This house supports the use of drones by the military

You have just heard the house promoting the military's use of drones: I will explain here why this house rejects the military's use of drones. I shall use the first round to set out my arguments, then the second to rebut. We both agree on what are drones, as far as I can tell, but I shall make explicit my burden: I aim to show that the use of drones by the military is in general unjust, and needs to change. The military's current use of drones is immoral and needs to change. Moreover, I shall question the general underlying principles of my opponent's arguments.Drones have no ability to distinguish between bystanders and targetsConsider a drone pilot following a potential human target. The pilot has been told his target is hostile, and he should be ready to shoot. Frightened and aware of what is imminently coming, the targetted man waves his hands to identify himself as non-threatening and to surrender to his enemy. If the pilot was a solider on the ground, he could accept the surrender, but instead the pilot is thousands of miles away, unable to react. There is no way to accept his surrender, and if a mistake has been made and this man has been falseley identified as a target and is instead a civilian, this cannot be communicated. A pilot in this case would nonetheless be forced to pull the trigger, as there is no identifiable or feasible way for someone to surrender to an unmanned drone. Of course, one may claim that the numbers show that there are very little non-militant deaths from use of drones. This is true. This is because the US administration defines the targets as militants, defined as “All military-age males in a strike zone”. Every man killed by a drone are, according to the military, targets, and thus are defined as “militant” deaths, not civilian deaths. Drones cause mass innocent death. This completely undermines, interestingly, my opponent's case that drones reduce civilian casualties.Drones break International Law and human rights Protocol I of the Geneva Convention states that "a person is hors du combat if...he clearly expresses intention to surrender"[1]. Such a person is considered “outside of combat” and thus even if he is a combatant at the point where he surrenders he is as illegitimate a target as any other civilian. Drone warfare offers no inherent facility to deal with such individuals, save for killing them or conversely allowing them safe passage — the latter being an extremely unlikely outcome in most cases. The oft-horrific result of such a circumstance has been noted by the people most intimately familiar with the program itself. In the words of ex-Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright, “To me, the weakness in the drone activity is that if there’s no one on the ground, and the person puts his hands out, he can’t surrender … What makes it worse with a Predator is you’re actually watching it. You know when he puts his hands up.”[2] Assassination by Drone Another objection to drones is that they have blurred the line between war and assassination. Somebody suspected of plotting a terrorist attack on the soil of the US or the UK would be subject to arrest and prosecution. But if the suspects are in the tribal areas of Pakistan, they can simply be blown away. Drones mean that the judicial process is with ease completely ignored, because it is easier to kill than to prosecute. One may say that "this is war" and so they will die one way or another, whether it is drones or soldiers. The problem though is that drones are used mostly on their own to scout out for targets, follow them for hours, and then attack. These targets could have been brought in, or at the very least given the chance to surrender, but instead are simply killed outright.Drones push us in many more wars than we want The low cost of war also causes massive problems for the ethical standard we have to hold ourselves to. Usually the high cost of war was a massive deterrent, but the fact it is so easy to fight means the common reason to not go to war, and the most important in most cases, disappears. The US is currently firing drones at Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, yet is somehow not at war. To quote Yemeni lawyer Haykal Banafa: “Dear Obama, when a U.S. drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda.”[3] Moreover, the fact that the cost of drones is lower means that public support for war is no longer as vital as it needs to be. Their use means that the miltiary can easily wage wars without us knowing. Taking the example of Yemen, or Oman, there are many nations which drones are used to attack targets, without formal declaration of war that we do not publicly know. Drones are contrary to peace and alienate the public from the government.Drone use ruins foreign relationsMoreover, as Mothana puts, "Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair."[3] Drones are ruining foreign relations, training more militants, and "rather than winning the hearts and minds of civilians, is alienating them by killing their relatives and friends"[3]. Currently, I have givena series of arguments why we should oppose drone warfare. However, now I want to argue against warfare in general - or against the use of war at all by our nations. In the words of Clausewitz: "War is merely the extension of politics...and the means can never be considered in isolation form their purposes."We are under no military threatNo first world nation is under any serious threat. Our targets especially are nations like Yemen[4], too poor to counteract, or Afghanistan[5], who are already crippled. The use of the military in these circumstances is nothing short of abhorrent, as well as fruitless and without value. War does not boost the economy - but even then this is irrelevant. The military cost is so astronomically high that continuing in these wars is a waste of money, time, and most importantly, lives. By affirming this resolution, we must affirm the commitments in these fruitless wars.In the short term, war is astronomically costlyI have already touched this issue, but war is astronomically costly in the short term. War costs thousands of lives[7][8], billions of pounds[6], and cripple our nation's cultural growth, creating emotively based national and anti-national sentiment, dividing countries. In the long term, War has uncertain outcomesWar in the long term is extremely uncertain to get the goals we want. To quote Caplan: "[M]any other wars - like the French Revolution and World War I - just sowed the seeds for new and greater horrors. You could say, "Fine, let's only fight wars with big long-run benefits." In practice, however, it's very difficult to predict a war's long-run consequences. One of the great lessons of Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment is that foreign policy experts are much more certain of their predictions than they have any right to be."[9] We have no idea what wars we should fight in, and especially how to fight them. In practice, getting it wrong leads to astronomic problems, like the war in Iraq, leaving us in a country for astounding periods of time due to poor tactics. War's chaotic nature should make us rule it out of any tactic, and with it, drone warfare.ConclusionI suggest not only are there countless reasons to oppose drone warfare, but many reasons to oppose warfare in total. 1 - http://www.icrc.org...2 - http://www.newyorker.com...3 - http://www.nytimes.com...4 - http://www.worldbank.org...5 - http://www.worldbank.org...6 - http://www.ourfuture.org...7 - http://tinyurl.com...8 - http://antiwar.com...9 - http://econlog.econlib.org...