Money quote(s):
"Although technically the United States has a “capture or kill” program, the drones are often used for targeted killing operations. True, they are also used for surveillance, which might precede an operation to capture a suspected terrorist, but the drone strikes we are concerned about involve the deliberate killing of suspected terrorists.
One of the comments during the panel discussion was quite elegantly phrased: You can’t surrender to a drone." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)
The (bolded) comment reveals as much about the confusion between the law enforcement and warfare models of, problem-solving as it highlights an assumed drawback of using drones in counter-terrorism.
(Of course, one man's bug is another man's feature.)
"The idea that a suspected terrorist cannot surrender to a drone suggests, somehow, that the appropriate course of action is to send in troops who could potentially accept the surrender of the targets and capture them rather than kill them. This argument deserves a little more scrutiny.
It is important to distinguish between the duty to accept surrender and the duty to afford the enemy the opportunity to surrender. These are two different normative requirements, under both the laws of war and the morality of warfare. Everyone agrees that a soldier cannot kill an enemy combatant who effectively communicates his desire to surrender to the opposing soldier. In fact, declaring that “no quarter will be given” (i.e. refusing to accept surrenders) is both a violation of international humanitarian law and a war crime generating individual criminal responsibility.
However, that’s entirely different from the duty to offer the enemy the opportunity to surrender." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)
What "Everyone agrees" to (see above) isn't necessarily so under wartime conditions. A bright guy like Prof. Ohlin can probably cite a half-dozen circumstances where a combatant on the battlefield is not obligated to accept a surrender, no matter how clear the "I surrender" message is communicated.
"(Y)ou can’t surrender to a drone, but you also can’t surrender to an F-16 or a stealth bomber or any other form of aircraft that fires weapons from a distance. That doesn’t necessarily suggest that the proposed norm is incorrect, but it does suggest that it is highly revisionary and would require wholesale revision to current practices of modern warfare. Although such a view would not necessarily be fatal to a moral requirement for warfare, I do believe it is fatal to a legal requirement that is necessarily based on customary international law (and requisite state practice)."
This is where Prof. Ohlin cuts to the meat of this question. Combatants (lawful or otherwise) coming under long-range or stand-off fire have few surrender options available to them, whether that fire is artillery, rocket, bomber, or drone-launched.
"Many of the asserted objections to targeted killings turn out not to be objections to drones per se but actually to the strategic use of air power generally.
As it happens, though, the recent technological advancements associated with air power (and smart bombs) make these weapons more discriminating than they have ever been in the past. A missile fired by a drone or F-16 today might ironically be more discriminating than an artillery shell fired a decade ago (or a missile fired today by a less technologically advanced country). Furthermore, within the category of air power, a drone operator has more real-time high resolution images of his target than a fighter pilot, who in many cases is dropping a bomb on a set of defined coordinates regardless of who happens to be in the building at that time."
A more suspicious sort, such as CAA, might see discussions like this as just the first feelers of an attempt to get civilized powers to voluntarily relinquish one of the more effective forms of military power currently available to them.
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