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I Have a Drone: the Implications of American Drone Policy for Africa and International Humanitarian Law

Document Cited authorities 4 Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 February 2015
Pages106-128
DOI10.3366/ajicl.2015.0112
Date01 February 2015
AuthorAdedokun Ogunfolu,Oludayo Fagbemi
INTRODUCTION

Placards that bore Martin Luther King's pictures captioned with his ‘I have a dream’ cliché juxtaposed and parodied with placards bearing Barack Hussein Obama's pictures captioned ‘I have a drone’ welcomed the re-elected American president to Germany in June 2013.1

M. Steininger, ‘In Return to Berlin, Obama Finds a Cooler Germany’, Christian Science Monitor, 19 June 2013, available at: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2013/0619/In-return-to-Berlin-Obama-finds-a-cooler-Germany (accessed 14 July 2013).

This was in sharp contrast to the pop-star cult status Senator Obama the presidential candidate received during his 2008 German visit.2

J. Izzard, ‘Is Obama's Trip a Hit Back Home?’, BBC News, Washington, 24 July 2008, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7524556.stm (last accessed on 14 July 2013).

 The most prominent signature attribute of the Obama presidency in warfare is the use of drones.3

P. Bergen and M. Braun, ‘Drone Is Obama's Weapon of Choice’, 19 September 2012, CNN, available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/05/opinion/bergen-obama-drone/ (accessed 14 July 2013).

 The Obama drone doctrine keeps American boots off the ground and unmanned drones rain death on suspected American enemies.4

J. A. Druck, Droning On: The War Powers Resolution and the Numbing Effect of Technology Driven Warfare, 98(1) Cornell Law Review (2012): 209–37, at 228.

 It has also eroded the promise candidate Obama made in 2008 to restore America's reputation abroad.5

‘But his administration's unilateralism and lack of transparency on targeted killings are undermining the connections that were painstakingly built over the past decade, particularly with Pakistan and Yemen’, A. K. Cronin, Why Drones Fail: When Tactics Drive Strategy, 92(4) Foreign Affairs (July/August 2013): 44–54, at 50.

 The Obama administration appropriated $5 billion on drones under the 2012 budget and America now trains lesser conventional pilots than the ever-increasing number of drone operators.6

B. Gogarty and I. Robinson, ‘Unmanned Vehicles: A (Rebooted) History, Background and Current State of the Art’, 21(2) Journal of Law, Information and Science (2011/2012): 1–34, at 11–12.

 Unmanned aerial vehicles or drones have been developed or purchased by more than forty countries and the most technologically advanced producer of drones, the United States, has deployed lethal hellfire missile armed, Predator drones since 2001, to Afghanistan, later to Iraq and other parts of the world, from the command centre in America's Nevada desert.7

N. Sharkey, ‘Saying ‘No!’ to Lethal Autonomous Targeting’, 9(4) Journal of Military Ethics (2010): 369–83, at 370.

 Machines and robots do not have the capacity of humans for rational decision making, to conform to the principles of distinction and proportionality regulating deployment of lethal force in armed conflict: ‘The main ethical concern is that allowing robots to make decisions about the use of lethal force could breach both the Principle of Distinction and the Principle of Proportionality as specified by International Humanitarian Law.’8

Ibid., at 378.

The use of drones by treaty members of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, whose Article 36 provides for the prohibition of new weaponry, that falls short of the laws of armed conflict, shows that until such a prohibition is made, drones are lawful weapons. But their deployment is still regulated by the laws of armed conflict.9

M. Hagger and T. McCormack, ‘Regulating the Use of Unmanned Combat Vehicles: Are General Principles of International Humanitarian Law Sufficient?’, 21(2) Journal of Law, Information and Science (2011/2012): 74–99, at 89.

Nevertheless, American war on terror has employed drones in covert operations to kill suspected Al Qaeda operatives in residential areas far removed from theatres of armed conflict, the mandatory precondition for the application of the rules of war.10

Ibid., at 93.

 Ironically, the American military has come to recognise that drone strikes' bloody and devastating graphic carnage, wrought upon insurgents excluded from the civilian/combatant bifurcation, fertilises the environment for insurgent germination:11

B. Anderson, ‘Facing the Future Enemy: US Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Pre-insurgent’, 28(7–8) Theory, Culture & Society (2011): 216–40, at 227.

The long-term effect of drone strikes may be that the al Qaeda threat continues to metastasize. An alphabet soup of groups with longstanding local grievances now claim some connection to al Qaeda, including al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al Qaeda in Iraq, al Shabab (in Somalia), and Boko Haram (in Nigeria).12

Cronin, supra note 5, at 50.

The danger for innocent African civilians is that they may be murdered by a covert drone strike, at the click of a computer mouse on American soil, on any suspected non-state actor Al Qaeda operative who fortuitously happens to be in their African locality.13

‘The ability to launch missiles differentiates the drones that hover over Afghanistan, Pakistan, and more recently Yemen and Somalia from drones and similar remote-controlled aircraft used to patrol the US–Mexico border and for surveillance by the FBI, DEA, and an increasing number of local enforcement agents’, M. Delmont, ‘Drone Encounters: Noor Behram, Omer Fast, and Visual Critiques of Drone Warfare’, 65(1) American Quarterly (March 2013): 193–202, at 200

Robots are still unable to be programmed to interpret the laws of armed conflict and apply them as humans do.14

R. C. Arkin, ‘The Case for Ethical Autonomy in Unmanned Systems’, 9(4) Journal of Military Ethics (2010): 332–41, at 339

 Machines and robots do not have the capacity of humans for rational decision making, to conform to the principles of distinction and proportionality regulating deployment of lethal force in armed conflict: ‘In short, in the harsh reality of war, there are no silver bullet-technological solutions for ethics.’15

P. W. Singer, ‘The Ethics of Killer Applications: Why Is It So Hard To Talk About Morality When It Comes to New Military Technology?’, 9(4) Journal of Military Ethics (2010): 299–312, at 304.

 America presently rules the drone world with its cutting-edge, extremely more lethal and smarter unmanned MQ-9 Reaper Plane that can trace the trajectory of footprints in an open field.16

Ibid., at 308.

 In Africa too, as in Germany, the fans of candidate Obama have been made aware of the entirely different world of President Obama. Obama has not lived up to the huge unrealistic African expectations that an American president with a Kenyan father would influence a positive change in public governance in Africa. Bad governance in Africa had led to armed conflicts and resulted in African states that do not have the capacity to guarantee security over significant portions of their territories. This fact led to the French involvement in Mali's civil war with British and American logistics support. An American professor of security studies who is in support of drone warfare opined on American involvement in Mali that: ‘Helping French and Malian forces defeat jihadists in Mali by providing logistical support, for example is smart policy, but sending U.S. drones there is not.’17

D. Byman, ‘Why Drones Work: The Case for Washington's Weapon of Choice’, 92(4) Foreign Affairs (July/August 2013): 32–43, at 43.

 The United Nations Security Resolution 1973 of 2011, led to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), enforced no fly zone, during the Libyan civil war and the United States deployed drones.18

P. Adey, M. Whitehead and A. J. Williams, ‘Introduction: Air-target: Distance, Reach and the Politics’, 28(7–8) Theory, Culture & Society (2011): 173–87, at 177–8.

 NATO enforced no fly zone quickly assumed an offensive nature: ‘In October 2011, a US Predator and a French warplane hit two vehicles fleeing Gaddafi's home town of Sirte, forcing the convoy to disperse, after which Gaddafi was caught by rebels.’19

Gogarty and Robinson, supra note 6, at 15.

 DRONE WARFARE

Modern-day drone technology was created by the United States in 1959, it utilised them effectively during the Vietnam War for intelligence gathering, and it was subsequently rejected by its air force fixated on pilot-ontrolled planes, but adopted by its army. The first public exposure of American use of remote pilot vehicles was in 1965 when China showed the wreckage of an American unmanned reconnaissance plane it shot down over its territory. The Israelis employed American-procured decoy drones, which were shot down by Egypt in 1973 because they were mistaken for bigger fighter jets on infected radar, and this error created a simultaneous opportunity for real Israeli fighter jets to wreak destruction and defeat upon Egypt.20

W.J. Broad, ‘The U.S. Flight from Pilotless Planes’, 213 (4504) Science, New Series (10 July 1981): 188–90.

America has drone bases all over the world and their deployment are mostly controlled from its Creech air force base in the American Nevada desert.21

D. Gregory, ‘From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War’, 28(7–8) Theory, Culture & Society (2011): 188–15, at 192.

Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities of drones now have an added extremely destructive capability.22

Ibid., at 193.

 This has whittled down the distinction and proportionality principles of international humanitarian law occasioning in greater civilian women and children casualties.23

Ibid., at 201–3.

 American drones or unmanned aerial vehicles in the twenty-first century's war theatres of Afghanistan and Iraq have added pinpoint lethal missile deployment capability to their traditional reconnaissance and decoy functions. Tim Blackmore's 2005 seminal article is one of the most comprehensive articles on the genealogy and cutting-edge technological capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles.24

T. Blackmore, ‘Dead Slow: Unmanned Aerial...

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