Remote Warfare and the Problem With the Suleimani Hit

The killing of Qassem Suleimani, however justified, will carry costs for the United States.  The rub doesn’t lie in the argument over whether the Suleimani hit was preemptive or retributional, if it was an assassination or even if it was legal. Instead, the problem lies in the method.  Its very success has inevitably contributed to a lowering of the threshold of war with the strategy of remote warfare.  Remote warfare, with drones and robots, removes the decision for war far from Jus ad Bellum, the idea of justice in war.  Reciprocity, the idea that the enemy can strike back, is the risk that drives careful deliberation before action.  With no risk, these decisions come quicker and easier.

Remote war has become hunting, and combat has become murder in the dark. Unlike the duel between juridical equals which Clausewitz described, where the friend/enemy dyad is whole, remote warfare is a manhunt.  Instead of combatants confronting each other, one is the hunter, and the other is the prey who flees and hides — this transitions war from what we knew to a war of the hunt.  Unfortunately, the ne plus ultra of recent wars is false:  The hunted must simply avoid death to win; the hunted will want justice.

Iran can hardly call itself a sovereign if the implicit promise of war retribution is turned on its head because of the technical superiority of its erstwhile foe.  Justice in war is promulgated upon a set of ethics, which carry retribution for infraction. With remote warfare, decisionmakers see no risk to the U.S. population, which means the political contract is broken. The equation of risk in war not only is no longer discussed, but it also ceases to exist.  The process is then hijacked by the war machine.  Reciprocity in war ensures that justice is the ideal end for the war machine.  The idea of actual death should mean that the state has analyzed the severity of the threat and the risk and has accepted the idea that the state and its population may suffer, i.e., that suffering is worth the violence to get to the end. Remote war turns this on its head.  As for the states under attack, its relationship with its citizens is predicated on the security contract.  Drones strikes take away the possibility of retribution for Iran, ratcheting up pressure on a state that may already be contemplating irrational moves.

What, then, is reciprocity for Iran?  Attacks against civilians?  With the almost untouchableness of drones and the coming tide of ground robots, weak states will respond with the only tactic available: offensive terrorism.  As the United States prepares its digital weapons, it inevitably will forget about networks and strong bonds, the same way earlier versions of itself had forgotten landmines and guerilla warfare. This is the reaction to the drones: The IED and the suicide bomber are the weak country’s attempt to achieve its own remote capabilities.  The feelings of hopelessness against the drone are echoed in attacks on malls and supermarkets. In order to maximize the impact of attacks, targets will be selected not on the potential of physical destruction, but psychological terror.  Terror attacks are the reciprocal remote weapon for the enemy leaders. 

The true cost of the Suilieman strike may then lie in the issue of reciprocity.  Without the reciprocity of fear, there occurs the disinhibition of force.  The theoretical upper limit of force provided by remoteness is removed, and all is permissible.  In drone wars, the act of killing is the culminating action of the hunt.  In war, a soldier is defending himself, but in remote war, there is no threat.  Justice requires the opportunity to confront once accuser, police or soldier, and for the judge to accept responsibility for imposing the ultimate judgment.  Whereas remote warfare has become politically expedient and very popular for certain breeds for politicians who want to become involved in every conflict, warfare needs to return to carefully weighed alternatives and strategery and the commitment that comes from putting soldiers into combat.  If remote warfare is not war, then is it a crime?    Perhaps the most important contribution to the philosophy of war that remote warfare has given us is the shouting out that the life at both ends of the killing demands a pause, an acceptance that combat is a most unfortunate option, to be guilty and to reject the idea of riskless war.

In theory, Iran can target the drone operators and have already begun with the missile attacks against Al Assad Air Base, northwest of Bagdhad, or if the reports are accurate, the downing of a CIA aircraft in Afghanistan.    It would be a far more powerful statement to target the soft drone pilot communities in Nebraska and New Mexico.  The unfortunate end of this logic is that the homeland would become a hardened prison to protect operators, manufacturers and families.  It is a contradiction inherent in remote preemption that using it actually increases the threats against the homeland that the decision invoked as its justification.

Dr. Reynolds is a guest lecturer at the Center for Futures Studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.