The lethal use of drones can’t carry on as a global free-for-all

The pandemic has already given the future a distinctly dystopian look. And then there’s this: the burgeoning of the ‘second drone age’. The international drone market—which ranges from startups selling $1,000-2,000 off-the-shelf technology that can be easily weaponized by terrorists, to high-tech unmanned vehicles that can carry laser-guided munitions and Hellfire missiles. It’s an even more highly autonomized proliferation of the first age of drones, which has been dominated by the US since its first attack using a remotely piloted craft in 2001. Now, it’s an ungoverned space with billions of dollars to be made and thousands of lives at stake.

The deadly shortcomings of this high-tech violence were placed in the public eye with a US drone strike in Kabul last August that targeted terrorists but instead killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children. It was a failure of military intelligence.

The defence transformation has been far-reaching: 102 countries now run active military drone programmes. It’s replaced thousands of troops on the ground with controllers behind computers located in bases far away from the air strikes they are launching. All of this is happening without any overarching regulatory regime to protect civilians and uphold humanitarian laws, or to examine the operational and tactical ramifications of this remote-control warfare.

That’s what worries experts like Paul Lushenko, a US Army lieutenant colonel and a PhD scholar at Cornell University. Drones are not just a form of war, but a tool of unregulated intra-state political violence, Lushenko told me, representing a “dystopian view of what’s developing right now.”

Lushenko, who co-edited Drones and Global Order: Implications of Remote Warfare for International Society with Srinjoy Bose of University of New South Wales, and William Maley of Australian National University, is just one of many advocating better regulation and more public scrutiny of drone operations.

There have been some attempts at oversight. The Missile Technology Control Regime, an informal political pact among 35 members, seeks to limit the proliferation of and trade in missiles and missile technology—which arguably covers attack drones. But there’s no enforcement mechanism, Lushenko says. It’s not equipped to regulate armed and networked drones, which can take as many as 200 people to operate.

Drones are a gateway technology, Agnes Callamard noted in June as she marked the end of her five years as the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. They’ve opened the door to weaponized artificial intelligence, algorithmic and robotic warfare, and loosened human control over the deployment of lethal force. Today’s armed drones, she wrote, are tomorrow’s killer robots; the absence of a control mechanism for a new generation of weapons of mass destruction represents a significant threat.

Callamard, now the secretary general of Amnesty International, has called for a specific ‘Drone Technology Control Regime’ and says nations should establish a multilateral process to develop standards for the design, export and use of drones, as well as stricter controls on the transfer of military technologies. Sales agreements, she says, should include civilian protection and adherence to international human rights.

This gaping hole in international oversight has allowed powers like the US to flout global norms (like the US drone strike that killed the commander of Iran’s elite Quds force, Qassem Soleimani, in Iraq in January 2020). Large-scale drone makers now negotiate sales directly with prospective buyers who have clear military and security uses in mind. It’s seen Turkey emerge as a drone power in the sector, which market intelligence firm BIS Research estimated was worth $28.5 billion in 2021.

The US has expressed concerns over Turkey’s sale of weaponized drones to Ethiopia, where the government is suspected of using them against rebel forces in the Tigray region in a civil war that’s killed thousands of civilians and forced more than 2 million people to flee their homes. The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region saw Azerbaijan emerge as the clear victor using Russian, Turkish, Israeli, and indigenous drones to overpower its neighbour’s less sophisticated military.

This illustrates the challenge facing the Biden administration and its plans for an ‘over-the-horizon’ strategy in Afghanistan. The policy depends on other countries agreeing to house US bases to enable Washington to continue its counterterrorism efforts, including the use of armed drones. But without regulation and oversight, the only certainty is that drone technology will continue to advance everywhere. There will be more civilian casualties, and no one will be held accountable.

Ruth Pollard is a columnist and editor with Bloomberg Opinion