( The National ) – A series of pager explosions across Lebanon, and secondary attacks on walkie-talkies the following day, have killed and maimed a number of Hezbollah operatives, as well as many civilians, including children. The attacks have also injured thousands, including Iran’s ambassador to Beirut.

Israel normally does not claim responsibility for attacks on foreign soil – and it did not do so in this case either – but Defence Minister Yoav Gallant gave strong indications in a speech on Wednesday of Mossad’s role in the sabotage.

Mr Gallant also said that Israel, which has been battling Hamas in Gaza for almost a year, was opening a new phase in the war. “The centre of gravity is shifting northward, meaning that we are increasingly diverting forces, resources and energy towards the north,” he added.

The Lebanon attacks demonstrate Israel’s ability to strike from a distance, establishing a form of deterrence, while claiming plausible deniability, and avoiding a US rebuke at a time when Washington is pressuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike Hezbollah. Nevertheless, the Lebanese group does have the ability to weaponise the digital, raising the possibility of violent non-state actors retaliating against their adversaries and taking digital warfare into the realm of AI across the Middle East.

Notwithstanding the vague allusions to the attacks over the past couple of days, historical precedent does demonstrate that weaponising communications is a modus operandi of the Israeli state.

In 1972, in retaliation for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Mossad operatives detonated an explosive in the phone of the Palestinian official Mahmoud Hamshari in his Paris apartment. While that telephone was an analogue device, the digital revolution made long-distance assassinations easier for Israel. Another telephone was weaponised in 1996, when Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, targeted the Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash’s Motorola Alpha mobile phone. Working with a Palestinian collaborator, Shin Bet placed 50 grams of explosives in the device, enough to kill him when he held the phone to his ear.

The recent deaths in Lebanon are the epitome of the postmodern, a product of the digital culture of the easy-edit, a time when science and technology allow us to change and manipulate information easily through code, making distances relatively obsolete.

The book Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weaponrefers to Israel’s ability to destroy parts of Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility in 2010 with a malicious digital code known as Stuxnet. This code, sneaked into a USB drive, caused nuclear centrifuges to accelerate to the point that they destroyed themselves.

In 1981, by contrast, Israeli F-15 and F-16 aircraft had to fly long distances, refuel in mid-air and drop bombs on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility to destroy it, with some even missing their target. Israeli pilots risked being shot down or even crashing, which almost happened when the planes narrowly missed telephone wires on the way to their target outside Baghdad.

Stuxnet did not put any Israeli operatives at risk when they sought to target Iran’s nuclear facility. The code, unlike a conventional bomb, could be easily edited, put onto a USB drive, travel a far distance, achieve its objective, and give Israeli deniability.

“Cyberwar,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Notwithstanding the technological sophistication and difficulty to tamper with thousands of communications devices, Israel over the past two days was able to strike targets all over Lebanon, even in neighbouring Syria, with relative ease, in that none of its operatives had to be present to target individuals. It was assassination by remote control.

Establishing deterrence is based on signalling and demonstrating the ability to inflict hurt on an adversary. While the death toll is relatively low, Israel has been able to warn Hezbollah that its members are not safe anywhere in their country, without having to violate the sovereignty of Lebanon.

Tragically, it has also had another effect, in that it has disrupted the civilians’ ontological security, meaning the mental state derived from a sense of order and continuity, even banality of everyday life. Even medical workers in the country use pagers due to electrical outages, and every citizen is bound to be left wondering if their mobile phone has been weaponised.

Deterrence cannot be measured, however, and instead of Israel having deterred Hezbollah, the group will be under pressure to save face by striking back. Israel should have learnt a lesson from when it introduced drone technology to the region in the 1970s, which only led to its proliferation among its adversaries, including the Houthis, who struck Israel directly with a long-distance drone in July.

Israel was the first to use drones in the Middle East in 1973 and had a monopoly on them in the region. But as Rami Khouri, the American University of Beirut professor, once told Peter W Singer, the world’s foremost expert on drones: “The response to drones is to get your own drones. They are just tools of war. Every tool generates a counterreaction.” Indeed, by 2024, Hezbollah released videos of its drones having violated Israel’s sovereignty, having reached the city of Haifa.

While it is uncertain if AI-enabled drones have ever been used, Israel did use an AI programme named Gospel to generate targets for its military campaign in Gaza.

With the digital domain having been weaponised, Hezbollah will feel the need to retaliate. The retaliation, however, is unlikely to be a brute rocket or missile strike that Israel can intercept. The group might play the long game of scoring its own digital victory, perhaps pursuing its own weaponisation of AI to achieve this goal.

Reprinted from The National with the author’s permission.

(The Conversation) – The Lebanese armed group Hezbollah recently released videos showing footage from one of its drones flying over the Israeli city of Haifa and the surrounding area. Hezbollah released the videos shortly after American special envoy Amos Hochstein went to Beirut in a bid to get Lebanese political leaders to pressure Hezbollah to withdraw from the border with Israel.

Following Hochstein’s visit, Hezbollah released images captured by one of its drones called the Hudhud (Hoopoe), highlighting strategic military and civilian infrastructure inside Israel.

The following day, the group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, gave a speech where he reiterated that Hezbollah has the ability to launch targeted strikes anywhere in Israel.

The drone footage provides evidence of Hezbollah’s growing technological capabilities. Along with Nasrallah’s speech, it appears designed to check Israeli threats to invade Lebanon and send a message that Hezbollah has the ability to cause serious damage in Israel in the event of a full-scale war.

Use of drones

In response to Israel’s attack on Gaza, Hezbollah has been attacking Israeli military positions along the border with Lebanon since October 2023. The Israeli military has shelled and launched airstrikes on several areas of southern Lebanon. Hundreds of people, predominantly Lebanese, have been killed and tens of thousands on both sides of the border have been forced to flee the area.

Israeli media reports suggest the military chose not to shoot down Hezbollah’s drone. Israel justified this decision by citing a concern over civilian casualties. However, military analysts believe that failing to intercept enemy drones during a conflict indicates inadequate detection capabilities.

Typically, a foreign military aircraft flying over a territory would immediately be neutralized to eliminate any security risk, potentially by targeting it over water or unpopulated areas.

Technological advancements are enabling Hezbollah, and the broader Axis of Resistance, to challenge Israel’s air superiority and its ability to maintain total control over the skies.

This includes development of highly powerful missiles and the ability to intercept or destroy Israeli drones such as the Hermes 450 and Skylark frequently used in reconnaissance missions over Lebanon.

However, this also exposes Lebanon to heightened risks, with each new weapon unveiled by Hezbollah potentially escalating the conflict.

Mutual deterrence

Confrontations between Israel and Hezbollah over the years have been marked by tit-for-tat attempts to establish mutual deterrence. In recent months, Hezbollah has shot down Israeli drones and bombed Israeli military bases.

Since October 2023, Israel has conducted preemptive and retaliatory strikes in Lebanon, targeting members of Hamas and Hezbollah, especially in southern Lebanon. In June, Israel targeted Taleb Sami Abdallah, a key Hezbollah commander on the Lebanese-Israeli front.

Following this attack, Hezbollah intensified its offensive, launching rockets that caused wildfires in Israel. The weekend that followed remained relatively calm due to Eid al-Adha celebrations.

Middle East Eye Video: “Nasrallah says nowhere in Israel will be spared if full-blown war breaks out”

Israel has also taken measures to deter Hezbollah attacks by disrupting the use of GPS navigation and location-based apps, such as Google Maps, out of security concerns, aimed at countering drones, missiles and other technologies used by Hezbollah and other armed groups. This demonstrates Israel’s determination to maintain its technological superiority and develop countermeasures against emerging threats.

However, while groups like Hezbollah have increasingly adopted advanced technology, they also rely on more rudimentary tactics to evade detection. Nasrallah once described Hezbollah’s use of such tactics in an interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The Iron Dome

Hezbollah has significantly bolstered its military and technological arsenal since its last war with Israel in 2006, and would likely pose a larger threat to Israel’s military in a broader confrontation.

Hezbollah recently claimed to have destroyed an Iron Dome battery, although the Israeli military said it was unaware of any damage to its launchers.

Iron Dome is designed to defend Israel from short-range missiles and drones launched by armed groups. It consists of batteries located throughout the country, and uses radar to track incoming targets and interceptor missiles to destroy them.

While Israel has touted Iron Dome’s interception rate, U.S. officials have said the system could be overwhelmed in an all-out war with Hezbollah.

Psychological warfare

Hezbollah is well aware that Israel is unlikely to show restraint in pursuit of its political and military goals.

This is as evidenced by the bombardment of Gaza and Israeli military tactics like the Dahiya Doctrine, which calls for the wide scale destruction of civilian infrastructure. Israeli airstrikes and threats of invasion have already forced around 95,000 people to flee southern Lebanon.

By provoking Israel, Hezbollah demonstrates its readiness to challenge it head on. The question remains: does Hezbollah truly possess this capability, or is it bluffing?

In his speech, Nasrallah emphasized the group has not yet revealed the full extent of its capabilities and hinted at further actions to come. His comments form part of Hezbollah’s strategy in the psychological war with Israel, and the current escalation represents a significant development.

Hezbollah is attempting to dictate the pace of the clashes, frustrating the population in northern Israel by giving impression that Hezbollah is controlling the situation and imposing its conditions on the area.

This psychological war appears to be having a real impact, causing Israeli leaders to avoid disproportionate responses and prompting growing concern among Israelis about their government’s inability to control the situation. More than 96,000 Israelis have fled the north since October 2023.

The Israeli military says it has approved “operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon.” However, despite Israel’s undeniable military superiority over Hezbollah, its actions so far indicate it acknowledges the dangers a wider war could bring. Israeli officials have warned that infrastructure like the electricity supply could be severely damaged in a full-blown war.

The Israeli army has not fought a major war in years, and appears increasingly bogged down in Gaza. Meanwhile, Hezbollah has spent much of the last decade fighting in Syria, providing its fighters with battle experience. Furthermore, if the war does escalate, Hezbollah allies in Iran, Iraq and Yemen could become even more involved.

Ultimately, Hezbollah knows Israel is much stronger. However, through psychological warfare it is sending the message that any conflagration would also be destructive for Israel.

It is imperative all parties involved exercise restraint. The fighting and destruction must end to protect the well-being of the people in the region who are suffering the devastating consequences of this conflict.

Israel’s military spokesman recently stated it’s not possible to destroy Hamas because destroying an idea with weapons is impossible. The same applies to Hezbollah. This conflict can only be solved around the negotiating table with a peace that safeguards the security and dignity of all people.

Emilie El Khoury, Postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University’s Centre for International Policy and Defence (CIDP), Queen’s University, Ontario

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

About 10% of world trade goes through the Suez Canal on some 17,000 ships per year, which is more like 30% of world seaborne trade. About 12% of world energy supplies also traverse the Red Sea.

Houthi attacks on shipping appear to be indiscriminate, since a cargo traveling from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan is a little unlikely to include Israeli goods.

The Houthi spokesman, Yahya Sarea, said that the Houthis had also launched drones at Eilat and other areas of what he called occupied Palestine. He said that the actions were in defense of the Palestinian people. The Israeli air force has killed over 20,000 Palestinians with indiscriminate aerial bombardment and destroyed much of the housing stock and other civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip in revenge for the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that left over a thousand people dead.

Aljazeera said that yet another vessel was struck off the Yemeni port of Hodeida earlier on Tuesday but provided no details.

Al-Jazeera: “The Houthi fighters launch a missile : Attack on a commercial vessel in the Red Sea”

Aljazeera reports that dozens of cargo ships have been stranded at the port of Djibouti for days and want to find a way to get word to the Houthis that they are not carrying Israeli goods.

The longer the Israeli assault on Gaza goes on, the more likely it is that the US will get pulled into a war on Sanaa. President Biden just hit an Iraqi Shiite militia in reprisal for attacks on US troops, angering Baghdad. Inasmuch as Iran is supplying and encouraging the Iraqi Shiite militias and the Houthis, another question is how long this proxy tit-for-tat can be contained and whether it will spiral into a larger US-Iran confrontation. One way to avoid this scenario is for President Biden to read the riot act to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and stop the madness.

As noted, the United States had announced a multi-nation effort to patrol the Red Sea and deter such Houthi drone attacks. No regional country but Bahrain agreed to join it publicly, however, likely because Arab governments do not want to be seen to be defending Israeli interests at a time when Israel is inflicting a genocide on the Palestinians. Secretary of Defense Austin Lloyd named as members Britain, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain. In fact, however, France said only that it would operate as usual in the Red Sea and would remain under French command. Spain declined to join the ad hoc mission, saying it would only participate in full NATO initiatives. The center-left government of Pedro Sánchez has been scathing about Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Italy said it would send one frigate.

So actually there is no multi-national coalition, it is smoke and mirrors, and it is just the US and maybe Britain shooting down drones as far as I can tell.

MSC Mediterranean said it had reported the attack to the coalition naval protection force (i.e. to the US).

Brad Lendon at CNN reports that the Houthis had let 17 drones and missiles fly on Tuesday that were intercepted by weapons fired by “guided-missile destroyer USS Laboon and by F/A-18 fighter jets flying off the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower.” The anti-missile weapons used by the US, however, are $2 million a pop, and the US doesn’t have all that many of them in the arsenal, so if the Houthis go on firing drones, the US Navy could run out of deterrents, Lendon says.

It appears that the drones that hit the MSC United VIII evaded US anti-missile efforts.

Denmark’s Maersk, a major container ship corp., had been going around Africa but says it will gradually resume using the Red Sea. But will it? It isn’t clear whether its officials are just trying to talk down spiking insurance and other costs.

Yemen is divided into three political regions at the moment, with the Houthis in the north, the internationally recognized government in the middle, and the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden littoral. Although it is internationally recognized, the government of President Rashad al-Alimi doesn’t actually control much of the country.

Alimi’s Information Minister, Muammar al-Eryani, warned that the Houthi tactics could backfire on Yemen (h/t BBC Monitoring). He pointed out that North Yemen depends on the Hodeida Port on the Red Sea for the importation of 80% of the country’s food, so you don’t actually want ships avoiding that route or charging more for carriage. Although, let’s face it, it isn’t the big international container ships that call at Hodeida.

Al-Eryani also questioned the value of idling Eilat Port in Israel, as the Houthis claim to have done. He pointed out that only 5% of goods imported by sea into Israel come in via Eilat.

It also isn’t very likely that the Houthi drones are actually hitting Eilat, despite what Sarea said.

Some commentators have criticized Israel for causing what is claimed to be disproportionate harm to civilians in its military response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

Others have defended Israel’s actions, claiming that such force – and the risk to civilians involved – is necessary to eliminate Hamas, which some Israelis believe poses an existential threat to Israel.

As of Nov. 25, according to health officials in the Gaza Strip, more than 14,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority of whom are women and children.

But one of the arguments given by defenders of Israel’s actions is that, tragic though these deaths are, the harm inflicted on civilians is proportionate because it is outweighed by the importance of destroying Hamas.

But what does “proportionate” mean in the context of civilian deaths? And how should we assess Israel’s claims of proportionality against critics who argue that Israel’s actions have caused disproportionate harm to civilians? As a scholar of war crimes and military ethics, I argue that to assess these claims requires careful thought about what it really means to value civilian lives. If all civilian lives are morally equal, as international law holds, then the lives of civilians on both sides of a conflict should be treated with the same degree of respect.

Why targeting civilians is wrong

International humanitarian law, or IHL, prohibits direct attacks on noncombatants – a category that includes civilians as well as wounded and surrendered soldiers. IHL also prohibits direct attacks on civilian objects such as schools, religious centers and hospitals and other civilian infrastructure.

However, because it is impossible to avoid all harm to civilians in a war zone, IHL permits attacks on military targets that are likely to cause harm to civilians if two conditions are met: First, the foreseeable harm to civilians must be proportionate to the military advantage sought by the attack. And second, the choice of tactics and weapons – what is referred to in IHL as the “means and methods” – must also aim to minimize risk to civilians, even if it means putting more soldiers in harm’s way.

The prohibitions on directly targeting civilians and exposing civilians to disproportionate risk of harm exist because, under IHL, civilians have protected status as long as they take “no active part in the hostilities.” This means that, as stated in the Geneva Conventions – the set of international treaties governing the conduct of armed conflict – all civilians must be “treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, color, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.”

Directly targeting civilians or exposing them to disproportionate harm is therefore wrong for the same reasons that it is wrong to kill or harm innocent people in peacetime. People who pose no threat to others deserve respect and protection from violence regardless of their nationality or group identity. To violate that respect in war is not only a war crime but a moral crime, which is why Hamas’ massacre of at least 1,200 Israeli citizens and the taking of 240 hostages is rightly condemned as an atrocity.

How should the lives of innocent people be weighed against important military objectives?

Proportionality and moral assessment

The condemnation of Hamas’ crimes is based on the same moral principle as the laws that protect noncombatants in war: All innocent people deserve protection.

However, scholars and legal experts disagree about how the legal framework laid out in the Geneva Conventions should be applied in war zones.

For example, in 1987 the International Committee of the Red Cross argued that the definition of “military advantage” – the advantage against which potential civilian harm must be weighed – should only include “ground gained” and “annihilating or weakening the enemy armed forces.”

But the 2016 U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual claimed that “military advantage” should also include other goals such as “diverting enemy forces’ resources and attention.”

There is also disagreement about what counts as “civilian harm.” For example, scholar Emanuela-Chiara Gillard argues that “civilian harm” should include psychological and physical harms; legal expert Dr. Beth Van Schaack argues that long-term harms should also be considered.

In short, there are no easy answers to questions about how to weigh harms against civilians against the value of military objectives. But while answers are difficult, there is a different way to frame this question: What does it mean – not just legally, but morally – to treat all civilian lives as equal, as the law requires?

As scholar Matthew Talbert and I argue, the first step in answering this question is to ask what a military force would accept if it were “their” civilians who were at risk of harm from military action.

That is the standard we should apply when assessing potential military actions that threaten harm to enemy civilians. We call this standard the “principle of the moral equality of noncombatants.” For example, Israel argued that its attack on Shifa hospital was justified because, it claimed, Hamas was hiding a command base and weapons under the hospital.

The hospital, which was running low on fuel, food and water, housed patients, including premature babies, and civilians seeking refuge from the conflict. According to footage shown in news reports, the attack left the hospital seriously damaged, filled with debris and lacking essential supplies for the remaining patients, who include the elderly and infirm.

Israel has released footage supporting its claim that there was a Hamas command center under the hospital. Does that mean Israel’s attack on the hospital meets the requirements of proportionality? In other words, was the harm to civilians caused by the attack – including the ongoing harm resulting from the loss of a major hospital – proportionate to the military value of destroying a Hamas command base?

In applying the principle Talbert and I proposed in our paper, the question would be phrased as follows: If Hamas was hiding a control base under an Israeli hospital and it was Israeli civilians at risk, would Israel think that attacking the hospital would be justified? If the answer is “no,” then the attack against Shifa hospital is also not justified.

This is because if the risk to Israeli lives outweighs the benefits of capturing a Hamas command base, then the risk to Palestinian lives should be given the same weight and lead to the same conclusion. Under IHL, all civilians are legally entitled to the same protection, regardless of their nationality.

Taking civilian lives seriously

Unfortunately, the debate about proportionality in the conflict between Israel and Palestine is only the latest of many debates about proportionality and civilian deaths in war zones.

“Gaza Guernica 7,” by Juan Cole, Digital (Dream/ IbisPaint), 2023.

For example, since 2001, the United States’ drone program has killed at least 22,000 civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere. A New York Times report on these deaths found multiple instances of “flawed intelligence,” cover-ups and cases of mistaken identity. Despite this record, civilians deaths still occur.

Using the principle of the moral equality of noncombatants to assess this track record would reveal whether the U.S. military is taking sufficient care to avoid harm to civilians. If the U.S. military would not accept these deaths – and the policies and practices that contribute to them – if U.S. civilians were at risk, then these deaths are unjustified.

This would mean that the drone program must change in order to treat civilians in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere with the respect to which they are legally and morally entitled. This example illustrates that to meet the standards of IHL and the moral principles that underlie those standards, military forces must apply the principle of the moral equality of noncombatants. There is no legal or moral justification, I argue, for treating some civilians lives as less important than others.

This is a demanding principle. Applying it would be difficult – military and political leaders would have to accept that there might be military objectives that are not important enough to justify risk to civilian lives. And it would require acknowledging that some military objectives might be so important that even harm to “their” civilians might be justified.

But one of the functions of IHL is to “limit the suffering and damage caused by armed conflict.” This principle reflects the moral and legal status of civilians in IHL and could lead to greater respect for and protection of all civilians during conflict.

Jessica Wolfendale, Professor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”  

That’s what a young Pakistani boy named Zubair told members of Congress at a hearing on drones in October 2013. That hearing was during the Obama years at a time when the government had barely even acknowledged that an American drone warfare program existed. 

Two years earlier, however, a Muslim cleric, Anwar Al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, both American citizens, were killed by U.S. drone strikes in Yemen just weeks apart. Asked to comment on Abdulrahman’s killing, Obama campaign senior adviser Robert Gibbs said: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”

Those are two of all too many grim tales of the brutality with which the United States has carried out its drone warfare program. Post-9/11 reiterations by the government of the danger we now live in (because the U.S. was attacked), have made the collective responsibility of Muslims and the callous dismissal of their deaths a regular occurrence.  

In 2023, this country’s drone warfare program has entered its third decade with no end in sight. Despite the fact that the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 is approaching, policymakers have demonstrated no evidence of reflecting on the failures of drone warfare and how to stop it. Instead, the focus continues to be on simply shifting drone policy in minor ways within an ongoing violent system.

The Inherent Dehumanization of Drone Warfare

In February 2013, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney justified drone strikes as a key tool of American foreign policy this way:  

“We have acknowledged, the United States, that sometimes we use remotely piloted aircraft to conduct targeted strikes against specific al-Qaeda terrorists in order to prevent attacks on the United States and to save American lives. We conduct those strikes because they are necessary to mitigate ongoing actual threats, to stop plots, prevent future attacks, and, again, save American lives… The U.S. government takes great care in deciding to pursue an al-Qaeda terrorist, to ensure precision and to avoid loss of innocent life.”

More aggressively endorsing the use of such drones, Georgetown Professor Daniel Byman, who has held government positions, emphasized the necessity of such warfare to protect American lives. “Drones,” he wrote, “have done their job remarkably well… And they have done so at little financial cost, at no risk to U.S. forces, and with fewer civilian casualties than many alternative methods would have caused.”

In reality, however, Washington’s war on terror has inflicted disproportionate violence on communities across the globe, while using this form of asymmetrical warfare to further expand the space between the value placed on American lives and those of Muslims. As the rhetoric on drone warfare suggests, the value of life and the need to protect it are, as far as Washington is concerned, reserved for Americans and their allies.

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Since the war on terror was launched, the London-based watchdog group Airwars has estimated that American air strikes have killed at least 22,679 civilians and possibly up to 48,308 of them. Such killings have been carried out for the most part by desensitized killers, who have been primed towards the dehumanization of the targets of those murderous machines. In the words of critic Saleh Sharief, “The detached nature of drone warfare has anonymized and dehumanized the enemy, greatly diminishing the necessary psychological barriers of killing.” 

In his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman focuses on the “mechanical distancing” of modern warfare, thanks to “the sterile Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical bugger that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim.” Scholar Grégoire Chamayou describes this phenomenon in even starker terms. Thanks to the distance between the drone operator and the victim, “One is never spattered by the adversary’s blood. No doubt the absence of any physical soiling corresponds to less of a sense of moral soiling… Above all, it ensures that the operator will never see his victim seeing him doing what he does to him.”  

Needless to say, drone technology has rendered those in distant lands so much more disposable in the name of American national security. This is because such long-range techno-targeting has created a profound level of dehumanization that, ironically enough, has only made the repeated act of long-distance killing, of (not to mince words) slaughter, remarkably banal.  

In these years of the war on terror, the legalities of drone warfare coupled with the way its technology capitalizes on an unfortunate aspect of human psychology has made the dehumanization of Muslims (and so violence against them) that much easier to carry out. It’s made their drone killing so much more of a given because it’s taken for granted that Muslims in “target sites” or conflict zones must be terrorists whose removal should be beyond questioning — even after a posthumous determination of their civilian status.

Responsibility, Not Accountability

At a 2016 press conference, President Barack Obama finally responded to a question about the increasing numbers of drone strikes by admitting: “There’s no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn’t have been.” Then he added, “In situations of war, you know, we have to take responsibility when we’re not acting appropriately.”

Rare as such admissions of “responsibility” have been, however, they remain quite different from accountability. In Obama’s case, all that was offered to the survivors among those who “shouldn’t have been” killed in such drone strikes was an utterly minimal acknowledgment that it was even happening.

While the use of drones in the war on terror began under President George W. Bush, it escalated dramatically under Obama. Then, in the Trump years, it rose yet again. Halfway through Trump’s presidency, drone strikes had already exceeded the total number in the Obama era. Though the use of drones in Joe Biden’s first year in office was lower than Trump’s, what has remained consistent is the lack of the slightest accountability for the slaughter of civilians.  

In 2021, as the U.S. was withdrawing chaotically from its 20-year Afghan War disaster, its military surveilled a white car driving around Kabul, believed it to be carrying explosives, and launched its final drone strike of that conflict, slaughtering 10 Afghans. Two weeks later, after reporting by the New York Times revealed what really happened, the Pentagon finally admitted that only civilians had been killed, seven of them children (but penalized no one). 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin later apologized to the families of those killed and offered compensation — one of the few times American officials had even bothered to acknowledge wrongdoing in Afghanistan in the last 20 years. True to form, however, the government’s pledge to compensate the impacted families has gone unfulfilled, a grim reminder that in none of those years has there been any semblance of justice for civilian survivors of such drone strikes.

A few weeks ago, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Biden administration was forced to release a redacted version of a presidential policy memorandum, signed in October 2022, that detailed the administration’s latest approach to drone warfare globally. At least some details about it were known prior to its release, however, thanks to an anonymous senior administration official. 

The Washington Post editorial board, among others, celebrated the memo, arguing that the restrictions in place are “smart rules of engagement” and a significant improvement over the Trump years when it comes to limiting civilian damage from drones. In reality, however, Biden’s memo is likely to do little to stem future drone warfare nightmares. In essence, the memo represents a return to Obama-era rules, including the supposed need to have “near-certainty” that the target of a drone strike is a terrorist and “near-certainty” that non-combatants won’t be injured or killed. The memo also includes other criteria that (at least theoretically) must be met before an individual is targeted, including an assessment that capture is not feasible.

In the case of Anwar Al-Awlaki, while the U.S. claimed his capture wasn’t possible, members of his family disputed this. In a Democracy Now interview, Al-Awlaki’s uncle Saleh bin Fareed stated, “I am sure I could have handed him over — me and my family — but they never, ever asked us to do that.” Needless to say, the lack of transparency has made it impossible to know if such standards are being met before a strike takes place and, worse yet, there’s no method of accountability if they aren’t.

That Biden administration memo does ban signature strikes that target individuals whose identities are unknown based on behavior suggesting they might be involved in terrorist activity. Still, we shouldn’t mistake a modestly better policy for a truly legal, moral, and ethical one, especially since the drone strike “mistakes” of the past haven’t led to any genuinely meaningful overhauls of the program.

Minimizing Civilian Deaths?

On September 20, 2001, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress in which he first used the phrase “war on terror,” while announcing a domestic and global campaign to be fought without borders or time constraints. Previewing what, years later, would become known as this country’s “forever wars,” he advised Americans that they “should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success.”

Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics — that is, the politics of death – catches the essence of the war on terror Bush launched as a way of life (and death) — “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.” With the invasion of Afghanistan and the designation of entire largely Muslim parts of the planet as the enemy, the Bush administration began a “war” in which Muslim deaths were necessary for the protection and preservation of American ones.  This set a precedent for the value of Muslim life when the act of killing them could be equated with the security of Americans and the protection of “the homeland.”

Twenty-two years later, drones continue to be instruments of civilian slaughter and the language deployed by successive administrations to describe such slaughter has served to sanitize that fact. Whether it’s the use of “target” or “collateral damage,” both minimize the reality that human beings are being murdered.  Taken together with a larger war-on-terror narrative in which Muslims have been strikingly demonized and criminalized, the result has been the production of killable bodies whose deaths elicit neither guilt, remorse, nor accountability. 

In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama explained why he put “prudent limits” on drone warfare, pointing out that Americans “will not be safer if people abroad believe we strike within their countries without regard for the consequence.” And how right he was.

As yet, however, there have been zero consequences for the air-strike deaths of tens of thousands of civilians globally and, as Obama’s statement suggests, the only real concern this caused American officials was the fear that too many such killings might, in the end, harm Americans.  

Grieving Muslim Lives

In Sana’a, Yemen, a wall with graffiti art shows a U.S. drone under which someone has written in blood-red paint, “Why did you kill my family?” in English and Arabic. The relentless American drone campaign has indeed left all too many civilians in Muslim-majority countries asking the same question. The only answer offered in Washington over all these years is that such killings were unavoidable collateral damage.

But imagine, for a moment, what Americans might do if their family members were regularly being killed by drones because another government claimed “near certainty” that they were terrorists? You know the answer, of course, given the response to the 9/11 attacks: this country would undoubtedly launch a catastrophic war of epic proportions with no conceivable end in sight. In contrast, Muslims targeted by American drones have been left to pick up the all-too-literal pieces of their loved ones, while risking the possibility of also being killed in a double- or triple-tap strike — a level of violence that should never be justified.  

We should all reject a war on terror committed to the disposability of Muslims because no one (including Muslims) should have to mourn the killing of civilians the U.S. has targeted for far too long. Muslim lives have inherent value and their deaths are worth grieving, mourning, and above all valuing. Drone warfare will never change that fact.

Copyright 2023 Maha Hilal

Via Tomdispatch.com

Loud explosions rock the evening sky. Streaks of light appear like comets. Missiles rain down. Below, people scramble for cover. The injured are taken on stretchers – the dead, buried.

That is daily life in Ukraine, where pilotless vehicles known as drones litter the sky in an endless video gamelike – but actually very real – war with Russia.

Both Russia and Ukraine are using drones in this war to remotely locate targets and drop bombs, among other purposes.

Today, drones are used in various other conflicts, but are also used to deliver packages, track weather, drop pesticides and entertain drone hobbyists.

Welcome to the world of drones. They range from small consumer quadcopters to remotely piloted warplanes – and all types are being used by militaries around the world.

As a scholar of public diplomacy and foreign policy – and a former United States under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs – I know how important it is for people to understand drones and their proliferation, given the risks of war, terrorism and accidental drone clashes in the world today.

A buying spree

The U.S. is among more than 100 countries using drones in times of conflict.

Terrorists have also been known to deploy drones because they are relatively low-cost weapons with high degrees of civilian damage.

Consumer drone shipments, globally, topped 5 million units in 2020 and are expected to surpass 7 million by 2025.

Via Pixabay.

Sales of drones globally were up 57% from 2021 to 2022.

With the exponential rise in drone purchases, there are few constraints for buyers, creating a wild, wild west of uncontrolled access and usage.

Each country is free to decide when and where drones fly, without answering to any other country or international authority governing drones. The skies are often filled with drone swarms, with little on-the-ground guidance on the rules of the sky.

Different purposes

Each country has a unique interest in getting and using drones.

China is increasingly using sophisticated drones for covert surveillance, especially in international waters to patrol the disputed islands in the South China Sea. Its expanding drone program has influenced other countries like the U.S. to also invest more in the technology.

Turkey’s military has a highly sophisticated drone, the Bayraktar TB2, which is capable of carrying laser-guided bombs and small enough to fit in a flatbed truck.

The United Arab Emirates imports drones from China and Turkey to deploy in Yemen and Libya to monitor warlords in case conflict breaks out.

And South Korea is considering starting a special drone unit after it failed to respond to a recent North Korean drone incursion. When North Korea deployed five drones towards it southern neighbor in December 2022, South Korea had to scramble its fighter jets to issue warning shots.

No rules in the air

The countries with armed drones are individually navigating their own rules instead of an international agreed-upon set of regulations.

International law prohibits the use of armed force unless the United Nations Security Council authorizes an attack, or in the case of self-defense.

But short of launching a full war, drones can legally be deployed for counterterrorism operations, surveillance and other non-self defense needs, creating a slippery slope to military conflict.

Figuring out the national and international rules of the sky for drone usage is hard.

For 20 years, experts have tried to create international agreements on arms – and some countries supported an informal 2016 U.N. agreement that recommends countries document the import and export of unmanned aerial vehicles.

But these efforts never evolved into serious, comprehensive standards and laws that kept pace with technology. There are several reasons for that: To protect their national sovereignty, governments do not want to release drone data. They also want to avoid duplication of their technology and to maintain their market share of the drone trade.

US and drones

For decades, the U.S. has wrestled with how to balance drone warfare as it became involved in overseas operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and other conflict zones.

The U.S. killed a top al-Qaida leader with a drone strike in Afghanistan in 2022.

But there have been other instances of drone strikes that resulted in unintended casualties and damage.

In 2021, The New York Times reported that a U.S. drone strike on a vehicle thought to contain an Islamic State bomb resulted in the deaths of 10 children – not three civilians, as the U.S. said might have happened.

There is scant public opinion research on how American feel about the use of drones overseas, which makes building public support for their military use difficult.

Drone dangers

Drone dangers are real. Many drone experts, including myself, believe it is unsafe for each country’s military to make its own decisions on drones with no rules guiding drone transfers, exports, imports and usage – and no major forum to discuss drones, as the technology continues to evolve.

Multiple drones can communicate with each other remotely, creating shared objectives rather than an individual drone path or pattern. Like a swarm of bees, these drones form a deadly and autonomous aerial army ripe for accidents.

With the advent of artificial intelligence and more sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicles, drones can change speed, altitude and targeting in seconds, making them even more difficult to track and investigate. Attacks can happen seemingly out of the blue.

In my view, the world needs new and consistent rules on drone usage for the decade ahead – better international monitoring of drone incursions and more transparency in the outcome of drone attacks.

Information about the impact of military use of drones is not just important for historical purposes, but also to engage societies in action and temper the impulse to engage in conflict. It is time to talk seriously about drones.

Tara Sonenshine, Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice in Public Diplomacy, Tufts University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Along with the recent reciprocal drone strikes by Iran and the United States in Syria, Russia continues to unleash its arsenal on Ukrainian civilian and military targets alike. While the Russian armies have started using outdated weapons, novel technologies remain the objects of fascination on the battlefield.

Hypersonic missiles and nuclear weapons have understandably grabbed media attention. However, drone warfare continues to occupy a central role in the conflict.

Ukraine’s not the only battlefield. Drone warfare has played a significant role in the Azerbaijan-Armenian conflict, with Armenia’s superior conventional forces being challenged by the kamikaze drones, strike UAVs and remotely controlled planes of Azerbaijan. A world away, China’s drones continue to test Taiwan’s defensive capabilities and readiness.

Drones are not the only weapons. As the global Summit on Responsible AI in the Military Domain (REAIM) illustrates, there is a growing recognition that lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) pose a threat that must be reckoned with.

Understanding this threat requires grasping the psychological, social and technological challenges they present.

Killing and psychological distance

Psychology is at the heart of all conflicts. Whether in terms of perceived existential or territorial threats, individuals band together in groups to make gains or avoid losses.

A reluctance to kill stems from our perceived humanity and membership in the same community. By turning people into statistics and dehumanizing them, we further dull our moral sense.

LAWS remove us from the battlefield. As we distance ourselves from human suffering, lethal decisions become easier. Research has demonstrated that distance is also associated with more antisocial behaviours. When viewing potential targets from drone-like perspectives, people become morally disengaged.

Autonomy, intelligence differ

Many modern weapons rely on artificial intelligence (AI), but not all forms of AI are autonomous. Autonomy and intelligence are two distinct characteristics.

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Autonomy has to do with control over specific operations. A weapons system might gather information and identify a target autonomously, while firing decisions are left to human operators. Alternatively, a human operator might decide on a target, releasing a self-guided weapon to target and detonate autonomously.

Autonomous weapons are not new to warfare. In the sea, self-propelled torpedos and naval mines have been in use since the mid-1800s. On the ground, elementary land mines have given way to autonomous turrets.

In the air, Nazi Germany wielded V1 and V2 rockets and radio-controlled munitions. Heat-seeking and laser-guided precisions followed by the 1960s and were used by the U.S. in Vietnam. By the 1990s, the era of “smart weapons” was upon us, bringing with it questions of our ethical obligations.

Contemporary LAWS have been framed as the “natural evolutionary path” of warfare. We can draw parallels between single drones and smart weapons, although drone swarms represent a new kind of weapon.

The ability to co-ordinate their actions gives them the potential to overwhelm human forces. The degree of co-ordination, in fact, requires a higher level of autonomy. If the swarm is sufficiently large, a single human operator could not hope to maintain sufficient situational awareness to control it.

By ceding lethal decisions to LAWS, their accuracy and reliability become paramount concerns.

Accuracy and accountability

The potential for reduced human error is often used to recommend LAWS. While an actuarial approach to AI ethics is hardly the best or only way to make moral decisions about AI, reliable data is essential to judge the accuracy and improve the operations of LAWS. However, it is often lacking.

A review of U.S. drone strikes over a 15-year period suggested that only about 20 per cent of more than 700 strikes were acknowledged by the government, with an estimated 400 civilian casualties.

In the early stages of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, reports suggested that Ukrainians destroyed about 85 per cent of the drones launched against them. In the most recent attacks, they have destroyed more than 75 per cent of the drones.

These statistics might suggest drones aren’t particularly effective. But the minimal cost and large numbers of drones mean that even if a small proportion of the weapons are successful, the damage and casualties can be significant.

When assigning responsibility, we have to consider who manufactures these weapons. They are not always homegrown. Drones used by Russia in the Ukrainian conflict hail from China and Iran.

Inside these drones, many parts come from western manufacturers. Understanding responsibility and accountability in conflicts requires that we consider the international supply chains that enable LAWS.

Can LAWS be outlawed?

Whether LAWS represent a unique threat to human rights that must be banned — like landmines — or otherwise controlled by international laws, there is widespread agreement that we must re-evaluate existing approaches to regulation.

REAIM’s work is not alone in attempting to regulate LAWS. The United Nations, multilateral proposals and countries like the U.S. and Canada have all developed, proposed or are reviewing the sufficiency of existing standards.

These efforts face an array of practical issues. In many cases, the principles are framed as best practices and viewed as voluntary rather than being enforceable. States might also be reluctant in order to ensure consistency with their allies.

Treaties and regulations also create social dilemmas — just as they do when contemplating cyberweapons, nations must decide whether they adhere to the rules while others develop superior capabilities.

Even if LAWS are wholly or partially banned, there is still considerable room for interpretation and rationalization.

In July 2022, Russia said responsibility lies with their operators and that LAWS can “reduce the risk of intentional strikes against civilians and civilian facilities” and support “missions of maintaining or restoring international peace and security … [in] compliance with international law.” These are hollow statements made by a hollow regime.

No matter how elegant the regulatory framework nor how straightforward the principles, adversarial nations are unlikely to abide by international agreements — especially knowing weapons like drones make it easier for soldiers psychologically removed from the realities of the battlefield to kill others.

As Russia’s war in Ukraine illustrates, by reframing conflicts, the use of LAWS can always be justified. Their ability to desensitize their users from the act of killing, however, must not be.

Jordan Richard Schoenherr, Assistant Professor, Psychology, Concordia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Many Ukrainians are facing the prospect of a winter of power outages after about 30% of the country’s power stations were knocked out in just over a week. The deputy head of the president’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, has warned that the country needs to be prepared for “a hard winter”.

It has been reported that a great deal of this damage is being inflicted by Shahed-136 “kamikaze” drones, acquired by Russia from Iran in recent weeks. On Monday October 17 alone, Russia launched 43 Shahed drones at Kyiv, killing four civilians as the focus of Russia’s attacks turned again to Ukraine’s cities.

Ukraine’s power and water infrastructure has been the most common target in recent days. Iran’s drones have a proven track record in this respect, having reportedly been used by Houthi rebels to strike at oil facilities in Saudi Arabia in 2019.

But drones have been deployed in numbers by both sides since the beginning of the war. The Turkish Baykar Bayraktar TB2 was used effectively in the first months to destroy Russian artillery systems and armoured vehicles. TB2s are the size of a small plane with a range of 300km and a flight ceiling of 7,500 metres. They rapidly acquired an almost mystical aura for Ukraine’s soldiers who composed songs in their honour.

BAYRAKTAR-Official Song (english)

But TB2s are expensive – about US$2 million (£1.78 million) each – compared with kamikaze drones which are available for US$20,000 (£17,800) each. And in a war in which neither side has gained control of the sky, these large drones are likely to be shot down by the adversary’s air defences, which disqualifies TB2s from more extensive use on cost grounds.

Another of the large drones is the Mohajer-6, also supplied by Iran (although it should be noted that Iran has consistently denied supplying drones to Russia for use in Ukraine). Ukrainian forces recently captured a Mohajer-6, which has a maximum flight speed of 200kmh, a ceiling of 5,400 metres and can fly for 12 hours.

Closer inspection can allow the Ukrainian defenders to work out the best way to counter these weapons. The fact that Russia appears increasingly to be relying on cheap Iranian drones also suggests a diminished capacity to produce its own Orion armed drone, which saw action in Syria.

‘Loitering munitions’

But it is the relatively radar-immune, low-flying Shahed drones that have attracted headlines recently. These are what is known as “loitering munitions” – so-called because they can wait in the air to identify the target before smashing into it. Hence the nickname, kamikaze drones.

Ukraine has been using several types of loitering munition since the start of the conflict. These include the RAM II, a Ukrainian-designed-and-manufactured drone with a range of 30km and a weapons payload of 3kg, which the Ukrainian public crowdfunded US$9.5 million to acquire in recent weeks. There is also the ST-35 Silent Thunder, which has a 3.5kg payload and can also attack targets within a range of 30km.

Ukraine also acquired hundreds of US Switchblade 300 drones in March, which are small and light enough to fit in a backpack and have a range of 15km and a payload of just under 3kg.

In addition to the Iranian drones, Russia has been deploying its catapult-launched Lancet drone, which has a payload of 3kg and was used in Syria with devastating results. They also have the KUB-BLA, one of which was recovered in Kyiv in March – prompting speculation it was deployed as part of an assassination attempt on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. The KUB is hard to detect and has a payload of 1kg of ball bearings – a classic anti-personnel weapon.

But the Shahed-136 offers Russia a different capability, with its 2,000km range giving the ability to strike targets much deeper into Ukrainian territory. Deployed in large numbers, Russia can use a rudimentary swarming tactic to try to overwhelm Ukrainian air defences.

So are these drones a gamechanger?

To call these kamikaze drones “gamechangers” in the war in Ukraine would be to overstate their significance. While they keep a low profile on radars and are relatively cheap, they remain dependent on Russian military intelligence to guide them towards targets.

They are also, according to Ukrainian reports, vulnerable to being shot down due to their low sophistication and relatively slow airspeed of about 118mph. Ukraine claims to have shot down more than 80% of the drones deployed against Kyiv this week.

The Guardian: “Ukraine police appear to shoot down Russian drone

Iranian drones are relatively low-tech and guided by a civilian GPS system which can be jammed. Ukraine has acquired Polish SKY CTRL drone jammers, although these have a range of only 10km. To improve Ukraine’s anti-drone defence, Nato defence ministers recently agreed to provide hundreds of drone jammers. The US has also promised to speed up delivery of the more powerful Switchblade 600 drone, which has a range of up to 90km.

For both sides in this conflict, drones have been most effective in a less sensational, enabling function. By providing cheap “eyes in the sky”, they improve the precision of artillery fire and increase situational awareness to the level of a foot soldier. In this way, drones have effectively changed the operational tempo of artillery assault from about half an hour (using traditional means of target acquisition) to just three-to-five minutes.

But drones on their own will not give either side a decisive advantage in winning this war. The bulk of the fighting and occupation of territory will still be done by soldiers in armoured vehicles.

However, drone attacks seem to maintain psychological pressure, undermining the morale of the military and civilians alike. And being able to strike at people and infrastructure hundreds of kilometres behind the actual lines of contact in effect offers Russia a new “front”. Ukraine’s defence chiefs must redouble their efforts to secure adequate defensive technology to ensure that this threat is quickly countered.

Dominika Kunertova, Senior Researcher, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The war in Ukraine is helping one country achieve its foreign policy and national security objectives, but it’s neither Russia nor Ukraine.

It’s Iran.

That was starkly clear on the morning of Oct. 17, 2022, as Iranian-made drones attacked civilian targets in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. Russia used the Iranian drones to inflict damage on Ukraine’s national energy company headquarters, and the drones also killed four civilians.

Iran is among Russia’s most vocal supporters in the war. As a military analyst who specializes in Iranian national security strategy, I see this having little to do with Ukraine and everything to do with Iran’s long-term strategy vis-à-vis the United States.

As Russia’s war on Ukraine passed six months and continued eroding Russia’s manpower, military stores, economy and diplomatic connections, leader Vladimir Putin opted for an unlikely but necessary Iranian lifeline to salvage victory in Ukraine and also in Syria where, since 2015, Russian soldiers have been fighting to keep Bashar al-Assad’s government in power.

And at a time when the Islamic Republic of Iran’s government is facing growing citizen protests against its autocratic rule, Putin’s move has, in turn, helped Iran make progress in promoting its national interests, as defined by its leadership.

Opposing the US everywhere

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran’s leaders have believed the United States is constantly scheming to topple Iran’s government. They view leaders in Washington as the greatest threat and obstacle to promoting Iranian national interests – achieving economic self-sufficiency, international legitimacy, regional security, power and influence.

The fears of Iran’s leaders are not irrational – the long history of U.S. meddling in Iranian affairs, continuous open hostility between the two countries and decades of U.S. military buildup in close proximity to Iran greatly concern leaders in Tehran.

The U.S. has military forces in many Middle Eastern countries, with or without invitation. To promote its national interests, Iran is working to force the U.S. military out of the region and reduce U.S. political influence there.

Iran has an even bigger aim: to overthrow what it sees as the U.S.-dominated global political order.

Iran counters U.S. influence by maintaining partnerships with an assortment of nonstate militias and governments united by their fierce anti-U.S. hostility. The country nurtures a network of militant partner and proxy groups, whose own political preferences and ambitions align with Iran’s objectives, by providing weapons, training, funds – and, in some cases, direction. Among the recipients are Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, friendly Iraqi militias and Ansar Allah in Yemen, better known as the Houthis or the Houthi rebels.

Through these militias and their political arms, Iran extends its influence and works to shape an Iran-friendly government in states like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It threatens U.S. forces and antagonizes Western-allied governments in states such as Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

At the national level, Iran maintains no permanent mutual defense treaties. Its closest strategic partners include Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, China and Russia. They cooperate politically, economically and militarily to create an alternative to what their leaders perceive as the U.S.-led world political order.

That cooperation includes undermining U.S. national interests and helping ease or circumvent Western political pressure and economic sanctions.

Tehran to the rescue

Russia’s current war in Ukraine has left Moscow with only a handful of sympathetic friends.

Few political leaders understand Putin’s newfound political isolation and related animosity toward the United States more than Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Iran-Russia relations are complicated.

The two countries found common cause in helping Syrian strongman Assad defeat his country’s opposition forces, but for different national interests.

Saving Assad helps Russia reassert itself as a major power in the Middle East. For Iran, a friendly Syria is a critical link in Iran’s anti-U.S., anti-Israel coalition.

As Russia and Iran fought to sustain Assad, they also competed for lucrative postwar reconstruction and infrastructure contracts in that country, and to shape the post-civil war political environment to their advantage.

But neither country was bold enough to influence the way the other operated in Syria. Consequently, sometimes Iranian-backed and Russian forces cooperated, and at other times they squabbled. Mostly they left each other alone.

Ultimately, though, Russia’s plight in Ukraine compelled its leader to solicit Iran’s help in two ways.

First, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a branch of the Iranian military, provided supplementary manpower to fill the void left when Russia reallocated troops from Syria to its Ukraine campaign.

Second, Russia has used Iran’s low-cost and battle-proven unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones, to counter Kyiv’s Western-supported arsenal and buttress its own struggling forces and surprisingly inept warfighting capabilities.

In July, Iran hosted numerous Russian officers and conducted training on Iranian Shahed-129 and Shahed-191 drone operations. As of early August 2022, anonymous intelligence sources and Ukrainian officials indicated that Russia had obtained and used Iranian drones in Ukraine.

Since acquiring Iranian drones in early September, Russia has launched over 100 Iranian Shahed-136 and Mohajer-6 attack and reconnaissance drones in over a dozen attacks against a large range of targets: Ukrainian special forces, armor and artillery units, air defense and fuel storage facilities, Ukrainian military and energy infrastructure, civilian targets and a recent series of drone and missile attacks against Kyiv.

Russia is expected to soon rely on Iran further to supplant its dwindling weapons supplies by acquiring two types of Iranian-made short-range ballistic missiles for use in Ukraine, according to U.S. and allied security officials.

Ukraine war promotes Iran’s interests

This warming alliance may not help Russia defeat Ukraine. It will promote Iran’s national interests.

Russia’s Syria drawdown brought additional Iranian soldiers there to further prove their fighting abilities and entrench themselves in Syria. That then allows Iran to control territory threatened by anti-Assad forces and maintain an open corridor or “land bridge” by which Iran extends support to its network of anti-America and anti-Israel partners and proxies.

Russia’s acquisition of Iranian arms will significantly boost Iran’s weapons industry, whose primary clientele right now is its own militias. Iran’s recent efforts to expand drone manufacturing and exports yielded limited success in small, mostly peripheral markets of Ethiopia, Sudan, Tajikistan and Venezuela.

Moscow is the second-largest global arms exporter, and its surprising transformation to Iranian arms importer signals the seriousness of Russia’s problems. It also legitimizes and expands Tehran’s weapons industry beyond arms production for the purpose of self-sufficiency. This one alliance moves Iran toward a more prominent role as a major arms exporter.

Lastly, Russia’s war in Ukraine extends a new avenue by which Iran might directly counter U.S.-provided weapons, as well as the opportunity to undermine U.S. and NATO influence in Eurasia. Iran’s drones could afford Moscow an effective and desperately needed response to U.S. weapons wreaking havoc against Russian forces in Ukraine.

Iranian weapons may force Ukraine’s Western benefactors to allocate additional billions for counter-drone or air defense systems, or aid to replace assets that Iranian weapons potentially neutralize.

Zero-sum game

The introduction of Iranian ballistic missiles to Ukraine would compound the limited tactical victories scored by Iranian drones. They will bring further unnecessary suffering and prolong and further destabilize the war in Ukraine, but I don’t believe they will tip the scales of conflict in Russia’s favor.

Their greater contribution is to Iran’s national interests: They allow Iran to directly check and undermine the U.S. and NATO outside of Iran’s usual regional area of operations. They boost Iran’s profile among countries that also wish to challenge the United States and NATO’s political, military and economic power. And they strengthen solidarity among those countries.

As Iran’s fighters, advisers and weapons proliferate to new areas and empower U.S. adversaries, Iran further promotes its national interests at the expense of U.S. national interests.

This is an updated version of a story originally published Aug. 30, 2022.

Aaron Pilkington, US Air Force Analyst of Middle East Affairs, PhD Student at Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.