(I have not read the paper, but these are my immediate thoughts)
Under the current distribution of capabilities it is highly unlikely--if nearly impossible--for our enemies to ever use more conventional weapons to strike American soil. Therefore, American civilians wouldn't be put at risk. Now, American soldiers deployed overseas would be put at risk and under this scenario greater accuracy would increase the probability of American deaths. Additionally, increasing the accuracy of one's weapons does have some practical battlefield implications beyond just avoiding civilian deaths--another reason why we wouldn't want to sell to likely adversaries. I would also assume that for those states we view as 'evil' or true 'enemies' the public would assume that their desire would be to possibly target our allies' civilians or that they would use them to further internal suppression and regime survival.
In either scenario, providing any kind of state-of-the-art technology to an enemy would be unpalatable.
Don't smart bombs work off of the American-controlled GPS network? Why wouldn't we sell anyone bombs with our chips (presumably not open-source) running off data from our satellite network? The real question is why would anyone buy them.
"Precision" (in either munitions or targeting or both) has long been promoted as a more ethical way of warfare.
Jack London, for example, applauded "the marvelous and awful machinery of warfare" that "today defeats its own end. Made pre-eminently to kill, its chief effect is to make killing quite the unusual thing" (quoted in I.F. Clarke, _Voices Prophesying War_, 1763-1984 (Oxford 1966), p. 77).
Early rhetoric on strategic bombing, for example, promoted the notion that because the "bomber will always get through," as Stanley Baldwin put it (and an excellent sentiment that is, vis-a-vis homeland security), wars would be made shorter -- and thus more humane -- because the strategic bomber could deliver the "knock-out blow" to the enemy's capital city quickly, forcing him to sue for peace and avoiding the bloodletting of the trenches.
Billy Mitchell wrote in 1925 that strategic bombing "is a distinct move for the betterment of civilization, because wars will be decided quickly and not drag on for years. What will the future hold for us? Undoubtedly an attack on the great centers of population...New York, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Washington will be the first targets. It is unnecessary that these cities be destroyed in the sense that every house be levelled with the ground. It will be sufficient to have the civilian population driven out of them so that they cannot carry on their usual vocations. A few gas bombs will do that... [This] quick way of deciding a war is really much more humane than the present methods of blowing up people to bits by cannon projectiles or butchering them with bayonets." (_Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power_ (Putnam's 1925), p. 16)
So the analytical problem for Farnsworth is double-edged. There's the familiar Realist lament -- why enhance the capabilities of potential competitors? -- and this far more problematic empirical-ethical challenge, namely the assumption that precision and bloodless-ness are intrinsically linked.
As a former soldier, I've seen precision air strikes, but "precision" wants operationalizing in particular ways -- particularly when you consider that if everyone has PGMs, everyone understands PGMSs, which means everyone can harden targets against, and develop counter-measures for, PGMs, rendering their use moot.
To overcome that limitation in the battlespace, then, we'd turn quite naturally to high explosives -- defeating the logic for PGMs in the first place, especially when one considers that in many (most?) likely future conflicts in this era of asymmetric warfare, PGM-worthy targets are farther and fewer between.
Thinking a bit more about this, mostly by way of avoiding my own students' papers, there is a kind of race to the bottom in destruction that is attendant to war.
Think about the sort-of cultural master narrative we have about WWI -- it starts out with cavalry and airmen saluting each other and Christmas carols on the front lines and ends with massed artillery barrages, unrestricted submarine warfare, gas, and the machine-gun.
If it were the case, for example, that with each passing day of conflict the costs of not prevailing rise while the payoffs to a negotiated outcome stay flat or decrease (for reasons of reputation, regime survival, sunk costs, etc.), then the incentive to de-PGM-ify a conflict would increase in much the same way that the incentives for gas increased in WWI (promoted, not incidentally, as a "humane" way of breaking the stalemate in Flanders and bringing the war to a conclusion).
Even if negotiations were in the cards, one might have an incentive to make a final push and improve one's bargaining position (a la the Chinese/American "war for the hilltops" in Korea in 1952-53), again accelerating this race to the bottom in terms of destructiveness.
I haven't read the paper yet, however, a quick question came to mind as I read your post. In saying, The US is generally committed to more bloodless war for primarily humanitarian reasons (hence the development of smart bombs and non-lethal weapons to avoid killing enemy civilians) but is highly selective as to which governments it will share this technology with so that they, too, can avoid hitting foreign civilians in their various wars. Why?
Doesn't this assume that many of the people fighting in a war, like us feel that minimizing civilian casualties is a good thing? That is not the reality, in many cases, as the deliberate targeting of civilians is part of the strategy of war. Think of Sudan and Darfur here. Does anyone expect the Sudanese government not to use smart weapons to target refugee camps more accurately?
The only way, this could work, is if we strengthened the international regime on the targeting of civilian populations. However, given the much increased precision of our adversaries, we would be self-deterred from wanting to incur a higher degree of casualties in such an endeavor.
First, I'm not sure giving incentives to unfriendly states to develop advanced targeteering skills - the human and computer operational planning behind precision strike bombing - is such a hot idea. We might not care for the downstream effects of that.
Secondly, Nykr in DC has beaten me to the punch on the normative question. The Burmese junta is apt to find a very different set of targets for a "precision bombing" than would a NATO country.
Bill,
You make a good point that the likely targets of our enemies' PGMs would be US troops overseas, if it came to war. But it's not obvious to me that failing to disseminate the technology would reduce those battle deaths. It would simply ensure that the same US troops would be targeted with indiscriminate weapons, and that a multitude of foreign civilians would be killed along with.
Russell: Bloodless is indeed a misnomer - there's a difference between "humanitarian" war which limits battle deaths, unnecessary suffering and avoids hitting civilians, and "bloodless" war, since even within just war parameters combatants are always legitimate targets and the goal is to butcher as many of them as necessary to win. The context of my post, then is really protection of civilians, not reduction in bloodshed per se. I consider it acceptable if weapons hit soldiers, be they them or ours; I would prefer they not hit small children, mine or theirs.
NYkrinDC and Zenpundit are concerned that PGMs in the hands of "evil" states will only undermine civilian protection by helping war criminals take better aim at the innocent. Sure, it's a risk - though it could be mitigated by changing the Foreign Military Sales criteria to reflect not US geopolitical interests but rather a country's record of compliance with humanitarian law. However, regimes that target civilians generally aim for plausible denialability. Milosevic handed out candy to women and children at Srebrenica before massacring the men of the city in order to make a show that he was actually "civilized." Even the Bashir regime denies strafing villages or having genuine control over the janjaweed. PGM technology would rid a regime of any legitimate cover for war crimes if carried out systematically. It's likelier that such acts would be carried out with indiscriminate weapons or by mobilizing rogue elements on the ground, which is the status quo in many conflict zones. On the other hand, indiscriminate targeting that occurs today for want of better weapons could be replaced by precision systems, and this could save civilian lives, if only on the margins.
Of course, the truly problematic assumption in my earlier post is whether the US public is informed enough / humanitarian-minded enough to think in these terms.
Hi Dr. Charli
A very eloquent defense of your student's work. Unfortunately, the problem with the underlying assumption therein remains unremediated by your rebuttal.
To clarify, I'll give Mr. Farnsworth sincere props for thinking outside of the box on security issues. Sometimes the best solutions are counterintuitive and that kind of creativity should be more encouraged in Security Studies/IR/Foreign policy fields. His effort, as you have described it, is a good exercise and food for thought in challenging conventional wisdom. That being said, we still have to take a hard analytical look at the implications of such proposals.
The costs of his idea are relatively clear:
a. Proliferation of high precision weaponry to many states ( which of course, is also the intent).
b. Erosion of the relative American qualitative edge in conventional military power.
The benefits are not so clear so much as hoped for based upon an assumption that states use particular classes of weapons that cause high levels of collateral damage primarily due to a shortage of technological alternatives. I'm not seeing evidence that such is the case.
You speak of "evilness" and plausible deniability. Well if a a state, say Milosevic's, is timidly evil and seeks "plausible deniability" by supporting ad hoc paramilitaries - they'll accept precision weapons, not use them on civilians and continue arming and paying private death squads. Then when NATO forces show up, perhaps Milosevic uses the precision weapons on them. Or the Croats. Or whomever.
The cost to benefit ratio is unfavorable, in my view.
Thanks for the reply Prof. Carpenter.
Zenpundit has done a pretty good job of pointing out the costs of the idea. As such, I will only deal with a couple of points.
Defending against our argument that such a move would likely increase the targeting of innocent civilians:
"Sure, it's a risk - though it could be mitigated by changing the Foreign Military Sales criteria to reflect not US geopolitical interests but rather a country's record of compliance with humanitarian law."
I agree that this would help, to an extent, but you still run into two problems. First, from an economic standpoint, the sale of these weapons would be very limited, as even Israel would not qualify under such a criteria (at least I don't think, given their treatment of Palestinians).
The second problem is, having rogue/bad nations acquire this technology through third parties, that is from countries to whom we have provided the technology, and who fall under our Foreign Military Sales criteria. After all, removing American national interest from the equation, and using the reduction of civilian deaths as a measure for providing such weapons would ensure that we provide them to states that are not really American allies, so long as they fit within our FMS. Hence, they would be even less likely than our allies to enforce our policy of not selling or trafficking in these weapons, if the price is high enough.
The other point you bring up:
regimes that target civilians generally aim for plausible denialability.
That is true, but as Zenpundit pointed out, their having these weapons would mean they could continue using death squads or militias on the population, while reserving the smart weapons to deter any armed humanitarian intervention. Given how reticent many of our allies already are about the prospect of nation-building or interventions in most cases (see Burma/Myanmar, Darfur, etc.) it is unlikely that allowing such countries to have such weaponry would do anything to encourage our allies to want to move to intervene then.
Additionally, given the precision these weapons have, it would also ensure that these regimes would use them to target say a leader of an insurgent movement within a refugee camp, and expand the definition of collateral damage to an even more dangerous level. That is, the US has been criticized for its use of the term, and al Qaeda turned it around on us on 9/11, do we really want to give these regimes the capability to more accurately target their enemies, among the sea of the people, when they will simply latch on to a "collateral damage" defense. This of course brings up a larger point about the use of the term collateral damage itself. However, that is better left to another discussion. My point in bringing it up here is simply to note, that once governments have these types of weapons, they will not hesitate to use them.
Finally, allowing the spread of these weapons/technology can have the effect of emboldening countries to deal militarily with countries who may have not received it from us. In short, it would change the power dynamic within a region, and it may not be for the better, as it may instead precipitate far more wars (putting more civilians in danger) than would otherwise be the case.
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