Tag Archives: Law of Armed Conflict

Drone Strike—Analyzing Public Perceptions of Legitimacy

Paul Lushenko considers how Mitt Regan’s book Drone Strike: Analyzing the Impacts of Targeted Killing [see also Regan’s article in this volume] informs the national security community’s understanding of the public’s perceptions of legitimate drone strikes. Lushenko explains that Regan, in evaluating the effectiveness of the post-9/11 US drone program, raises an important question about the implications of public opinion for the sustainability of US counterterrorism strikes and similar operations conducted by other countries.

Lushenko argues that where most researchers understand public attitudes in terms of support and approval, Regan’s analysis suggests that perceptions of legitimacy are equally, if not more important for countries’ drone policies. While scholars, policymakers, and practitioners often reference legitimacy, they rarely, if ever, empirically evaluate this outcome, Lushenko argues.

After outlining the literature for public opinion and drone warfare, Lushenko evaluates and incorporates Regan’s insights on public opinions of drone strike “legitimacy” into an emerging research agenda that defines drone warfare based on countries’ use and constraint of strikes to prevent unintended consequences, namely civilian casualties.

Lushenko concludes that unlike qualitative studies that are difficult to falsify, replicate, and generalize, his proposed approach allows researchers to analyze empirically derived data using statistical methods to determine the public’s subjective beliefs on appropriate strikes. 

Over-the Horizon Drone Strikes in an Ongoing Global War: Afghanistan and Beyond

Laura A. Dickinson discusses the challenges and limitations of applying domestic and international legal frameworks, including jus ad bellum and international human rights law, as the US conducts over the horizon, unmanned aerial vehicle operations, while US officials provide conflicting statements on whether the US remains at war.

Dickinson examines Mitt Regan’s book Drone Strike: Analyzing the Impacts of Targeted Killing [see also Regan’s article in this volume] and discusses the book’s significance in gathering important data to understand the actual effectiveness of drones strikes in combating al Qaeda and associated groups and the impact of these drone strikes on civilians.

Dickinson then discusses why the national security community might go beyond that data and reconsider the international and domestic legal paradigms under which drone strikes occur. She argues that we need to do more than simply change our understanding of how drones and their impacts fit within the law of armed conflict but rather consider a broader paradigm shift.

By allowing the executive branch to skirt legal rules that might limit such extraterritorial uses of force, drones contribute to ongoing declarations of wars with no geographical loci and no temporal endpoints. Thus, Dickinson concludes that from the perspectives of international and domestic law, the ongoing use of drone strikes must be studied not only for its effects on the ground but also for its effects on the rule of law more generally.

Deterrence as the MacGuffin: The Case for Arms Control in Outer Space

This article examines the theory and practice of two partially contrasting policy approaches to US national security and global stability: deterrence, which has long been regarded as virtually the “Holy Grail” of post-World War II US strategy, and arms control, which offers alternative goals, procedures, and structures.

In the realm of nuclear weapons, both approaches have been regularly employed: the United States has developed and deployed a diverse array of weapons, devoting time and treasure to assembling the tools of deterrence, but it has also simultaneously pursued successive generations of SALT, START, and other diplomatic initiatives to limit and reduce those inventories. In contrast, when it comes to outer space—where there is currently a widely-shared perception of starkly rising security threats from Russia, China, and elsewhere—it is deterrence, and deterrence alone, that has been marshaled. Arms control, even relatively modest, preliminary, and non-legally binding variants, has consistently been categorically ruled off the table, by Republican and Democratic leadership alike.

David A. Koplow posits that this exclusive American reliance upon deterrence for ameliorating the security problems of space is misguided. This is because deterrence in all its assorted forms and variations is systematically less applicable to the special circumstances of exoatmospheric competition, and arms control in outer space would be particularly valuable and successful in that milieu. Koplow therefore concludes that US national policy should be promptly re-aligned, to draw strategically upon both concepts for resisting the further degradation of the security and sustainability of critical space operations.