Are Armed Drones Anything Strategically New?

Strategika, a Hoover Institution online journal edited by Victor Davis Hanson, has published a symposium on whether armed drones are strategically something new, or just an incremental step forward in remote platform weapon systems.  Ben and I have a brief contribution to the issue, taken mostly from Chapter 3 of Speaking the Law, our book on the national security speeches of the Obama administration (which is being published online chapter by chapter, before hardback release from Hoover Press).  As I am on the Amtrak train to New York City to discuss the legal and moral issues of drones in a Carnegie Council-Bard College Drone Center event (tonight 6:00 pm---live streamed) with former CIA official Robert Grenier and former Air Force General Counsel Charles Blanchard, it's a good moment for me to think whether, separate from legal or moral issues, drone warfare is a sharp strategic break. Our conclusion is that, in conventional war on conventional battlefields, drones are largely just another remote weapon platform.  In counterterrorism-on-offense, however, against transnational non-state actor terrorist groups, they do represent something new:  first, an offensive, "raiding" capability---the lightest of the light cavalry, deployed against terrorist fighters who, as raiders on offense, have rarely had to confront a counter-raiding capability.  But drones offer a very special kind of raiding capability---that is, a "persisting" raiding strategy, to use military historian Archer Jones' terminology.  Typically a raiding strategy is just that: raiding, incursion and retreat.  But drones allow for "persistence" in the raids, and in two ways.  Drones allow a persistence in raids against the adversary---unlike, for example, human special ops teams, which are typically inserted and extracted in a tight time frame.  But perhaps more importantly, drones also allow for persistence in surveillance and intelligence gathering.  Tactically, this is a key part of the precision of drone targeting; also strategically, when drones are integrated with the full complement of intelligence gathering and analysis, including human networks on the ground. These two features of drone warfare---a "persisting" yet still "raiding" strategy of armed drone attacks, backed by persisting surveillance and intelligence gathering---marks armed drones out as something new in transnational counterterrorism.  They are a necessary, vital capability, a game-changing capability---and yet, for all that, still not a sufficient one. Drones---any counterraiding strategy in counterterrorism---must still be integrated, as our Strategika essay observes, with strategies for denying territory and haven, particularly whole political territories, to jihadist insurgents and their transnational terrorist wings.