As a living embodiment of Washington’s bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, Robert Kagan has few peers. The author of the best-selling book “The World America Made,” Kagan has pulled off the neat trick of impressing the only two men on the planet who have a realistic chance of serving as president of the United States any time soon.
In a much-noted passage in his State of the Union address, Obama echoed Kagan’s argument that America, despite a decade of war and a near-bankrupt economy, is not a declining or foolish power but the world’s indispensable nation. “Anybody who says America is in decline doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” Obama declared after making a point of letting Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin know he had recommended Kagan’s thesis (as excerpted in the ) to his advisors. Kagan also serves on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, whose agenda is “shaped by the questions and concerns of the Secretary.”
At the same time, Kagan’s bona fides as a Republican hawk are indisputable. He got his start in the State Department under Reagan and wrote with Bill Kristol in 1996 “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” the foundational document of modern Republican foreign policy. Unsurprisingly, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. He serves on the board of directors of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a conservative think tank that routinely finds fault with Obama’s leadership. Kagan now advises Romney, saying he has met regularly with the candidate over the years, most recently for a few hours last summer. Bipartisanship in U.S. foreign policy is alive and well — with a neoconservative flavor.
“I actually believe in a bipartisan foreign policy, not for its own sake,” Kagan tells Salon, “but because I think there actually is a bipartisan consensus on foreign policy. There are plenty of neoconservatives in the Obama administration and there were plenty in the Clinton administration, if you would define ‘neoconservative’ as I would. What’s lost on people not in Washington is how close this community really is.”
Military interventions have occurred “under Democratic presidents, Republican presidents, idealist realists, you name it,” Kagan explains. “America keeps returning to these policies.” People may be sick of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he argues, but polls show support is high for an attack on Iran.
“So even as the American people tire of one war, they’re getting ready for the next one,” he says. “If this system is warlike, it’s the tendency that flows from the public.”
Yet the overarching theme of Kagan’s work is essentially a happy one — and optimism is no small part of his success. In Kagan’s view, U.S. foreign policy is, on the whole, a benevolent force in the world. Yes, America can be aggressive and warlike in seeking to spread its interests and ideals, he admits. Nonetheless, he says U.S. military power has constructed an economically liberal and politically democratic world that most Americans favor and that the world finds congenial. His books, whether slender or fat, tell a story of the continuing morality of U.S. foreign policy.
“It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power,” he once wrote in an article co-authored with Kristol.
Such claims prompted critics of the Iraq war to accuse him of “wishful thinking” or “hubristic arrogance.” In response, Kagan insists the Iraq invasion helped pave the way for the Arab Spring.
“Did the Iraq war have an impact in the Arab world? I think the answer is probably yes. There were repeated free elections in Iraq and that undoubtedly had some effect on how neighboring people views their government. I think Egyptians said. ‘If the Iraqis can have elections, why can’t we have elections?’” he said.
This wan argument is heard more often in Washington than in Cairo, where democratic forces have spent decades seeking elections to free themselves of a U.S.-funded dictatorship. Paeans to the U.S. invasion of Iraq explain little about Egypt’s democratic aspirations, as Kagan surely knows.
He is on firmer grond when he says that Obama’s war in Afghanistan, and the drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen, fit into the U.S. tradition of military intervention. The United States has undertaken roughly 25 overseas interventions since 1898, he notes, an average of one foreign military action every 4.5 years. Since the end of the Cold War, the rate of U.S. interventions has increased to one every 2.5 years. U.S. troops intervened or engaged in combat in 16 out of the 22 years after 1989.
“The critiques that people make of neoconservative foreign policy are identical to critiques that people made of American foreign policy in the 1960s,” Kagan says. “They are identical to the critiques that [Republican Robert] Taft made of American foreign policy in the 1940s; that [progressive Idaho Sen. William] Borah made of American foreign policy in the 1920s, and that the anti-imperialists made of American foreign policy in the 1890s and 1900s. There is mainstream U.S. foreign policy and a constant critique of that. The usefulness of the term ‘neoconservative’ for some is that it makes people feel that it’s not the mainstream of America that’s doing this.”
In Kagan’s reading of U.S. foreign policy, the anti-interventionist tradition is, by definition, outside of the “mainstream” even when, as is the case of Iraq, the mainstream itself came to repudiate the war. Not even a fiasco of an invasion launched on a false premise (that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction) can disturb his comforting notion that military intervention is an expression of America’s essential benevolence. Even when America is wrong it is right.
This grand historical narrative reassures the close community of like-minded policymakers in Washington who want to believe in their own idealism. It also appeals to a liberal American president in a tough reelection fight who wants to preempt Republican attacks. Some say Obama cynically betrayed his principles to embrace an interventionist foreign policy. Others will say he decided early on to go with the Washington flow. Kagan says, in effect, Obama has chosen the American way of war. All three versions have merit.
At the same time, nonetheless, Kagan thinks Romney would be a more effective president than Obama.
“The truth about Romey is that he’s very pragmatic,” Kagan says. “He’s a problem solver as you would expect him to be given what he’s done with his life. He has some basic core principles about what he thinks the role of the U.S. is. But he’s not doctrinaire. I think you would see someone who is more about trying to deal with issues in whatever effective way there is.”
But Kagan is out of step with the Romney campaign in more ways than one. In his Washington Post column, he has praised Obama’s “lonely courage” and enumerated five things he’s done right. His relatively progressive views on Egypt are not going to be echoed by the the Republican contender. To those who charge Obama and Kagan “abandoned a U.S. ally” in Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Kagan pleads guilty.
“If the ally is the person Mubarak, yes I was advocating abandoning that ally, just as I advocated abandoning [Nicaraguan dictators Anastasio] Somoza and abandoning [Filipino dictator Fernando] Marcos. I think U.S. support for right-wing dictators during the Cold War was a mistake. I think supporting the Arab dictators was a mistake and I think we’re reaping some of the consequences now.”
To those conservatives alarmed by the rise of the Islamist party Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Kagan counsels toleration. “I am soft on the Muslim Brotherhood,” he says. “In the long run a successful Egyptian democracy that has these Islamist qualities is probably in our interests.”
His main complaint with the Obama administration is its decision to slash military spending. Kagan said Romney would not cut the defense budget and would have better relations with U.S. allies in Europe and Israel. But you don’t get the feeling that Kagan thinks the difference between Obama and Romney would be like night and day. Instead of cutting the defense budget, he says “we need to cut entitlements. I’m talking about indexing entitlements for upper-income people.”
And thus Kagan quietly acknowledges the costs, as well as the benefits, of America’s global empire that he champions. His vision of U.S. foreign policy anticipates near-constant war abroad and a smaller pension for Grandma at home. In the close community of policymakers in Washington, that’s what passes for bipartisan common sense. Outside of that community, many Americans from the liberal left to the libertarian right want a choice, or a least a debate, about the wisdom of permanent war. But we’re not likely to get it in 2012, not with Bob Kagan advising both candidates.
“As the wars wind down,” is a phrase often heard in Washington these days, whether from Time’s Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson or ProPublica’s T. Christian Miller, or Veterans for Common Sense. The suggestion, not unfounded, is that as the United States withdraws from Iraq and plans to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014, the U.S. soldiers will be leaving foreign battlefields.
But don’t expect the worldwide drone war now being waged in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen to wind down. To the contrary, an Air Force announcement posted online this week indicates the Pentagon anticipates more than quadrupling the size of the global drone war over the next four years. If that happens the number of suspected terrorists killed, the “deep resentment” provoked in the targeted countries, and the terrible civilian casualties are likely to grow as well.
The tip-off is found on FedBizOps.gov, the government’s site for contractors where the Air Force announced Tuesday it is seeking “industry input on how best to support Air Combat Command’s remotely piloted aircraft missions.” “Support will consist of aircraft, ground control station, and Predator Primary Satellite Link maintenance, weapons loading for both aircraft, [and] munitions build-up for MQ-9 aircraft,” the announcement says, referring to the Reaper drone which has a 66-foot wingspan and can carry a 500-pound laser guided bomb.
A timetable included in the announcement says that the Reapers are now launched from two locations and carry out five sorties per day. The Air Force anticipates that activity will double in 2013 to four locations and 14 sorties a day. By 2015, the scope of the Reaper program is expected to double again to nine locations carrying out 46 sorties a day. By 2016, the plan is that Reapers will be launched from 11 locations carrying out 66 sorties per day.
All told, the Air Force foresees Predator and Reaper sorties increasing from the current level of 15 a day to 72 per day in 2016. With the vast majority of sorties to be conducted by the weaponized Reaper, it seems reasonable to assume that the increase in sorties will result in increased attacks — and civilian casualties. (An Air Force spokesman declined to comment.)
The Predator and the Reaper are the two largest weaponized drones in the Air Force arsenal. The CIA is also believed to run drone programs which use the same equipment and weapons.
The announcement jibes with previously reported Pentagon’s plan to phase out the Predator, (which was not originally designed to carry missiles) while expanding operations of the bigger, faster and more lethal Reaper over the next four years.
The new locations of drone bases are not disclosed in the announcement other than that the Air Force wants them to be located outside of the continental United States. Bill Roggio, editor of Longwar Journal which monitors (and supports) the drone war, says he expects the new locations to be located in Afghanistan, as well as the Seychelle Islands in the Indian Ocean (for anti-piracy operations); Djibouti and Ethiopia (for attacks in Somalia), and Saudi Arabia or Oman (for attacks in Yemen.)
The drone war expansion, “is very likely to happen given the trend of a hands-off approach in using U.S. ground forces,” Roggio said.
As the announcement notes, the Air Force’s plans are subject to change. The Obama administration has been forced to curb the drone war in Pakistan. Near universal public opposition and objections from the Pakistani military prompted the U.S. to deescalate the drone war over the past two years. The number drone attacks in Pakistan declined from 118 in 2010 to 70 in 2011, according to the New America Foundation, which monitors media reports of attacks.
According to New America’s Peter Bergen, the Obama policymakers implemented new rules for drone war last November governing
when and how specific drone strikes were authorized. The State Department was given a larger say in the decision-making process. Pakistani leaders were promised advanced notification of some strikes. The CIA pledged to refrain from conducting strikes during visits by Pakistani officials to the United States.
So while the politics of the drone war have forced the U.S. to curb its unmanned aerial war in Pakistan, Pentagon planners anticipate expanding it to many more locations. The drone war is “backfiring,” according Reuters columnist David Rhode, even as the Air Force prepares for escalation.
So you want to be a drone pilot? Have a seat in the operator’s control station that guides the remotely piloted aircraft. You could be sitting in a trailer on Creech Air Force Base in Nevada or doing your duty at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. From this perch, you can see a battle space on the other side of the world. You are virtually on the front lines of war.
One of the screens in front of you has a live full-motion video feed from the aircraft (perhaps showing the home of an anti-American sheik and his family in Pakistan or Afghanistan). A second screen has mission data like the altitude of the drone and its fuel level. A third screen displays multilayered menus of more data. You can steer the drone with the joystick in your right hand; the pedals beneath your feet control its rudder. But if you want to turn on the autopilot, it will require 22 keystrokes on one of several available keyboards.
Your partner, the “sensor operator” seated next to you, controls the camera. He or she can zoom in on the face of the man you are hunting. Is this target a danger to the United States? The keyboard in front of you enables you to communicate with a JAG (or a CIA lawyer) to make sure that your target qualifies under the Rules of Engagement. You have audio contact with the Combat Air Command Center in Qatar, which must authorize the firing of missiles. When it does, you push the button on the joystick and send the missile on its way. Then, an explosion. If you want, the sensor operator can train the camera on the wreckage.
If you don’t feel comfortable in this seat, you’re not alone. When the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board studied the drone operator control stations last year, it found no less than 17 flaws in the “poorly designed” system, including “poor ergonomics” and ill-conceived input systems, like the autopilot activation. While much of the drone war remains shrouded in official secrecy, the Air Force’s ongoing campaign to improve the ground control station provides a window into America’s newest way of war. (I found details in a couple of reports at Public Intelligence, a WikiLeaks-type site that publishes closely held government reports.)
The story of the ergonomically correct drone war has two threads: the White House imperative to reduce civilian casualties and the Pentagon’s duty to find pilots willing to live with inflicting them. As long as civilian authorities want to mount drone attacks (and the Obama administration has ordered four times as many as the Bush administration), the military must respond. For active-duty military people, the ethical questions are necessarily subordinated to a human engineering challenge. How do you get enlisted people to kill long distance?
“A more human-friendly control station”
The problems with the current operator system is that it was designed for engineers, not pilots, say drone specialists. The original drone was just an aerial surveillance vehicle; missiles were not added until 2001. Then with American forces at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, many commanding officers in difficult situations demanded this efficient new weapon for tracking and eliminating perceived enemies.
“There was a lot of time pressure to get them on the theater,” says George B. Harrison, a retired general and consultant to the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Harrison said the current operating system is “usable” and its deficiencies correctable. “Considerable research and a lot of effort is going into designing a more human-friendly control station.”
“It can be very confusing for the operators,” admits Missy Cummings, a professor at MIT who also serves on the AFSAB. “Things haven’t been optimized. It’s a system problem across all operating stations.”
Finding people to pilot the drones has proved unexpectedly difficult. The ground control station had many flaws that required work-arounds, such as accessing fuel gauge information and creating more work space. Accidents were common. One pilot mistook the “kill engine” button for the adjacent landing gear switch, resulting in the crash of a $4.5 million Predator drone. The pilots of traditional manned vehicles who moved in remotely piloted aircraft did not always make the best drone operators. A lot of people dropped out of the program and retention was low.
There are reports of post-traumatic stress disorder and many more of sheer boredom.
“Now you sit in a trailer, for most missions nothing happens,” says Cummings, a former pilot. “Your plane orbits in the sky, you watch and you wait. For the everyday mission, it’s very boring. I’d much rather be flying an F-16.”
And then boredom is punctuated by terror — and deadly mistakes. The exact death toll is much disputed. The New Jersey-based Long War Journal says 138 civilians have been killed in drone strikes in the last eight years. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism counters that the strikes have killed anywhere from 479 to 811 noncombatants in that period, including 174 children. (Long War Journal’s methodology described here; BIJ’s here.)
By another metric, the New American Foundation estimates, based on news reports, that 17 percent of the Pakistanis killed in U.S. drone strikes between 2004 and 2011 were civilians; in 2011 the figure was 11 percent. The Air Force does not release statistics on the subject but the science board’s report cited an internal estimate that suggested U.S. drone strikes accounted for 8 percent of all civilian casualties in the Afghan theater (compared to 66 percent caused by the Taliban).
The two most common causes of U.S.-inflicted civilian deaths, according to the science board, were the “lack of positive identification” and the “lack of tactical patience.”
On the first problem, technological improvements should help, say drone specialists. By bringing together more feeds of accurate intelligence into the control station, the pilots should be able to more precisely identify an armed enemy with higher-resolution photography and greater access to databases.
The second common cause of civilian deaths, the “lack of tactical patience,” is not a problem that can be solved technologically. That is a matter of training American soldiers to live in a surreal moral universe.
“You shoot a missile, you kill a handful of people,” says Cummings, a former pilot, “and then, this is what is strange, you go home. Your shift is over. You get in your car and drive 30 minutes to the northern suburbs of Las Vegas and you mow the lawn, talk to your kids, you go to church.”
“When I was a pilot and you came back from a mission you would come back to the carrier to be with people who were doing the same thing you were doing. You were all together in it. On your own, it’s harder to keep it in perspective.”
Cummings said, “We don’t know if PTSD is more common among drone pilots than among aircraft pilots. It’s just different.”
The promise and limits of technology
The issue is not trivial. Some legal authorities argue drone pilots could be charged with war crimes in the future. All the while, the drone war continues to escalate. According to a May 2010 report from the Human Performance Wing of the Air Force, the number of operator control stations in use is expected to double from 64 in 2010 to 168 by the end of 2012. The new stations will have a number of significant modifications including a more comfortable seat, unified screen, upgraded throttle and improved pedals.
The science board hopes that improved technology will mean that fewer noncombatants get killed.
Increased connectivity of split remote operations results in more “eyes on target” in the CONUS [continental U.S.] ground stations and more opportunities for data fusion from available feeds. Increased sensor fidelity can enhance positive identification, the lack of which is a key cause of civilian casualties. Finally, the employment of low collateral damage/directed lethality munitions on RPAs can help limit civilian casualties.
But there is no technological cure yet for “the lack of tactical patience.” New York University law professor and special United Nations reporter Philip Alston has warned about the risk of a “PlayStation mentality toward killing” among drone pilots. In any case, the most careful pilot must respond to orders from higher civilian and military authorities who want to kill for reasons of policy: to protect Americans from imminent threat or preempt more distant threats, they say.
The Air Force Science Board says U.S. leadership’s tolerance for killing civilians has diminished in recent years.
Combat theaters previously had more tolerance for collateral damage, gaining military advantage by easing flight rulesets. Today, the increased concern over collateral casualties among the civilian population and the ability to target individuals instead of areas, has led to a more stringently applied control.
Civilian casualties are the subject of heated debate across the State Department, Pentagon and CIA. You might not see it on cable-news talk shows but there are military people on both sides. Dennis Blair, retired admiral and former chief of national intelligence, is perhaps the most forceful military critic of the drone war. The ultimate arbiter of this debate, of course, is the commander in chief. As Glenn Greenwald points out, President Obama is touting his aggressive national security policy measures on the campaign trail even as he seeks to shield them from court review.
Meanwhile, the secret aerial attacks launched from American soil continue. Last week, Military.com reported two drone strikes in Pakistan killed four alleged militants from Uzbekistan. Two attacks in Yemen killed four al-Qaida militants and wounded four civilians in Yemen, according to Long War Journal.
And the same obvious questions go unanswered. What sort of imminent threat did these unnamed Uzbeks and Yemenis pose to the people of the United States? What were they planning to do to you or your neighbor that merited their taxpayer-funded deaths? The drone pilots who pushed the lethal button probably know — but they cannot say.
Mitt Romney, Bob Kagan and Barack Obama (Credit: AP/Wikipedia/Salon) 
(Credit: Salon) 
(Credit: Salon) 
