 Hello, welcome everybody. So thanks so much for coming out today. We're doing a book event as you know for drone wars Which is a book that in some ways Came out of it came out of a conference that was jointly organized by Arizona State University and New America in this space And it's been sort of a long time coming and we have the honor of having six of the Contributors presenting different aspects of their work. So really briefly We're dividing into two panels the idea is we're going to have sort of brief presentations From each contributor and then open the floor for questions So the first panel we'll talk about what is drone warfare and how did it come to be? so we're going to hear from Peter W. Singer shot a Justin senior fellow in New America Peter is the author of multiple award-winning books a contributing editor at popular science magazine He's been named by the Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery as one of the hundred leading innovators in the nation by defense news as one of the hundred most influential people in defense issues and By foreign policy magazine to their top 100 global thinkers list We're also joined in this panel by Christopher Swift Christopher is an adjunct professor of national security at Georgetown where his research focuses on terrorism arm conflict And the intersection between constitutional law international law and national security He also practices law Folian Lardner where he's a member of the white collar litigation group and then finally we'll hear from Michael waltz Mike is a lieutenant colonel in the US special forces He's also a senior fellow here at the international security program at New America He's the president of Metis solutions That provides strategic analysis policy development intelligence support and foreign commercial development to the US government before we move on to each of the speakers and what each speaker will just Discuss a theme related either to their contribution in the book or to some pressing issue related drones that that they want to speak about but one thing I want to let all of you know is that This project the drone wars project and what had what began being known here as the year of the drone and Then expanded at New America to the decade of the drone has now taken us to a new project Which is called the future of war project which involves a formal relationship between Arizona State University where I teach and Includes right now over 90 faculty members at Arizona State and then also in New America It's a linkage with a future of war team that is based here and then a series of affiliated faculty and ASU We will have our big launch on February 24th and 25th. We're gonna have a major conference here in Washington, DC and You will hopefully hear about that and then hopefully you'll hear over time about some of the different programs projects and sort of outcomes from this future of war project What's interesting about it is that meant that the term future of war and our research concerns have very much grown out of Grappling with drones not just drones as the tools that they are and the machines that they are But the sorts of complex questions that are raised by drone use and that have become You know, they've become indicative of this sort of moments in the projection of US power where drones have been so Significant and when I say so significant one thing to keep in mind as we move forward is not just our Interest in drones being related to the drones themselves, but after you know over 13 years of Significant conflict for some reason drones are the only military technology that's captured the popular imagination and We may not have a single answer for why that's the case But that seems to be true and that's a good starting point for trying to work through the sorts of questions that come out of our Engagement with drone wars. So let's hear first from Peter singer Great first, thanks for having me and I'm definitely excited about the new project that we're launching with ASU I thought I would hit the idea of what's changing in the discourse and policy side over drones My own entry point into this that started the book that I did wired for war back in 05 was a conference in DC the title of it was looking at what is changing in warfare and it was in 2005 and it was One of these DoD one of these Pentagon sponsored events two days worth of meetings at the Reagan building to give you a sense of the size everything from four-star generals to Pentagon officials to all the top walks in town and for two days they talked about what's changing in war and Over those two days in 2005 the word drone the word robot the word unmanned was not used once Then I joined the Obama campaign and helped coordinate their defense policy task force and during that period I was working on a book on robotics unmanned systems wired for war and It was kind of made clear. Hey keep that quiet That's a really crazy zany topic That's not a serious thing to be talking and exploring the use of drones and unmanned systems in war There's an irony and that of course in terms of how much that's become known related to the administration's kind of Foreign policy, but the point is that was the discourse then and in 2009 after the book came out I remember meeting with a senator where I had to explain to him that no There was not a little man inside the cockpit of a predator That it was too small to fit someone like that. That was the discourse That was the awareness of drones in these various spaces Now here we are today where you know as you talked about it We've gone from the year of the drone to the decade of the drone What not and I think we're seeing a couple of key changes. I would say that it's really three One is that the technology itself is evolving its size its shape its form We're seeing everything from insect-sized systems to unmanned systems that with planes a length of a football field We've gone from them being viewed as Utterly remotely piloted as the Air Force describes them. That's the way you operated the mq1 predator To now they are able to do more and more on their own Whether it's the ability of the mq9 reaper to take off and land on its own fly mission waypoints To the x-47 u-class which is able to do the toughest human pilot tasks take off and land from an aircraft carrier on its own It's going to be doing air-to-air refueling on its own and the next year to the test that the British are doing with the Taranis that's doing target recognition and Potentially strike on its own Again the human is not completely out of the loop We're not entering the era of the Terminator But the definition of the human role in the loop is changing and that hits a lot of these issues of law and ethics That we want to talk about that leads to Not just a greater number of uses but a greater number of users as they become more complex But easier to operate and so that means not just in the military space. This is shifting You really can't find a military function right now. That's not being roboticized in some way shape or form whether it's front-end tactical operations to back-end logistics to medicine but also the civilian use we've seen everything from Isis flying its own drones for surveillance to There is a test in going on in Virginia soon on using drones for farming that widespread use is hitting what Dan laid out is the way it's captured the public's imagination and Then there's also a feedback loop that's going on in the media where the media sees this and then is driving more news stories around it The word drone is in media terms a heat word if you see it in a headline, you're more likely to click on it That's why we're seeing it so often and so there's this loop going on if you do a Google search right now. There's Overall the term drones used 88 million times in the news section It's nine million times and that's everything from an Atlantic article on killing machines to BBC just had an article out on the most stunning drone pictures of 2014 and That really hits the change that I think we're gonna see ultimately in this is that it's becoming baked into our politics and discussions of law and ethics where it's no longer an anomaly but it's a full part of it to the point that we don't even think about it anymore and I think we can see that and everything from our Discussions of South Asia policy where it's you can't talk about American policy in Pakistan or Afghanistan right now without some discussion of this becoming part of it to our overall View of war itself to actually our use of cell phones himself. We can hear a robot talking back to us with Siri there so to our discussions and war itself where right now we have ongoing operations in Iraq and Syria where unmanned systems are Simply put a natural part of the operation right now To the point that we don't even notice that every video that you see of the strikes is one gathered for you by unmanned systems Including even the ones carried out by man's systems that supposedly were the only ones that could get there But somehow we had an unmanned system there So if you've seen for example the famous use of the f-22 stealth fighter finally in war It was an unmanned system that took pictures of the strike and that leads to this idea that to steal a phrase from Brian Eno the musician he talked about how Technology is a term that you use to describe something that you don't use every day And once you use it every day you no longer call it technology anymore And I think drone is On its way to becoming that that is very soon will stop having articles about the Top drone pictures of the year and I'll just be the top pictures of the year and in turn Just as we now have books on drone wars The follow-up as you laid out will just be about war itself This baking in of this term this concept is something that I think we have to face like it or not Good morning Thank you all for the opportunity to be here and the opportunity to opine and hopefully share some insights from the field on 2012 the summer of 2012 I went to Yemen with the object of studying how al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Interfaces with indigenous tribal structures I did not go with the intent of studying Drones or drone warfare or the legal or ethical or operational controversies surrounding the same But it was very difficult to avoid that issue when I was there in part because one of the individuals I was going to witness is going to interview got droned The night I was supposed to interview him and also in part because every single one of the religious and tribal leaders that I spoke to in Southern Yemen out on the line between where the Yemeni army was advancing where al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Had control of two provinces The drones were very much on their mind now the drones weren't on their mind in the way They're on our mind here in Washington DC and what I'd like to do with my time this morning is try to give you a Bottom-up perspective or perspective from the theater Every single individual I spoke to resented u.s. Intervention in Yemen and hated the drones and Every single one of them told me you have to continue the program That may not make any sense to us sitting here in Washington where the issue is an ethical issue or it's a legal issue Or it's you know CIA versus JSOC issue or a title 10 versus title 50 issue But if you're in a community that is seeing its young man drawn into al-Qaeda by virtue of economic inducement If you're in a community where traditional tribal and social structures are breaking down because of the intervention of this outside group Your equities are very different from the equities that we consider here in Washington Now what were those equities? Well the equity first off was security Second off was community and third was really the sense of resentment and sovereignty But in the near term individuals that were fighting al-Qaeda door-to-door in their own villages We're seeing their young men recruited away into the organization were very keen on the need for someone to come in and help Them solve the problem. They didn't necessarily trust the Yemeni government to do it They didn't necessarily trust the neighboring tribe to do it. They didn't like that. We were doing it But they didn't want us to stop a very very complicated set of circumstances and those very complicated set of circumstances bring us into some of the comments You made earlier about the distinction between the nature of the instrument and the nature of the war of war itself The instrument is an interesting interest Interesting provides us with a set of interesting capabilities. We can stay on station for a longer period of time We can surveil and collect intelligence We can use that intelligence in real-time against an actual target in the theater with very light footprint and very little very high You know in return on investment and very low risk to actual troops The difficulty is if we buy into the technology as a panacea in terms of solving these You know complex small wars and far away places We completely forget the fact that we're still engaged in a war and we completely forget the nature of war itself And you know as Klausowitz taught us war has a tendency to serve itself if it's not bound by policy And one of the ways we bind war with policy is understanding who our adversary is Where our adversary is and who our adversary is not and I think to the extent that you've seen problems in Yemen and Pakistan and Elsewhere with the targeting of particular individuals and groups It's been because we have a broader problem of defining the adversary in the global war on terrorism And a much deeper problem of not having relationships in these Countries where we intervene and operate that go beyond the English speaking elites in the capital. We see it in Yemen We see it in Pakistan That brings me back to a bigger question and that is Whenever you're involved with war whether it's a small war or a big war whether it's by remote control or on the ground There are political and social Consequences that attend to the use of organized violence, especially when it's the use of organized violence in somebody else's country So it's very clear that we need to keep those things in mind both from a strategic perspective and from a policy perspective When we're using these instruments rather than fetishizing the instrument itself, right? It's not the drone that causes the problem It's the policy and the choice to use an instrument in Furtherance of that policy that may create a problem You know one of the problems that we perceive in it in a theater like Yemen is that the drones recruit for al-Qaida Well, I can tell you that every individual I spoke to in Yemen with the exception of two Told me that it's actually local economic inducement that's recruiting for al-Qaida if you can pay $200 a month or $400 a month and a $60 a month economy. That's a game changer for an 18 year old It's a game changer for a head of family It's a game changer for a tertiary tribal leader who maybe has been cut off from traditional sources of patronage So that's where the recruiting is happening. It's not happening because of drone strikes What the drone strikes are doing though is they're giving people who are resentful of US intervention in Yemen Spoilers in the political process not not limited to al-Qaida an opportunity to raise these bigger questions about who is intervening in our country How are they intervening and where is our agency in this war that we're fighting on our own soil? That brings me back to a broader question about the character of our debate in Washington We tend to look at this either as a liberty versus security issue as if liberty and security were somehow some sort of dichotomy And the two couldn't be reconciled they can indeed be reconciled the way we reconciled is with law and the next panel is going to address that more broadly But it also really underscores the fact that we're focused on the platform and not the bigger failures in our policy the failure to Identify our adversaries the failure to develop relationships on the ground that are sustainable over a long period of time That would give us the insight we need to distinguish between You know an American who's been kidnapped by al-Qaida and an American who might be running like I was running around in the back Of a truck with a bunch of tribal guys who is there to research al-Qaida We don't have that kind of ability to distinguish right now And if we don't have that kind of granular understanding of what's going on you can understand the difficulties that You know would come would flow from engaging in warfare by remote control The final thing that I want to do is sort of set out a framework and it's a framework That's not just relevant for the drone issue. It's also relevant to the torture report issue We see in Washington this week and relevant I if I can say as much more broadly to how we execute policy and strategy in the war on terrorism And the framework is threefold first is the operation that we're engaging in legal Is it legal under international law? I don't be taking care of the sovereignty and the Geneva issues in the theater where we're operating And is it legal under US law? Is anyone exceeding their authority or undermining some fundamental constitutional right as long as you can cover both of those Things off in my point standpoint. You've checked the first box in terms of this three-part Framework the second is is it effective? Right well one of the ways drones are most effective is not in taking out high value Individuals or terrorist, you know group leaders It's in hollowing out the middle management in a terrorist group in order to Dissociate the high leadership from the foot soldiers. It's a form of attritional warfare That's what we did with high success in Pakistan That's what we have been doing with a fair amount of success in Yemen notwithstanding the civilian casualties So we need to understand that when we're measuring efficacy exactly what efficacy we're measuring And then the third question is is it wise and what I mean by that or are there? unintended consequences or externalities that still attach even if your operation is legal and effective and That's really where you need to know a place you need to know a place from the ground up and not from they not from the outside in In the case of Yemen the externality is our success in the drone program wasn't recruiting for al-Qaeda But it was undermining some of the intertribal and Interfactional, you know diplomacy we were trying to organize to the GCC framework and you see that even today So understanding these things from the ground up is key Not getting caught in our false dichotomy between liberty and security and those old debates that go back to the Vietnam War Here in Washington is key and this three-part framework. Is it legal? Is it effective? Is it wise? It should be a better in my view approach to dealing with some of these issues if something's legal and effective It's probably wise if something's effective and wise it should probably be legal But if something is not legal and not effective, how could it possibly be wise? Thank you Very briefly for those who are tweeting please use hashtag at hashtag drone wars One thing before Mike speaks I wanted to bring up something about the book part of our goal here is to focus the attention on the Book drone wars so it's divided into four sections the first is drones on the ground The second is drones and the laws of war the third is drones and policy and the fourth is drones and the future of war We have a pretty strong commitment to interdisciplinarity in our ASU new America linkage and the future of war project And the reason I'm saying all this before Mike speaks is that each of the four sections begins with a personal narrative One of David road talking about what it was like to be held by the Taliban for seven months And and how his captors responded to drones another of a drone pilot Nels Air Force Base in Nevada another of a local in North Waziristan and one of them is is is Mike Speaking about what drone deployment was like for somebody on the ground in special forces I bring that up just to give you a sort of lead into the book Encouraging you to get it But even if you don't you'll have a sense of this kind of structure that we're after to combine Personal narratives and direct experience with kind of high-level policy analysis and legal analysis from both scholars practitioners Scientists and others so Mike Thank you. Thank you. So I'll just start with a simple statement and that I love drones Love them. I would not be here Hands down would not be here talking to you today without them Nor would many of my soldiers in the special forces community or many of our folks deployed Overseas they've saved my life and they've saved many others And and I welcome a conversation like this to talk about the broader policy framework that that drones fit into But as I'll talk to in a minute, I think we need to be very careful about confusing a tool for the policy debate and I commend your your statements on you know Often it becomes drones have become a shiny object for folks who disagree with the policy But at the end of the day, it really is it really is a tool and it's a darn effective one So one of the reasons that it's been so effective is that it's very precise It allows us to put eyes Out on the battlefield which we've been trying to do from a military perspective since men We're going up in balloons on the Civil War And it allows us to do things that frankly we just couldn't do before I served Out in Afghanistan and oh three oh five and oh nine and really saw the evolution of Having more and more of this capability available to us and and I'll talk to you today and frankly net net It was very very beneficial to our effort Despite a lot of the kind of think some of the media around it you know the the first thing allowed us to do was to really get a pattern of life for some of the Taliban Commanders and al-Qaeda commanders that we were targeting Often the goal of that pattern of life. So when I say that that's we would have continuous drone orbits over where we thought they were Located often we weren't quite sure so part of those orbits were to nail down where they were located before we either launched a special forces raid or launched an attack from the drone itself or Sent in the Afghan National Army or police on a raid themselves to arrest the individuals the great thing is in 2003 if we are intelligent separatists kind of boiled this down, you know the location of you know name the Taliban commander Hikani commander what have you? Boiled this down to four or five different locations back in 2003. We would go into four or five different locations By 2009 we could confirm the exact location and we're often using the kind of pattern of life as continuous surveillance to time our Interventions so precisely that we would time it to when civilian casualties either or civilians weren't in the vehicle Family members weren't around And would use it as a collateral damage mitigation tool There's a lot of talk about Drones associated with civilian casualties and and I'm here to tell you someone who's used them now for the better part of The decade out on the ground. It was often quite the opposite We use them to avoid civilian casualties and to go into areas when civilians weren't around usually I Think from a pretty common-sense perspective That was in the middle of the night when people weren't out in the bizarre weren't out in the village And and we could maximize surprise to these guys which Minimize the amount of firefights and the amount of collateral damage So it's allowed us to do a lot of a lot of things as they've evolved The other thing it's allowed us to do is from a kind of a force protection standpoint Derivative of the drone is the aerostat or the blimp you know blimps and to distinguish the difference Commonly blimps fly they move around an aerostat is tethered So we would have in most of our bases by 2009 an aerostat up over the base with a camera That could have you know a wide area view around it these things were wonderful They would prevent common mistakes for instance You know local villagers shooting off their weapons and celebration of a wedding or an event that could be mistaken For an attack we could then see it with the aerostat and we got so dependent on them frankly I was in one coalition base with some of our NATO partners and whenever the weather was bad And that thing had to be pulled down They were a hundred percent manning the gates because they were and but when the weather was fine and it was up You know we could really go about a lot of our the rest of our business a great tool And then the last thing I think allows us to do and I'll start edging into kind of the policy realm here But it allows us to do things without troops that in the past we would have Needed troops to do so I know probably most of you here have seen the movie Loan Survivor Where you had four Navy SEALs out on a surveillance mission literally with binoculars staring at a house That was in 2005 my unit actually took over The SEAL team was so devastated by you know by their losses that that they were pulled out early And we were accelerated in to take over that mission Years a couple of years later those guys wouldn't have been out those four guys wouldn't have been out with binoculars We would have had a drone over over that house and I would argue that that's a good thing It also I and I talk about this in the my contribution to the book It allows us to again be much more precise in our operations So, you know, I developed a relationship with an elder in host province in eastern Afghanistan I worked with him in the early years And he you know both he and his tribe vehemently opposed the Hikani network and and sought our support Which we gave in the early years whenever You know bottom line is whenever we were kind of opposing the Hikani's or going after the insurgency We would go in with platoons of infantry or Afghan National Army or what have you by 2009 He was asking for what he called the magic and what he referred to as the magic is I mean They had experienced by then when we went Conducted a kinetic strike with a drone that literally a bedroom would blow up or a car Amongst five cars would blow up and from the village elders perspective Whenever he wanted to rid, you know He called it kind of ridding his valley of this cancer called the Hikani network Which truly is a just a criminal group and a group of thugs He would rather it be done with an individual strike that targets that one that one Individual rather than a platoon of the Afghan National Army or a brigade of the of American forces rolling through his Valley, so By 2009 2010 he was asking for the magic hold off guys. I want a drone from an Afghan elders perspective, so it allows us to do things that Very precisely and very remotely that normally we would have had us troops doing I'll take a step backwards. I was also I worked as a civilian for secretary Gates and vice president Cheney as their South Asian and CT advisor in the Bush administration and when we're looking at this from a policy perspective If you buy into the notion that we have to counter al-Qaeda in their sanctuaries And you buy into the policy kind of parameters of that whether it's in Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia What's your better option are we going to do that with a full force boots on the ground intervention? Are we going to do that with? With drone strikes that target individual commanders very precisely not always perfectly I think we all admit that there's there's collateral damage to civilians. It's very unfortunate But I would certainly take that over Over the other policy option, so I would just encourage everyone as we're talking about drone warfare You have to put it in the kind of broader perspective of okay, if not drones then what? you know and the and the last thing I'll talk about is The fact that there is a human I assure you That there is a human at every level I would argue and and and give some examples here in the book that there's probably Too many levels of intervention when it comes to the use of drones It's allowed technology is allowed a level of micromanagement Out in the battlefield that I think is actually detrimental many times to what we're trying to do with small units in in remote areas Not only do you obviously have the drone pilot seeing what he's seeing? I usually would have a remote A viewer on the ground as the ground force commander. I'm actually responsible I'm giving they force you to give your name and initials over the radio and it's recorded that I'm seeing on the ground in addition to what the drone pilot seeing Before using kinetic force In my view, that's no different than calling in an artillery strike That's no different than you know using any other system to to affect the enemy on the battlefield But in addition with drones because you can send that feed anywhere my boss sees what i'm seeing His boss sees what he's seeing. I actually in many operations had folks all the way back in the special operations command And tampa and in one in the pentagon Seeing what i'm seeing and asking many questions and standing next to each one of those commanders is a is a lawyer Ensuring that what we're doing fits within Their interpretation of the law of of of land warfare. So You know, I just say that to refute this notion that there's these kind of remote Things flying around zapping people You know, it is it is you're making life or death decisions Often it's our life or theirs. This is war. This is combat and You know, there are humans involved at at every level So so I just say that to dispute that I think I'll stop or just to dispute that common notion and and again You know in any discussion I emphasize if not drones then what as we're fighting this long Uh, this long war on terrorism. I'll stop. So thank you so much and we'll we'll turn to all of you for questions I don't know if um Technologically are there is there a mic floating around or should I just take one of these? There is one floating around great. Okay, so raise your hand. There we go. Uh, laura Hi, uh, I'm laura dickinson. I'm a professor at george washington university law school and also a future of war fellow here at new america um Most of you have focused on the policy implications of our offensive use of drones either for intelligence gathering or targeting Peter you mentioned that isle has reportedly Used drones and or potentially may use drones. I guess what I want to ask is about the implications of the proliferation of this technology It's very cheap And what are the policy implications of that for for us either overseas or even domestically? Thanks I'll hit that first but please others weigh in so it's a technology. Um, again, it's fascinating to compare the the discourse with the reality here Uh, a year ago. I was, um, invited to speak at a us government sponsored session at another think tank about, um, how to prevent the proliferation of drones And I was the awful guy at the start of the conference who said Sorry, they're already in the hands of 87 other countries. So, you know, the how do you prevent, you know We're done. It's they're already out there. Um, and again, it's not just other states It's non-state actors that range from submission isis to hollywood paparazzi um, so the implications of that are everything from uh, military implications in terms of, um The us military starting to wrestle with, uh, how does it defend against adversary use of unmanned systems against it whether it is in state on state action Uh, for example, it's not being baked. Well, I talked about how it's becoming baked into warfare It's not being baked in enough into, um, our concepts versus, uh, china air sea battle concept or doctrine As you want to call it. That's actually what my next book is on. Um, is looking at what is the next major war Look like and we have to assume that both sides will have high technology Not the advantageous way. We've seen it so far, but also, um Things like air defense operations, um in, uh, what we could think of as hybrid or counter insurgency We haven't been thinking about adversaries like an isis or, um, a hezbollah or a hamas. They've all got it right now. Um, so, uh You have that to the legal and ethical and policy implications of, um Our use of something setting precedents that others might either follow And or abuse Saying oh you did x so therefore I can do it too And we should expect that to happen, um with others misuse of drone strikes It's similar to what's playing out in the torture debate right now There were states that were already going to do bad things that are now explaining themselves using the cia report china today came out That way and we should see expect the same thing to happen. Um With unmanned systems, um, so I think that's some of the implications There's one other thing though I wanted to be sure to lay out and it'll hopefully connect to some of these questions and also the presentation here I think I want to echo being very careful about smushing together unlike or different things or operations Because of the same use of technology And we actually did this up on stage and I expected to come and the questions too of talking about overt military use of the technology in an afghanistan Or an iraq versus the not so covert operations In a pakistan or a yemen So when we talk about everything from civilian casualties to rules of engagements to laws and authorities To how local civilians are reacting be sure to distinguish between these They operate on under very different terms. It's the same technology an mq9 But you might have everything from A different law that it's been authorized by You definitely have a different set of lawyers involved who are looking with a different set of training I'm the son of an army jag officer. They look at things. They follow different processes than a cia lawyer does Um to different accountability or not So when air strikes go bad in afghanistan There are investigations. There have been court marshals. We have not had that on the not so covert side in a pakistan to um The roes the rules of engagements you follow Things like a signature strike or a double tap Jag officers would not authorize that At least according to media reporting that has happened in the not so covert operations on the civilian intelligence side To the policy perspective of how we talk about it and what we authorize the difference between boots on the ground Versus um how for example president bush's uh former chief of staff described the decision to send in A very small team of navy seals to go after the ultimate target ben laden Just for those 30 minutes. He described it as um The toughest call any president could make Didn't talk about the more than 300 air strikes into that same country in that same terminology versus Sending, you know, we don't describe having multiple numbers of boots on the ground in that same discourse So I just want to be very clear here. We need to be refined We need to be um careful about smushing together discussions of civilian casualties to authorities to rules of engagement When we're talking about very different things when it comes between overt use of and in military operations what we think of as war Versus not so covert use by civilian intelligence agencies Which then we get into a debate over whether it's war or not, but let's not smush them together because they use the same technology Other question, but let's just make sure we get a few more questions and then you can just Anybody else out in the audience with uh, you know kurt You just identify yourself and ask your question Thanks. Hi, uh, kurt volker Lead the mccain institute also part of arizona state university work with daniel and formerly ambassador to nato and I want to pick up what peter was just saying and Push it in a slightly tougher direction Because I agree. I think drones are just like any other piece of military equipment. You know, they do a job The difference is that at a strategic level of decision making we find it a lot easier To use a drone and we go through At least on the covert side Fundamentally different processes than we would for a normal military operation So the risk that we run into is that we are attempted to engage with the drone where we wouldn't otherwise engage That is an act of war that we're not calling an act of war and not exercising the same degree of oversight in our own political process And not providing an example for how an international community should have standards for how you engage in In conflict like this So I think that we have a lot to do not on the technology or the military use of it But a lot to do on the political oversight in our own system I wonder if you might comment on that I want to ambassador volker and laura. I want to package some of your questions together Um Laura peter's exactly right in the dockrinal and operational issues. Let's not distinguish what's distinguished what happens in the theater From the broader policy looking to the legal implications There are ways that you can deal with proliferation One would be to revise the missile technology control regime with more focus on UAVs. That's what currently Gover the international treaty that currently governs the Proliferation of UAVs and like systems. So if you're interested in you know managing the proliferation issue We can do it in conjunction with our allies to the mctr. I'm getting the policy issues ambassador volker. I think you're exactly right when We it may not feel like war to us But it certainly felt like war when I was in yemen And for the yemenis it certainly felt like war and so there's been a lot of debate about whether new technologies and new systems require new laws and new policies and I would respectfully suggest That the problem we need to solve here is not a technological problem It's a human problem. The fault is not in our stars as shakespeare would say but in ourselves And we've already solved these problems in the geneva conventions We already have this body of law that tells us when and how we can use organized violence to achieve political ends The amount of proportionality we need to use the amount of discrimination we need to use Right the when and and how and where we can engage that Part of the difficulty we've had over the last few years and you know Resonating with ambassador volker here is the attempt to call something that is war not war And therefore remove it from the normal geneva oversights Right, we've done that with torture. We've done that with drone strikes We've done that with a number of other areas in the war on terrorism Look the laws and customs of war are not a restraint Right if they're used properly They help mitigate harm on the front end and help keep war from expanding and serving itself Right and it's not just a bunch of lawyers sitting around in a room saying, you know, you can't do this You can do that It's a body of knowledge and experience that's been handed down to us from our grandparents And our grandparents grandparents It's it's the sum total of all the mistakes they made in prior wars And it's written down and it's open source code for everyone in the world to read So if I was going to fix something from a policy perspective in terms of the covert side of our program I'd say yeah, it's a title 50 event fine, but make sure it's subject to geneva Make sure it runs through the same processes that we would use if we were hitting a state target Right That's one way of solving it the other point I want to make in terms of the policy issue Is really to emphasize the distinction that peters raised between the overt wars the title 10 events That special forces are doing in a in a conflict zone like afghanistan or iraq Where drones can be used for force protection and with a sort of a higher, you know Degree of permissibility because you're in an open Acknowledge combat flick zone versus a place like afghan like yemen or pakistan The same rules need to apply as far as i'm concerned from a legal perspective Where we're failing in places like yemen in pakistan is we don't have the relationships That you were mentioning on the ground, right? I interviewed a guy in raka, which is one of the al-qaeda hotbeds his tribe Was leading had formed its own militia to fight al-qaeda door to door in his own home village They were taking fire every day people were dying, right? That's not us That's not the yemeny government. That's the local tribal structure He told me in no uncertain terms that he was willing to work with the united states and the yemeny government if he felt he could trust us But if we made a mistake And accidentally droned his people as opposed to the bad guys There's no way his people could come on board with collaborating with us I came back from yemen three months later. We droned his people rather than kaeda Because we didn't have those relationships on the ground Don't worry about the policy worry about the people Worry about the people making the decisions the people getting the information That's where our system is broken down. That's where more oversight is needed. No panaceas. No silver bullets This is a problem that takes us back to the greeks 3 000 years ago Let's take two more questions for this panel so we can stick with yeah in the back I just wanted to jump in real quick Absolutely agree Are we prepared to then have the folks on the ground in samalia in yemen and in these places and in northern iraq and in syria that we need to then build these Relationships right and certainly is this administration ready to do it given a stated policy Couldn't agree more and that's what kind of my tribe of special forces and our brothers over in uh over in the See I really specialize in But the flip side of that as I'd argue it would make the drones then even more effective Right um it the second piece. I just want to touch on the proliferation You know, I work a lot through on the private sector with uh with countries that are trying to they want drones And but they're so focused right now, you know oftentimes I tell them stop Quit buying things you know quit just Buying everything you can get your hands on because what they'll do is they'll buy all of these things And then they'll come to us and ask them to craft a strategy around it Like let's figure out your requirements and what you want to do. Do you want to do border surveillance? Do you want to do internal surveillance? Do you want to do force protection for your military? Do you want to do projection and then that'll drive the procurement the reason i'm bringing that up is Is many many of these countries where they're proliferating? Yes, they're in 87 I would argue maybe about five can actually use them effectively They're and particularly in the irregular groups, you know, yes has bella has them They're so focused on just making the thing fly There's a whole other aspect to it. How do they then receive the feeds? How do they fuse it with all of their other intelligence? How do they do it in a time timely manner that you can then make decisions? You know, all of those other pieces are what we've kind of learned over the last decade And that drones are just one Piece of an otherwise very broad intelligence picture that it's going to take a lot of these countries a very long Very long time to kind of get their wrap their mind around Major Thomas Ibel. I'm the Marie Queen University law of war instructor So having been one of those judge advocates who stands next to commander and says don't do that don't do that How would you recommend? Kind of combining those streams of on the over and the covert side of potentially holding people responsible when they do make mistakes Or on the other hand enabling people to be in a place where they can make decisions Without making mistakes And you talked about various layers and too many layers of management And you talked about uh, Mr. Singer about various different factors that become involved the different sets of laws depending on what types of operations You are because right now we're talking about two separate legal systems in title 10. So how would you avoid that? I don't want to jump too much into the next panel But I'd say the title 10 title 50 debate is a another false dichotomy, right? If you're talking about us do d forces Conducting these operations. They're bound by Geneva no matter what doesn't matter whether making it a title 50 event Doesn't change the law and customs of war It just changes the title of you as of the us code you're using and who you report to who has to do the finding Whether the gang of eight gets it whether the as versus, you know, hask and sask, right? so You know the oversight and the mechanism is different But the law of war often customs of war still apply In terms of bringing it together and we need to stop seeing law as A restraint and we need to see it start to see the law of war as a Basically a strategic system a way of mitigating unnecessary harm on the front end Managing and restraining your use of violence such that you're focused on your adversary And more importantly a way of identifying your adversary I mean look we're 13 years into this war more than 13 years into this war I still have not seen any member of any administration republican or democrat come out with objective consistent criteria for determining Whether or not someone falls under the AUMF Where are those criteria? Right, we have reverse engineered about 10 or 20 different groups into the AUMF over the last 13 years through, you know You know six degrees of separation Well, I can tell you that anybody that's met peter bergen is two degrees of separation away from osama bin laden Right, and I'm I don't know how many degrees of separate if I if I social network myself It's like, you know, you'd think I was part of kaida right that type of analysis doesn't help us What we need is objective criteria for determining who our adversaries are And we haven't done that yet and look it goes back to the fundamentals of war like we said earlier You know class which said that the first thing that a commander and statesman has to do when embarking on a war Is to determine what kind of war they're getting it into getting into not mistaking it for Or turning it into something alien to its true nature We haven't done that here We haven't done that in the last 13 years and that's why we're in the fix where it just to just to be clear I mean we're fighting irregular We're fighting in an irregular conflict We're fighting an adversary that does not follow the geneva convention that does not follow the Accepted rules of land warfare and we choose to So there but there is a there's a difference in fighting a state-on-state actor Where both sides are abiding by the geneva convention they are not clearly and we are We are taking the moral high ground and choosing to so I just Yes And I think it also applies again in many of these things applies to the torture debate right now Just because the other side does or does not Follow geneva conventions Does not determine whether you do both legally Or logically i.e. We had the classic state-on-state action of war war two and the other side did not follow geneva But that didn't mean that we still shouldn't or but you know it's a progenitor to it And we we see that argument made repeatedly and and what I would say to to you on the What can we do is? On the legal side stop trying to fudge it Stop trying to fudge title 10 and title 50. You see people talk about title 60 It's you know, there's no such thing, but that's a real term in the building on the pentagon side Stop trying to fudge in terms of moving units between back and forth and Stop we on the flip side outside of the the jag community senior leaders need to stop blaming lawyers For the law limiting them from doing stupid policy decisions And you know, I'll and look we can even go back to The decision not to air We see the law blamed For policy decisions consistently when it's not the case I'll I'll leave it at that. It's it's frustrating And you know We're We're 13 years into this We can get it right at some point. I hope and we'll have a retort but we'll Just so we can just so we can give all panelists an even chance to chat. Let's thank our first panel And switch out for for the next Okay So we're moving on to our next panel has The title of law and ethics of drone warfare, but as you can see the first panel not surprisingly also engage those questions Very briefly we we have Constantine cacus who's here as a 2013 future tens fellow and now managing right newly managing a new drone project Here at new america dealing with International development property rights He's the author of the e-book the piner detectives did a distant spacecraft Prove einstein and newton rong. I can say his his piece in the drone wars book Is a particularly illuminating one because it traces drones from sort of the era of the right brothers to the present and is quite illustrative of how Not new key elements of the vision of drones in fact is and it's it's a very well researched an interesting piece We also have Tara mckelvey, who's the white house reporter for bbc news and she was a correspondent for news week and the daily beast She's also a frequent contributor to the new york times book review and has authored Monstering inside america's policy of secret interrogations and torture in the terror war And then finally rosa brooks Who is a senior fellow in the international security program and part of our future of war project? A professor at the georgetown university law center where she teaches courses on international law national security constitutional law and other issues And she was the former counselor to the under secretary of defense for policy So let's just move forward and constitute great. Thanks, aniel So I wanted to start out by describing a uav to you guys, which is one that's about 20 feet long weighs about 3,000 pounds. It's got a nine foot wigging span It's gps guided has a satellite communications link, which the early versions did not It's relatively low endurance. It's about three hours Travels relatively quickly 500 miles per hour You may some of you may recognize it based on these flight characteristics. It's the tomahawk cruise missile which As chris swift alluded talking about the missile control export control regimes The distinction between cruise missiles and drones is an entirely artificial one of our own conception cruise missiles have a lot less in common with with rockets because they're jet engines They are planes that are quite bad at landing Because landing it turns out is one of the technically more difficult challenges, which is why The technology evolved in a way that then a policy evolved that we will use this to do what it's good at Which is not worry about landing and just run it into something and have it explode so in that sense And the tomahawk for the record sort of entered service in 1983 Was used by bill clinton to attack sudan and afghanistan in 1998 and that attack Wasn't as precise didn't have the the many long endurance characteristics that more recent drone strikes have had But in my view is in the character very Analogous to the later drone strikes under the bush and obama administrations Um, pizzinger mentioned that uh drone is a very clickable headline Which leads us to think sometimes that it's new the x-37 b which was a it's an air force space plane Which landed in september was often described as a space drone in headlines Which was to me a good example of sort of appropriation Of a term because it sounds sort of shiny and futuristic and new There's no way in which the x-37 b was really a space drone in a way that sputnik You know launched in the 1950s was not we're used to having satellites flying overhead that are you know semi-autonomous in capability that don't have people on them by and large that accomplish surveillance missions Um, they tend not to bomb things which is another can of worms Uh, but but our distinction sort of between What is and is not a drone tends to be a misleading one. Um, a lot of the history of drones Was also very secret at the time Uh, so uh in the vietnam war there was a program called buffalo hunter um, which was a uh a total of 5.8 billion dollars in 2010 dollars over a thousand drones were built 200 were lost in combat um It sort of picked up between 1970 and 1972 um a sort of july 1973 air force Report that was a sort of after-action report about buffalo hunter Said that buffalo hunter has played an extremely important part in securing for us the bda That's the bombing damage assessment of the strikes in the north Uh, it was invaluable in the role the general who was in charge of the program said I know of no other way we we could have obtained the information we needed a linebacker too was a Bombing campaign in north vietnam that took place during the monsoon season when there was very heavy cloud cover So it wasn't just that by the end of the vietnam war about 12 percent of total reconnaissance sorties Were flown by drones. It was that that 12 percent was getting information That the u.s. Would have been otherwise unable to get And that tends to be a chapter that if we think of drones as something that sort of sprung out of nowhere in the last 15 years We're just flat out wrong um Another aspect in terms of you know, what's new and what isn't uh, daniel mentioned he talks about sort of signature strikes Both earlier today and in the chapter in the book Which Because the initial usage of drones in pakistan was targeted at Individuals and then evolved into something that wasn't we sort of discussed signature strikes as a new usage um If you look another early even earlier use of drones in laos when there was The pentagon spent about 1.7 billion and that's 1968 dollars. So multiply that by I don't know seven a factor of seven or eight on a program called igloo white To place 20,000 battery powered sensors in the jungle in laos, which was again just outside of an acknowledged Military conflict somewhat analogous not precisely but somewhat analogous to pakistan and afghanistan today And those battery powered sonar sensors in conjunction with drone overflights were used to target bombings at truck traffic Which you know, you would assume that that truck traffic was north vietnamese Military traffic, but you didn't actually know it for certain. So it was very much analogous to Signature strikes today Quickly, I don't want to take up too much time here quickly mentioned In the late 60s and early 70s. There were a series of national reconnaissance over office drone over flights of china Which were again quite secret at the time not very successful So drones working as well as they do today is in fact new trying to get them to work is not Which is relevant in terms of if we think about How quickly the technology will evolve if we think of it as something that just originated We think it's changing really quickly if we look at the history of failure We understand that the change is a lot slower Quickly addressing the issue of proliferation in terms of how the technology evolves As mike mentioned, you know, despite this figure of 87 countries have drones very few of them Use them effectively That's not purely because they haven't had the savvy to evolve the doctrine It's also because they don't have the global satellite telecommunications and positioning systems that we have China to some extent does russia to some extent does the european union to some extent does Nobody else does Launching satellites is really expensive and difficult. It's getting cheaper. That's changing. It's not changing overnight The extent to which the proliferation of drones will really matter in a substantive way depends on how the technologies of autonomy evolve And that's an area which the last few years have seen pretty dramatic changes However, a sort of fully autonomous aircraft taking off In my mind is still some distance away despite a lot of sort of proof of concept things There's a lot of complicated things if you're if you're going to be flying at any distance from your base I guess i'll wrap up with that Yeah, there's other there's plenty plenty more to talk about but i'll Um, oh i thought it was gonna be rosa. Well, it's very nice to be here. I'm glad you guys are all here And um, I have to say it's um, you know, nice to have the cameras built into the walls I came back um just came back from london where I was for two weeks and there were cameras everywhere cctv cameras And I was at the cia yesterday lots of cameras there. Um, I um lost my sweater when I was at the cia And they found it for me quickly. So that's one of the advantages Of being watched you feel like you're taken care of Which leads me to the subject of drones and the obama administration One of the my goal when I started working on this chapter or the research In this area was to look at the question of liberals and the obama administration And how they've responded to their counterterrorism policies So a year or so after obama was elected I was having dinner with some people in new york and one of them was a humans rights activist And I asked her about the counterterrorism strategy how she felt about it and she said Waterboarding is out drones are in Um, and I was a little bit surprised when she said that also kind of the glib nature of the statement So I asked her to explain a little bit more and she said, oh, I'm very sorry. You can't quote me on that And she also said that unfortunately nobody in her office was really willing to talk about Their feelings about the obama strategy So I started to look into sort of the Conflict between liberals and the obama administration and their support for the president And some of the policies that he was doing not the drones that were run by the military But the drones that are run by the cia. That's a separate program as you guys talked about in the former discussion And I focused my work in the chapter on herald co I chose him because he used to be the dean of yale law school and he was also one of the leading voices in international law and also human rights When he was a critic of the buddhish administration He talked about a targeted targeted killing program that had been discussed or had been underway under the buddhish administration And described it as extra judicial killings and also as assassination Once he became the legal advisor for the state department. It was a job He had dreamed about for many years. He changed his views So my chapter looked at how Someone changes their mind what goes into that process? And that's what I wrote about and I'm Hoping you guys will have questions That's it. Okay Well, thanks daniel for organizing this and thanks to all of you for coming out at lunch at a lunchtime event At which we are not feeding you which is particularly cruel Um, uh, I've been Writing about drones for several years now. I'm not quite sure how I started writing about this But somehow somehow I became a person who writes about drones Um And so it's it's hard for me to know quite what to say because I've I've said too much but let me let me Start by um, I'll tell you about a task force. I was recently on Uh through the stimson center here in here in dc convened a expert high-level task force on us drone policy and um I was co-chairing it together with general john avizade the former commander of sent com And the other task force members included john bellinger who was the legal advisor to the state department during the bush administration It had also been the Bush's national security council legal advisor Jeff smith a former general counsel the cia retired lieutenant general dav barno and number of other folks with uh technology military intelligence community backgrounds and um One of the things that we really struggled with from doing a report on us drone policy was that sort of threshold question That's already come up today. What are we actually talking about? What what are we interested in here? I mean drones drones, you know, you can use drones to you know crop dusting You can use drones for search and rescue, you know, amazon's going to soon be delivering your packages via drone You can use drones to provide close air support. It's probably not too far in the distant future that we'll be able to use drones for Transporting battlefield casualties For instance in situations where it might be too dangerous to send in manned aircraft with medics and so on to to get people out when they're a dangerous situation Um, obviously as as as mike has mentioned also They can provide the exact equivalent of the kind of close air support that manned aircraft could provide in a combat setting Uh, only with less risk to a human pilot Um, we pretty quickly decided that we weren't actually interested in any of those issues Um, which we don't think present anything really new. I mean, I think I think and again This has already come out. There are a ton of red herrings in the discussion about drones You know, it is it is many ways. It is just another tool. It is it is something that flies around You don't have to have a human and it can do a bunch of stuff. It can look at things It can drop stuff off. It can drop a bomb. It can take pictures whatever And there's really nothing new here So we spent a lot of time trying to kind of get our Get a handle on what is it that is bothering people what bothers us what should bother us We we we very much ended up sharing the the view that michael's already articulated Which is the problem is not civilian casualties. You know on the contrary There's no particular reason to think that that drones However use create more civilian casualties than other means of dropping things that blow up on people In fact, there are lots of reasons to think that they they're they're far greater precision You know, they enable us to do a better job of discriminating between civilians and combatants In in a battlefield setting and elsewhere And there's always been a one of the things that was sort of interesting as we as we began to research this Historically, there's always been anxiety about new long-distance weapons and and and as others have said You know, that's what you look for on the battlefield. Everybody's always trying to gain some advantage How can we get how can we get the enemy while exposing our own forces a little bit less? Every significant advance in long-distance weapons systems has generated a lot of anxiety and backlash And you know going back to the second ladder in council, which prohibited Under anathema the the un-christian crossbow The murderous art the villainous art of crossbowmen you see Uh Cervantes Don Quixotes Raising questions about Artillery a devilish invention that permits a base cowardly hand to essentially drop munitions on The bravest gentleman from who knows whence? And in all sorts of ways Historically speaking Innovations in long-distance weapons have have been tied up with really pretty significant social and political shift You know the longbow and the crossbow In many ways are connected to upending the chivalric social order because suddenly Ordinary peasants without a whole lot of training can pierce the metal armor of knights Rendering them much more exposed on the battlefield. Everybody gets very confused So I we ended up saying it was on the one hand, you know, you it's important to see drones as as in this context of Weapons systems innovations create anxiety and they can be they can facilitate and enable real social transformations So they're not new in that sense on the other hand, you know Major political and social transformations are major political and social transformations and you need to pay attention to them so we zeroed in on Drones as a technology that does not cause It's not cause but certainly enables or facilitates a set of practices By states and soon by other actors that would be a lot harder would be more expensive more complicated more risky In a variety of ways if this technology were not available for policymakers to use and specifically the We focused in on the use of drones at the moment by the united states for cross-border targeted killings outside of what we increasingly refer to as so-called hot battlefield e g afghanistan A rock etc So i'm talking about the use of drones to strike individuals in places such as yemen Somalia pakistan Where there's there's we don't have ground troops engaged But we are doing this very individualized target selection and then attempting to kill people using this particular technology We could do that without drones, you know, we could send in special operations forces for instance And sometimes we do but that's much riskier. It's riskier to our own people in some ways There's actually a greater risk of civilian casualties when you get a messy ground situation Etc etc Drones again, as I said, they they don't they you know, you could do this without them, but it's riskier So once we have this technology, we have done it more and more and peter bergen Has been one of the people who's been really instrumental in in helping us understand that the the scale and the scope of the us targeted killing program Primarily using using drones We don't know almost all of this is is still covert But the best estimates of triangulating publicly available information Suggests that probably about four thousand people have been killed by us drone strikes in the last decade You know give or take we really don't know And and what this stimson center task force ended up feeling very very strongly And it was actually I was pleasantly surprised you get these sort of bipartisan groups We we've started off thinking gosh, we may not be able to reach consensus They're just maybe you know too much disagreement people Such as myself originally with the background in human rights people such as phil mud The background at the cia and the fbi, you know, we're never going to be able to agree But but but one thing that was actually kind of a pleasant surprise Was how quickly the group did Reach consensus on a lot of discomfort a lot of concern about the targeted killing policy the u.s Has been engaged in and and I just to very very quickly summarize the areas of concern And then I'll talk a little bit more about one of them in particular We were concerned about potential erosion of sovereignty norms As we have this technology that enables The sort of cross-border uses of force and makes them cheaper and easier and more deniable We were concerned about blowback Even if you know if you do kill civilians, there will be blowback Even if you don't you know terrorists have friends and families too Who don't particularly like it when their relatives end up, you know Dead because of something that came down out of the sky And and it can cause tremendous resentment which can in fact Increase extremist recruiting and increase long-term threats against the u.s We were concerned about slippery slopes towards ever widening more perpetual conflict That as you sort of lower the perceived costs of using cross-border force in this way It becomes tempting for policy makers to think oh what the heck let's do it one more time You know that that precisely because in the situations where you might say Cost benefit analysis it's not worth sending in special operations force Not worth sending in human beings who might get caught who might get killed might be a total political mess It wouldn't be deniable if they get caught you might think oh what the heck we could send in a drone Why not you know it's deniable so you do it more often because it's perceived as cheaper and easier Which in turn, you know How much How much do you end up drifting without really quite noticing into a kind of ever widening conflict? We were also very concerned about what we saw is just the lack of strategic analysis the the The lack of any Real effort on the part of this administration to say So when you net it out, are we gaining or are we losing here from this set of policies? You know, is this making it safer is this making us less safe? And it's not particularly clear to it was not particularly clear I think to any of us that we were We were strategically Ending up better off that we were very very good at dropping Bombs on the people we wanted to get sending missiles to the people we wanted to get We were not very good at figuring out whether in the long run This was reducing the threats to the united states from extremist groups or not And I think I think many of us ended up feeling like yesterday That's probably no this may be making our our sort of longer-term national security situations Significantly more precarious rather than less so and there certainly didn't seem to be a sufficient systematic effort To evaluate this The the other concerns we had and those were more strategic concerns Had to do with uh, I suppose what you might you could call the law on ethics Had to do with the lack of transparency. I mean, I think one thing that really kind of Felt like a little shocking a little bit morally shocking to that whole group of people Was the united states has in effect been in a covert war for more than 13 years You know 4,000 dead people is a lot of dead people Only a tiny fraction of those strikes have been acknowledged by the united states Which gets us into a lot of concerns about about Accountability About democratic accountability And about rule of law accountability more broadly and I think We get very and I say this as a law professor It's nice for things to be legal But we often get really confused about the difference between law and rule of law, right And I would put it to you that there are things that are more important than lawfulness And that is consistency with really core rule of law norms And here's the here's the poorest of the core rule of law norms I'll actually I'll you know court our own declaration of impendence, right? This is why the us split away from britain rebelled violently Against great britain Back in 1776 We started off our declaration by saying We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are endowed by their creator with Certain unalienable rights including the like rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness And we then we detailed a series of incursions by the The king of england george the third On essentially the the unaccountable use of lethal and coercive power And you know the most sort of core rule of law principle is that Uh and again, we said we you know we said these are these are unalienable rights of He said men humans we today we call them human rights, right? Not because of their nationality, right? But because they are human Uh that you know if if somebody is going to kill you You should know why that should the exercise of lethal force should be rule bound And there should always be accountability. There should be no unaccountable uses of lethal force period Not by nobody not by any government power and that the lack of that accountability is what made us split off from great Britain Here's the I think to me the fundamental problem with the Uh use of drones outside of hot battlefields and sort of the targeted killing context We don't we don't have any of that, you know, if as chris said earlier, you know, if you're if you're in yemen Uh if you're in yemen You don't know what's going to get you killed. You don't know what pattern of behavior What what what set of networks? What set of triangulated intelligence is going to lead to you being identified? Uh as someone who is targetable. It's it's sort of unknowable because at the moment the the Organizations that we regard as targetable The behaviors that we regard as sufficient evidence of belonging to those organizations or as posing a threat This is all still in the covert not, you know at the moment The legal analysis engaged in by the u.s government to justify these strikes Is still uh has not been disclosed publicly The uh process Is still not public. We know some we know more about Some parts of it than about other parts. Uh, we don't know, uh, we don't the evidence that leads to an individual being targeted Is of course classified The fact that the u.s engages in the strikes and somebody ends up dead Is not by and large even acknowledged by the u.s government Or our role in it and so there is therefore there is no mechanism whatsoever Either for the individuals who are affected or for the rest of us as american citizens or in elsewhere in the world to say Wait, but maybe you made a mistake or you got that wrong or somebody who shouldn't have gotten killed got killed or You know this whole processes message. There's nothing you can do about it and that to me is the you know that to me And and I think for all of us on that stimson task force was the the thing that was just so deeply troubling was the sense of a covert Killing program you couldn't even really say is it war? Is it not war? How do you even begin to evaluate that? How do you begin to know and here I would Differ a bit from from chris and saying that the the Geneva convention sort of solved answered these questions I think we don't know what law is applicable because we don't even have the information that we would need to To come to any consensus on should we call this a war should we call this not a war? And that actually matters enormously right because the legal regime governing armed conflicts And the legal regime governing not armed conflicts are really different and things that are lawful We think are moral and lawful in a war We think are unlawful and immoral when you're not in a war it makes this fundamental difference and I'll here I'll end with my my my visual aid Which I have here if I like to like to pull out You know the the humans are Categorizers we like to put things in boxes. We have war over here And we have not war every human society has tried to draw those distinctions because the rules are really different So if we're in an armed conflict With al-qaeda and its associated forces Where error they may be in yemen samalia, etc And if we're you know can correctly identify who is part of those groups and who's a civilian who's a combatant Then these drone strikes are lawful wartime targetings of enemy combatants. No problem If we are not in a war then there are unlawful extra judicial killings their murders their assassinations whatever you want to call them Given that the whole program is covert We don't know how to evaluate that but it matters enormously. So here's my visual aid and you may some of you may recognize this Everybody know what this is. Whoops, wait it went away again went away again. It's going to be like a picture of my kids But everybody know what this is What's this duck? It's a duck It's a rabbit It's it's uh Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous Duck rabbit, which uh depending on your perspective is either Manifestly a a duck or or manifestly a rabbit And you can you know look at as long as you want and it will it will not reveal itself more more Distinctly to be one or the other That's kind of the really deep problem we have right now And that's I think the the meta issue raised by not only drones But a variety of other technological transformations social transformations in warfare We don't know anymore what a war is You know and I could look at you know, we could equally just as I could say it's a duck Look, it's a duck clearly. It's a duck. Um, I wouldn't necessarily be wrong. I wouldn't be lying. I point out little You know it quacks. It's got a beak or I could say no, it's a rabbit It's clearly a rabbit point out of ears When you look at when you look at uh, many of the individuals who've been the targets of us drone strikes You could say it's a war and they're combatants or you could say it's not a war and they're not combatants It's not clear what basis we have for saying who's right and who's wrong Particularly when so much is shrouded in in secrecy at the moment That I would put to you is the the really deep problem The the goal of keeping that distinction between war and not war even though it's you know, it's always changing always adapting our laws, etc Is that we don't want we want war to be the exception not the norm Because we want the this permissive set of rules that say yes, it's okay to use lethal force state Without it without due process, etc We want that to be the body of law that governs in the exception not the body of law that that governs altogether And when the the exception sort of eats the norm When we can't tell the difference anymore when the government won't give us the information we need to tell the difference That I think is when we really start having problems and and I think that you know for both for me personally and for This whole stimson task force ended up issuing a report in in the summer Uh, which I Or any of you are interested in this to take a look at the stimson center task force on drones You just google it to pop up Was the the really deep problem that trouble is the same problem ambassador volcker pointed out, uh, you know, it's not it's not about the technology It's it's about a series of policies and practices have been enabled by the by this technology That I think we all end up feeling are are really undermining the u.s Commitments to core rule of law norms and I will stop there. Thanks Okay, so we'll let's just take a couple of questions from folks in the audience And then we you if you want to buy some books then they're they're there to be purchased As we have uh candidate obama stepping into office As you know rated by a number of groups as one of the more liberal senators in the senate at the time And in arguably probably very concerned with all of the things that rosa just laid out What changed, you know, I mean now we have now we have access to the intel Now we but we have all of those concerns and we essentially keep the program as it was under the bush administration And then accelerate it. Yeah. Yeah, why? um That's a very good question I mean a couple things obama as a liberal had this need to prove himself in the national security front Right, so um, that's one argument for what happened and also obama never said You know, he said even during the campaign that he was going to go after ben laden and pakistan That he was going to do things unilaterally So he made it clear Early on that he was going to be hardcore about about this strategy and in that way he was different from bush But the people who were at the cia and who had been involved in the drone program under bush They were surprised at how Enthusiastic obama was with the with the cia run drone program So, you know, it's a question like a lot of things in washington It may be years before we have the whole answer Questions out in the audience? Yes, please If you guys will say who you are as before the question Hi, my name is george peeler. I'm a lawyer and freelance writer um following up on Mike's question Is there any correlation that anyone has detected between the prevalence of using Both covert and overt drone strikes to take people out and the withdrawal of us Forces from iraq and afghanistan as a substitute war Increasing what that means or is that not a factor? I mean, there's people who are more steeped in this stuff than i am But what i've been told is that as the us troops come home from afghanistan The drone strikes will go down in that area because the reason for the drone strikes is no longer there protecting the us troops I think it's As as this point has been made repeatedly in the book and and today the sort of distinction between a particular technological tool and a policy Like you almost might as well ask, you know, is there a distinction between, you know, the amount of bullets spent and and troop levels like Yeah, there is uh, but does that mean that? You know the the guns have some sort of like causal link like they're a tool of war as is any other so uh, and again You mentioned drone strikes in in to to i think we can't drive home the point enough of Just how extremely different the which has been said before the use of drones in afghanistan and pakistan is they're doing two Fundamentally fundamentally different things I do think that the the only thing i would add to that is that uh, I think it is pretty clear that the white house to some extent regards drone strikes as a better means of protecting us national security interests than ground troops, um That they're they're cheaper If they get shot down or they break it's not a dead person And that there there there has been I think a tendency which I think is I think is mistaken to think that They will somehow be a substitute for Actually having boots on the ground Or for some so harder conversations about what's actually in our strategic interest anyway But so I do think that we we are not likely to see an end to The use of that kind of cross border drone strike as we withdraw Troops further from afghanistan and reduce their role there. I think I think we you know in the coming decade We will probably see more rather than less of that So as I understand where we're drawing but also putting some new troops in I wonder if that correlates to the point the last Battle day about human intelligence from being critical to effectiveness I'd like to just bring one sort of related point that has to do with sort of the project the book and all of this loop together, which is When new america went when peter bergen and the team some of whom are here started Gathering information from publicly available sources. It was at a time when drone strikes weren't even being openly acknowledged particularly we're talking about in pakistan and And then later in yemen on smalia And what this show what's fascinating right is over a period of time by using publicly available sources The project here at new america and frankly a few other projects around the world have added to a public understanding and debate Some substantive data from which we can pull out patterns And it's it's really quite an extraordinary accomplishment. It's not as if all this material has been provided by the government for open review That's not how we know about this Interestingly in relationships somewhat to what you're saying We've seen for example a pretty significant drop in the number and percentages of civilian casualties say in pakistan Since this material started to get out into the public that doesn't prove causality as to what exactly led to that change And the data isn't perfect But what it does suggest is something that's quite central to like why we're all here, which is With relatively minimal resources It turns out that it's possible to substantively contribute to a very real debate that affects things globally Now that's coming quite extraordinary So the year of the drone that became the decade of the drone That's become the future war project and the end this book has something to do with the capacity to substantively engage public debate Possibly on issues like how drone policy is implemented in a world where there as roses point out There's enormous amounts of secrecy secrecy. There's great difficulty in accessing actually what's going on But what's fascinating is there is really the ability to do something productive And so really thank all of you to be part of this conversation this discussion Um because this is it has a substantive real impact Um given the time I want to want to close out the the panel and then we'll walk over and If you want some books, we will gladly sell them and sign sign copies of them. So thank you all so much for coming