Drones and democracy

By B.G. | LOUISVILLE

AN AMERICAN general told Peter Singer once that insurgents most fear America's unmatched technology. Then, talking to a Lebanese newspaper editor as a drone circled overhead, he heard a different story: Americans and Israelis, the editor said, are cowards to send machines to fight for them. Much of the ethical conversation around America's unmanned aerial vehicle strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan has centered around unintended civilian casualties. This is certainly a worthy topic for conversation. But Mr Singer asked a different set of questions: how do drones change the nations that use them?

Mr Singer, the author of "Wired for War" and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank, spoke this week at the IdeaFestival in Louisville. He made it clear, first, that drones are not merely an American phenomenon. More than 40 countries, he says, are building robotic combatants. No country can hold a first-mover advantage for long. For America, however, the consequences are not only strategic, but constitutional. A president who sends someone's son or daughter into battle has to justify it publicly, as does the congress responsible for appropriations and a declaration of war. But if no one has children in danger, is it a war?

In Pakistan, it is not. The Wall Street Journal reported today that America has dramatically increased the number of drone strikes in Pakistan this year. Though some of the drones have been borrowed from the military, the CIA flies the missions. The drones make it easier for America to maintain the fiction that it is not fighting a war in Pakistan, but employing technology in a covert action. According to Mr Singer, the CIA's civilian counsels—and not the military's judge advocates general—make legal decisions about the strikes. Officers don't have to write letters home to mothers; politicians don't have to justify human losses to voters.

Mr Singer told another story, though, of an officer in Iraq, so moved by the sacrifice of a bomb-disposal robot that he wrote a letter of condolence to its manufacturer. The robot had saved the lives of many of the officer's ordinance-disposal soldiers. It is hard to justify anyone's death by pointing out that democracy demands it. But death happens in an air strike; Mr Singer argues that so long as none of that death is American, America's democracy doesn't have to consider the consequences of its choice.