How We Fight

Last week, when asked to respond to Republican presidential primary candidates’ charges of appeasement, U.S. President Barack Obama answered coolly, “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 50 top al-Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field.” Indeed, targeted assassination is now a widely accepted tool of American foreign policy. 

The rise of targeted killing is part of a broader change in how we fight. The exact process that introduced war as we know it – state versus state – is now in reverse. Traditional warfare emerged alongside the rise of the modern state; as globalization erodes state sovereignty, traditional warfare turns upside down. The result is a distinctly new type of warfare – new in terms of reasons, actors, and methods. 

In the How We Fight series, OpenCanada examines the impact of these changes on the methods of war. How is technology changing weaponry? Soldiers? Threats? Enemies? How do drones change the social relations of war? They make assassination easier, but do they make it okay? They decrease combatant casualties, but what is their impact on civilian casualties? And how do we even know how many children die when a robot drops a bomb in a remote Yemeni village?

Over the course of the next three weeks, OpenCanada will engage international experts in discussions about these issues. By the end of the series, we hope that you will have a better sense of where the $600 every Canadian spent on the military this year goes – and where it ought to go.

For more depth on this topic, check out: 

	1. Professor Stephanie Carvin gives three reasons why assassination is unethical and ineffective.
	2. The American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin defends assassination as a way to get rid of enemies without causing civilian casualties. And it’s legal too.
	3. Professor John Tirman, Executive Director of MIT’s Center for International Studies, considers the consequences of forgetting the destructiveness of America’s wars.
	4. Professor Michael Spagat argues that John Tirman undermines his objective of reducing violence by raising awareness about the reality of war by overestimating the number of civilian casualties.
	5. One study reported 1 in 5000 Iraqis dead; another 1 in 500. An analysis of the different ways we count civilian casualties.
	6. Is the United Nations the organization the world needs? Dr. Leslie Roberts suggests no, arguing that the U.N. plays an active role in hiding death tolls in international crises.
	7. When RoboCop replaces Private Jackson: The Brookings Institution’s Peter W. Singer wonders what technological advancement means for who fights, where we fight, and who dies.

Image courtesy Open Clipart Library.