Opposition to Drones Goes Global
In the United States, the activist movement against drone warfare grew up organically, in different parts of the country, without much national coordination. A loose umbrella coalition called United Against Drones, formed in August of 2010, connects groups through a listserv, a website and monthly conference calls to coordinate actions.
Another network called the Alliance to Resist Robotic Warfare & Society (ARROWS) was formed in July 2009 to expand awareness and resistance to what it calls the emerging robotic/biotech/nanotech control matrix.
In April 2010 the Alliance organized a civil society conference called Challenging Robotic Warfare and Social Control. Held in Columbia River Gorge, Oregon, near Boeing Corporation’s military drone complex, it brought together over 125 people from veterans’ groups, churches and peace organizations throughout the US Northwest. The conference ended with an urgent call for further activism and a protest at Boeing’s ScanEagle drone headquarters. The Alliance has continued to organize speaking tours and to promote resolutions in churches rejecting robotic weaponry and other artificial life forms. But like United Against Drones, this is a loosely coordinated network.
Across the Atlantic, in England, a more developed coalition of organizations, academics and individuals emerged in 2010 called the Drone Campaign Network. Many UK groups had drones on their radar ever since the Royal Air Force started using them in 2007, but until the creation of the network, there wasn’t one particular group that focused exclusively on drones.
The network is led by author and activist Chris Cole, formerly director of Fellowship of Reconciliation, Oxford. Cole helps groups connect to drone-related activities in their local area, particularly if there are manufacturers based in their communities, and organizes a yearly gathering to share information and coordinate activities. Through the blog Drone Wars UK, he keeps track of drone news, information sources, and upcoming actions.
One thing in the activists’ favor is the UK public’s general antipathy towards drones. After some snooping, Cole discovered on the Ministry of Defence’s website that one of their top concerns was the increasingly negative public perception of drones. Suspiciously, the Ministry of Defence took down the page as soon as he publicized it on the Drone Wars UK website. “People aren’t buying the whole ‘they’re keeping our boys safe’ story,” Cole said. “With the Iraq war debacle, people are skeptical about what the military says, especially claims that the drones are so accurate that they don’t kill civilians. There is also much more skepticism about the use of drones for surveillance in the UK than the US.”
The coalition includes peace groups such as War Resisters International and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; faith-based organizations such as Fellowship of Reconciliation, England and Pax Christi; and professionals such as Scientists for Global Responsibility. They have organized actions that range from a Stop the Arms Fair at the Houses of Parliament to demonstrations at General Atomics’ new London office. Member group Child Victims of War sets up meetings with members of Parliament to complain about the number of children killed in drone attacks. Scientists for Global Responsibility disseminates information about drones on their website.283
The Fellowship of Reconciliation, England, which has done its own excellent reports on drone warfare, has been calling on the government to make public the number of casualties resulting from British drone attacks and calls for a more open, serious, and informed discussion about the UK’s use of drones.284 “Drones are the latest in a long line of new weapons used in the mistaken belief that they will provide a clean and tidy solution to a conflict. Time and again history has proved that this is a myth,” their website states.285
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Cymru (the Welsh name for Wales), or better known as CND Cymru, was inspired to speak out against drones when they discovered in 2004 that the Aberporth training area in Wales—an area that is also a missile base—was slated to become a “UAV Centre of Excellence,” with promises to deliver one thousand jobs in an area ravaged by unemployment. Despite protests, the government went ahead with its plan. The jobs never materialized—only about thirty jobs were created—but Aberporth became one of two places in Europe where drones are flight tested. The other location is in northern Sweden.
The group continues to raise a ruckus—holding vigils, trespassing on military property, putting pressure on their elected officials. On September 21, 2011, which is International Peace Day, they launched a Commemorative Garden to recognize all victims of the deployment of drones. “Quite apart from the problem that these machines and their imaging equipment were being tested over our homes, many people objected to the terrible fact that our community, and our country, was planning something appalling against people in other countries,” said CND Cymru’s national secretary Jill Gough. “We certainly don’t want Wales to be part of that.”
One issue that is more prevalent in European anti-drone campaigns than American ones is the connection between Israel and the drone industry. Concerned about the occupation of Palestine and the use of drones in Gaza, UK activists were appalled to discover that their corporations were producing key components for Israeli drones, exporting them to Israel, and then buying them back in the form of completed vehicles. They are calling on their government to stop using the Israeli Hermes 450 drone made by Elbit, and to cut ties with Israeli drone manufacturers.
The Catholic peace group Pax Christi UK holds a regular vigil outside a factory called UAV Engines, also owned by Elbit.286 Hastings Against War, a UK coalition of individuals formed in 2003 to oppose the war on Iraq, also protests against the lease and purchase of Israeli drones.287 They are particularly vigilant around the UK Watchkeeper drone project, in which several hundred million dollars went to an Israeli company, thus indirectly supporting the occupation of Palestine.
Another approach to curbing drone warfare comes from a group formed in 2009 called the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC). It represents a group of robotic specialists, philosophers and human rights activists from a number of countries—including the US, UK, France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Australia.
Among the members are Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield; Peter Asaro, a professor of philosophy at the New School University in New York; Robert Sparrow of the Centre for Bioethics in Melbourne, Australia; and Mark Gubrud, a physicist at the University of North Carolina.
The organization started with the aim of stimulating debate about the ways that military robots have already altered the nature of warfare and subverted many of the existing rules of engagement. They were concerned that robotic technologies might tempt policymakers to think war can be less bloody, and that hostile states or terrorist organizations would be able to hack robotic systems and redirect them.
Bringing together experts from all over the world, the group held its first workshop in Berlin in the summer of 2010, organized by Jürgen Altmann, a physicist teaching at Dortmund, Germany. The meeting consisted of academics and policy experts, human rights lawyers, Red Cross representatives, peace activists, military advisers, and others opposed to the arms trade. They explored the threats to peace and international security posed by robotic weapons, including threats to civilians and the undermining of international law. In addition to worries that robots may be used as weapons in space or be armed with nuclear weapons, the experts expressed serious concerns about the inability of automated robotic systems to discriminate between combatants and civilians, and that these new technologies could make it difficult to determine the moral and legal responsibility for any atrocities committed in war.
They came up with the following goals: the prohibition of the development, deployment and use of armed autonomous unmanned systems, with the exception of automated anti-missile systems; limitations on the range of and weapons carried by “man-in-the-loop” unmanned systems; a ban on arming unmanned systems with nuclear weapons; the prohibition of the development, deployment and use of robot space weapons; and restrictions on the use of armed drones for targeted killings in sovereign territories not at war.288
For guidance, ICRAC is looking back at other successful campaigns to ban certain kinds of weapons, particularly the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty outlawing the use of landmines.
After failed attempts by government institutions to regulate the use of landmines, non-governmental organizations launched their own campaign to ban the weapons altogether. In 1992, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines was formed, bringing together hundreds of member organizations in countries all over the world. These included organizations in both mine-producing and mine-affected countries, and groups focusing on human rights, humanitarian assistance, children, peace, disability, veterans concerns, arms control, religious affairs, the environment, and women’s issues. The members engaged in education campaigns, shared political strategies, and pushed their governments to come up with a solution.
In October 1996, fifty governments and twenty-four observers met in Ottawa to strategize, and over the course of several subsequent meetings, they drafted a treaty. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, representing the grassroots global community, won a seat at the table—participating in all the diplomatic meetings and negotiations, helping draft the treaty, and writing the preamble to the treaty that eventually passed.289
The Mine Ban Treaty, officially titled the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, was adopted in September 1997. Thanks to the constant pressure from the grassroots, it was implemented in less than two years, faster than any treaty of its kind in history. By 2011, eighty percent of the world’s nations had banned the use of landmines.290
The landmine campaign credits its success to several factors.291
Also critical to the campaign’s success was that the negotiations took place outside the UN system, and the treaty conference relied on voting, rather than consensus, which made it easier to move forward. Governments were also required to “opt in,” meaning that governments attending the treaty negotiation conference had to agree on the text beforehand. Strong leadership at the negotiation conference led to a persuasive treaty that was safeguarded from the possibility of governments watering it down or slowing down the negotiations.292 Another success of the campaign was that it so stigmatized landmines that even most states that refused to sign the treaty were shamed into not using them.
Key to the fight against landmines was Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her campaign work. With the recent proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles, Williams has been writing and speaking out against drone warfare. She would love to see a ban on all lethal drones, but she fears it would be infinitely more difficult than banning landmines because their use is already so widespread, because it’s easier for the military to make the argument that their benefits outweigh their drawbacks, and most of all, because drones have become such a big business.
“I have a visceral repugnance to the use of drones; I would love for all lethal drones to disappear,” Williams said in an interview. “But with landmines, we didn’t have a lot of industry blowback because in terms of weapons sales, landmines were chump change. Drones are different. They’re a cash cow for the beltway bandits. There’s going to be a massive arms race for these kind of weapons and I’m afraid the companies just won’t tolerate a ban.”
Even regulations on their use would be fiercely opposed by both the weapons industry and by government authorities, especially in the US. “There would be absolutely no support in the US government for any international restrictions on the use of drones,” insisted Jeff Hawkins from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy and Human Rights at a meeting on drones from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy and Human Rights at a meeting on drones. “Of that you can be certain.”293
Williams thinks the best chance the international community has to curb the use of drones is to stop autonomous robotic weapons—weapons that operate independently according to pre-programmed missions—because they are not yet fully developed and because they bring up the most difficult ethical and legal questions.
“If we think it’s bad now, imagine a fully autonomous vehicle going out and wiping out several villages,” said Williams. “Who’s accountable? The company who made them? The military who used them? The software developer? Perhaps they all should be taken to court but that probably isn’t going to happen. So we need to stop them before they’re used. And this is something I think an international coalition could accomplish.”
Peter Asaro of ICRAC agrees. He is concerned about targeted killings, but feels that these are already illegal under international law, so what is needed is enforcement, not a new treaty. In terms of a treaty banning autonomous robotic weapons, Asaro understands that there are many complex questions about implementation and enforcement, but he believes that just having an international consensus that autonomous systems are immoral and illegal would be a major step. “An international ban would dissuade the major military technology developers by vastly shrinking the potential economic market for those systems, which would greatly slow their current pace of development,” said Asaro.294
Many groups agree that fully autonomous attack and kill robotic weapons can and must be banned before they appear in the global weapons market and fuel an entirely new and terrifying weapons race. Such a campaign is something that has the potential to unite the activists, human rights organizations, academics, humanitarians, and the religious community.
For most activists, however, banning autonomous drones would be good but not nearly enough. “It would be a big mistake to just focus on autonomous drones,” said organizer Nick Mottern. “Our goal should be to ban all weaponized drones. This new kind of warfare where the US and others feel they can attack any place, anytime, must be opposed, just as the overwhelming invasion of privacy with surveillance drones intimidating entire populations—from Waziristan to Gaza—must be stopped.”295