Weaponized Canadian drones likely to make us less secure
The Trudeau government recently presented a new defence policy that has Canada building a fleet of weaponized drone aircraft.
These drone aircraft are remotely piloted vehicles that carry pay loads, including surveillance equipment and missiles. They can be controlled from North America or Europe; they can be based at air fields in friendly countries in the Middle East and elsewhere; and they can fly over any country that either cannot or will not shoot them down, whether Canada is at war with these countries or not.
Here are four reasons why this is not a good move for Canada. 1. Our society has forgotten the horrors of war, so don’t make war easy. After the First and Second World Wars and the Korean conflict, the vast majority of the population knew about the horrors of war, even if it was measured in the number of our people who were killed and the scenes witnessed by those who came home to tell about it. It wasn’t difficult to convince the majority of people that we should support the UN Charter, the United Nations and join NATO, all in the name of preventing a future war.
Adopting drone aircraft will make getting into wars easier because political resistance will be reduced with the promise of fewer of our own killed and wounded. 2. Easy wars will become permanent wars. Judging from the experience of the United States, when it comes to drone warfare, the watch words are “out of sight, out of mind.” The United States has been able to wage “low-intensity” aerial warfare in countries where the U.S. is supposedly not at war, including Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Syria, in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is little domestic U.S. awareness of what’s going on and even less resistance. The U.S. now appears to be in a permanent state of war, because no military technology is really a quick fix and can’t deliver decisive victories. Also, this warfare is very visible to its victims on the other side, whose resolve to fight increases over time.
While there are disagreements over the numbers, everyone in the U.S. now admits there are some civilians killed anonymously from the sky. Individuals inspired and radicalized by these deaths are capable of making small-scale strikes all over the world, as we have seen in Western Europe, and so the cycle of violence continues. 3. Stop overestimating air power. Besides the destructiveness of warfare generally, we have also forgotten the lesson that air power has its limits and always has. Wars are won because of the activities primarily of armies, the “boots on the ground.” If air power was everything, the U.S. would have prevailed in Vietnam, and the Global War on Terror would have been won years ago. Like other forms of air power, drones will not bring an early end to the conflicts in the Middle East or elsewhere. 4. Drone warfare undermines the 20th-century achievements in international law. The 20th century will be remembered for terrible inter-state wars and also for heroic efforts to write rules to prevent war and to minimize unnecessary suffering in war. The ban on the resort to war except in self-defence, embodied in the United Nations Charter and the international law that regulates conduct in both international and non-international conflicts, are threatened by drone warfare.
Those who have weaponized drone capability can, and will, give in to the temptation to pursue offensive action, disrespecting borders and the distinction between combatant and non-combatant.
Drone warfare also has the potential to displace the central role of uniformed militaries (those legally able to wage war), given the significant role of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as a client in directing the use of the U.S. drone fleet. The honouring of international law requires reciprocation, and it is a system that won’t survive the potential of this new technology.
So what is a country like Canada, a middle power, to do?
In our view, Canada should return to its historical recognition that our interest lies in a more orderly world, one that is not awash in conventional arms or weapons of mass destruction. This orderly world can only be created by states banding together, not by a small number of the most powerful countries acting alone. Geoff Martin and Erin Steuter teach at Mount Allison University, Sackville, N.B., and their most recent book is entitled Drone Nation: The Political Economy of America’s New Way of War.