‘Blog’

by Bob Reinhold

The United States has decided for the moment to use drones as its strategic weapon of choice in places that cannot be easily conquered.  This is a poor choice for moral reasons as well as military strategy reasons.

Drones are relatively simple small low flying small aircraft that need no pilot, but are remotely controlled.  They are much like small planes hobbyists fly with hand held controls on large fields.  But drones are not toys but rather are deadly weapons of war.  They once were primarily used and still are used for spying.  They are manipulated by “pilots” at control “joysticks” often many thousands of miles away and can be and are used to kill targeted enemies, sometimes dozens or even hundreds of people.

They have been used to assassinate leaders of “supposed terrorist” armies.  Their advantage is they don’t put the U.S. troops at risk in their deadly missions.  They must rely on sophisticated mapping systems such as are prepared at the Defense Mapping Agency in St. Louis and equipment manufactured at places like our local Boeing factories.

Ann Wright and others have told us of the moral issues involved with drones, but they entail an inherent strategic disadvantage as well.  The United States has been the victor in the nineteenth and twentieth century wars, which were wars of attrition.  The North in the Civil Was was victorious because it had more men, more guns and could replenish disproportionate losses on the battlefields.  In the First World War, the United States and its allies had a greater number of men in the field and greater ability to restore losses of equipment.  In the Second World War the United States and its allies took disproportionate losses in the battlefield, but were better able to train and deploy replacement pilots and aircraft than Germany.  Its supporting ally in that war, the Soviet union lost more men in the field than the Germans, but had more men in place to lose in battle which the Germans could not match.  Likewise even before the nuclear bombing of Japan, the Americans were clearly winning the war of attrition in the Pacific.

Getting back to drones, each one apparently requires one man to each “joystick” to operate each drone to effectively seek out and destroy targets.  Please don’t forget there are more people available to constitute an army of joystick pilots in both India and China.  Although both of those nations presently are not at war with the U.S. they could be in the future.  this is not to mention the large numbers of people, potential joystick pilots, in the Islamic world.

The U.S. would likely lose a drone war of attrition, which to recoup, a U.S. military advantage, would start U.S. military planners to think in nuclear terms or the possibility of using chemical or germ warfare.  This is unthinkable and all reasonable people know that.

Thus, let us encourage our nation to take the moral high ground as well as the most sound military course and stop this drone nonsense, before it’s too late.

Bob Reinhold is an attorney and member of Citizens for Global Solutions.  He also sits on the Instead of War Steering Committee.