2NC - 08-26-19 - Drones: Homestead File Title Bernard Medeiros 1

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File Title Bernard Medeiros
2NC – 08-26-19 – Drones

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2NC – ON
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2NC – Prolif
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2NC – Alt Causes
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2NC – No Impact to Spread
Basic countermeasures solve—drones are only usable in permissive
environments, creating a built in check to aggressive use.
Michael W. Lewis 12, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University Pettit College
of Law, Spring 2012, “ARTICLE: SYMPOSIUM: THE 2009 AIR AND MISSILE WARFARE
MANUAL: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS: Drones and the Boundaries of the Battlefield,” Texas
International Law Journal, p. lexis
Like any weapons system drones have significant limitations in what they can achieve. Drones are extremely
vulnerable to any type of sophisticated air defense system. They are slow. Even the jet-powered Avenger
recently purchased by the Air Force only has a top speed of around 460 miles per hour, n20 meaning that it cannot escape
from any manned fighter aircraft, not even the outmoded 1970s-era fighters that are still used by a number of nations.
n21 Not only are drones unable to escape manned fighter aircraft, they also cannot hope to successfully fight
them. Their air-to-air weapons systems are not as sophisticated as those of manned fighter
aircraft, n22 and in the dynamic environment of an air-to-air engagement, the drone operator could not hope to
match the situational awareness n23 of the pilot of manned fighter aircraft. As a result, the outcome
of any air-to-air engagement between drones and manned fighters is a foregone conclusion.
Further, drones are not only vulnerable to manned fighter aircraft, they are also vulnerable to jamming. Remotely
piloted aircraft are dependent upon a continuous signal from their operators to keep them flying, and this signal is vulnerable to
disruption and jamming. n24 If drones were [*299] perceived to be a serious threat to an advanced military, a
serious investment in signal jamming or disruption technology could severely degrade drone operations if it
did not defeat them entirely. n25 These twin vulnerabilities to manned aircraft and signal disruption could be mitigated
with massive expenditures on drone development and signal delivery and encryption technology, n26 but these vulnerabilities
could never be completely eliminated. Meanwhile, one of the principal advantages that drones provide - their low
cost compared with manned aircraft n27 - would be swallowed up by any attempt to make these aircraft survivable against a
sophisticated air defense system. As a result, drones will be limited, for the foreseeable future, n28 to use in
"permissive" environments in which air defense systems are primitive n29 or non-existent. While it
is possible to find (or create) such a permissive environment in an inter-state conflict, n30 permissive environments that
will allow for drone use will most often be found in counterinsurgency or counterterrorism
operations.
Reject their “conflict threshold” theory—ignores history of intervention

Michael Aaronson 13, Professorial Research Fellow and Executive Director of cii – the Centre
for International Intervention – at the University of Surrey, and Adrian Johnson, Director of
Publications at RUSI, the book reviews editor for the RUSI Journal, and chair of the RUSI
Editorial Board, “Conclusion,” in Hitting the Target?: How New Capabilities are Shaping
International Intervention, ed. Aaronson & Johnson,
http://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/Hitting_the_Target.pdf
Another, more general, criticism of drones is that, by offering the absence of personal and political
risk, they ‘lower the bar to war’.8 By inducing a ‘false faith in the efficacy and morality of armed attack’, unmanned
systems could ‘weaken the moral presumption against the use of force’.9 These, too, are critiques that must be taken seriously. The
decision to take military action must always be made heavily. If the object of war is to make a better peace, then it must be waged
with due regard not just for one’s own cost in blood and treasure, but also for that of the adversary. Yet it
is a mistake to
ascribe too much to technology as a dynamo of intervention itself. It is true that major Western
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militaries now prepare for an era of ‘light-footprint’ intervention born of budget austerity and
war exhaustion from the protracted counter-insurgencies of the post-9/11 era. But the Western record of intervention
has not been linear. For the Libya intervention, there is the Syria non-intervention; the West intervened firmly in Bosnia in 1995, but only
after the earlier failures resulted in the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War at Srebrenica; the withdrawal from
Somalia and the shameful inaction over Rwanda sits in the historical record alongside the
determined, forceful, sustained military action in Kosovo of 1999 and the preventative diplomacy in Macedonia of
2001. Technological capabilities can shape the form of intervention, but ultimately its drivers and
determinants are political and moral. President Sarkozy and Prime Minister Cameron, for instance, pushed for intervention in
Libya on moral grounds despite serious equipment deficiencies that meant reliance on American assets – and, in the case of Cameron, much against
the counsel of his own military.10
Even if they make it easier to fight, their scenario means conflict would still
occur, but with more damaging weapons.
Kenneth Anderson 11, Professor of International Law at American University, 10/9/11,
“What Kind of Drones Arms Race Is Coming?,” http://www.volokh.com/2011/10/09/what-
kind-of-drones-arms-race-is-coming/#more-51516
Then there afurther idea that drones make it “too easy” to reach across borders and that is the
difference today; a long-standing legal doctrine suddenly made far too powerful by reason of
new technology. I am not convinced. That drones – precisely because they are accepted as both
more sparing of civilians and more sparing of one’s own forces – makes it “too easy” to use
force, reduces the disincentive against using force, has proven irresistible to many as a criticism of drones
and targeted killing. I address some of the questions in this draft article. Still, one consideration is simply that the
number of “resorts to force” is not enough to damn drones and targeted killing. One must also
consider the intensity of the fighting that ensues by comparison to conventional war, as well as
the question of whether they increase or diminish the damage that might otherwise arise from
conventional wars that take place in lieu of these more discrete uses of force.
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2NC – No Drones Racing
No risk of runaway drone norms.
Lewis and Crawford 2013 – *Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University Pettit College of
Law , ** PhD, post-doctoral fellow and associate at the Sydney Centre for International Law
(Michael and Emily, Georgetown Journal of International Law, “DRONES AND DISTINCTION:
HOW IHL ENCOURAGED THE RISE OF DRONES”,
http://www.law.georgetown.edu/academics/law-
journals/gjil/recent/upload/zsx00313001127.PDF)
Before discussing the legal merits of the norms that the United States is shaping through its present conduct of drone
warfare, it is first necessary to dispel a pervasive misconception about drones that Alston and many
other commentators have promulgated. That misconception is that the current manner in which
the United States is using drones broadly justifies any use of drones by other countries against the
United States and that drones represent a serious threat to the United States. 159 This misconception
has spread so easily because the reciprocity theme is intuitively appealing and, to a point,
legally correct. It is true that whatever legal basis the United States offers for utilizing drones in Yemen, Pakistan,
or Somalia must also be available to any other nation wishing to use drones as well. However, that does not
mean that drones will be appearing over New York City anytime soon, in large part because drones
are very vulnerable to air defense systems and signal interruption and because they are particularly unsuited to
use by terror groups. 160 Even the most advanced drones that the United States possesses are relatively
slow and vulnerable to fighters or surface-to-air missiles, meaning that, as conventional weapons,
drones would have limited utility in a traditional state-on-state armed conflict. 161 Perhaps more
importantly, the physical realities associated with using drones makes them of limited usefulness to
terrorists. Drones that are capable of carrying any significant payload need hard surfaced runways and significant maintenance
support. Any drone returning to such facilities would be closely followed by U.S. forces, meaning that any drone used by terrorists
would be a single strike proposition, and quite an expensive one at that. Therefore, from a practical standpoint, car
bombs, suicide bombs, and attacks on airliners remain by far the most credible threat to the United
States, regardless of how it pursues its drone policy. But the misconceptions concerning drones are not limited to
the practical effects of U.S. drone policy. Legally, the United States’ position is not one of “ever-
expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.” 162 The “entitlement” to use drones, just like
the entitlement to engage in any other action on the sovereign territory of another state, is largely based upon the
consent of the nation in which drones are being used. It is clear that Yemen consented to the
strikes undertaken on its territory. 163 This is supported by the WikiLeaks release of cables indicating Yemeni
government consent for the actions taken there. 164 Likewise, there is evidence that the Pakistani government
has privately consented to most of the strikes that the States had conducted on its territory. 165 To the extent that
the norm being shaped by U.S. behavior is limited to cases of consent, it is hard to see how the
United States will one day be disadvantaged by that norm. Outside of situations in which the host state
consents to the strike, the United States has only asserted an “entitlement” to target al Qaeda in
situations where the host state has proven itself to be unable or unwilling to incapacitate or expel al
Qaeda from its territory. 166 It has long been established that states not involved in armed conflicts have a responsibility not to aid
either belligerent. 167 The
United States’ position that the law of armed conflict allows it to conduct
proportional strikes against al Qaeda targets within states that have proven themselves to be
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unable or unwilling to incapacitate or expel those targets cannot be fairly characterized as creating an
“ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.” 168
Tech is difficult and integration is even harder—our studies are better.

Gilli & Gilli 13—PhD Candidates, Pol Sci, EUI (Andrea & Mauro, Sept 3 2013, “Attack of the
Drones: Should we fear the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles?,” SAGE Pub)
Third, regardless of these considerations, in contrast to the idea that drones can spread quickly, both
the US and European
countries needed time and resources to achieve their current UCAVs production capabilities.
Most of the aforementioned programs were launched over a decade ago, with investments running
in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, at least. Yet, consistent with policy-makers’ technological plans, no
program has emerged yet. For example, in 2005 the British Defence Industrial Strategy, remarked that “targeted
investment in UCAV technology […] would also ensure that we can make better informed decisions […] around 2010- 2015
[…].”123 Put in another way, the UK started the Taranis program in 2005 for being able, a decade later, to take decisions, and thus
field a capability by 2020/25. Whether this process is quick is a matter of opinions. However, such procurement times are
analogous to traditional combat aircrafts’. Only General Atomics Aeronautics’ Avenger required notably shorter
development times: likely this is because the company could build on its experience on the Predator and the Reaper – in turn the
product of decade-long work.124 It
is possible that China, India or Russia will soon close the technological
gap with the US, and maybe they already are. However, the experience from manned aircrafts warns
skepticism about the ease and quickness of this process.125 In the end, as Saunders and Wiseman have pointed
out, even [d]eveloped countries with more advanced techno-industrial bases than China, like
Japan and Taiwan, have struggled to achieve the systems integration know-how necessary to
produce cutting-edge fighter aircraft.126 The same is true also for India, Israel and South Africa,
whose attempts to develop an indigenous jet fighter have miserably failed.127 In this sense,
observers closer to these dynamics have probably a better grasp of reality. For example,
according to Russian armed forces, Russia lags at least 20 years behind in drones technology.128
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2NC – AT: Indo-Pak War
Bunch of mitigating factors solve.
Haider 16 – Sajjad Haider, Editor at the Kashmir Observer, “Why War Between India And
Pakistan Will Not Happen?”, 9-20, https://kashmirobserver.net/2016/ko-analysis/why-war-
between-india-and-pakistan-will-not-happen-10264
War hysteria is being drummed up by the media and “news room experts”, and there are
growing calls for revenge against Pakistan for allegedly being the mastermind behind the Uri
attacks. All this is hysteria- pure and simple- and will come to naught. The reasons pertain to
the very nature of war in the 21st century- that is, its mutation and improbability-, the
nuclearization of the subcontinent wherein conventional military superiority is dulled by
nukes, and the large megatrend of historical import, globalization. War between states or
entities began as “total war” which meant all resources and even all peoples in the throes of war
got involved and were also seen as targets.
The First and the Second Great War constitute classic examples of this in modern history.
However, since the end of the Second World War, on account of profound structural changes –
in domains as varied as world politics, military developments and thinking, the development
and spread of nuclear weapons and what has been termed as “complex interdependence”- the
thick flows of commerce and trade that bound nations together- rendered total war almost
impossible. For instance, the Cold war never crystallized into a “hot war” because of nukes.
The paradigm that determined US- Soviet relations was Mutually Assured Destruction(MAD)
which meant that if either the US or the former Soviet Union broke or crossed a certain
threshold, it would be at the peril of either country. Both would get destroyed.
This paradigm holds between India and Pakistan- albeit in a truncated manner. So given
structural issues and conditions, total war is ruled out between India and Pakistan. What
about “limited war”? Can India respond by limited, surgical strikes on Pakistani installations or
targets? The answer again is a NO. A surgical strike would entail abrogating Pakistan’s
sovereignty and an act of war.Pakistan, if this scenario pans out, with its nuclear doctrine, can
escalate the conflict and resort to its nukes and it may follow up by posturing or “hot pursuits”
in vulnerable points of Indian defence. All this would mean escalation of the war beyond
tolerable thresholds for both India and Pakistan. Moreover, the respective nationalisms of India
and Pakistan will become more belligerent in an idiom of what we would call “techno
nationalism”. These themes or issues then act as major impediments to war between India and
Pakistan.
This, however, is not all. There has been both an evolution and revolution in military thinking
and doctrine. While most nations maintain and reserve the military instrument- that is
conventional military and army build ups and deployments- the domain of war is now in what
is called “asymmetric war”- that is, roughly speaking, a quasi war which does not entail the use
of all the state’s military options and instruments. In more advanced countries, there is also the
new doctrine called the “Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) - which entails the use of high
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technology warfare. But this option, given the nature and structure of India and Pakistani
armed forces is not available to either country. Even if, hypothetically speaking, it was, nuclear
weapons would give RMA short shrift.
Overlaying these military and security dynamics which precludes the military option for India
and Pakistan is globalization- a large historical megatrend that involves economic openness
over autarky and ensconcing a nation into the sinews of the global economy. While Pakistan is
not a “globalizer” (the country does not really figure in the globalization index and its economic
and financial linkages with the world are weak), India, post 1991, has been a beneficiary of the
open world economic order. This, among other things, has allowed the country to reap political
dividends too.
While the global economy is yet to recover entirely, India, if certain things remain constant and
hold, is expected to clock a growth rate of over 6%. This growth rate is absolutely essential for
India to maintain its economic trajectory and grow in other dimensions- including defense
spending and expenditure and even military modernization. And, importantly, India being a
component of “complex interdependence” with deep linkages- trade, and commercial- with the
wider world will throw spanner into this paradigm. War will redound negatively within and
without. Capital flows which are a complement or supplement to the national savings rate
which in turn determines investment which leads to growth will dry up; interest rates will
shoot up and so will inflation leading to an economic crisis. There will also be consequences on
the global economy and the world will pay a price for war between India and Pakistan. All
these factors essentially militate against war between the countries. What then is being trotted
out by the media? Nothing more than a feel good factor from drumming up hysteria.
The contemporary world is too complex to be singularly drummed into a straitjacket of vanity ,
emotionalism and revanchism. So those who fear the outbreak of war between India and
Pakistan must rest assured that this will not happen. Structural and economic reasons will
militate against this- a disappointment, in the final analysis for war mongers and “TV experts”
but a victory for peaceniks and sober minds.
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2NC – Casualties
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2NC – Drones Good
More evidence – drone solve terror –
1. Disruption – they disrupt terror-ops.
Johnston and Sarbahi ‘15 (Patrick B. Johnston and Anoop K. Sarbahi, RAND Corporation and the University of
Minnesota, "The Impact of U.S. Drone Strikes on Terrorism in Pakistan," Semantic Scholar, 4-21-2015,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d215/391e3c91534e53ba285bdb68f57b79dd1dc1.pdf?_ga=2.100650654.166684084.1561833064-
620911412.1561833064, SB).
The first mechanism involves the “disruption” of militant operations. This disruption mechanism
suggests drone strikes reduce militants’ ability to operate in a cohesive, efficient, manner and
limit their ability to control local areas. Even if an insurgent or terrorist organization is the only
armed actor in an area, as is often the case in FATA localities, the greater the threat drones pose, the harder it
is for the militants to exercise direct control in that area. This runs counter to Kalyvas (2006), whose
“logic of violence” predicts that when insurgents are the sovereign in an area, insurgent violence will be absent, since
betraying an area’s sovereign carries prohibitive risks for civilians. This equilibrium makes violence against civilians unnecessary
for the sovereign. In this case, government or U.S. forces seeking to root out militants from an area they control lack the necessary
information to target militants selectively. Kalyvas’ logic of violence suggests counterterrorist operations would thus be likely to
rely on indiscriminate force. Drones’ novel intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities change these dynamics in
contemporary Pakistan vis-a-vis the earlier conflicts that Kalyvas seeks to explain. Not only do drones enable the U.S. to collect
information in denied areas where they have no ground presence—as is currently the case for the U.S. in Pakistan—but they can
also credibly threaten to punish militants from afar, with lethal and discriminate force. Our argument is that, in this scenario,
militant violence should decrease, both in terms of its frequency and its lethality. The reason is that
drone strikes in an area represent a meaningful indication of an increased security risk to
militants operating in that area. The increased risk associated with continuing to operate in the targeted areas should
apply to any type of militant activity that is vulnerable to drone capabilities, including conducting terror
attacks, regardless of whether militants would otherwise conduct operations at their “average” rate and level of lethality (the null
hypothesis), or if they would otherwise escalate the frequency and lethality of their operations to deter potential defectors (the
alternative) “logic of violence” hypothesis. We thus advance the following hypothesis: H2: All else equal, drone strikes
decrease terrorist violence. We should note that there are a couple of other mechanisms that would be consistent with
this observable implication. First, there is a possibility that drone strikes make the population more reticent to
inform, and therefore reduce the need for terrorist violence in retribution. If this were the case, we
would expect to see a relatively small number of drone strikes drying up the pool of available informers and making additional
drone strikes based on multi-source intelligence difficult. This is not what we see—there have been over 350 drone strikes
conducted in Pakistan’s tribal areas since 2004–which is consistent with the disruption mechanism described above. The disruption
mechanism’s implication is that semi-frequent drone strikes are used to pursue persistent disruption of terrorist operations. This is
consistent with the empirical record. Second, it can be argued that recent
technological advancement, including the
use of drones and tracking of cellular and satellite phones, has enabled counterinsurgents to
reduce their reliance on human intelligence. This not only implies that there are fewer potential targets for
insurgents, and that civilians have more credible basis for ‘deniability’, but it also implies that if
insurgents kill more civilians, they are more likely to make mistakes, which would be
counterproductive.
2. Degradation – drone strikes eliminate HVIs.

Johnston and Sarbahi ‘15 (Patrick B. Johnston and Anoop K. Sarbahi, RAND Corporation and the University of
Minnesota, "The Impact of U.S. Drone Strikes on Terrorism in Pakistan," Semantic Scholar, 4-21-2015,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d215/391e3c91534e53ba285bdb68f57b79dd1dc1.pdf?_ga=2.100650654.166684084.1561833064-
620911412.1561833064, SB).
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The second mechanism by which drones could reduce terrorism is through “degradation.” This mechanism
would suggest that drone strikes reduce terrorism by taking terrorist leaders, and other “high-value
individuals” (HVIs), off the battlefield. The loss of individuals with valuable skills, resources, or
connections hinders a terrorist organization’s effectiveness, including its ability to continue producing
violence at the same rate it had before losing it lost key HVIs. Killing core and affiliated al-Qaida leaders is the stated objective of
drone strikes.8 Drone strikes have resulted in the deaths of many top terrorist leaders. In late 2012, the
U.S. administration claimed to have eliminated at least two-thirds of the top 30 al-Qa’ida leaders in Pakistan
and Afghanistan during the first three years of President Obama’s first term in office.9 . The estimates compiled by New America
Foundation suggest that by August 2014 drone
strikes in Pakistan accounted for the killing of 64 militant
leaders. The list includes 38 high-level al-Qai’da functionaries and several al-Qai’da-affiliated
and Taliban group leaders.(New America Foundation 2015).
Al Qaeda proves drone strikes are effective.

Michael V. Hayden 02-19-2016 – Retired United States Air Force four-star general and former
Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence,
and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. [“To Keep America Safe, Embrace Drone
Warfare,” Accessible Online at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/opinion/sunday/drone-warfare-precise-effective-
imperfect.html] @ AG
TARGETED killing using drones has become part of the American way of war. To do it legally and
effectively requires detailed and accurate intelligence. It also requires some excruciatingly difficult decisions. The dialogue above,
representative of many such missions, shows how hard the commanders and analysts work to get it right. The longer they have
gone on, however, the more controversial drone strikes have become. Critics
assert that a high percentage of the
people killed in drone strikes are civilians — a claim totally at odds with the intelligence I have
reviewed — and that the strikes have turned the Muslim world against the United States, fueling terrorist recruitment. Political
elites have joined in, complaining that intelligence agencies have gone too far — until they have felt in danger, when they have
complained that the agencies did not go far enough. The
program is not perfect. No military program is. But here is
the bottom line: It works. I think it fair to say that the targeted killing program has been the most
precise and effective application of firepower in the history of armed conflict. It disrupted
terrorist plots and reduced the original Qaeda organization along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to a shell
of its former self. And that was well before Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011. Not many years before, the targeted killings were
fairly limited. But by 2008, we knew that the terrorist threat had increased to intolerable levels, both to American forces in South
Asia and to the United States itself. From our surveillance platforms, we could observe training camps where men
leapt off motorbikes and fired on simulated targets. Early that year, the C.I.A. and I began recommending more aggressive action.
We were confident that the intelligence was good enough to sustain a campaign of very precise attacks. To be sure, it was not, is not,
always error-free. In late 2006, for instance, a strike killed a one-legged man we believed was a chieftain in the Haqqani network, a
violent and highly effective group allied with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It turned out that the man was indeed affiliated with the
Haqqanis, but he wasn’t the leader we wanted. With all the land mines in the region, there were many one-legged terrorists in
South Asia. I demanded a full explanation for the misidentification. There were no excuses. People were thoroughly, maybe even
excessively, contrite. But even if I was convinced that we could routinely provide high-quality intelligence to
enable precision targeting, we still had to convince policy makers in the government that they should take advantage of it.
We had one thing going for us. I got to talk to President George W. Bush directly every week without filters. I briefed him every
Thursday morning and began to use the sessions to underscore Al Qaeda’s growing footprint and brazenness in the tribal region of
Pakistan. My chief analyst on this, a lanky Notre Dame graduate, met with me almost daily and stressed that as bad as this might be
for Afghanistan and our forces there, the threat could also come to our shores. If we had boiled our briefings down, the essence
would have been: “Knowing what we know, there will be no explaining our inaction after the next attack.” So the United States
began to test some limits. In early 2008, a charismatic Qaeda operations chief was killed along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The
strike was clean and the target so important that even regional reaction was muted. Local people knew who he was and did not
mourn his passing. Later in the year another senior Qaeda operative, active in planning attacks in the West, was killed along with
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several lieutenants in a similar strike that resulted in a similar reaction. By midsummer, when Hellfire missiles killed a senior Qaeda
operator who was active in its weapons of mass destruction program, it was clear that the United States had launched a campaign
of targeted killings in South Asia. Publicly available sources document nearly three dozen attacks in the last seven months of the
Bush administration, almost three times the total of the previous four years. According to those sources, 18 senior and midlevel
Taliban and Qaeda leaders were killed. The intelligence used for these strikes was based on human reports, surveillance technology
and the near unblinking stare of the Predator itself. The strikeswere particularly damaging to Al Qaeda’s
operational leaders, who couldn’t afford to hunker down like Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-
Zawahri, whose main contribution to the movement was pretty much just staying alive. Those front-line operators had to
move and communicate — and that made them vulnerable. Other attacks were intended to
disrupt known Qaeda locations and activities even when the identities of the people present
were not known. Critics said these so-called signature strikes were indiscriminate. They were not.
Intelligence for signature strikes always had multiple threads and deep history. The data was near
encyclopedic. Many such strikes killed high-value targets whose presence was suspected but not
certain. And we made no excuses about killing lower-ranking terrorists. The United States viewed these attacks as legitimate acts
of war against an armed enemy — and in warfare it is regrettably necessary to kill foot soldiers, too. The signature strikes
drastically shrank the enemy’s bench and made the leadership worry that they had no safe
havens. Almost inadvertently, these strikes also helped protect intelligence sources and methods since
the strikes seemed more random than they actually were. It wasn’t long before intelligence reporting
began to confirm our success. We learned there was a widespread sense of helplessness among the
Qaeda leadership. Years later, documents proved just how anguished they were. In 2015, an American
court case against a Qaeda member prompted the government to release eight documents from the trove of Bin Laden letters
captured when he was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. Bin Laden’s correspondence with his chief lieutenants, in 2010, is
remarkable in its candor. The letters show the stress within the organization. “I convey my condolences regarding our great brother
Sheikh Sa’id” who died “as a martyr during a spy plane attack,” read one from June 2010. “The strikes by the spy planes are still
going on,” it continued. A member named al-Sa’di Ihsanullah was the “latest to become a martyr: He was killed about a week ago,
also by air raids.” It noted, “The midlevel commands and staff members are hurt by the killings.” Signature strikes were
also taking a toll. In November, the same Bin Laden lieutenant complained, after 20 fighters were killed in one place on Eid al-
Fitr, the Muslim feast celebrating the end of Ramadan, that the men had “gathered for the holidays, despite our orders.” Al Qaeda
gained a healthy respect for American intelligence. “Based on our analysis, they are constantly monitoring several potential or
possibly confirmed targets,” the June letter said. The frightened underlings in the field beseeched Bin Laden to help. “We would
like your guidance,” the June letter said. “Especially on this idea: reduce the work, meaning stopping many of the operations so we
can move around less, and be less exposed to strikes.” “There is an idea preferred by some brothers to avoid attrition,” it continued.
“The idea is that some brothers will travel to some ‘safe’ areas with their families, just for protection. They would only stay for a
time, until the crisis is over, maybe one or two years.” Two months later another Bin Laden deputy agreed to their taking refuge
and “calming down and minimizing movement.” All this correspondence was from 2010, but it is consistent with the intelligence
picture we were gathering in 2008. Al
Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was spending more
time worrying about its own survival than planning how to threaten ours. The correspondence also
confirmed our intelligence showing that attacking Americans on American soil was central to their plotting. The letters are filled
with references to recruits from a host of countries, including the United States. One correspondence emphasized that “operations
inside America are some of the most important work of the Organization, as long as they are possible, because they affect the
security and economy of the American people as a whole.” Throughoutthe campaign, civilian casualties were a
constant concern. In one strike, the grandson of the target was sleeping near him on a cot outside,
trying to keep cool in the summer heat. The Hellfire missiles were directed so that their energy and
fragments splayed away from him and toward his grandfather. They did, but not enough. The target was
hard to locate and people were risking their lives to find him. The United States took the shot. A child died, and we deeply regret
that he did. But his grandfather had a garage full of dangerous chemicals, and he intended to use them, perhaps on Americans. We
tried to get better. Carefully reviewing video of one successful strike, we could discern — as a GBU was already hurtling toward an
arms cache — a frightened woman responding to another weapon that had just detonated. She was running with young children
square into the path of the incoming bomb, and they were killed. We realized, once our after-action review was done, that we
needed to put even more eyes on targets as they were being struck to try to avoid any future civilian casualties. For my part, the
United States needs not only to maintain this capacity, but also to be willing to use it. Radical Islamism thrives in many corners of
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the world — Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Mali, the list goes on — where governments cannot or will not act. In some of
these instances, the United States must. And unmanned aerial vehicles carrying precision weapons and guided by powerful
intelligence offer a proportional and discriminating response when response is necessary. Civilians have died, but in my firm
opinion, the death toll from terrorist attacks would have been much higher if we had not taken action. What we need here is a dial,
not a switch.
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-- AT: Blowback
Blowback thesis is false – media bias and stats confirm – even if its true, the
impact is marginal at best.
Kenneth Anderson June 2013 – Professor of Law at the Washington School of Law. ["The
Case for Drones", Accessible Online at: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-
case-for-drones/] @ AG
The most prominent critique today, however, is that drone warfare is counterproductive because it produces
“blowback.” What is blowback? Blowback comprises the supposed bad consequences of drones that
swamp the benefits, if any, of drone warfare itself—the anger of villagers whose civilian relatives have been killed,
for instance, or the resentment among larger populations in Pakistan or Yemen over drone strikes. The anger, we are told, is fanned
by Islamist preachers, local media, and global Web communities, and then goes global in the ummah about the perceived targeting
of Muslims and Islam. This leads to radicalization and membership recruitment where the strikes take place. Or maybe it leads to
independently organized violence—perhaps the case of the Boston bombers, though it is too early to say. All this bad public
perception outweighs whatever tactical value, if any, drone strikes might have. Blowback can never be dismissed, because it might
be true in some cases. But even
when true, it would exist as a matter of degree, to be set against the benefits
of the drone strikes themselves. By definition, blowback is a second-order effect, and its diffuse
nature makes its existence more a matter of subjective judgment than any other evaluation of
drone warfare. As a hypothesis, the possibility of blowback arises in two distinct settings: “narrow”
counterinsurgency and “broad” global counterterrorism. The narrow blowback hypothesis concerns those in
communities directly affected by global counterterrorism drone strikes while the United States is trying to carry out a ground-level
counterinsurgency campaign. The
question is whether civilians, women and children especially, are being killed by drones
in such numbers—because collateral damage is a fact, including from drone strikes—that they
make these local
communities even more fertile ground for anti-American operations. Do the drone strikes make things
unacceptably more difficult for ground forces attempting to carry out a hearts-and-minds campaign to win over the local
population? Direct and immediate concerns about villagers’ perceptions during the counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan
led, at some points, to extraordinary (from the standpoint of lawful targeting and acceptable collateral damage) measures against
using air power and even infantry to fire back at insurgents. But local
counterinsurgency is not the long-term
concern today; global counterterrorism is. Village-level resentments fueling recruitment might
be a concern, but this type of blowback matters far less in terms of war fighting when the
United States no longer has infantry in those places (and is no longer making its counterterrorism policy rest
upon the chimera of a stable, democratic Afghanistan). It is sharply contested, to say the least, whether and to what
extent drone strikes are creating blowback among villagers, or whether and to what extent, as a former British
soldier recently returned from Afghanistan remarked to me, villagers are sad to see the Taliban commander who just insisted on
marrying someone’s young daughter blown up in an airstrike. There is also debate about the degree to which villagers are aware
that the American drones are undertaking strikes that the Pakistani government might otherwise undertake. Critics
often
neglect to focus on the Pakistani government’s regular and brutal assaults in the tribal zones.
Despite a general perception that all of Pakistan is united against drone strikes, voices in the
Pakistani newspapers have often made note that the tribal areas fear the Pakistani army far
more than they fear U.S. drones, because, despite mistakes and inevitable civilian casualties, they see them as
smaller and more precise. But the blunt reality is that as the counterinsurgency era ends for U.S.
forces, narrow blowback concerns about whether villages might be sufficiently provoked
against American infantry are subsiding. That leaves the broader claim of global blowback—the
idea that drone campaigns are effectively creating transnational terrorists as well as sympathy for their
actions. That could always be true and could conceivably outweigh all other concerns. But the evidence is so diffuse as to be
pointless. Do Gallup polls of the general Pakistani population indicate overwhelming resentment about drone
Homestead 17

strikes—or do they really suggest that more than half the country is unaware of a drone campaign at
all? Recent polls found the latter to be the case. Any causal connections that lead from supposed
resentments to actual terrorist recruitment are contingent and uncertain. Discussing global blowback
is also an easy stance for journalists writing about U.S. counterterrorism—Mark Mazzetti’s new book,
The Way of the Knife, is a good example—because it automatically frames an oppositional narrative, one
with dark undertones and intimations of unattractive, unintended consequence. The blowback
argument is also peculiarly susceptible to raising the behavioral bar the United States must
meet in order to keep the local population happy enough not to embrace suicide bombing and
terrorism. It defines terrorist deviancy down, while U.S. and Western security behaviors are always defined up. From a
strategic standpoint, however, the trouble with the blowback theory is simple: It will always
counsel doing nothing rather than doing something. It’s the kibitzer’s lazy objection. Whether one knows a lot
or a little about the action and its possible blowback consequences, whether one has an axe to grind or is reasonably objective, one
can always offer the blowback scenario. There might be situations in which to give it priority; Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert, for
example, says that a particular form of strike in Yemen causes blowback because it hits low-level fighters whose families cannot
understand the American justification. (The response is, usually, that we are effectively fighting as the air arm of the Yemen
government against its insurgents, including its low-level fighters.) That bears attention; whether it outweighs the strategic concern
of supporting the Yemeni government, which does have to fight even low-level insurgents who in effect offer protection to the
transnational terrorist wing, is another question. But we should consider it carefully. Blowback is a form of the precautionary
principle. But it’s
awfully difficult to conduct war, after all, on the basis of “first do no harm.” As it
happens, the
United States once had a commander driven largely by considerations of blowback
from a restive local population. His name was George McClellan. If he had not been replaced by
Abraham Lincoln, the Union would have lost the Civil War.
The best studies conclude terror recruitment has little correlation with drone
strikes – the “blowback” thesis is too simplistic.
Aqil Shah 06-10-2018 – Shah is Wick Cary Assistant Professor of South Asian Politics in the
David L. Boren College of International Studies at the University of Oklahoma and a non-
resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. [“Drone Blowback: Much
Ado about Nothing?,” Accessible Online at: https://www.lawfareblog.com/drone-blowback-
much-ado-about-nothing] @ AG
Targeted killings of suspected Islamist militants by armed drones have become the mainstay of U.S. counterterrorism campaigns in
non-traditional conflicts in countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Analysts, human rights organizations, and former U.S.
officials claim that drone strikes produce blowback: Rather than reducing the terrorist threat,
drone strikes increase it by providing terrorist groups with fresh recruits. According to two prominent
experts, David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, “every one of these dead noncombatants [in Pakistan] represents an alienated family, a
new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have
increased.” Although intuitive, the blowback argument lacks empirical support. The Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) has launched an estimated 430 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004 (roughly 75 percent of
its known total strikes worldwide). My research there shows that drone blowback may be much ado about nothing.
Drawing on interviews with 167 well-informed adults from North Waziristan Agency (NWA), the most heavily
targeted district in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), extensive interviews with respected
experts on terrorism, and an official Pakistani police survey of 500 detained terrorists from
southern Sindh Province, I find no evidence of a direct link between drones strikes and radicalization
or the recruitment of militants, either locally or nationally. Instead, my data and secondary sources suggest that
militant recruitment is a complex process driven by a variety of factors, such as political
grievances, state sponsorship of militancy as a tool of foreign policy, state repression, weak
Homestead 18

governance, and coercive recruitment by militant groups—not drone strikes. At the local level,
finding evidence of blowback from well-informed locals should be relatively easy given the
dense social and kinship ties of NWA inhabitants. Virtually every family in NWA has been
affected by the conflict, whether through the death of a relative, the destruction of property, or displacement resulting from
a military offensive. Yet these people have largely been left out of debates about the threats they face
and the effect these threats have on their lives. Moreover, the inhabitants of FATA identify themselves
as members of a particular Pashtun qabail or qaum (tribe) divided into khels (sub-tribes), each of which consists
of extended clans or families. Inhabitants are therefore enmeshed in dense social networks, which
makes them uniquely informed about the effects of drone strikes on their community. Most
respondents claimed to personally know or be aware of someone in their clan or village who had been
involved in militant activity or who had been indirectly linked to militants, but none believed that the reason
was the loss of a relative in a drone strike. As one tribal elder from Dande Darpa Khel in Miranshah, the drone-
targeted headquarters of the Haqqani Network, explained: “We hear rumors that this or that man joined the Taliban or al-Qaeda
because of anger over drone strikes. It is possible. But I know almost every family in my area, and I do not know of a case where a
local man or boy joined the Taliban as direct result of death or injury to a close relative in a drone strike. In fact, most of the
Taliban fighters were already radicalized, or inclined toward militancy for various reasons, or forced
to join these groups.” Comments like this came up frequently in my sample. Even local leaders of Islamist and
other right-wing parties acknowledged that the ability of drone strikes to spawn militants is
exaggerated. The views of this informed group of NWA residents rest on pragmatic calculations. Most were resentful
of the coercive tactics the Taliban used to terrorize and control the local population, especially after
the Pakistani military struck a peace deal with them in September 2006. Taliban tactics included taxation and harsh penalties for
minor offenses. Local
resentment is also rooted in state repression. Until recently, FATA was
governed under the colonial-era Frontier Crimes Regulation (enacted under British rule in 1901), which
prescribes harsh penalties for crimes without the right of appeal in a court of law, including collective
responsibility for offenses committed by one or more members of a tribe or those committed by anyone in its area. During its
operations, thePakistani military has used collective punishments, including economic blockades,
to punish families or clans whose members they suspected of harboring foreign militants. The state’s application
of these draconian and often indiscriminate measures against the local population, and its
appeasement of militants through peace agreements, has only compounded local alienation
stemming from counterinsurgency operations that, some studies show, benefit insurgents. But in North
Waziristan, many locals are alienated from both the Pakistani state and the militants. Some proponents of the blowback
thesis also claim national-level effects: Drone strikes, they argue, impinge on a country’s territorial
integrity and sovereignty, enraging a broad swathe of its population and providing anti-U.S. militant groups with a sizable
reservoir of sympathizers and potential recruits. Civilian deaths in such strikes amplify the blowback effect. According to the
Stimson Center’s Task Force on U.S. Drone Policy, “Even where strikes kill only legitimate targets, the perceived insult to
sovereignty—in places like Pakistan and Yemen—sparks bitterness, feelings of nationalism…hostile to the U.S.” In addition, the
task force reports that “civilian casualties, even if relatively few, can anger whole communities, increase anti-U.S. sentiment and
become a potent recruiting tool for terrorist organizations.” The Pakistani opposition leader and former cricketer Imran Khan, who
revived his dormant political career in part by loudly criticizing the U.S. drone campaign, has claimed that drone strikes carried out
in Pakistan kill many civilians and “are turning young men into angry jihadis.” My interviews with terrorism experts
and counterterrorism officials from Punjab and Sindh provinces and the findings of the Sindh
Counterterrorism Department’s (CTD’s) 2017 survey of 500 detained terrorists show that this is not
the case. Tariq Parvez, founding coordinator of Pakistan’s National Counterterrorism Authority, argues that organizations
with a clear anti-U.S. narrative, such as al-Qaeda, can exploit drone strikes for propaganda purposes,
but that “drones are a distant threat for people in Punjab or Sindh, for which you can express indignation
but not be really be threatened or motivated by it to become militants.” According to Ahmed Rashid, one of the
Homestead 19

world’s foremost authorities on the Taliban and terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “ There
is no evidence to show
that Punjabi or other terrorist groups in Pakistan use drone strikes as an important recruitment tool or
that these attacks create terrorists en masse.” Amongst the counterterrorism officials I interviewed, there was
consensus that drone strikes in FATA were not a crucial factor in militant recruitment at the
national level. Senior Superintendent of Police Sohail Habib Tajik, who was the additional director of the
Federal Investigation Agency’s Counterterrorism Wing from 2008 to 2010, when the U.S. drone
campaign was as it peak, stated: “Drone strikes did not generate militancy, militancy
generated drone strikes.” Fourteen of the sixteen officers I interviewed shared his assessment that the causal arrow points
in the opposite direction. The CTD survey shows that the main motivations for joining terrorist groups
in Sindh Province are economic and religious/sectarian, rather than anti-Americanism generally or
opposition to U.S. drone strikes specifically. When asked “Why did you start thinking that violence in the name of Islam was
justified?”, a plurality of the respondents cited perceived Western opposition to Islam as a motivating grievance (41.4 percent); other
grievances cited were a perceived lack of justice in society (19.4 percent), personal experiences (19.8 percent), and other (19.4
percent). But in
response to the most important question, “What ultimately drew you to join a
terrorist/banned outfit?”, 41 percent cited unemployment or economic concerns, 40 percent
religious concerns, and 16 percent psychological issues. According to a CTD official with 12 years of
experience, “The drone issue is highly overrated as a motivation for militancy. In my experience in police
and counterterrorism work, I have seen no evidence of drone-driven militants in Sindh Province.” Some of those who support
terrorist groups or become terrorists themselves may be motivated by the desire to seek revenge for their family members or by
broader sentiments of nationalism. But there is little or no evidence to support the simplistic claim of the blowback thesis, either in
the directly targeted district of NWA or the two largest provinces of Pakistan. Simply put, the complex processes of radicalization
and joining militant groups cannot be reduced to drone strikes. While drone strikes have provided the United States a degree of
success in eliminating terrorist leaders and operatives in semi-permissive conflict environments like Pakistan, more effective
counterterrorism policies would require taking into account other variables, such as state
policies that directly sponsor terror and/or provide the environment conducive for breeding
terrorism. Not to mention that the use of drone strikes is fraught with ethical and moral concerns. President Donald Trump’s
reported decision to expand the powers of the CIA for carrying out drone strikes and to relax Obama-era restrictions on
counterterrorism operations by both the CIA and the military is likely to increase the risk of civilian casualties in conflict zones.
Beyond the obvious need for transparency and accountability when conducting drone strikes and counterterrorism operations, the
United States should do its utmost to protect civilians from harm in accordance with international legal and normative standards.
Homestead 20

2NC – Alt Causes
Homestead 21

2NC – Civilian Casualties T/
More evidence – government weapons use is inevitable – there is no better
alternative to drones use.
Anderson 2013 - senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings and a professor of law at
American University (May 24, Kenneth, “The Case for Drones”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/24/the_case_for_drones_118548.html)
Yet irrespective of what numbers one accepts as the best estimate of harms of drone warfare, or the legal proportionality of the
drone strikes, the moral question is simply, What’s the alternative? One way to answer this is to start from the
proposition that if you believe the use of force in these circumstances is lawful and ethical, then all things
being equal as an ethical matter, the method of force used should be the one that spares the most
civilians while achieving its lawful aims. If that is the comparison of moral alternatives, there is simply no
serious way to dispute that drone warfare is the best method available. It is more
discriminating and more precise than other available means of air warfare, including manned
aircraft—as France and Britain, lacking their own drones and forced to rely on far less precise manned jet strikes, found over
Libya and Mali—and Tomahawk cruise missiles. A second observation is to look across the history of precision weapons in the past
several decades. I started my career as a human-rights campaigner, kicking off the campaign to ban landmines for leading
organizations. Around 1990, I had many conversations with military planners, asking them to develop more accurate and
Although every
discriminating weapons—ones with smaller kinetic force and greater ability to put the force where sought.
civilian death is a tragedy, and drone warfare is very far from being the perfect tool the Obama
administration sometimes suggests, for someone who has watched weapons development over a quarter
century, the drone represents a steady advance in precision that has cut zeroes off collateral-
damage figures. Those who see only the snapshot of civilian harm today are angered by civilian deaths. But barring an
outbreak of world peace, it is foolish and immoral not to encourage the development and use of more
sparing and exact weapons. One has only to look at the campaigns of the Pakistani army to see
the alternatives in action. The Pakistani military for many years has been in a running war with its own Taliban
and has regularly attacked villages in the tribal areas with heavy and imprecise airstrikes. A few years ago, it thought it had reached
an accommodation with an advancing Taliban, but when the enemy decided it wanted not just the Swat Valley but Islamabad, the
Pakistani government decided it had no choice but to drive it back. And it did, with a punishing campaign of airstrikes and rolling
artillery barrages that leveled
whole villages, left hundreds of thousands without homes, and killed
hundreds. But critics do not typically evaluate drones against the standards of the artillery
barrage of manned airstrikes, because their assumption, explicit or implicit, is that there is no call to
use force at all. And of course, if the assumption is that you don’t need or should not use force, then any civilian death by
drones is excessive. That cannot be blamed on drone warfare, its ethics or effectiveness, but on a
much bigger question of whether one ought to use force in counterterrorism at all.
Drones minimize civilian casualties – precision weapons, target tracking, and

avoids combat stress.
Schmitt 11, Professor of International Law @ U.S. Naval War College (Michael N. Schmitt, ex-
Professor of Law @ Durham University, “Drone Attacks Under the Jus Ad Bellum and Jus In Bello: Clearing
the ‘Fog of Law’”, Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law, 3/2/11)
Some of the controversy surrounds the facts

that the drones are piloted from a ground station that may be based
thousands of miles away and that the attacks are conducted using video feeds with no human „eyes on
target‟. This purportedly results in mistaken attacks or unnecessary civilian casualties. Such
Homestead 22

counterfactual criticism merits only short shrift. Drone attacks rely on high resolution imagery
usually transmitted in real time to a drone crew which, undistracted by any threat, engages the
target. When feasible and necessary, drones can be used to carefully monitor the potential target for
extended periods before engaging it with precision weapons. Compared to attacks by manned
aircraft or ground-based systems, the result is often a significantly reduced risk of
misidentifying the target or causing collateral damage to civilians and civilian property. For
instance, a drone can track a target, attacking only when he is at some distance from civilians. It can
also be used to conduct the „pattern of life‟ analysis that is now common in targeting conducted
by advanced militaries. In such an analysis, the activities of the civilian population are monitored to
assess when and where an attack may be conducted to best avoid causing civilian casualties.
Moreover, the weapons employed by drones are generally as good as or better than those carried by
manned aircraft. And, because the crew is not at risk, drone operations avoid the stress of combat and
its attendant tendency to thicken the fog of war.
Homestead 23

2NC – Circumvention
More evidence – recipient nations will just buy and arm un-armed drones.
Woodhams, 18 — George Woodhams is a Researcher in UNIDIR’s Security and Society Programme and leads UNIDIR’s
research project on Increasing Transparency, Oversight and Accountability of Armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. He previously
worked as a Researcher for the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Drones, on cybersecurity issues within the National Security
Secretariat of the UK Cabinet Office and at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs. He holds an MSc from the
London School of Economics. (“Weapons of choice? The expanding development, transfer and use of armed UAVs;” pg. 6-7;
UNIDAR; //GrRv)
1.3 ARMING THE UNARMED
Before concluding this discussion of armed UAV proliferation, it

is important also to consider transfers in
weapons-capable UAVs—even if currently unarmed—given the technical feasibility of
arming these systems. The Netherlands30 and Belgium31 both recently announced plans to acquire
derivatives of the US-made MQ-9. In June 2018, the German Bundestag approved a €1 billion spending agreement to
lease five Israeli Heron TP UAVs. 32 The German agreement also includes infrastructure support and training, and it is believed
that the decision to provide the operational contract to Airbus will contribute to the company’s efforts to develop the
aforementioned Eurodrone.
While these States have no current plans to arm these UAV systems, they have been described
as both “armable” and “weaponizable”. 34 Their acquisition in unarmed form occurs in the context of significant
domestic political opposition to armed UAVs in these States. 35 Purchasing Governments have presumably
allowed for the possibility of arming these systems in the future, if domestic circumstances
were to become more favourable to doing so. The United Kingdom, France and Italy all
originally acquired unarmed UAVs, before arming them at a later date (although it is unclear whether
the Italian military has done so). 36 As some commentators have suggested following Germany’s Heron acquisition, it is highly
likely that its military will seek to arm these systems in the future, given the significant investment required to procure them. 37
Their evidence doesn’t assume tech improvements that enhance surveillance

and precision – and the alternative is conventional weaponry which is worse.
Tamar Meisels 10-11-2017 – Faculty of Social Sciences, Tel Aviv University. [“TARGETED
KILLING WITH DRONES? OLD ARGUMENTS, NEW TECHNOLOGIES, Accessible Online at:
http://rifdt.instifdt.bg.ac.rs/bitstream/handle/123456789/1540/Tamar%20Meisels.pdf?sequen
ce=1&isAllowed=y] @ AG
Many of the earlier arguments about targeted killing pertain to the use of drones as well. Assuming the war model and last resort,
Statman poses and answers the appropriate question: “Are civilians put at higher risk of harm by the use of
drones than by the use of alternative measures?” (Statman 2015: 2; 2014: 41) Here again: The crucial point
to remember here is that the alternative to the use of drones is not the avoidance of violence
altogether, which would entail zero-risk to civilians but the use of other, more conventional,
lower-tech measures, such as tanks, helicopters, and so on. (Of course, if the use of force were not necessary, there would be
no justification for using force even when no harm to civilians was to be expected). But such imprecise measures would
almost certainly lead to more civilian casualties rather than to fewer.13 More critical of drone warfare
generally, Jeff McMahan nonetheless concedes that the advantage of remotely controlled weapons is their
ability to be highly discriminating in the targets they destroy: What differentiates the newer
models of remotely controlled weapons from traditional long-range precision-guided
munitions is that they allow their operators to monitor the target area for lengthy periods
Homestead 24

before deciding whether, when, and where to strike. These are capacities that better enable the
weapons operators to make morally informed decisions about the use of their weapons. (Statman
2015: 42) Similarly, Walzer notes, drones “combine the capacity for surveillance with the capacity for
precise attack” (Walzer 2013).
Homestead 25

2NC – Norms Fail
Even moderate norms fail—circumvention and prestige – subsumes
“pressure.”
McGinnis, senior professor – Northwestern Law, 10 (John O. 104 Nw. U. L. Rev. Colloquy
366)
It is hard to overstate the extent to which advances in robotics, which are driven by AI, are transforming the United States military. During the
Afghanistan and Iraq wars, more and more Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) of different kinds were used. For example, in 2001, there were ten
unmanned "Predators" in use, and at the end of 2007, there were 180. n42 Unmanned aircraft, which depend on substantial computational capacity,
are an increasingly important part of our military and may prove to be the [*374] majority of
aircraft by 2020. n43 Even below the skies, robots perform im-portant tasks such as mine removal. n44 Already
in development are robots that would wield lasers as a kind of special infantryman focused on killing snipers. n45 Others will act as
paramedics. n46 It is not an exaggeration to predict that war twenty or twenty-five years from
now may be fought predominantly by robots. The AI-driven battlefield gives rise to a different set of fears than those
raised by the potential autonomy of AI. Here, the concern is that human malevolence will lead to these ever more capable machines wreaking ever
more havoc and destruction. III. THE FUTILITY OF THE RELINQUISHMENT OF AI AND THE PROHIBITION OF BATTLEFIELD RO-BOTS Joy
argues for "relinquishment"--i.e., the abandonment of technologies that can lead to strong AI. Those who are concerned about the use of
AI technology on the battlefield would focus more specifically on weapons powered by AI. But whether the objective is
relinquishment or the constraint of new weaponry, any such program must be translated into a specific set of legal
prohibitions. These prohibitions, at least under current technology and current geopolitics, are certain to be ineffective. Thus,
nations are unlikely to unilaterally relinquish the technology behind accelerating compu-tational power or the
research to further accelerate that technology. Indeed, were the United States to relinquish such technology, the whole
world would be the loser. The United States is both a flourishing commercial republic that benefits from global peace and prosperity,
and the world's hegemon, capable of supplying the public goods of global peace and security. Because it gains a greater share of the prosperity that is
afforded by peace than do other nations, it has incentives to shoulder the burdens to maintain a global peace that benefits not only the United States
but the rest of the world. n47 By relinquishing the power of AI, the United States would in fact be giving
greater incentives to rogue nations to develop it. Thus, the only realistic alternative to unilateral relinquishment would be
a global agreement for relinquishment or regulation of AI-driven weaponry. But such an agreement would face the same
insuperable obstacles nuclear disarma-ment has faced. As recent events with Iran and North Korea demonstrate, n48 it
seems difficult if not impossible to per-suade rogue nations [*375] to relinquish nuclear arms. Not only
are these weapons a source of geopolitical strength and prestige for such nations, but verifying any prohibition
on the preparation and production of these weapons is a task beyond the capability of international
institutions. The verification problems are far greater with respect to the technologies relating to artificial
intelligence. Relative-ly few technologies are involved in building a nuclear bomb, but arriving at strong artificial intelligence has many routes
and still more that are likely to be discovered. Moreover, building a nuclear bomb requires substantial infrastruc-ture. n49 Artificial
intelligence research can be done in a garage. Constructing a nuclear bomb requires very substantial resources beyond that of
most groups other than nation-states. n50 Researching artificial intelligence is done by institu-tions no richer
than colleges and perhaps would require even less substantial resources.

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