Limitations of Robot Warfare

No, I am not talking about the fact that robots don't have feelings and so cant understand how precious and important life, and love, really is. Because without love, we are nothing, and so we always win. At least when we are making the movies. When the robots start making the movies it will likely be about how soft and pudgy we were, and the fact that without being able to solve

in our heads, we were never going to make in anywhere anyway.

But back to the point.

And that point is that right now robots don't win wars. Specifically, counter-terrorism conflicts. You would have thought that we would have learned back during this little thing call the Vietnam War that bombing the living bejesus out of an enemy does not = victory (actually, the same thing was found in WWI, Normandy, the Battle of Britain etc etc). But our plan in Afghanistan has been less troops, and more Predator/Reaper strikes: 20 this month alone, vs. 36 in the last year of Bush's Presidency.

The thing is... its not working. You need to change the situation on the ground in order to achieve results. And we have not changed the situation on the ground:

In early 2009, counterinsurgency gurus David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum aired their concerns that American drone strikes in Pakistan might not be all that productive — a tactic for knocking off individual terrorists, maybe, not a strategy for wiping out Al Qaeda’s haven. The pair caught all kinds of flak from military and intelligence officials for the suggestion. But months earlier, we now learn, the director of the CIA was expressing similar reservations to the White House.

Overlooked in the hoopla over naming calling and secret memos, there are vignettes in Bob Woodward’s new book of officials at the highest levels discussing the drone campaign’s severe limitations. Most startlingly, the person with the deepest concerns about the CIA’s signature effort of the terror war appears to be Gen. Michael Hayden, the Agency’s one-time director.

“As an Air Force officer,” Woodward writes, “Hayden knew that to get a strategic victory — to defeat al Qaeda — America had to change the facts of the ground. Otherwise, the U.S. would be doing piecemealal drone strikes forever. The great lesson of World War II and Vietnam was that attack from the air, even massive bombings, can’t win a war.”

On January 23rd, a pair of drone strikes took out five militants in Pakistan. “Rahm,” Hayden told the new White House Chief of Staff, “you have to understand that what we just talked about was a counterterrorism success… Unless you’re prepared to do this forever, you have to change the facts on the ground. That requires successful counterinsurgency.”