Foreign Policy: If Drones Had Feelings, They'd Be Hurt

[The Northerner]

Charli Carpenter is associate professor of international relations at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and blogs about human security at the Duck of Minerva. Lina Shaikhouni is completing a degree in political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with an emphasis on human rights and humanitarian law.

Killer robots. Video-game warfare. Unlawful weapons. Terminators. Drone-attack commentary has become synonymous with reports of civilian carnage, claims of international-law violations, and worries about whether high-tech robotic wars have become too easy and fun to be effectively prevented. But the debate over drones is misleading the public about the nature of the weaponry and the law. It is also distracting attention from some more important and bigger issues: whether truly autonomous weapons should be permitted in combat, how to track the human cost of different weapons platforms and promote humanitarian standards in war, and whether targeted killings — by drones or SEAL teams — are lawful means to combat global terrorism. Based on our analysis of recent op-eds, we unpack four sets of misconceptions below and offer some sensible ways for the anti-drone lobby to reframe the debate.

Misconception No. 1: Drones Are "Killer Robots."

This is actually two assumptions; neither is precisely wrong, but both are misleading. First, drones themselves are not necessarily "killers": They are used for many nonlethal purposes as well. Drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) can carry anything ranging from cameras to sensors to weapons and have been deployed for nonlethal purposes such as intelligence gathering and surveillance since the 1950s. Yet the nonlethal applications of drones are often lost in a discussion that treats the technology per se as deadly; 90 percent of the op-eds we analyzed focus solely on drones as killing machines.

Read more: http://www.npr.org/2011/06/08/137055338/the-nation-if-drones-had-feelings-theyd-be-hurt

[lordsummerisle]

1. I have never read

a more dishonest discussion in my life. The premise "we're not killing as many civilians as you think" makes it OK? And we should believe this???