk that defines warriors soldiers sadists and so now politician and then author Michael Magnariev wrote about the 1999 Kosovo campaign which achieved its objectives without a single NATO combat fatality that this was an unprecedented achievement which had in his view transformed the expectations that govern the morality of war but he observed that one side had killed with impunity and he complained that a war ceases to be just when it becomes a turkey shoe that's using his words so one question we might pose ourselves is that if drone operators are combatants and we must regard them as combatants in order to allow them to participate in armed conflict at all they would be considered legitimate targets for retaliation and that's one thing but realistically is their physical safety in doubt in august of 2009 a CBS 60 minutes documentary went out to a US Air Force Base in Nevada Creech Air Force Base about 40 minutes drive from Las Vegas and during that documentary there were two drone operators interviewed Lieutenant Colonel Chris Goff and Colonel Chris Chambliss I know that because I saw their name tags displayed and I also saw as I watched that documentary that these particular drone operators were filmed in their homes you could see the the the street number of their house and you had to ask yourself how does this compare for example to the way that our SAS personnel constantly having their faces pixelated in any footage and it seems to suggest that drone operators who consent to be filled at home are so confident that they are not going to be subject to retaliation it seems to suggest that they themselves feel as if they do not experience any risk in a warlike sense but they are drone operators who fly predators and reapers armed with hellfire missiles are they engaging in something that we might call non-courageous killing and observers and participants in war have at various times expressed great distaste at this notion of non-courageous killing and before I go into that an interesting side argument about contrasting attitudes between war and hunting in the United States. In 2004 an entrepreneur in Texas launched a website www.liveshot.com and this website allowed fee paying users to log in and then aim and fire a real gun at real targets using the mouse. The website ultimately was intended as a so-called teleoperated hunting business and the intention was that live animals could be shot online by quote physically impaired hunting enthusiasts who could not go into the woods themselves. But before this got up and running 11 American states including Texas legislated against online hunting and they insisted that a hunter had to be physically present when hunting and those who were lobbying against lobbying for a ban on online hunting included both animal lovers and animal shooters as it were. One of the latter was a Wisconsin congressman who said in 2005 quote to me hunting is about being out in nature and becoming one with nature unquote. You had to be out there for it to be counted as for it to be counted as a sporting activity as it were. Another warrior who has reflected on the comparison between war and hunting is a former Cyper Frank Percy Crozier. In 1937 in a memoir entitled The Men I Killed he described how he enjoyed hunting big game in Africa but he eventually grew to balk at the bloodthirstiness of tavern and humans. He said quote the game was dirty I had to give it up. The cool calculated murder of defenseless men was diabolical. He admitted to quote that sense of guilt that conscience-stricken feeling of killing a man who at the moment was not menacing you and who was brought most within handshaking distance by the telescopic sites unquote. In 1920 British air power was used against insurgents in Iraq. One pilot who was there at the time remarked quote we can wipe out a third of the inhabitants of the village in 45 minutes killed by four or five machines which offer them the village inhabitants no real target no real opportunity to be glorious warriors. And Christopher Coca who recounted this tale observed those British pilots that there was little glory in bombing unarmed defenseless civilians. Just two weeks after the attack to the 11th September 2001 in the United States the author Susan Sontag wrote very controversially in the New Yorker magazine quote if the word cowardly is to be used it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation high in the sky than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others unquote. More recently critics of hunter killer drones have suggested that unmanned systems because they spare operators from danger and sacrifice are creating what has been described as a virtuous war requiring neither courage nor heroism to use the words of Brian Burridge a former British air chief marshal in Iraq. In his 2009 book wired for war Peter Singer quote say United States Air Force veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan explained that operating a drone is quote like being a pilot for nerds. Where is the sense of adventure the sense of danger. Let's put it this way I don't think they're going to make any movies about guys who fly predators unquote. In the same year in response to a soaring demand no pun intended for drone operators the US Air Force began a training program for officers with no aviation background or any training in flying to operate the predator and the Air Force chief at the time Norton Schwartz decreed that the graduates of this training program should be called pilots it was an issue whether or not they should be and at their graduation ceremony he pinned a specially designed set of wings on each trainee's uniform and these wings featured lightning bolts to signify the satellite signals that connect drones to their operators. And last year a US Air Force Colonel Luther Turner told the Washington Post quote there is no valor in flying a remotely piloted aircraft I get it unquote. And yet as of April 2007 US drone operators are eligible to be awarded the air medal and the distinguished flying cross. The distinguished flying cross in particular is a prestigious decoration that ranks just behind the silver star as a valor decoration it is awarded for heroism or extraordinary achievement and this is to the say the least controversial in certain sections of the US Air Force. But perhaps old notions of courage and valor are either evolving or disappearing according to one US drone operator and squadron commander Colonel Eric Matthewson who told the Washington Post last year quote valor to me is not risking your life valor is doing what is right valor is about your motivations and the ends you seek it is doing what is right for the right reasons that to me is valor unquote. Now Aristotle, Napoleon and Klausowitz would probably not agree with such a definition but does it matter that a drone operator's faraway enemy has a perhaps more traditional old fashioned view of that virtue of courage because the word drone has become a colloquial word in or do in Pakistan. It's used in pop lyrics accusing the United States of fighting without honor. There's a sense that although the hunter killer drones might be deployed so as to create and instill fear in America's enemies the population of Pakistan itself some sections thereof are regarding hunter killer drones as a sign rather that Americans are fearful and there's a song of protest in Pakistan's cities which purports to taunt the world's super power for sending robots to do a man's job and lines of that song include America's heartless terrorism killing people like insects but honor doesn't fear power. This allegation of killing people like insects sounds a little bit like horribly but interestingly at our conference in Washington in April of this year former CIA director Michael Hayden described how when there was a predator circling overhead those on the ground involved in ordering the use of its missiles from thousands of miles away could call up computer maps that show the potential effects of each weapon. Before any of the health fire missiles are launched he said the backup team asks for the so-called bug splat of the attack which is basically a readout of the impact that the missile would have on its ground target and so we see surrounding this technology a vast gulf as between the United States and its allies and local populations in these far-flung parts of the world far from the U.S. mainland a vast gulf physical and cultural and where vast distances are living room for disrespect mutual disrespect so Colonel Matthewson again the our drone squadron our drone squadron commander at Creech Air Force Base again told Washington Post last year that he had a three-word mission statement for his unit which was quote kill expletive heads or KFH for sure. The notion that one can dazzle an enemy into submission through the use of higher technology is somewhat problematic especially if the message you are trying to send is not received in any way near the same form by that particular audience could it be that in these parts of the world it is regarded dishonorable to kill an enemy in a manner that involves no risk to the killer are these drone operator Americans unlike their brothers on the ground too afraid to fight because there is a vastly different understanding of war in play here in this war on terror but as between the United States in one part of the world and Pakistanis and Afghanistan another there are hugely different understandings in the role of the warrior what it means to engage in sacrifice on the one side you have the use of war in an instrumental fashion as a means to an end and then the other side perhaps less touched by modernity there are those who see war as a great metaphysical contest and placing a greater and different meaning on the very act of dying for a cause and it's those local understandings and sensibilities that are so important as we engage in a form of warfare but also a form of social transformation known as counter insurgency in his 2009 book Confunding the Hydra Mark O'Neill emphasized the importance in counter insurgency of rectitude and acting morally with integrity and justice remarking that insurgents and their supporters make decisions influenced by their hearts as well as their heads Mark argued that counter insurgents lacking rectitude will struggle to get others to accept whatever is morally ambivalent about their position or deeds and likewise in May of this year the UK ministry of defense issued a joint doctorate note which included the statement quote the counter insurgency operation must be perceived as ethically sound above reproach and the ill-considered use of armed unmanned aircraft offers an adversary a potent propaganda weapon this enables the insurgent to cast himself in the role of underdog and the west as a cowardly bully that is unwilling to risk his own troops but is happy to kill remotely report went on to conclude that the use of armed unmanned systems in such a war of ideas needed to be carefully managed so as those in Pakistan and Afghanistan contemplate differing notions of courage such a notion is also undergoing transformation within the US military itself unmanned warfare is intruding into military doctrine drone operators are increasingly encroaching on the space of those swaggering pilots who have long dominated military aviation those magnificent men in their flying machines when Frank Barrett researched the construction of masculinity in the US navy in the mid 1990s he found that aviators had the highest status amongst naval officers he said that they came closest to embodying the warrior ideal representing aggressiveness technical mastery of complex machinery courage and autonomy and each of the pilots that he interviewed confirmed quote that his life is marked by a degree of recklessness and wildness behavior attributed to the danger associated with flying and one pilot remarked quote each time we go out we never know if we'll be back so we live for today we do tend to be wild and take more risks it's a mortality thing Peter Singer interviewed a former defense department analyst who joked that no fighter pilot is ever going to pick up a girl at a bar by saying that he flayed that he flew a UAV and right or wrongly it is the case that masculine identity is a powerful characteristic of military culture to this day and we might recall that great icon of western military mythology Shakespeare's Henry V on the eve of the Battle of Ashing Corps and vastly outnumbered by the French the English King gathered his men around him and he said we few we happy few we band of brothers for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother be he ne'er so vile this day shall gentle his condition and gentlemen in England now a bed shall think themselves a curse they were not here and hold their manhoods cheap whilst any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin as that so from the perspective of those military professionals who are in the field does a drone operator fight with us and shed his blood or is he a gentleman in bed or perhaps neither there's 15th century distinction between going to war and not going to war might sometimes no longer apply Achilles went to Troy the Anzacs went to Gallipoli the SAS goes to Afghanistan but a drone operator's mind alone goes to war while his body remains at home albeit encased in a flight suit he manifests as a disembodied warrior and this is paradoxical because the warrior's body is arguably the indispensable pillar of his unique moral status if drone operators experience no risk why should we as civilians spare a thought for their safety and why indeed should we care about the killing that they do in our name after all it is not our father's brothers and sons who are dying and on this point we come full circle and return to that controversial notion of post-heroic war as we contemplate the possible future of disembodied warriors disengaged civilians Robert E. Lee the Confederate general in the US Civil War said at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862 it is well that war is so terrible otherwise we should grow too fond of it and we often find that it's because their blood is personally invested that soldiers and the relatives of soldiers are the ones that are most vociferous in arguing against ill-considered foreign military adventures but where the risks to one own to one's own forces are less could it be that there is less reason to hesitate before waging war in NATO's 1999 Kosovo campaign precise air power coupled with the impunity given by stealth bombers and standoff weapons capability this all served to dramatically lower the threshold for the use of force and indeed the official US Air Force report on that intervention included the statement quote the air war over Serbia offered airmen a glimpse of the future one in which political leaders turned quickly to the choice of aerospace power to secure the alliance of security interests without resorting to more costly and hazardous alternatives that would have exposed more men and material to the ravages of war now lowering the threshold for deciding to use force is not necessarily a bad thing we might say if your cause is just let us hasten in its pursuit but there needs also to be proper authority for using force a democratic mandate if you will because if the situation escalates the home population could be imperiled and so what is remarkable about the use of hunter killer drones is how little public discussion there has been certainly in Australia certainly in the United States and yet we are witnessing possibly the rise of a radically new a geographically unbounded use of lethal force by states and some have raised a concern that because drone warfare is risk-free this works to isolate the American people from the military actions that are taken in their name and that this undermines the political democratic checks on endless war and so as Michael Ignati have recalled in terms of the Kosovo intervention in virtual war as he called it citizens are divested of their power to give consent now you'll recall that in April of this year Barack Obama authorized the use of armed drones over Libya and are we perhaps seeing another little glimpse of virtual war and asking questions about consent and authority because in June of this year the White House argued that Congress did not need to authorize US military operations in Libya because quote US operations do not enable sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces nor do they involve the presence of US ground troops US casualties or a serious threat thereof or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors unquote if it's drones alone going in Congress does not need to authorize this military action and the risk of course that is that if war becomes more and more unreal to the citizens and modern democracies will they care enough will we care enough to ask for restraint and to exert greater control over the violence that is exercised in our name and where it is easier to use force there is greatest scope for using force for purposes and in ways that are essentially aggressive rather than defensive and so I'll bring this to a close you might recall two characters from Joseph Heller's 1955 novel catch 22 airmen in a fictitious American bomber squadron base in Italy in 1944 one of the characters named or and the other Yssyrian and this is a passage from that book there was only one catch and that was catch 22 that specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind all was crazy and could be grounded all he had to do was ask and as soon as he did he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions all would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't but if he was sane he had to fly them Yssyrian was deeply moved by the absolute simplicity of the cause of catch 22 and let our respectful whistle that's uncorrect so by removing the pilot from any danger to hunter killer drones now render catch 22 obsolete because operating a drone arguably requires neither craziness nor courage or could it be that there is now a new catch removing oneself from risk completely is arguably the most sane thing a warrior could want and yet only by experiencing at least a scintilla of risk can a killer claim to be acting in a warlike manner if drone operators kill without exercising courage can we admire them if we can't does it matter but i think we do need to admire our military professionals for their safe as well as ours such admiration is an important foundation for recruitment retention morale and more generally for a sense of professional and national self-worth but how relevant and important is courage likely to be into the future and is the non courageous use of hunter killer drones an aberration or a transformation in military affairs and we might envisage two alternative futures one is that this is merely all an aberration and that this form of air power like so many forms of air power in the past will prove disappointing recall that in his 1921 book the command of the air Italian general Giulio Dui argued that the invention of airplanes had rendered obsolete all other parts of the military remember also that there is huge opposition within air forces to the increasing presence of drone operators opposition led by the fighter and bomber pilots and they are forced to be reckoned with and most importantly could this all be an aberration if we are looking at a future characterized not by more Kosovo's but by more afghanistan's where counterinsurgency a slow risky long-term grind is the pathway to success rather than limited use of air power now we could leave it at that but we must note that the U.S. military is anticipating a large increase in its use of hunter killer drones Admiral Mike Mullen then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2009 said that he believed that the F-35 joint strike fighter would be the last manned aircraft in June of this year the U.S. Congressional Budget Office reported that the U.S. Department of Defense planned to increase its drone inventory by 35 percent over the next 10 years spending 40 billion dollars over that period and the bulk of its new acquisitions would not be a small reconnaissance drones but large hunter killer drones like the predator the reaper and the reaper's successor the jet-powered Avenger buying at least an extra 288 reapers in the next 10 years and so do we then start to contemplate a drone arms race an Iranian drone a Chinese drone drone against drone each competing with greater and greater levels of sophistication and in that scenario we need to be mindful that there is and will continue to be a technological imperative to reduce and perhaps eliminate human control because the human being unable to think decide and act quickly enough is becoming the weakest link in our highly networked military systems the human brain is the cognitive weak link human flesh needs to be accommodated and protected in the engineering construction and use of aircraft and other platforms and without a pilot drones can fly very high altitude without pressurization temper control requirements there's more payload capacity through the space that's saved they can stay up in the air longer and so on and so forth and crucially currently drones are highly dependent on satellite communications and vulnerable to any break in those communications and so the system which can operate in the absence of communications links will have an obvious military advantage and in that we contemplate the possibility of autonomous drones will we withstand technological pressure and hold fast to the notion that war is necessarily and inescapably a human affair or will we come to rely on autonomous drones that are not or need not be enslaved to satellite communications autonomous drones that can decide for themselves whether when and who to kill it is perhaps not too early to start contemplating such a world a world of predators reapers and post-human war I'm sure you'll have grabbed me but Christians talks and I was wide-ranging and lost drone warfare while being risk-free I suspect some of the questions these bad entertain may not be we have 20 minutes for our question and answer session but we do like to finish our lectures here on time at the National Security College so I would ask that if you have a question you identify yourself in any obvious organisation or affiliation you might have please speak clearly because like all of our presentations we are recording this for subsequent podcasts and I would ask that you ask a question succinctly rather than make a party political speech so we can get through the number of questions and we'll end up with that sir up above and Pedro Villarra and Dan Basta of Argentina but I'm here just on my own interest on this you mentioned all this the fight in the particular situation that you have in cases like Afghanistan where you are attacking terrorists or civilians associated with terrorists if you have this asymmetry that the drones create would not that justify or make these people go and try to exercise their response to targets which may be attainable the drones are not and that and that's increasing terrorism in fact because it's the only place where they can actually hit the ones that are hitting them thank you excellency a good point and arguably the right to self-defense is inalienable and that the harder someone tries to reduce your ability to exercise that right the harder you are entitled to try and get at the side attacking you and an interesting point to raise in response to your question is if a member of a terrorist organization if we want to call that organization terrorists if such a person attacked a drone operator in his Las Vegas suburban home would we regard that as an act of war in the exercise of self-defense or would we regard that as murderous or terroristic in nature and i think the unfortunate conclusion is that only by regarding that as warlike rather than murderous can we maintain the notion that drone operators really are combatants entitled to participate in warfare so that's a test case for exactly how seriously we take combatant status and i think it's the ultimate test of whether or not we're willing to acknowledge a right to self-defense even in circumstances of extreme asymmetry thanks question for a very similar lighting presentation accused with visiting fellow university college effort lots of questions but i only asked one it seems to me there is an inherent and deep tension from the military perspective with regard to drones because it's rather dirty work it's not terribly honorable not terribly glorious as you say it's killing sort of international murder perhaps from a military perspective it's fine to let some other organization do it some other organization like the CIA or anyone else non-uniform on the other hand the strong arguments for keeping it in any form of hands one of course is to keep your role particularly the air forces suggested that they may be running out of command aircraft but there's a more fundamental point too what one is if you've only used violence for political purposes as a political instrument it should be kept in the hands of one organization that you can control as a government also it's kept in the hands of an organization that is trained and imbued with the law of armed conflict and we didn't say a great deal about that it's interesting to speculate whether there was a choice in getting rid of the one whether that should be done by a drone or by the SEALs by uniform people and I would love to know about that debate my question is do you see this as an inherent tentative and can it ever be resolved? thank you Hugh and I won't even touch the bit larger issue but your point about international humanitarian law is is well made and indeed one of the principal concerns that lawyers have about the reported use of CIA officers in running the drone war over Pakistan is there is uncertainty as to whether those drone operators in the CIA are trained in the laws of war in the same way that the US military is and you can have a greater degree of confidence if you know that someone in uniform is operating the drone but at least they know the meaning of discrimination and proportionality and minimizing harm and and so on and so forth and the great dilemma for the United States is that it's wanting to reassure people that it is using force discriminately in in proportionate fashion over Pakistan but the government won't acknowledge the reported reality that the CIA is engaged in those activities and so there's an imperative to somehow let it be known that yes the CIA is properly comprehensively trained in international humanitarian law and then there's the question which goes to the tension point that you raise if you've got a situation where Air Force and Air Force Airmen trained in IHL is operating a drone and a CIA contractor or employee trained in IHL is operating a drone and that you can have confidence that that force will be used ethically under those circumstances why bother distinguishing between those two kinds of operator and that's something that makes the military profession nervous in some circles because wearing a uniform does an automata to them maybe the tension will be resolved in an unsatisfactory fashion by the emergence of a new quasi-combatant a CIA combatant but it's highly controversial and some law professors in the United States have referred to CIA drone operators as unlawful combatants I don't think there's a quick answer to your question. Well we've heard a lot about the American perspective on that I'd like to invite one of our American friends Paula Shinko to pose a question. Thank you very much for your presentation pretty provocative and freshly hear different views especially because it redeployed from Afghanistan working through these systems I'm curious how your argument of post-heroic war reconciles four fundamental tensions or paradoxes that I see and I'll call these the four C's the first one is comparative advantage some of the philosophers and thinkers you talked about in the 15th century understood the principles of war and the UAB provides surprise maneuver and things of this nature the second one would be confusing or confusing the moral legal authority that a commander has to actually authorize a deployment of munition with the drone operator himself who does not their firm would might be conflating that we're actually taking drone operators who represent 0.01 or 0.001 percent of our military and extrapolating the wider trends of post-war war and the final one would be cycles this is probably the most important one to think about and that is targeting cycles that no matter what targeting cycle you special operations or conventional you still have to gather intelligence that fuels these type of munitions so therefore you actually put soldiers in more harm and more risk and those are the tensions I'm talking about sir um I didn't quite get it all the down and so I might have to button hold you later on and talk a little further I guess I'll uh I'll duck most of that except on the point of comparative advantage which of course is something that we ought to assume um but um the ambassador raised the issue of when when asymmetry becomes so immense that war has rendered a one-sided experience of risk have has your advantage become so great that you've crossed a line into something that Michael Nutty would call a turkey shoot whereby there is no element of self-defense in anything that you are doing because of the platform you're using and and whereas I'm willing to take this argument about comparative advantage right up to the point where one side still retains a scintilla of risk I propose that once you've completely divested yourself of risk what you're engaging in is something other than war and of course that's provocative and I would relish the chances talked with you about that later gentlemen talk about going I wonder if it is privileging novelty here in effect an artillery please an artillery shell fired indirectly is a dumb drone a ship sailing off the coast firing a shell into some foreign country could probably have done that quite safely as you said imperial policing from the air pilots could do that quite safely a pilot flying over Kosovo on a perfectly manned aircraft at 15 000 feet could have done that quite safely the only thing that's new here is probably the range and the things and what you're really separating is the purpose of it and the purpose for which it's done and the legality probably lies in that not in the risk to which the combatant is placed if this was a war against a peer-competitive the united states then the risk might be quite as great that there will be flying drones over an air force base outside Las Vegas and dropping out their own bombs down on it so the risk I think is completely separable from the the purpose of it and the legality lies in the purpose and the way it's done from the genocidal target and everything else is really just novelty yes and it's possible that a threshold has already been crossed and that the drone is not just glorified artillery shell but probably even a glorified arrow launched from the long bone I guess it depends how much attention you want to pay to whether or not this technology really does cross a line that hasn't been crossed before which is to say it's crossed from reduction to elimination of risk now yes you are right and you could object you could object to artillery high-altitude bombing sars 5 from ships off ships offshore for the same reasons that you could object to this imbalance in risk that I've highlighted with regards to drones but is this is this something that is genuinely new about drones and the range issue arguably is important because when you're operating a drone from 11,000 kilometers away that's getting towards the maximum distance as you can be apart from any other place on the point of the earth or getting up there towards and because it's satellite oriented that can certainly come into play but has there been a line crossed because unlike for example artillery shell or a cruise missile or an arrow or something the drone operator also has this kind of out of body experience of sort of hovering over the target and having a kind of human interaction with that person in a way that someone firing a ranged weapon from a long distance would never get and so maybe the newness as you suggest shouldn't be contemplated so much in ethical and legal terms but rather in sociological terms in terms as regards how the military profession sees itself and how a drone operator fits in with the rest of the profession as a non-risk taker. The difference is that you know once war had moved in so long time ago in thousands of years ago moved belonging between being a duel between equals handicapped in some ways that everyone was equal and the killings probably wasn't equal to all the people who were killed it was more than equal. That idea of seeking an advantage and shooting the man in the back if you got the chance there's always been just good tactics. Oh sure sure and look war is not about an equal contest or is not about an equal contest I guess my argument is that it needs to be some kind of contest however it involves and unless one side has at least a scintilla of risk then there's no real contest in play so that's that's what I'm after and it may well be that the high altitude bomber and the guy on the ship offshore has so is experiencing so little risk that you might regard that as virtually zero but I would suggest that it's not actually zero because a plane could drop out of the sky a ship could be in theater closer to the action artillery could be in theater close to the action that that because of their physical presence in theater they are that much more likely to endure risk than a drone operator even if it's only a slight difference. You know I would suggest you we'll have to take that off long way. But what I'm saying is that you're conflating fairness with morality and it's not the same. Okay we'll take that as a comic to paraphrase someone else. I did offer the suggestion Christian before that drone operators can choke on the donor keeping for our philosophy here at the National Security College of time. There's some one more question and Charles Ikins Charles Ikins I'm an exchange officer defense I was once told by someone I'm also retired from the Marine Corps and I was once told by someone that everyone's experience of war is different and it's actually different. And one of the things we know a lot more about now is post-traumatic stress disorder and the mental and psychological effects of of killing or being exposed to it. I'm wondering if the drone operator who has breakfast with his children drops him off at school and then goes up and kills somebody lying on a rooftop in Pakistan. I wonder if you're not underestimating the psychological risk of that person there may not be physical risk but there are certainly psychological risks particularly and in fact the statement you made about the disembodiment would support that. I would be interested in seeing how Colonel Matheson his psychological profile 10 years from now after he's pushed the button on many people and then gone home and had dinner with his children. So I think it's more than just physical risk there is also a psychological risk and and so therefore I think that that needs to be have you have you thought about that and taken that into account in this theory? It was with immense reluctance that I ripped out the entire emotional risk section of my paper and I'm therefore indebted to you for bringing this up because it is probably the major caveat to my argument about risk and I guess the conversation would then need to turn to whether we want to distinguish between physical and emotional risk and I will say this much that the use of hunter killer drones is sufficiently new that there is hardly any psychological research into the emotional trauma of killing someone and then driving 40 kilometers back to Las Vegas and talking to your kids about their homework and it it must be quite a bizarre thing to go through I literally can't imagine what it must be like but there are early indications in Congress has expressed its concern initially that this is something that will have to be watched and that emotional and psychological risks can and may well be endured in a big way by drone operators but I'm I guess I'm just really grateful that you've mentioned that. Okay ladies and gentlemen we'll call it the Stuck Santa this evening. Please join me in thanking Christian for quite a substantial presentation.