P.W Singer’s
article, “Do Drones Undermine Democracy”, presents an interesting question as
to whether or not drone warfare has given our president the power to avoid the
War Powers Resolution, due to the minimal risk involved in drone warfare. The
main point of the Wars Powers Resolution was to increase deliberation so that the
United States would only go to war when deemed necessary.
Within
the article, Singer states the shocking statistic that there has never been a
congressman to vote for or against drone strikes. Therefore, I think it is
important to get congress more involved in approving drone strikes as part of a
checks and balances system. With this system, each drone attack would need to
be carefully considered before being deployed. This is extremely important,
because with technology as advanced as it currently is, no one man (the
president) should have the ability to make the significant decision of whether
or not to unleash drones on a certain area.
In
addition, despite the fact that the risks of U.S. causalities are generally
very low during these drone attacks, there are still other important factors
that must be taken into account. If foreign civilian casualties from U.S. drone
attacks increase, the United States may be forced to deal with the potential
threat of retaliation from the states being attacked, and will most certainly
receive heavy scrutiny from other powerful nations since virtually no country
except for India approves drone strikes in the first place.
The United States
was founded on the principle of having a system of checks and balances, and
though our founding fathers could not predict a future of unmanned warfare, I
feel confident that they would want more than one party involved in the
decision-making aspect of drone warfare.
how should we go about restoring these checks and balances?
ReplyDeleteI agree with your point Brandon. There should be checks and balances on the President. Unfortunately, our government has become too lenient on the President, allowing him to make all of the foreign policy decisions with little scrutiny. Either the Supreme Court or Congress could change the law so the President is required to receive approval from the majority of the House and Senate. Otherwise, the Obama Administration will continue to use as many drones as they please.
ReplyDeleteFrom a military standpoint, a significant amount of information used in the executive decision making process comes from the recommendations of his top brass advisors (chairman of the joint chiefs, respective heads of branch operations). Unfortunately, I don't think Congress can be involved in the decision to act on threats and give the go-ahead to conduct operations due to the need for time-critical action. That being said, there must be an effort by Congress to create a legislative doctrine for the use of drone warfare in the future, restricting the ability of the President to order ops without respect to the guidelines.
ReplyDelete