Poll: Americans uneasy with some uses for drones
Plans spark privacy and safety concerns
Americans support using unmanned aircraft for patrolling borders and tracking down criminals, but not handing out speeding tickets, a poll out Tuesday finds.
The poll by the Monmouth University Polling Institute comes in anticipation of drones becoming much more common in the skies.
Congress ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to create a plan for drones to fly in general airspace by September 2015, and states are competing to become one of six locations to help develop that plan.
The poll also arrives as the public becomes more aware of privacy concerns and dangers of drones. A Navy drone crashed Monday in Maryland during a test flight. The poll was conducted before the crash and didn’t ask about safety concerns.
The poll of 1,708 people June 4-6, which has a margin of error of +/–2.4 percentage points, found:
-Fo-r out of five support using drones for search-and-rescue missions.
-Abo-t two-thirds of respondents support using drones to track down criminals and patrol the border for illegal immigration.
-Fewer than one in four, however, support using drones to issue speeding tickets.
In addition, four out of five voiced at least some concerns about their privacy if law enforcement officers used drones with high-tech cameras.
“Americans clearly support using drone technology in special circumstances, but they are a bit leery of more routine use by local law enforcement agencies,” poll director Patrick Murray said.
Ben Gielow, general counsel of the industry group Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, said the poll shows that people understand the benefits of using drones in dangerous situations such as searches, fires and disasters. “Unmanned aircraft help save time, save money and, most importantly, save lives.”
Drones come in many sizes, weighing from a few ounces to thousands of pounds. Military versions — the Global Hawk for surveillance and the Predator with weapons — fly routinely in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas.
Local police and firefighters are eager to use small drones to scout fires, survey accident scenes or track down missing persons at a fraction of the cost of a manned helicopter. The Department of Homeland Security has a few drones to patrol the borders.
Last week’s U.S. drone strike, which killed alQaeda’s No. 2 leader at a house in northern Pakistan, was by any measure a step forward in the war on terrorism. One of the organization’s most charismatic leaders, Abu Yahya al-Libi, was eliminated. But the attack also added a bit more fuel to the debate over the morality and effectiveness of such remote-control warfare.
Pakistan registered its ritual disapproval, inevitable given the incursion on its territory. And the ACLU renewed its argument that drone attacks create more enemies than they kill. What’s missing from those arguments, though, is a viable alternative.
Strikes from combat aircraft? Well, no. Just last week, a NATO air attack in Afghanistan killed 18 civilians attending a wedding. Drones are more precise. Commando operations? Vastly more difficult, more dangerous and less likely to succeed. Doing nothing? Not an option, given the overwhelming evidence of al-Qaeda’s continuing plots to attack the U.S.
That leaves the drones, which have been a remarkably effective way to hunt down terrorist leaders and keep others cowering. Al-Libi was the latest of six top al-Qaeda leaders killed in Pakistan and Yemen in the past year. That success has generated bipartisan support and 83% public approval in the U.S. for the program.
But if the drone wars are to be continued, or even ratcheted up, at least three issues merit further attention:
-Civilian casualties. Strikes that are aimed at terrorists but also kill non-combatants, including children, are enormously damaging to the United States. They turn local populations against the U.S. and put enormous pressure on governments such as Pakistan’s and Yemen’s to stop cooperating with U.S. forces.
Accurate counts of civilian casualties are virtually impossible to get, but the U.S. appears to be making progress toward reducing what’s euphemistically called “collateral damage.” The New America Foundation estimates that civilian deaths have fallen from half of all drone deaths in 2008 to fewer than 10% last year, a total of somewhere between 16 and 36 people.
The anti-American backlash stoked by these deaths argues strongly for concentrating attacks on dangerous and high-ranking leaders who can’t realistically be captured or killed any other way.
-R-les of engagement. President Obama and administration officials have begun speaking openly about the once supposedly secret drone attacks, claiming authority for them under the same post-9/11 law that the Bush administration frequently invoked to justify its actions against suspected terrorists. The number of drone strikes rose from 52 during the Bush presidency to 278 under Obama, peaking in 2010, according to a Bureau of Investigative Journalism analysis.
A recent story in The New York Times revealed that the administration keeps a detailed “kill list” of suspected militants, and that Obama personally approves the addition of every new name and also vets many of the individual drone attacks. Although it’s reassuring that Obama recognizes the sensitivities and stakes involved, his handson approach raises questions about the appropriate level of direct involvement by a U.S. president in a program of targeted killings.
-Antiseptic warfare. Some of the military drones are operated by “pilots” in Nevada, who go home to dinner with their families when their shifts are over. When war starts to resemble a video game, will there be an irresistible urge to overuse the remote-control weapons? And will the same temptation apply to the 50 other nations said to have drones or plans to get them?
These are all valid concerns. For the time being, though, the U.S. continues to confront a non-state enemy bent on plotting terror attacks inside America. Unless someone comes up with a better way to protect the nation, the drone strikes should continue, at least until Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahri, is eliminated and al-Qaeda is out of business.