Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Tuesday 11th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Leigh, to take part in this debate, not least because Westminster Hall is not quite as cold as elsewhere. I thank The Times for pointing out what the two Front Benchers will say in the debate: apparently, the Labour spokesman will ask for new rules of engagement, and the Minister will not entirely agree with the notion that our pilots are not sufficiently trained. I leave it to them to say their piece, but there are some areas I will not touch on because nothing is to be gained from repetition.

I want to start by defining the parameters of this debate. The Library helpfully says that unmanned aerial vehicles—UAVs—are used by the UK armed forces and are

“more commonly known as drones. These are remotely piloted aircraft that range from simple, hand-operated systems to high altitude, long endurance systems similar in operation to small aircraft.

UAVs are primarily used to gather intelligence and provide a surveillance and reconnaissance function for the armed forces. Only a handful of systems are capable of carrying weapons. The only armed UAV used by the UK Armed Forces is the Reaper and it is only used in Afghanistan.”

It is important to remind ourselves of those distinctions and limited use. The Library continues:

“Remotely piloted aircraft operate on the same rules of engagement as manned aircraft. However the growth in the use of armed UAVs, particularly by the United States, raises a number of moral, ethical and legal issues.”

It is the moral, ethical and legal issues that I want to examine more closely.

We can see in Hansard some of the questions that are being asked, and that the debate is about collateral damage and loss of life, which some people find difficult to explain. A wider argument is that if a country has armed forces, it uses lethal force, and it does so for a benevolent purpose: defence. We have not had much chance to talk about that, and I thought that such a debate would be suitable in Westminster Hall.

To put the matter into context, I understand that, depending on who is counting, between 76 and 80 countries have UAVs, but only three—the United Kingdom, the USA and Israel—use armed drones in military operations. The Minister will be more aware than I am that this country is investing extensively in that area, whether it is in the provision of specially designed headquarters for the Reaper station here or the Anglo-French initiative for Scavenger long-endurance UAVs, so there will be even further development.

That is combined with the strange situation that almost no one in this country under the age of 30 has a defined sense of who or what the enemy is. During the cold war, it was easy to define the enemy, which was another nation state. We now face warfare in which the enemy is no longer a nation state, but a group of individuals who are far away. The process is geographically remote, and some of the warfare engagement is physically remote. That creates problems.

Lethal force is a process by which we license to kill. Curiously, in this country that phrase is associated with James Bond more than with what our armed forces are doing. Politicians should spend more time thinking about the use of lethal force, and when it is appropriate. We need to take the public with us, and it has been clear, particularly when reading newspaper reports on the use of drones in Afghanistan, that in many ways we have not taken the public with us. In areas such as Pakistan, there is an argument that the fallout is greater than the benefits.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. On the use of drones in Afghanistan, does she agree that we need clarity from the Government on whether they are sharing location intelligence with the United States on drone strikes in Pakistan? If we want to win the hearts and minds of the public, we must carry them with us, but when they see hundreds of lives lost in drone strikes, they turn against the west and pose a danger to our national security.

[Ms Stuart]

That is an argument, but I do not want to go down that road. The hon. Gentleman has had an Adjournment debate on that matter, which I read with great interest, but I want to take in new territory. Parliament must explain why it does certain things, and take the public with it. The 1868 St Petersburg declaration refers to the requirement

“to conciliate the necessities of war with the laws of humanity.”

How to get that right is an ever-enduring struggle, and I am not sure whether we have debated that sufficiently here. That is why I am pleased to have this debate. We have become casualty-averse, and there is a debate to be had about moral equivalence, and whether it is morally superior to deal with threats remotely instead of in hand-to-hand battle. I want so spend some time discussing targeted killing, which is the area of the drone debate that causes greatest concern about whether it is right.

A defence research paper on the ethics of targeted killing defines it as

“a pre-mediated state sanctioned killing of a named individual beyond the territorial and jurisdictional control of that state, in an international or non-international armed conflict or hostilities against terrorist or non-state groups.”

In other words, we are not talking about assassination or illegal killing for purely political purposes, and that is what people find most difficult to get their head round.

Some people argue that military historians may view 19 January 2010 as being as significant as August 1945, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, because technology suddenly allowed a move to something that was not sufficiently explained or spelled out in the ethical framework under which we operate. Two things happened: one was the killing in Dubai; the other, much more importantly, was in Pakistan where a US unmanned aerial vehicle killed six alleged militants in North Waziristan. That takes us to the legal and ethical dilemma that we must examine more closely.

On the history of lethal force, it may be worth reading “My Early Life” by Winston Churchill in which he describes a moment during a cavalry charge:

“Suddenly in the midst of the troop up sprung a Dervish. How he got there I do not know. He must have leaped out of some scrub or hole. All the troopers turned upon him thrusting with their lances: but he darted to and fro causing for the moment a frantic commotion. Wounded several times, he staggered towards me raising his spear. I shot him at less than a yard. He fell on the sand, and lay there dead. How easy to kill a man! But I did not worry about it. I found that I had fired the whole magazine of my Mauser pistol, so I put in a new clip of ten cartridges before thinking of anything else.”

The question these days is about the moral position of asking a man, or giving him the legal authority, to kill another within a framework that we find acceptable, because some people seem to think that if it is hand-to-hand combat, it has a greater moral force or value than if it is remote. I would argue that technology takes us to an ethical area where the framework might have to be configured slightly differently, but what the state is asking of the individual has, in many ways, not changed much. People are worried about remoteness, and it is worth remembering some experiments that were done in the 1960s in America, in the wake of the Adolf Eichmann trial, about the perils of obedience. Individuals were tested on how much pain they were willing to inflict on someone just because they were ordered to do so. In a military context, it is very important that we continue to keep that in mind.

The United Kingdom has always been clear that the chain of command, when it comes to killing or the use of lethal force, has always been retained within the military, whereas the United States and the CIA, as I understand it, are much more prepared to use civilian intelligence as part of that chain of command. That causes its own legal and ethical problems, because there is an argument about whether the civilians in that chain relinquish their right not to be targeted under international humanitarian law.

[Rehman Chishti]

On targeted killing and drones, the United Nations rapporteur, Christof Heyns, is now looking into extra-judicial killing in relation to the use of drones by the United States. Does the hon. Lady also think that that needs to be extended to see whether it can be applied to where the United Kingdom uses its drones?

[Ms Stuart]

I do not yet know, because I do not know what the outcome is, but to my mind, it is very significant that in the United Kingdom it is within the military chain, whereas in the United States it is not.

I am not trying to get us to ask today, “Is that particular application right or wrong?”. In the context of defence and us as parliamentarians, who are asking an Army and a public to order the use of lethal force, I want us to debate what the framework should be, rather than concluding whether it is right or wrong. I am also worried that the further away in the globe something happens, the easier it is—and the happier we seem to be—to jump to conclusions one way or another.

[Rehman Chishti]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way again. My final point is with regard to the policy and the criteria. Drones were operated by the United Kingdom on 7 October 2007 in Afghanistan, so it is for many years that we have not had the criteria, policy, rules and restrictions, whether under a different Government or this Government. I absolutely agree, therefore, that it is vital for us to get it right.

[Ms Gisela Stuart]

Until we get that right, perhaps we all ought to become a little more articulate and explicit about where and when we are prepared to say that something is right or wrong. One point that I was trying to make at the beginning of my speech is that for those over the age of 30 who grew up during the cold war, the enemy was very visible—it was another nation state, very close to home—and the space of theoretical ethical argument tended to be much narrower than it is now, when the war is happening on the other side of the globe. We should face up to that, and given that the Government are intending to spend extraordinary amounts of money on future investment, and that we have international co-operation, this place needs to be aware of what the rules are.

I want, therefore, to draw the Minister further on a number of parliamentary questions that have been asked. First, am I right in assuming that the United Kingdom has no plan to change the operational kill chain, as it is called, to be anything other than within the military? If that is so, does he agree that that ethical dimension must play an enormously important part, as an institution of the military, in their continued training, and will he give a commitment on that? Secondly, the Minister was asked when Watchkeeper will see active service, and the answer was that it will be at some stage or another, but we cannot yet tell. He said:

“The Ministry of Defence remains committed to deploying it to Afghanistan at the earliest opportunity.”—[Official Report, 29 November 2012; Vol. 554, c. 461W.]

It would be helpful to hear how early the earliest opportunity is.

Thirdly, there was a question about unmanned aerial vehicles from the new aircraft carrier for surveillance purposes. I know that there has been a string of questions about whether that is within the remit, and the latest I heard from the Minister was:

“Although not all would be suitable for carrier operations, the UK has previously conducted trials with a Scan Eagle UAV flown from a frigate and is currently considering another such concept demonstration.” —[Official Report, 26 November 2012; Vol. 554, c. 30W.]

Has there been any progress on that?

Above all, I would like to hear whether the Minister is contemplating any changes to the ethical rules, and if he does so, at what level will that happen? Will it just be within the military, and does he have any concept of a time scale? Will it go in tandem with the greater investment? As unpopular a view as this may be, I think this is a technological development in warfare that—if used within the right constraints and controls—is with us, and we had better make the best of it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I apologise to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) for having missed the first few moments of her very interesting remarks. I was held up elsewhere. I apologise for that to her and to the House. I also apologise to Mr Speaker because I did not intend to speak in the debate and therefore did not write to him on the subject. However, having heard the very interesting contributions from the hon. Lady and from the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith), I hope that the House will forgive me for expressing a few ill formed thoughts. That may not take up much time, and we have plenty of time available.

I congratulate the hon. Lady on raising the issue. She is right to say that discussion about the ethics and morals surrounding the use of unmanned air vehicles is as great as or greater than discussion about the ethics and morals associated with armaments or any warfare that exists. It is a huge ethical problem and one that needs to be addressed. She is right to say that so far we have addressed it too little in this place, so I congratulate her on raising it. I listened carefully to her and I commend the extremely subtle and intelligent way in which she approached the issue. I agree very much with every aspect of what she said.

None the less, there is a series of misunderstandings in the world about the use of UAVs. The word “drones” itself often brings into people’s minds an image of something that is almost by definition worse than any other kind of warfare. If we asked people out in the street, “What do you think of the use of drones—unmanned vehicles firing weapons at civilians in Pakistan, for example?”, they would say, “That is absolutely disgraceful. It is scandalous. We must stop it. It is wicked. It is wrong.” There is a significant degree of misunderstanding in the public domain about the use of these vehicles. Therefore, it is right that we in this place should try as best we can to correct it.

There are two aspects to the ethical considerations. First, there are those who say that the use of any weapon of this kind at all is illegal and wicked and should not be allowed. That was said by perfectly good pacifists in this building for many hundreds of years. They would say that any weapon that potentially kills people is a bad thing and should not be allowed, and we should disarm and turn our weapons into ploughshares, or words to that general effect. That is a perfectly legitimate, although in my view incorrect, stance.

The motto of my regiment, the Honourable Artillery Company, is “Arma pacis fulcra”, which is of course the Latin for arms are the balance of peace. I have always held very strongly to that. We won the cold war not because we disarmed, but because Margaret Thatcher took a tough line by arming the United Kingdom and supporting the United States in our nuclear deterrence. That is why the Soviet Union fell. Arms were very much the balance of peace in that context.

Therefore, to those who say that in any conditions UAVs are by definition a bad thing, I simply say that the same could apply to almost any weapon or piece of warfare that they care to mention. Of course, the tragedy is that people are killed in wars. An even greater tragedy is that civilians are killed in wars. That is an unacceptable and unforgivable thing, but unfortunately it does happen. Therefore, one of the important things that we must do in considering warfare is to work out ways in which civilian casualties—collateral damage, as it is rather heartlessly called—can be minimised. We must find ways of minimising the damage to civilians and those who are not involved in the conflict.

In addition to the belief that all weapons are a bad thing, there is a strange piece of psychology that people seem to have in their minds. The hon. Lady touched on it in her interesting tale about Winston Churchill in a cavalry charge at, I think, Mafeking. Is shooting a man from a foot or two feet away more or less ethical than firing a weapon in Nevada that kills people in Afghanistan? Most people would say that Churchill was courageous: he galloped into the teeth of the enemy and fired. He fought a person: he looked him in the eye and shot him. That is courageous. However, a technician fiddling with a computer in Nevada, who will potentially kill hundreds of people, is somehow being cowardly. He is hiding behind technology and saying, “We want no part of that; I’m doing it remotely.”

It was interesting to hear the intervention from the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on the psychological effect that there may be on people who are firing these weapons at remote distances. Of course they are aware of what they are doing and of course they will be affected by it for the rest of their lives. The notion that because they are in a bunker in Nevada, they are somehow less affected by it than the chap on the front line is incorrect. The hon. Gentleman made an interesting point on that subject.

[Ms Gisela Stuart]

I am very grateful that the hon. Gentleman mentioned that point, because that is where the institutional ethics of the training of our military come in to ensure that there is awareness that on the other end of every piece of machinery there is a human being and that therefore the relationship and the ethical considerations must remain the same. It is a constant battle of vigilance to ensure that that is never lost.

[Mr Gray]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. It is terribly important that we train all our people in the military and working in foreign affairs and elsewhere that there are human beings at the end of the weapon, whether that weapon is a knife used on the front line or a UAV from which a missile is fired remotely.

On a recent visit to Afghanistan, I was chilled by the conversation I had with a 19-year-old sniper in The Rifles. I said to him, “How many kills have you had?”, and he said, “Thirty-seven confirmed kills, sir, and about 40 or 50 others unconfirmed.” There was a young man of 19 who knew that he had killed 37 people—I think it was 37—and had probably killed 70 or 80. Is the psychological effect on him any greater or any less than the psychological effect on the man sitting in the bunker in Nevada or wherever it may be who is called on to press the switch that finally fires the weapon from the UAV?

There are two elements of concern. One is about the use of weapons themselves, which I think is a perfectly reasonable concern, although not one to which I would subscribe. The second is the question whether a remote killing is somehow less brave or less ethically supportable than an immediate killing. Again, I would not support that particular angle.

That leads me away from the negatives that people might raise on the subject of UAVs to the positives. As I said, it is terribly important that in all our warfare, whatever we are doing, whether it involves planes, bombs or UAVs, we seek to minimise civilian casualties. The use of UAVs and this extremely complex high technology is precisely the thing that will reduce collateral damage. We can, by using these things, spot a particular person from a very great height and track his movements. We know precisely who he is and can kill him very precisely, very technically, and minimise damage to civilians who may be nearby. That contrasts sharply with the use of artillery, for example. One round takes out a good square—1,000 metres by 1,000 metres—and who knows what is in that good square? It contrasts sharply with the use of bombs of all kinds, which also involves very substantial collateral damage. The use of these weapons is very particular and very precise and for that reason must be supported.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Dunne]

I will explain how the UK armed forces use rules of engagement that are clearly defined and informed by legal opinion, as the hon. Gentleman indicates.

RPAS technology is principally required and used by our armed forces for surveillance and reconnaissance tasks, as several Members mentioned, providing vital intelligence in support of our forces on the ground. While the utility of sensors is broadly similar to those aboard conventionally manned aircraft, RPAS have the ability to loiter for longer, building an intelligence picture that significantly enhances the situational awareness of commanders, forces on the ground and air crew.

RPAS surveillance and reconnaissance capability and the requirement for ever better intelligence, precision and situational awareness are such that they are now vital to mission success, as has been clearly demonstrated in theatre in Afghanistan. The UK currently only deploys RPAS for support of operations in Afghanistan. With the progress of technology and increasing appreciation of their military utility, the number deployed in Afghanistan has continued to increase, with further task lines of Reaper due to become operational next year.

To deliver operational RPAS capability for our forces in Afghanistan, a number of UK RPAS are being used for development trials and training in the UK and in a number of our partner nations. I confirm again that currently the operational deployment for RPAS is for the purposes of operations in Afghanistan, and that UK RPAS are saving the lives of both British and coalition service personnel and Afghan civilians on a daily basis. In that respect, RPAS are no different from other aircraft. The same rules that govern the use of conventional military aircraft apply to RPAS. As I said, UK RPAS are anything but unmanned.

[Ms Gisela Stuart]

Just for clarity, can the Minister tell us whether there are plans to use RPAS against pirate actions off the coast of Somalia? At the moment, he seems to be stressing that we are looking at the system in terms of Afghanistan and not further.

[Mr Dunne]

I was not intending to get into the wider deployment of RPAS, but it is the case that we are about to embark on a concept-of-use demonstration trial to see whether, for surveillance purposes, a maritime system could be deployed in the future, which relates to a question that was raised by the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife. It is not at present beyond the demonstration phase.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Dunne]

As I mentioned earlier, the Royal Navy is undertaking a short-duration capability concept demonstrator, to inform the future concept of use for tactical maritime unmanned air systems. We are not intending to test a specific system, but a system will go through concept demonstration next year. The uses will be for the Royal Navy to decide, if it decides to procure a system in due course.

I think I have addressed the specific questions that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston put to me.

[Ms Gisela Stuart]

rose—

[Mr Dunne]

I will give the hon. Lady the opportunity to ask one more question.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Stuart]

Clearly we intend to keep the chain of command within a purely military concept, but some of our very close allies do not. Do we have difficulties working with other Governments whose chain of command is not purely military?

[Mr Dunne]

As I have explained a couple of times, we are at present using RPAS on operations in Afghanistan, and at present we have no other operational use in mind for UK assets beyond Afghanistan. I think that is as far as I can go on that matter at the moment.

I will pick up on some of the comments made by the hon. Member for North Durham. I am grateful for his support for the continued use of unmanned aircraft systems. I am glad that he referred to the joint doctrine document, because it begins to set out some of the issues that are of concern. However, I do not accept the need to undertake a codification of separate rules for RPAS. As I have already mentioned, and as the hon. Gentleman acknowledges, all aircraft operators must follow national and international laws, together with the rules of engagement. Those rules are the same whether an air, sea or land-based platform is being used. Similarly, we have well-established command, control and supervisory frameworks for all our operational assets, so we do not believe at this point that additional measures are needed for RPAS. I will just pick up on the thrust of why I think he was suggesting that we need to take the public with us in our use of RPAS, which is something that I agree with. There is a greater role to be played by politicians and the military in explaining to the public the utility of unmanned systems from a military perspective, from the safety perspective of our own personnel, which is obviously vital, and in minimising the risk of collateral damage when weaponised systems are used. As a Government, we need to do more, and I welcome the help of the hon. Gentleman in advocating the use of such systems to the public at large.