1NC

T

Statutory means set by laws

Vocabulary 13 Vocabulary.com, “statutory,” accessed 7-23-2013, https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/statutory

If something is statutory, it is related to or set by laws or statutes. Statutory restrictions on air pollution require drivers to have the emissions from their cars check every few years.

You might wonder what the difference is between statutory and legal. Both are adjectives and both are concerned with the law. If something is legal, it is allowed by the law, whereas if it is statutory, it is regulated by law. In the negative, this is easier to understand. If something is not legal, the law says you can't do it. If something is not statutory, there are no laws regulating it.

“Judicial restrictions” can be imposed on executive war powers

Singer 7 (Jana, Professor of Law, University of Maryland School of Law, SYMPOSIUM A HAMDAN QUARTET: FOUR ESSAYS ON ASPECTS OF HAMDAN V. RUMSFELD: HAMDAN AS AN ASSERTION OF JUDICIAL POWER, Maryland Law Review 2007 66 Md. L. Rev. 759)

n25. See, e.g., Dep't of the Navy v. Egan, 484 U.S. 518, 530 (1988) (noting the reluctance of courts "to intrude upon the authority of the Executive in military and national security affairs"); see also Katyal, supra note 1, at 84 (noting that "in war powers cases, the passive virtues operate at their height to defer adjudication, sometimes even indefinitely"); Harold Hongju Koh, Why the President (Almost) Always Wins in Foreign Affairs: Lessons of the Iran-Contra Affair, 97 Yale L.J. 1255, 1313-17 (1988) (discussing the Court's use of justiciability doctrines to refuse to hear challenges to the President's authority in cases involving foreign affairs); Gregory E. Maggs, The Rehnquist Court's Noninterference with the Guardians of National Security, 74 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1122, 1124-38 (2006) (discussing the Rehnquist Court's general policy of nonintervention in cases concerning actions of governmental agencies and political entities in national security matters); Peter E. Quint, Reflections on the Separation of Powers and Judicial Review at the End of the Reagan Era, 57 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 427, 433-34 (1989) (discussing the use of the political question doctrine as a means to avoid judicial restrictions on presidential power in cases involving military force).

Restriction is a limitation codified in statute

Law.com 9

(“restriction”, The People's Law Dictionary by Gerald and Kathleen Hill (legal writers),

http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=1835&bold=restrict, accessed 9-9-9)

restriction

n. any limitation on activity, by statute, regulation or contract provision. In multi-unit real estate developments, condominium and cooperative housing projects managed by homeowners' associations or similar organizations, such organizations are usually required by state law to impose restrictions on use. Thus, the restrictions are part of the "covenants, conditions and restrictions" intended to enhance the use of common facilities and property which are recorded and incorporated into the title of each owner.

Violation—

The 1AC is a personal advocacy statement: it does not include judicial or statutory restrictions.

Standards—

Limits — delimiting from USFG action allows for infinite actors — can pick any government, any organization, any individual

Ground — core ground based on instructional action — can shirk link to DAs, CP competition, and critique links

CP

Karthik and I support a ban on signature strikes and the limitation of targeted killings to high value targets, a ban on the preemptive introduction of the United States Armed Forces into hostilities, and the public articulation of the legal rationale for the United States’ targeted killing policy, including the process and safeguards in place for target selection.

Competes, solves the case and avoids the terrorism DA---the plan restricts targeted killings, the CP restricts signature strikes

David Hastings Dunn 13, Reader in International Politics and Head of Department in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, and Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham in the UK, March 2013, “Drone Use in Counter-Insurgency and Counter-Terrorism: Policy or Policy Component?,” in Hitting the Target?: How New Capabilities are Shaping International Intervention, ed. Aaronson & Johnson, http://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/Hitting_the_Target.pdf

Yet an important distinction needs to be drawn here between acting on operational intelligence that corroborates existing intelligence and confirms the presence of a specific pre-determined target and its elimination – so-called ‘targeted strikes’ (or less euphemistically, ‘targeted killings’) – and acting on an algorithmic analysis of operational intelligence alone, determining on the spot whether a development on the ground suggests terrorist activity or association and thus fulfils certain (albeit, to date, publicly not disclosed) criteria for triggering an armed response by the remote pilot of a drone – so-called ‘signature strikes’.6

Targeted strikes rely on corroborating pre-existing intelligence: they serve the particular purpose of eliminating specific individuals that are deemed crucial to enemy capabilities and are meant to diminish opponents’ operational, tactical and strategic capabilities, primarily by killing mid- and top-level leadership cadres. To the extent that evidence is available, it suggests that targeted strikes are highly effective in achieving these objectives, while simultaneously generating relatively little blowback, precisely because they target individual (terrorist) leaders and cause few, if any, civilian casualties. This explains, to a significant degree, why the blowback effect in Yemen – where the overwhelming majority of drone strikes have been targeted strikes – has been less pronounced than in Pakistan and Afghanistan.7

Signature strikes, in contrast, can still be effective in diminishing operational, tactical and strategic enemy capabilities, but they do so to a certain degree by chance and also have a much higher probability of causing civilian casualties. Using drones for signature strikes decreases the dependence on pre-existing intelligence about particular leaders and their movements and more fully utilises their potential to carry out effective surveillance and respond to the conclusions drawn from it immediately. Signature strikes have been the predominant approach to drone usage in Pakistan and Afghanistan.8 Such strikes have had the effect of decimating the rank and file of the Taliban and their associates – but they have also caused large numbers of civilian casualties and, at a minimum, weakened the respective host governments’ legitimacy and forced them to condemn publicly, and in no uncertain terms, the infringement of their states’ sovereignty by the US. In turn, this has strained already difficult relations between countries which have more common than divergent interests when it comes to regional stability and the fight against international terrorist networks. That signature strikes have a high probability of going wrong and that such failures prove extremely counterproductive is also illustrated by a widely reported case from Yemen, in which twelve civilians were killed in the proximity of a car identified as belonging to an Al-Qa’ida member.9

The kind of persistent and intimidating presence of a drone policy geared towards signature strikes, and the obvious risks and consequences involved in repeatedly making wrong decisions, are both counterproductive in themselves and corrosive of efforts that seek to undercut the local support enjoyed by insurgent and terrorist networks, as well as the mutual assistance that they can offer each other. Put differently, signature strikes, in contrast to targeted killings, do anything but help to disentangle the links between insurgents and terrorists.

Counter-insurgency as a strategy works best by providing security on the ground (deploying soldiers amongst the community that they are intended to protect) and establishing and sustaining a sufficiently effective local footprint of the state and its institutions providing public goods and services beyond just security (water, food, sanitation, healthcare, education and so forth). This strategy is often encapsulated in the formula ‘clear, hold, build’,10 and it needs to go hand-in-hand with pursuing a viable political settlement that addresses what are the, in many cases, legitimate concerns of those fighting, and supporting, an insurgency. By living among the communities they seek to secure, soldiers can win their trust, stem support for the insurgents, and understand who their enemies are, what their demands and objectives are, and how best to single out those who represent an irreconcilable threat to the community. In other words, in a context in which the objective is to protect innocent civilians, win over reconcilable insurgents and their supporters, and eliminate those who are irreconcilable, drones can deliver specific contributions to an overall counter-insurgency policy. Yet this can only happen if drones target individuals for a reason, rather than being used, and perceived, as a blanket approach against an entire community.

Disclosing the legal basis and procedures for targeted killing policy enables public accountability and criticism---it’s the best middle ground that solves the excesses of drone warfare while preserving its beneficial clarification of the stakes of state violence

Kiel Brennan-Marquez 13, Visiting Human Rights Fellow at Yale Law School, 5/24/13, “A Progressive Defense of Drones,” http://www.salon.com/2013/05/24/a_progressive_defense_of_drones/

In this respect, drones represent a welcome shift of paradigm: they stand to clarify the moral stakes of state-sponsored violence by eliminating the dynamic of attachment that has traditionally accompanied it. By itself, of course, this proposition does not entail that drone strikes are preferable to traditional troop deployments. What it does entail, however, is that the benefits of moral clarity should be weighed, in practice, against the drawbacks of less circumspect decision-making. As much as drones are liable to desensitize leaders, making violence easier to employ, the outrage they produce is also likely to have a chilling effect in the other direction. Which way will this calculus ultimately run? We exercise an important threshold of control over this question. Whether the anesthetic effect of machine-induced violence will outstrip the sense of outrage that violence-by-machines provoke, or vice versa, is not a static political fact to which we must be resigned – it’s a hard issue for us to deliberate with care. One thing, however, is certain. Moral clarity in the face of drone strikes, as compared to troop deployments, is only politically worthwhile — indeed, only possible — insofar as members of the public are kept informed about when drone strikes are happening, and what damage they cause. Transparency is a precondition of outrage – and of accountability.

Importantly, this does not necessarily mean that information about drone strikes should be publicized, and subject to approval, before the fact. The question of ex ante oversight, which has begotten protracted debate in the popular media and academic circles alike, is an incredibly difficult one – as ever with respect to decisions that bear on national security. Many proposals have emerged, running the gamut from leaving the president and military leaders unfettered to make strategic decisions — as in traditional theaters of war — to full-blown judicial review of drone strikes. Sound arguments exist on both sides of this debate, and they are the usual arguments that tend to sprout up around wartime violence. Make leaders too accountable, one side laments, and their decisions will blow in the political wind, reflecting external pressures rather than national security interests. But grant leaders too much discretion, the other side rejoins, and the power they wield — the most tremendous power of all, over life and death — will transform from a means of protection into a wellspring of abuse.

I take no position in this debate – not because I don’t have my own view, which of course I do, but because part of my effort here is to disentangle the question of oversight beforehand from the question of transparency afterward. This distinction is not always drawn with care, and my claim about moral clarity is addressed toward the latter, not the former. To insist that information about drone strikes be made transparent to the public, ensuring that we have an opportunity to scrutinize it with the unrelenting moral clarity that violence-by-machines makes possible, does not depend on the existence of oversight beforehand. Nor is it undermined by the absence of such oversight. The two simply operate on different dimensions. Thus, even if we ultimately decide that it’s wise, for national security reasons, to insulate drone strikes from oversight by Congress, the judiciary or any other governmental body, we should still insist that information about drone strikes be made publicly available after the fact. In other words, regardless of our collective decision, whatever it ends up being, about whether to insulate drone strikes from review, there’s a different ideal of accountability — transparency — that simultaneously deserves our attention. Amid all the discussion of institutionalized oversight, we should not lose sight of what is, in the longer arc of our democracy, the most potent oversight of all: popular disapproval.

This defense of transparency may seem cold comfort, little as it does to ensure that any given drone strike will be executed with the rectitude demanded by instruments-of-death. Yet irresponsible decisions are perennially a risk during wartime, whether it’s machines or troops that carry out the violence. The problem of how to ensure that decisions in the interest of national security are made responsibly — whether the answer is prophylactic oversight, or precisely its absence — is a grave and timeless problem. It yields to no easy answer. And drones neither exacerbate nor attenuate its difficulty. The issue of transparency after the fact, by contrast, is much simpler. In fact, I would go so far as to call it an obvious issue. Transparency ought to exist. Period. Even if there are good reasons to prohibit the American people — or their institutional representatives: legislators and judges — from vetoing individual drone strikes, we nevertheless have a right to know what is happening, once it has happened, and to decide for ourselves whether the results are acceptable.

It is in this respect, if only this respect, that drones are a welcome development in the history of war making. They make possible what to date has been, for all intents and purposes, a fantasy: the irruption of moral truth in a domain — the battlefield — traditionally overrun by mysticism and lies.

DA

Status quo target vetting is carefully calibrated to avoid every aff impact in balance with CT--- there’s only a risk that restrictions destroy it

Gregory McNeal 13, Associate Professor of Law, Pepperdine University, 3/5/13, “Targeted Killing and Accountability,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1819583

Target vetting is the process by which the government integrates the opinions of subject matter experts from throughout the intelligence community.180 The United States has developed a formal voting process which allows members of agencies from across the government to comment on the validity of the target intelligence and any concerns related to targeting an individual. At a minimum, the vetting considers the following factors: target identification, significance, collateral damage estimates, location issues, impact on the enemy, environmental concerns, and intelligence gain/loss concerns.181 An important part of the analysis also includes assessing the impact of not conducting operations against the target.182 Vetting occurs at multiple points in the kill-list creation process, as targets are progressively refined within particular agencies and at interagency meetings.

A validation step follows the vetting step. It is intended to ensure that all proposed targets meet the objectives and criteria outlined in strategic guidance.183 The term strategic is a reference to national level objectives—the assessment is not just whether the strike will succeed tactically (i.e. will it eliminate the targeted individual) but also whether it advances broader national policy goals.184 Accordingly, at this stage there is also a reassessment of whether the killing will comport with domestic legal authorities such as the AUMF or a particular covert action finding.185 At this stage, participants will also resolve whether the agency that will be tasked with the strike has the authority to do so.186 Individuals participating at this stage analyze the mix of military, political, diplomatic, informational, and economic consequences that flow from killing an individual. Other questions addressed at this stage are whether killing an individual will comply with the law of armed conflict, and rules of engagement (including theater specific rules of engagement). Further bolstering the evidence that these are the key questions that the U.S. government asks is the clearly articulated target validation considerations found in military doctrine (and there is little evidence to suggest they are not considered in current operations). Some of the questions asked are:

• Is attacking the target lawful? What are the law of war and rules of engagement considerations?

• Does the target contribute to the adversary's capability and will to wage war?

• Is the target (still) operational? Is it (still) a viable element of a target system? Where is the target located?

• Will striking the target arouse political or cultural “sensitivities”?

• How will striking the target affect public opinion? (Enemy, friendly, and neutral)?

• What is the relative potential for collateral damage or collateral effects, to include casualties?

• What psychological impact will operations against the target have on the adversary, friendly forces, or multinational partners?

• What would be the impact of not conducting operations against the target?187

As the preceding criteria highlight, many of the concerns that critics say should be weighed in the targeted killing process are considered prior to nominating a target for inclusion on a kill-list.188 For example, bureaucrats in the kill-list development process will weigh whether striking a particular individual will improve world standing and whether the strike is worth it in terms of weakening the adversary's power.189 They will analyze the possibility that a strike will adversely affect diplomatic relations, and they will consider whether there would be an intelligence loss that outweighs the value of the target.190 During this process, the intelligence community may also make an estimate regarding the likely success of achieving objectives (e.g. degraded enemy leadership, diminished capacity to conduct certain types of attacks, etc.) associated with the strike. Importantly, they will also consider the risk of blowback (e.g. creating more terrorists as a result of the killing).191

Targeted killing’s vital to counterterrorism---disrupts leadership and makes carrying out attacks impossible

Kenneth Anderson 13, Professor of International Law at American University, June 2013, “The Case for Drones,” Commentary, Vol. 135, No. 6

Targeted killing of high-value terrorist targets, by contrast, is the end result of a long, independent intelligence process. What the drone adds to that intelligence might be considerable, through its surveillance capabilities -- but much of the drone's contribution will be tactical, providing intelligence that assists in the planning and execution of the strike itself, in order to pick the moment when there might be the fewest civilian casualties.

Nonetheless, in conjunction with high-quality intelligence, drone warfare offers an unparalleled means to strike directly at terrorist organizations without needing a conventional or counterinsurgency approach to reach terrorist groups in their safe havens. It offers an offensive capability, rather than simply defensive measures, such as homeland security alone. Drone warfare offers a raiding strategy directly against the terrorists and their leadership.

If one believes, as many of the critics of drone warfare do, that the proper strategies of counterterrorism are essentially defensive -- including those that eschew the paradigm of armed conflict in favor of law enforcement and criminal law -- then the strategic virtue of an offensive capability against the terrorists themselves will seem small. But that has not been American policy since 9/11, not under the Bush administration, not under the Obama administration -- and not by the Congress of the United States, which has authorized hundreds of billions of dollars to fight the war on terror aggressively. The United States has used many offensive methods in the past dozen years: Regime change of states offering safe havens, counter-insurgency war, special operations, military and intelligence assistance to regimes battling our common enemies are examples of the methods that are just of military nature.

Drone warfare today is integrated with a much larger strategic counterterrorism target -- one in which, as in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, radical Islamist groups seize governance of whole populations and territories and provide not only safe haven, but also an honored central role to transnational terrorist groups. This is what current conflicts in Yemen and Mali threaten, in counterterrorism terms, and why the United States, along with France and even the UN, has moved to intervene militarily. Drone warfare is just one element of overall strategy, but it has a clear utility in disrupting terrorist leadership. It makes the planning and execution of complex plots difficult if only because it is hard to plan for years down the road if you have some reason to think you will be struck down by a drone but have no idea when. The unpredictability and terrifying anticipation of sudden attack, which terrorists have acknowledged in communications, have a significant impact on planning and organizational effectiveness.

Constraining targeted killing’s role in the war on terror causes extinction

Louis Rene Beres 11, Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue, 2011, “After Osama bin Laden: Assassination, Terrorism, War, and International Law,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, 44 Case W. Res. J. Int'l L. 93

Even after the U.S. assassination of Osama bin Laden, we are still left with the problem of demonstrating that assassination can be construed, at least under certain very limited circumstances, as an appropriate instance of anticipatory self-defense. Arguably, the enhanced permissibility of anticipatory self-defense that follows generally from the growing destructiveness of current weapons technologies in rogue hands may be paralleled by the enhanced permissibility of assassination as a particular strategy of preemption. Indeed, where assassination as anticipatory self-defense may actually prevent a nuclear or other highly destructive form of warfare, reasonableness dictates that it could represent distinctly, even especially, law-enforcing behavior.

For this to be the case, a number of particular conditions would need to be satisfied. First, the assassination itself would have to be limited to the greatest extent possible to those authoritative persons in the prospective attacking state. Second, the assassination would have to conform to all of the settled rules of warfare as they concern discrimination, proportionality, and military necessity. Third, the assassination would need to follow intelligence assessments that point, beyond a reasonable doubt, to preparations for unconventional or other forms of highly destructive warfare within the intended victim's state. Fourth, the assassination would need to be founded upon carefully calculated judgments that it would, in fact, prevent the intended aggression, and that it would do so with substantially less harm [*114] to civilian populations than would all of the alternative forms of anticipatory self-defense.

Such an argument may appear manipulative and dangerous; permitting states to engage in what is normally illegal behavior under the convenient pretext of anticipatory self-defense. Yet, any blanket prohibition of assassination under international law could produce even greater harm, compelling threatened states to resort to large-scale warfare that could otherwise be avoided. Although it would surely be the best of all possible worlds if international legal norms could always be upheld without resort to assassination as anticipatory self-defense, the persisting dynamics of a decentralized system of international law may sometimes still require extraordinary methods of law-enforcement. n71

Let us suppose, for example, that a particular state determines that another state is planning a nuclear or chemical surprise attack upon its population centers. We may suppose, also, that carefully constructed intelligence assessments reveal that the assassination of selected key figures (or, perhaps, just one leadership figure) could prevent such an attack altogether. Balancing the expected harms of the principal alternative courses of action (assassination/no surprise attack v. no assassination/surprise attack), the selection of preemptive assassination could prove reasonable, life-saving, and cost-effective.

What of another, more common form of anticipatory self-defense? Might a conventional military strike against the prospective attacker's nuclear, biological or chemical weapons launchers and/or storage sites prove even more reasonable and cost-effective? A persuasive answer inevitably depends upon the particular tactical and strategic circumstances of the moment, and on the precise way in which these particular circumstances are configured.

But it is entirely conceivable that conventional military forms of preemption would generate tangibly greater harms than assassination, and possibly with no greater defensive benefit. This suggests that assassination should not be dismissed out of hand in all circumstances as a permissible form of anticipatory self-defense under international law. [*115]

What of those circumstances in which the threat to particular states would not involve higher-order (WMD) n72 military attacks? Could assassination also represent a permissible form of anticipatory self-defense under these circumstances? Subject to the above-stated conditions, the answer might still be "yes." The threat of chemical, biological or nuclear attack may surely enhance the legality of assassination as preemption, but it is by no means an essential precondition. A conventional military attack might still, after all, be enormously, even existentially, destructive. n73 Moreover, it could be followed, in certain circumstances, by unconventional attacks.

Nuclear terrorism is feasible---high risk of theft and attacks escalate

Vladimir Z. Dvorkin ‘12 Major General (retired), doctor of technical sciences, professor, and senior fellow at the Center for International Security of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Center participates in the working group of the U.S.-Russia Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism, 9/21/12, "What Can Destroy Strategic Stability: Nuclear Terrorism is a Real Threat," belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/22333/what_can_destroy_strategic_stability.html

Hundreds of scientific papers and reports have been published on nuclear terrorism. International conferences have been held on this threat with participation of Russian organizations, including IMEMO and the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies. Recommendations on how to combat the threat have been issued by the International Luxembourg Forum on Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe, Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, Russian-American Elbe Group, and other organizations. The UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism in 2005 and cooperation among intelligence services of leading states in this sphere is developing.¶ At the same time, these efforts fall short for a number of reasons, partly because various acts of nuclear terrorism are possible. Dispersal of radioactive material by detonation of conventional explosives (“dirty bombs”) is a method that is most accessible for terrorists. With the wide spread of radioactive sources, raw materials for such attacks have become much more accessible than weapons-useable nuclear material or nuclear weapons. The use of “dirty bombs” will not cause many immediate casualties, but it will result into long-term radioactive contamination, contributing to the spread of panic and socio-economic destabilization.¶ Severe consequences can be caused by sabotaging nuclear power plants, research reactors, and radioactive materials storage facilities. Large cities are especially vulnerable to such attacks. A large city may host dozens of research reactors with a nuclear power plant or a couple of spent nuclear fuel storage facilities and dozens of large radioactive materials storage facilities located nearby. The past few years have seen significant efforts made to enhance organizational and physical aspects of security at facilities, especially at nuclear power plants. Efforts have also been made to improve security culture. But these efforts do not preclude the possibility that well-trained terrorists may be able to penetrate nuclear facilities.¶ Some estimates show that sabotage of a research reactor in a metropolis may expose hundreds of thousands to high doses of radiation. A formidable part of the city would become uninhabitable for a long time.¶ Of all the scenarios, it is building an improvised nuclear device by terrorists that poses the maximum risk. There are no engineering problems that cannot be solved if terrorists decide to build a simple “gun-type” nuclear device. Information on the design of such devices, as well as implosion-type devices, is available in the public domain. It is the acquisition of weapons-grade uranium that presents the sole serious obstacle. Despite numerous preventive measures taken, we cannot rule out the possibility that such materials can be bought on the black market. Theft of weapons-grade uranium is also possible. Research reactor fuel is considered to be particularly vulnerable to theft, as it is scattered at sites in dozens of countries. There are about 100 research reactors in the world that run on weapons-grade uranium fuel, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).¶ A terrorist “gun-type” uranium bomb can have a yield of least 10-15 kt, which is comparable to the yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion of such a bomb in a modern metropolis can kill and wound hundreds of thousands and cause serious economic damage. There will also be long-term sociopsychological and political consequences.¶ The vast majority of states have introduced unprecedented security and surveillance measures at transportation and other large-scale public facilities after the terrorist attacks in the United States, Great Britain, Italy, and other countries. These measures have proved burdensome for the countries’ populations, but the public has accepted them as necessary. A nuclear terrorist attack will make the public accept further measures meant to enhance control even if these measures significantly restrict the democratic liberties they are accustomed to. Authoritarian states could be expected to adopt even more restrictive measures.¶ If a nuclear terrorist act occurs, nations will delegate tens of thousands of their secret services’ best personnel to investigate and attribute the attack. Radical Islamist groups are among those capable of such an act. We can imagine what would happen if they do so, given the anti-Muslim sentiments and resentment that conventional terrorist attacks by Islamists have generated in developed democratic countries. Mass deportation of the non-indigenous population and severe sanctions would follow such an attack in what will cause violent protests in the Muslim world. Series of armed clashing terrorist attacks may follow. The prediction that Samuel Huntington has made in his book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” may come true. Huntington’s book clearly demonstrates that it is not Islamic extremists that are the cause of the Western world’s problems. Rather there is a deep, intractable conflict that is rooted in the fault lines that run between Islam and Christianity. This is especially dangerous for Russia because these fault lines run across its territory. To sum it up, the political leadership of Russia has every reason to revise its list of factors that could undermine strategic stability. BMD does not deserve to be even last on that list because its effectiveness in repelling massive missile strikes will be extremely low. BMD systems can prove useful only if deployed to defend against launches of individual ballistic missiles or groups of such missiles. Prioritization of other destabilizing factors—that could affect global and regional stability—merits a separate study or studies. But even without them I can conclude that nuclear terrorism should be placed on top of the list. The threat of nuclear terrorism is real, and a successful nuclear terrorist attack would lead to a radical transformation of the global order. All of the threats on the revised list must become a subject of thorough studies by experts. States need to work hard to forge a common understanding of these threats and develop a strategy to combat them.

Extinction---equivalent to full-scale nuclear war

Owen B. Toon 7, chair of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at CU-Boulder, et al., April 19, 2007, “Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts and acts of individual nuclear terrorism,” online: http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/acp-7-1973-2007.pdf

To an increasing extent, people are congregating in the world’s great urban centers, creating megacities with populations exceeding 10 million individuals. At the same time, advanced technology has designed nuclear explosives of such small size they can be easily transported in a car, small plane or boat to the heart of a city. We demonstrate here that a single detonation in the 15 kiloton range can produce urban fatalities approaching one million in some cases, and casualties exceeding one million. Thousands of small weapons still exist in the arsenals of the U.S. and Russia, and there are at least six other countries with substantial nuclear weapons inventories. In all, thirty-three countries control sufficient amounts of highly enriched uranium or plutonium to assemble nuclear explosives. A conflict between any of these countries involving 50-100 weapons with yields of 15 kt has the potential to create fatalities rivaling those of the Second World War. Moreover, even a single surface nuclear explosion, or an air burst in rainy conditions, in a city center is likely to cause the entire metropolitan area to be abandoned at least for decades owing to infrastructure damage and radioactive contamination. As the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in Louisiana suggests, the economic consequences of even a localized nuclear catastrophe would most likely have severe national and international economic consequences. Striking effects result even from relatively small nuclear attacks because low yield detonations are most effective against city centers where business and social activity as well as population are concentrated. Rogue nations and terrorists would be most likely to strike there. Accordingly, an organized attack on the U.S. by a small nuclear state, or terrorists supported by such a state, could generate casualties comparable to those once predicted for a full-scale nuclear “counterforce” exchange in a superpower conflict. Remarkably, the estimated quantities of smoke generated by attacks totaling about one megaton of nuclear explosives could lead to significant global climate perturbations (Robock et al., 2007). While we did not extend our casualty and damage predictions to include potential medical, social or economic impacts following the initial explosions, such analyses have been performed in the past for large-scale nuclear war scenarios (Harwell and Hutchinson, 1985). Such a study should be carried out as well for the present scenarios and physical outcomes.

Their epistemology is incorrect---the availability heuristic causes systematic under-estimation of the threat of terrorism because we assume that future scenarios which we can’t accurately predict or relate to the past are impossible

Gregory D. Koblentz 11, Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs and Deputy Director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University, 2011, “Predicting Peril or the Peril of Prediction? Assessing the Risk of CBRN Terrorism,” Terrorism & Political Violence, Vol. 23, No. 4

Due to the availability heuristic, people judge the frequency or probability of an event by the ease with which examples come to mind. 20 Therefore, “hypothetical events that defy easy explanation and for which images are difficult to construct should appear as improbable.” 21 As Thomas Schelling has observed, “the tendency in our planning is to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously.” 22 The combination of the availability bias and hindsight bias leads to what Nassim Taleb calls Black Swans: rare events that have a huge impact and can only be predicted retrospectively. 23 Taleb argues that the unforeseen nature of Black Swans leads to the underestimation of such events despite their huge potential impact. For example, collateral debt obligations and sub-prime mortgages looked like great investments based on past performance. However, this high rate of return and low risk was dependent on the housing bubble and the continued rise of real estate prices. Once the bubble burst and real estate prices dropped, homeowners began defaulting at unprecedented levels, turning these investments into toxic assets which destabilized the entire financial system.

The terrorist attacks on September 11 and the anthrax letter attacks were Black Swans. Before September 11, a handful of government officials had imagined the possibility of a hijacked airplane being used as a weapon, but this scenario was not taken seriously and integrated into homeland security or counterterrorism planning. As a result, neither the Federal Aviation Administration nor the military had plans or procedures in place to deal with this type of scenario. 24 Likewise, virtually no one in the biodefense community paid attention to using the mail as a delivery system for a biological weapon before the anthrax letter attacks. 25 The novelty of this method of dissemination caught the United States Postal Service and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention off-guard. Both agencies underestimated the risk of anthrax spores escaping from the letters at mail processing facilities and infecting postal workers and contaminating other letters. 26

In the wake of September 11, the Black Swan became the pessimists' most potent argument against the optimists. Although those attacks did not involve the use of CBRN weapons, al-Qaeda's successful surprise attack and ability to inflict an unprecedented level of casualties provided powerful ammunition for pessimists who argued that a CBRN attack was a matter of “when, not if.” According to Bill Keller, “The best reason for thinking it [nuclear terrorism] won't happen is that it hasn't happened yet, and that is terrible logic.” 27 The Bush Administration's fear of being surprised by another Black Swan led it to adopt what has been called the One Percent Doctrine. After receiving a briefing from the CIA on possible ties between Pakistani nuclear scientists and al-Qaeda, Vice President Richard Cheney stated, “If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis … It's about our response.” 28 This logic provided the foundation for the dramatic increase in funding for programs designed to prevent, deter, detect, prepare for, and respond to CBRN terrorism.

Case

ss

The plan specifically and narrowly creates damages for victims of targeted killings---those killings are legally and operationally distinct from “signature strikes”

David Hastings Dunn 13, Reader in International Politics and Head of Department in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, and Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham in the UK, March 2013, “Drone Use in Counter-Insurgency and Counter-Terrorism: Policy or Policy Component?,” in Hitting the Target?: How New Capabilities are Shaping International Intervention, ed. Aaronson & Johnson, http://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/Hitting_the_Target.pdf

Yet an important distinction needs to be drawn here between acting on operational intelligence that corroborates existing intelligence and confirms the presence of a specific pre-determined target and its elimination – so-called ‘targeted strikes’ (or less euphemistically, ‘targeted killings’) – and acting on an algorithmic analysis of operational intelligence alone, determining on the spot whether a development on the ground suggests terrorist activity or association and thus fulfils certain (albeit, to date, publicly not disclosed) criteria for triggering an armed response by the remote pilot of a drone – so-called ‘signature strikes’.6

Targeted strikes rely on corroborating pre-existing intelligence: they serve the particular purpose of eliminating specific individuals that are deemed crucial to enemy capabilities and are meant to diminish opponents’ operational, tactical and strategic capabilities, primarily by killing mid- and top-level leadership cadres. To the extent that evidence is available, it suggests that targeted strikes are highly effective in achieving these objectives, while simultaneously generating relatively little blowback, precisely because they target individual (terrorist) leaders and cause few, if any, civilian casualties. This explains, to a significant degree, why the blowback effect in Yemen – where the overwhelming majority of drone strikes have been targeted strikes – has been less pronounced than in Pakistan and Afghanistan.7

Signature strikes, in contrast, can still be effective in diminishing operational, tactical and strategic enemy capabilities, but they do so to a certain degree by chance and also have a much higher probability of causing civilian casualties. Using drones for signature strikes decreases the dependence on pre-existing intelligence about particular leaders and their movements and more fully utilises their potential to carry out effective surveillance and respond to the conclusions drawn from it immediately. Signature strikes have been the predominant approach to drone usage in Pakistan and Afghanistan.8 Such strikes have had the effect of decimating the rank and file of the Taliban and their associates – but they have also caused large numbers of civilian casualties and, at a minimum, weakened the respective host governments’ legitimacy and forced them to condemn publicly, and in no uncertain terms, the infringement of their states’ sovereignty by the US. In turn, this has strained already difficult relations between countries which have more common than divergent interests when it comes to regional stability and the fight against international terrorist networks. That signature strikes have a high probability of going wrong and that such failures prove extremely counterproductive is also illustrated by a widely reported case from Yemen, in which twelve civilians were killed in the proximity of a car identified as belonging to an Al-Qa’ida member.9

The kind of persistent and intimidating presence of a drone policy geared towards signature strikes, and the obvious risks and consequences involved in repeatedly making wrong decisions, are both counterproductive in themselves and corrosive of efforts that seek to undercut the local support enjoyed by insurgent and terrorist networks, as well as the mutual assistance that they can offer each other. Put differently, signature strikes, in contrast to targeted killings, do anything but help to disentangle the links between insurgents and terrorists.

Establishing new restrictions that only apply to targeted killings causes a shift to signature strikes

Jeh Johnson 13, former Pentagon General Counsel, 3/18/13, “Keynote address at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School: A “Drone Court”: Some Pros and Cons,” http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/03/jeh-johnson-speech-on-a-drone-court-some-pros-and-cons/

Also, beware of creating the wrong set of incentives for those who must conduct these operations. A lawful military objective may include an individual, whether his name or his citizenship are known; it may also include a location (like a terrorist training camp) or an object (like a truck filled with explosives). By creating a separate legal regime with additional requirements for an objective if his name or citizenship becomes known, what disincentives do we create for an operator to know for certain the identity of those likely to be present at a terrorist training camp or behind the wheel of the truck bomb? Or, must the government refrain from an attack on what it knows to be an active and dangerous training camp if an al Qaeda terrorist who might be a U.S. citizen wanders in?

Signature strikes are far worse for all of their impacts---this turns the case on a grand scale

David Hastings Dunn 13, Reader in International Politics and Head of Department in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, and Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham in the UK, March 2013, “Drone Use in Counter-Insurgency and Counter-Terrorism: Policy or Policy Component?,” in Hitting the Target?: How New Capabilities are Shaping International Intervention, ed. Aaronson & Johnson, http://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/Hitting_the_Target.pdf

Yet an important distinction needs to be drawn here between acting on operational intelligence that corroborates existing intelligence and confirms the presence of a specific pre-determined target and its elimination – so-called ‘targeted strikes’ (or less euphemistically, ‘targeted killings’) – and acting on an algorithmic analysis of operational intelligence alone, determining on the spot whether a development on the ground suggests terrorist activity or association and thus fulfils certain (albeit, to date, publicly not disclosed) criteria for triggering an armed response by the remote pilot of a drone – so-called ‘signature strikes’.6¶ Targeted strikes rely on corroborating pre-existing intelligence: they serve the particular purpose of eliminating specific individuals that are deemed crucial to enemy capabilities and are meant to diminish opponents’ operational, tactical and strategic capabilities, primarily by killing mid- and top-level leadership cadres. To the extent that evidence is available, it suggests that targeted strikes are highly effective in achieving these objectives, while simultaneously generating relatively little blowback, precisely because they target individual (terrorist) leaders and cause few, if any, civilian casualties. This explains, to a significant degree, why the blowback effect in Yemen – where the overwhelming majority of drone strikes have been targeted strikes – has been less pronounced than in Pakistan and Afghanistan.7¶ Signature strikes, in contrast, can still be effective in diminishing operational, tactical and strategic enemy capabilities, but they do so to a certain degree by chance and also have a much higher probability of causing civilian casualties. Using drones for signature strikes decreases the dependence on pre-existing intelligence about particular leaders and their movements and more fully utilises their potential to carry out effective surveillance and respond to the conclusions drawn from it immediately. Signature strikes have been the predominant approach to drone usage in Pakistan and Afghanistan.8 Such strikes have had the effect of decimating the rank and file of the Taliban and their associates – but they have also caused large numbers of civilian casualties and, at a minimum, weakened the respective host governments’ legitimacy and forced them to condemn publicly, and in no uncertain terms, the infringement of their states’ sovereignty by the US. In turn, this has strained already difficult relations between countries which have more common than divergent interests when it comes to regional stability and the fight against international terrorist networks. That signature strikes have a high probability of going wrong and that such failures prove extremely counterproductive is also illustrated by a widely reported case from Yemen, in which twelve civilians were killed in the proximity of a car identified as belonging to an Al-Qa’ida member.9¶ The kind of persistent and intimidating presence of a drone policy geared towards signature strikes, and the obvious risks and consequences involved in repeatedly making wrong decisions, are both counterproductive in themselves and corrosive of efforts that seek to undercut the local support enjoyed by insurgent and terrorist networks, as well as the mutual assistance that they can offer each other. Put differently, signature strikes, in contrast to targeted killings, do anything but help to disentangle the links between insurgents and terrorists.¶ Counter-insurgency as a strategy works best by providing security on the ground (deploying soldiers amongst the community that they are intended to protect) and establishing and sustaining a sufficiently effective local footprint of the state and its institutions providing public goods and services beyond just security (water, food, sanitation, healthcare, education and so forth). This strategy is often encapsulated in the formula ‘clear, hold, build’,10 and it needs to go hand-in-hand with pursuing a viable political settlement that addresses what are the, in many cases, legitimate concerns of those fighting, and supporting, an insurgency. By living among the communities they seek to secure, soldiers can win their trust, stem support for the insurgents, and understand who their enemies are, what their demands and objectives are, and how best to single out those who represent an irreconcilable threat to the community. In other words, in a context in which the objective is to protect innocent civilians, win over reconcilable insurgents and their supporters, and eliminate those who are irreconcilable, drones can deliver specific contributions to an overall counter-insurgency policy. Yet this can only happen if drones target individuals for a reason, rather than being used, and perceived, as a blanket approach against an entire community.

Distancing---1NC

Distancing created by drones is good---battlefield pressure makes soldiers more likely to commit unethical actions and demonize the enemy---removal from the field of battle causes ethical decisionmaking and restraint

Stephen Holmes 13, the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law, New York University School of Law, July 2013, “What’s in it for Obama?,” The London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n14/stephen-holmes/whats-in-it-for-obama

But Obama can make an even subtler case for drones. Well-meaning but imperfectly informed critics sometimes claim that the absence of risk to US forces explains the recklessness with which American drone operators kill combatants and noncombatants alike. Mazzetti quotes, in this context, Richard Clarke’s comment on the routinisation of asymmetry in drone warfare: ‘if the Predator gets shot down, the pilot goes home and fucks his wife. It’s OK. There’s no POW issue here.’ That noncombatants are regularly killed by pilots of unmanned aircraft sticking to their routines is widely acknowledged. But does it make sense to argue that such documented overkill results from the absence of risk to the pilots’ own lives and limbs? Obama and his supporters, rightly in my view, dismiss this line of attack as theoretically confused and empirically unproven. For one thing, the stress, panic and fear experienced on combat missions can easily increase rather than decrease the number of mistaken hair-trigger strikes on noncombatants. Reckless endangering of civilians results more often from heat-of-battle fear than from above-the-battle serenity. The drone operator is freed from the pressures of kill or be killed that can easily distort interpretations of what one sees, or thinks one sees, on the battlefield. The faux cockpits from which drones are remotely piloted are unlikely to be commandeered by berserkers.¶ An even more powerful, if still flawed, argument in favour of Obama’s campaign is the way heavy losses in any war can subconsciously put pressure on civilian politicians to inflate irrationally the aims of the conflict in order to align them with the sacrifices being made. War aims are not fixed ex ante but are constantly evolving for the simple reason that war is essentially opportunistic. Initial objectives that prove unrealistic are discarded as new opportunities emerge. Far from inducing greater caution in the use of force, heavy losses of one’s own troops may exacerbate a tendency to demonise the enemy and to hype the goals of the struggle.¶ Formulated more abstractly, the way we fight has a marked impact on when and why we fight. This is true despite what experts in the laws of war tell us about a theoretically watertight separation between jus in bello and jus ad bellum. Fighting in a way that limits the risk to one’s own troops makes it possible to fight limited-aims wars that don’t spiral into all-out wars for national survival. This, I think, is Obama’s best case for drone warfare. Land wars are ‘dumb’ because they almost inevitably involve mission creep as well as postwar responsibilities that US forces are poorly equipped to assume. Drone warfare is smart because, while helping dismantle terrorist organisations and disrupt terrorist plots, it involves less commitment on the American side, and is therefore much less likely to escalate out of control.

Their “kill chain” arg is backwards---drones cause the person ordering the strike to make more ethically sound decisions than any other weapon platform

Jeff McMahan 12, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, 2012, “Foreword,” in Killing by Remote Control, edited by Bradley Jay Strawser

What differentiates the newer models of remotely controlled weapons from traditional long-range precision-guided munitions is that they allow their operators to monitor the target area for lengthy periods before deciding whether, when, and where to strike. These are capacities that better enable the weapons operators to make morally informed decisions about the use of their weapons.

But remotely controlled weapons are associated in the popular imagination with targeted killing, especially of terrorist suspects outside of traditionally delimited combat zones. Yet they can be, and are, used in combat as well and have the same advantages in each of these roles: that is, they function without risk to their operator, can be highly discriminating in the targets they destroy, and can be used in places that are inaccessible to soldiers or prohibitively dangerous for their deployment. The objections to targeted killing are not, therefore, necessarily objections to remotely controlled weapons – though if targeted killing is objectionable then it is one objection to remotely controlled weapons that they make targeted killing safer and politically more palatable than it would otherwise be.

The distinction between using remotely controlled weapons in war and using them for targeted killing is not always easy to draw. There seems to be little difference morally between using a drone to kill members of the Taliban in remote areas of Afghanistan or Pakistan when they are not engaged in violent or coercive activities and using the same weapons in the same areas to kill members of al Qaeda, who are not combatants in a war but criminals preparing to engage in terrorist action.1 It can, indeed, be argued with considerable cogency that the use of remotely controlled weapons to kill Taliban fighters in their “safe havens” can be legally justified as the killing of enemy combatants in war, while their use to kill al Qaeda operatives in their havens can be legally justified as police action against dangerous criminals who cannot be arrested and tried at a reasonable cost, so that the requirement of arrest must be suspended, as it sometimes must be even in domestic law enforcement. Critics of this suggestion will say that the difference between targeted killing and cases in which the requirement of arrest must be suspended in domestic law enforcement lies in the imminence of the threat. In domestic cases, the requirement of arrest is suspended only when a criminal is on a rampage and is resisting arrest, posing a danger to the police and perhaps to innocent bystanders as well. But targeted killing is necessarily preventive: it is done when there is no imminent threat from the terrorist. If a terrorist posed an imminent threat, killing him would not count as targeted killing but simply as third-party defense of others, about which there is no legal controversy. But to have any plausibility, the imminence requirement must be understood as a proxy for considerations of probability or necessity. Usually threats that are not imminent are either below some threshold of probability or can likely be dealt with in some other way. But in the case of committed terrorists who are protected by the political and legal authorities where they live, targeted killing may be necessary for defense of the innocent in the same way it is in the case of a rampaging murderer.

Alternatives---1NC

Moral evaluation of drones requires considering the most likely alternatives that would replace targeted killings---they’re all worse for civilian casualties and state violence

Kenneth Anderson 13, Professor of International Law at American University, June 2013, “The Case for Drones,” Commentary, Vol. 135, No. 6

EFFECTIVENESS IS ONE THING, MORALITY ANOTHER. The leading objection to drone warfare today is that it supposedly involves large, or "excessive," numbers of civilian casualties, and that the claims of precision and discrimination are greatly overblown. These are partly factual questions full of unknowns and many contested issues. The Obama administration did not help itself by offering estimates of civilian collateral damage early on that ranged absurdly from zero to the low two digits. This both squandered credibility with the media and, worse, set a bar of perfection -- zero civilian collateral damage -- that no weapon system could ever meet, while distracting people entirely from the crucial question of what standard civilian harms should be set against.¶ The most useful estimates of civilian casualties from targeted killing with drones come from the New America Foundation (NAF) and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which each keep running counts of strikes, locations, and estimates of total killed and civilian casualties. They don't pretend to know what they don't know, and rely on open sources and media accounts. There is no independent journalistic access to Waziristan to help corroborate accounts that might be wrong or skewed by Taliban sources, Pakistani media, Pakistani and Western advocacy groups, or the U.S. or Pakistani governments. Pakistan's military sometimes takes credit for drone strikes against its enemies and sometimes blames drone strikes for its own air raids against villages. A third source of estimates, UK-based The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), comes up with higher numbers.¶ TBIJ (whose numbers are considered much too high by many knowledgeable American observers) came up with a range, notes Georgetown law professor and former Obama DOD official Rosa Brooks. The 344 known drone strikes in Pakistan between 2004 and 2012 killed, according to TBIJ, between "2,562 and 3,325 people, of whom between 474 and 881 were civilians." The NAF, she continues, came up with slightly lower figures, somewhere "between 1,873 and 3,171 people killed overall in Pakistan, of whom between 282 and 459 were civilians." (Media have frequently cited the total killed as though it were the civilians killed.) Is this a lot of civilians killed? Even accepting for argument's sake TBIJ's numbers, Brooks concludes, if you work out the "civilian deaths per drone strike ratio for the last eight years…on average, each drone strike seems to have killed between 0.8 and 2.5 civilians." In practical terms, adds McNeal, this suggests 'less than three civilians killed per strike, and that's using the highest numbers" of any credible estimating organization.*¶ Whether any of this is "disproportionate" or "excessive" as a matter of the laws of war cannot be answered simply by comparing total deaths to civilian deaths, or civilian deaths per drone strike, however. Although commentators often leap to a conclusion in this way, one cannot answer the legal question of proportionality without an assessment of the military benefits anticipated. Moreover, part of the disputes over numbers involves not just unverifiable facts on the ground, but differences in legal views defining who is a civilian and who is a lawful target. The U.S. government's definition of those terms, following its longstanding views of the law of targeting in war, almost certainly differs from those of TBIJ or other liberal nongovernmental groups, particularly in Europe. Additionally, much of drone warfare today targets groups who are deemed, under the laws of war, to be part of hostile forces. Targeted killing aimed at individuated high-value targets is a much smaller part of drone warfare than it once was. The targeting of groups, however, while lawful under long-standing U.S. interpretations of the laws of war, might result in casualties often counted by others as civilians.¶ Yet irrespective of what numbers one accepts as the best estimate of harms of drone warfare, or the legal proportionality of the drone strikes, the moral question is simply, What's the alternative? One way to answer this is to start from the proposition that if you believe the use of force in these circumstances is lawful and ethical, then all things being equal as an ethical matter, the method of force used should be the one that spares the most civilians while achieving its lawful aims. If that is the comparison of moral alternatives, there is simply no serious way to dispute that drone warfare is the best method available. It is more discriminating and more precise than other available means of air warfare, including manned aircraft -- as France and Britain, lacking their own drones and forced to rely on far less precise manned jet strikes, found over Libya and Mali -- and Tomahawk cruise missiles.¶ A second observation is to look across the history of precision weapons in the past several decades. I started my career as a human-rights campaigner, kicking off the campaign to ban landmines for leading organizations. Around 1990, I had many conversations with military planners, asking them to develop more accurate and discriminating weapons -- ones with smaller kinetic force and greater ability to put the force where sought. Although every civilian death is a tragedy, and drone warfare is very far from being the perfect tool the Obama administration sometimes suggests, for someone who has watched weapons development over a quarter century, the drone represents a steady advance in precision that has cut zeroes off collateral-damage figures.¶ Those who see only the snapshot of civilian harm today are angered by civilian deaths. But barring an outbreak of world peace, it is foolish and immoral not to encourage the development and use of more sparing and exact weapons. One has only to look at the campaigns of the Pakistani army to see the alternatives in action. The Pakistani military for many years has been in a running war with its own Taliban and has regularly attacked villages in the tribal areas with heavy and imprecise airstrikes. A few years ago, it thought it had reached an accommodation with an advancing Taliban, but when the enemy decided it wanted not just the Swat Valley but Islamabad, the Pakistani government decided it had no choice but to drive it back. And it did, with a punishing campaign of airstrikes and rolling artillery barrages that leveled whole villages, left hundreds of thousands without homes, and killed hundreds.¶ But critics do not typically evaluate drones against the standards of the artillery barrage of manned airstrikes, because their assumption, explicit or implicit, is that there is no call to use force at all. And of course, if the assumption is that you don't need or should not use force, then any civilian death by drones is excessive. That cannot be blamed on drone warfare, its ethics or effectiveness, but on a much bigger question of whether one ought to use force in counterterrorism at all.

The likely alternative to targeted killings would be invasions or un-targeted killings, both of which involve far more state violence

Alan M. Dershowitz 12, the Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard Law School, 11/15/12, “The Rule of Proportionality,” http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/14/how-can-targeted-killings-be-justified/in-targeted-killings-the-rule-of-proportionality-should-be-the-guiding-principle

If a combatant is appropriately subject to military attack, as the military leader of Hamas certainly was, then targeted assassination may be the preferred legal and moral course. It is certainly better than a broad military attack that might endanger large numbers of noncombatants. Targeted assassinations are intended to limit collateral damage by focusing specifically on the combatant. Every reasonable effort should be made to avoid collateral damage. Sometimes it is impossible to eliminate completely all risk to noncombatants. In such cases, the military value of the target must be weighed against the likelihood and degree of collateral damage. The rule of proportionality should be the guiding principle.¶ It is sometimes argued that targeted assassination should never be permitted because it is a form of “extrajudicial killing.” This view is absurd: all military deaths are extrajudicial (as is killing in self-defense and shooting a fleeing felon). If a judicial element is to be added to targeted assassinations, it could take the form of a warrant requirement. Under such a requirement, the military or the executive would be obligated to seek a judicial warrant setting out the basis for why the target is an appropriate one, and why the risk of collateral damage is warranted. When time permits, such a warrant could be sought prior to the military action, but when immediate action is required by exigent circumstances, the warrant could be obtained after the fact. This is far from a perfect solution, but it introduces a more neutral decision maker into the balancing process. ¶ The alternatives to targeted killing are either to allow terrorists free rein in targeting civilians or to engage in undertargeted military actions that are likely to cause more casualties. Targeted assassination will often be the least bad alternative in an inevitable choice of evils.

Discrimination---1NC

Drones are morally obligatory because they drastically reduce civilian casualties compared to any possible alternative

Scott Shane 12, National Security Reporter, New York Times, 7/14/12, “The Moral Case for Drones,” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/the-moral-case-for-drones.html?_r=0

But most critics of the Obama administration’s aggressive use of drones for targeted killing have focused on evidence that they are unintentionally killing innocent civilians. From the desolate tribal regions of Pakistan have come heartbreaking tales of families wiped out by mistake and of children as collateral damage in the campaign against Al Qaeda. And there are serious questions about whether American officials have understated civilian deaths. ¶ So it may be a surprise to find that some moral philosophers, political scientists and weapons specialists believe armed, unmanned aircraft offer marked moral advantages over almost any other tool of warfare. ¶ “I had ethical doubts and concerns when I started looking into this,” said Bradley J. Strawser, a former Air Force officer and an assistant professor of philosophy at the Naval Postgraduate School. But after a concentrated study of remotely piloted vehicles, he said, he concluded that using them to go after terrorists not only was ethically permissible but also might be ethically obligatory, because of their advantages in identifying targets and striking with precision. ¶ “You have to start by asking, as for any military action, is the cause just?” Mr. Strawser said. But for extremists who are indeed plotting violence against innocents, he said, “all the evidence we have so far suggests that drones do better at both identifying the terrorist and avoiding collateral damage than anything else we have.” ¶ Since drone operators can view a target for hours or days in advance of a strike, they can identify terrorists more accurately than ground troops or conventional pilots. They are able to time a strike when innocents are not nearby and can even divert a missile after firing if, say, a child wanders into range. ¶ Clearly, those advantages have not always been used competently or humanely; like any other weapon, armed drones can be used recklessly or on the basis of flawed intelligence. If an operator targets the wrong house, innocents will die. ¶ Moreover, any analysis of actual results from the Central Intelligence Agency’s strikes in Pakistan, which has become the world’s unwilling test ground for the new weapon, is hampered by secrecy and wildly varying casualty reports. But one rough comparison has found that even if the highest estimates of collateral deaths are accurate, the drones kill fewer civilians than other modes of warfare. ¶ AVERY PLAW, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, put the C.I.A. drone record in Pakistan up against the ratio of combatant deaths to civilian deaths in other settings. Mr. Plaw considered four studies of drone deaths in Pakistan that estimated the proportion of civilian victims at 4 percent, 6 percent, 17 percent and 20 percent respectively. ¶ But even the high-end count of 20 percent was considerably lower than the rate in other settings, he found. When the Pakistani Army went after militants in the tribal area on the ground, civilians were 46 percent of those killed. In Israel’s targeted killings of militants from Hamas and other groups, using a range of weapons from bombs to missile strikes, the collateral death rate was 41 percent, according to an Israeli human rights group. ¶ In conventional military conflicts over the last two decades, he found that estimates of civilian deaths ranged from about 33 percent to more than 80 percent of all deaths. ¶ Mr. Plaw acknowledged the limitations of such comparisons, which mix different kinds of warfare. But he concluded, “A fair-minded evaluation of the best data we have available suggests that the drone program compares favorably with similar operations and contemporary armed conflict more generally.” ¶ By the count of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, which has done perhaps the most detailed and skeptical study of the strikes, the C.I.A. operators are improving their performance. The bureau has documented a notable drop in the civilian proportion of drone casualties, to 16 percent of those killed in 2011 from 28 percent in 2008. This year, by the bureau’s count, just three of the 152 people killed in drone strikes through July 7 were civilians.

Structural Violence K---1NC

Anti-drone activism reinforces a narrative of U.S.-led repression in Pakistan which erases and sanitizes violence done in the FATA by the Pakistani government and the Taliban---uses the people of FATA as pawns in a political game of opposing the U.S. reflexively

Myra MacDonald 12, Reuters journalist based in London, author of "Heights of Madness", a book about the Siachen war between India and Pakistan, 10/3/12, ““Living Under Drones” – the anti-drone campaign can do damage too,” http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/2012/10/03/living-under-drones-the-anti-drone-campaign-can-do-damage-too/

In a poignant tale published last month by Chashm, a new website set up to promote alternative discourse in Pakistan, the narrator describes what happened when the Taliban came to the village of Saidano, the site of a popular shrine in Orakzai Agency in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). ¶ First the Taliban imposed sharia; they banned all activity at the shrine and intimidated those in the political administration into quitting their jobs. The people organised themselves into a lashkar, or militia, to fight them. “In return, the Taliban pummelled the armed resistance and the people back into submission. Any attempt at resistance led to dissenters’ immediate silencing, including by slaughter.” Having decreed that visiting shrines was un-Islamic, the Taliban said they would demolish it. “With that note, the shrine of Bawal Haq Saheb was reduced to rubble by the Taliban. The people of Saidano were enraged at this heinous act of the Taliban, but no one could say anything…they were all scared.” ¶ Another story on Qissa Khwani, a website about North-West Pakistan, describes the fate of 18-year-old Najib, “a studious, humble, calm and a normal boy”, a student in computer sciences from the Tirah Valley in Khyber Agency, where several militant groups were fighting for control. ¶ “He was forced to fight…as he was the only young boy in his family. It is mandatory for the people living in these militant-controlled areas to hand over one young man to fight… Najib was not trained for war, therefore he was used as a shield to protect the trained militants…and if anyone tried to escape or leave, either his family would be harmed or that person would be slaughtered. Najib’s fate was no different from those who tried to escape, he was cut into pieces and delivered to his family in a sack.” ¶ They are small tales, unlikely to make international headlines; yet these are the stories that give texture to the lives of ordinary people in FATA – people whose views are submerged by the polemics over U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. ¶ Much has been written criticising the use of drones, some – like the recently published study by Columbia Law School “The Civilian Impact of Drone Strikes” – raising serious questions about the secrecy of the programme and the risk of it being overused. But just as the United States stands accused of ignoring people on the ground, so too do some of the most vocal of the anti-drone campaigners in ways that can be just as insidious. ¶ This is not just because of the obvious charge of hypocrisy, although that is there too. Many of those who shout the most about casualties from U.S. drone strikes rarely condemn so loudly the many more deaths of civilians as a result of Pakistan army operations in FATA or Taliban violence. Nor are they particularly vocal in challenging Pakistan’s slowness to incorporate FATA into the political mainstream – the region continues to be run according to the colonial-era Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), which deprives its people of many of the rights granted to other Pakistani citizens and leaves them vulnerable to collective punishment. Few pay attention to the region’s deliberate marginalisation so that it could be used – since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 – as a deniable staging ground for the Pakistan army’s jihadi proxies – whose ideology spawned the same Taliban who are now terrorising the local population. ¶ But the problems lie not just in hypocrisy, but in something worse; in the way in which much of the anti-drone campaign is used, sometimes deliberately, sometimes unwittingly, to bolster a narrative inside Pakistan which runs counter to the interests of the people of FATA. ¶ According to this narrative, militancy sprang from FATA itself in response to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and drone strikes. That in turn leads to the questionable conclusion that making peace deals with the Pakistani Taliban will help the people of FATA (ask yourself whether those quoted above would benefit or lose from peace agreements with the militants.) ¶ Rather militancy was imposed from outside, using FATA as a base. Its origins lie in a decades-old project conceived by the military to rely on non-state actors to counter its bigger neighbour India (a policy the army officially says it has now abandoned). Drone strikes in FATA may or may not be the answer to that; but it will be hard to judge if we don’t get the description right in the first place. ¶ First of all let’s be clear we don’t know, and can’t know, exactly what is going on in FATA. It is hard for outsiders to go there; foreigners visit accompanied by the army; people inside are afraid to speak openly and its journalists say their reporting is hampered by threats from both the military and the militants (for an excellent, report on this, and useful research on a FATA in general, do read this study by Intermedia (pdf) ¶ Data on drone strikes based on media reports do not tell us the number of civilians killed; they tell us what unnamed Pakistani security officials choose to say about casualties, and they have the option of either exaggerating or underestimating the numbers depending on what suits politically. ¶ But what we can do is look at how descriptions of the impact of drones subtly reinforce a narrative which diverts attention away from Pakistan’s own treatment of FATA and onto the United States, all the while ignoring the people who would be best placed to say how peace might be achieved, if only they were allowed to speak freely.

Every alternative to drones is worse for oppressed people in Pakistan---retaining a limited role for targeted killings in counter-terrorism is the best choice for reducing anti-civilian violence

Myra MacDonald 12, Reuters journalist based in London, author of "Heights of Madness", a book about the Siachen war between India and Pakistan, 10/3/12, ““Living Under Drones” – the anti-drone campaign can do damage too,” http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/2012/10/03/living-under-drones-the-anti-drone-campaign-can-do-damage-too/

So what does this tell us about drones? ¶ First get the history right. Or to quote George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Pause to consider why militants are present in FATA in the first place (and the United States and Saudi Arabia also played their own role in funding Pakistan’s use of jihadi proxies against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan) and you come up with a completely different view of the argument that stopping U.S. drone strikes will bring peace to the region. ¶ Second, consider what would be required to help the people of FATA drive out militants. Full political rights, a free press and economic development are all long-term solutions. Some anti-drone campaigners do also push for this. But be very wary of those who don’t, particularly when populist anti-Americanism is used as a means of trying to return FATA to the status quo ante: ie a deliberately marginalised region and useful base for jihadis. ¶ Third, ask serious questions about rejecting the use of force. Peace agreements do not necessarily bring peace to those who live there. As Daud Khattak has noted in a review of past past accords, they often have the effect of reinforcing the authority of the Taliban over the tribal elders. The same will happen with an anti-drones “peace march” planned this weekend by Imran Khan to South Waziristan – the Pakistani Taliban have already arrogated to themselves the right to decide whether to allow it to go ahead without attacking it, suggesting that they, rather than the government, have sovereignty over the area. ¶ And if the use of force is necessary, ask if it is better to rely on drone strikes, which have the technological capacity to cause far fewer casualties than other aerial or artillery bombing. Some people in FATA say drones are a lesser evil compared to army operations and Taliban violence; some even welcome them, though it varies from agency to agency. And for ordinary Pakistani soldiers caught up in the fighting in FATA, drone strikes can also limit the toll of brutal fighting in difficult terrain (the Pakistani Taliban not long ago released a video of them beheading captured soldiers). The more strident in the anti-drone campaign leave no room for such nuance. ¶ Fourth, encourage online projects meant to tell local stories from FATA. I quoted from two. There are others. For without a free press, you are never going to know otherwise what people on the ground think. Studies like that of Stanford/ /NYU, which give an academic imprimatur to a particular narrative, do not help. ¶ And finally, realise – at least in the case of FATA – the polemics over drones have little to do with their impact on civilians. The United States and Pakistan have been effectively fighting a war over Afghanistan with FATA caught in the middle. They both blame the other for failure there – from U.S. incompetence to Pakistani backing for the Afghan Taliban. They both have their ways of attacking the other: Washington, impatient at Pakistan’s failure to clear militants out of FATA, ignores Pakistani sovereignty in its use of drones; Pakistan in turn whips up anti-Americanism through the media and insists on a national pride over FATA which never existed when the region was excluded from the political mainstream.¶ There is no moral high ground here. But many of those who lend their name to the anti-drones campaign would do well to remember they are also fighting in the swamps. And consider how the narrator from Orakzai opened the story. “There was a time when peace and happiness prevailed in Orakzai Agency – a place that wasn’t as popular as it was turned into by the Taliban and the Army’s government.”

2NC

2NC

2NC—Condo Good

Counter-interpretation—one conditional CP/one conditional critique.

Standards—

Argument Innovation—debaters are risk-averse—a fallback strategy encourages introduction of new positions—solves research skills.

Neg Flex—in-round testing is critical to balance aff prep.

Nuanced Advocacy—contradictory positions force aff defense of the political middle-ground through specific solvency deficits—prevents ideological extremism.

Strategic Thinking—causes introduction of the best arguments—necessitates intelligent coverage decisions—key to info processing and argument evaluation.

[If Dispo] Logic—a decision maker can always chose the status quo.

Substance crowd-out—re-appropriating time spent on condo solves fairness offense.

High Threshold—the 2AR is reactive and persuasive—theory has a 1-to-5 time trade-off—unless we make debate impossible, vote neg.

Defense—

Fairness impossible—resource and coaching differentials—no terminal impact—no one quits b/c of the process CP.

Skew inevitable—DAs and T

Contradictions inevitable—Security K and Deterrence DA

2NR collapse solves depth.

Cheating strategies lose to theory & competition args.

Judge is a referee—potential abuse isn’t a voter—blaming us for other teams behavior is unfair—voting down abuse solves their offence.

T

2NC—Overview

Statutory means set by laws — judicial means based in courts — restrictions must be codified.

That’s vocabulary, singer and Law

The 1AC does not meet because it is a personal advocacy statement: it does not include judicial or statutory restrictions.

They un-limit the topic — delimiting from USFG action allows for infinite actors — can pick any government, any organization, any individual — allows UN or international community affs — it also allows vague affs like the 1AC that result in future non-specific actions.

Limits outweigh: smaller lit bases produce in depth research, which creates clash, improves pre-round education and in round critical thinking—every ground and education claim assumes a predictable limit so if we win this argument it indicts their idea of beneficial debate.

Ground — core ground based on instructional action — can shirk link to DAs — politics DA, drones DA both rely on institutional checks — CP competition assumes institutional action — most of all, the entirety of the 1AC is a neg critique that I should have the option of reading in every drones round.

Ground magnifies the limits impact — every new aff they allow is particularly unfair and anti—educational because it avoids core controversies.

T version of the aff — constrain president’s ability to use drones through congressional or judicial checks — accesses the majority of aff advantage.

Counter-interpretation

Counter-interpretation—

Our definitions have intent to define and set a clear limits on the topic.

Their interpretation links to the limits DA.

Sufficient aff ground — you can ban actions in any of the four topic area’s — you just can’t use other mechanisms.

AT: Reasonability

Competing interps create a race to the top — find most defensible definitions.

They’re unreasonable — proven by the limits DA.

It’s arbitrary—reasonability is subjective which makes 2NR choice impossible.

DA

AT: Local Blowback

Drones don’t cause anti-Americanism and reducing strikes doesn’t solve it---zero data supports their claims

Amitai Etzioni 13, professor of international relations at George Washington University, March/April 2013, “The Great Drone Debate,” Military Review, http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20130430_art004.pdf

Other critics argue that drones strikes engender much resentment among the local population and serve as a major recruitment tool for the terrorists, possibly radicalizing more individuals than they neutralize. This argument has been made especially in reference to Pakistan, where there were anti-American demonstrations following drones strikes, as well as in Yemen.44 However, such arguments do not take into account the fact that anti-American sentiment in these areas ran high before drone strikes took place and remained so during periods in which strikes were signiﬁcantly scaled back. Moreover, other developments—such as the release of an anti-Muslim movie trailer by an Egyptian Copt from California or the publication of incendiary cartoons by a Danish newspaper—led to much larger demonstrations. Hence stopping drone strikes—if they are otherwise justiﬁed, and especially given that they are a very effective and low-cost way to neutralize terrorist violence on the ground45—merely for public relations purposes seems imprudent.

Zero data supports a causal link between drones and anti-Americanism---empirically reducing drone strikes doesn’t reduce resentment

Amitai Etzioni 13, professor of international relations at George Washington University, March/April 2013, “The Great Drone Debate,” Military Review, http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20130430_art004.pdf

Critics argue that drone strikes alienate the population and thus help Al-Qaeda’s recruitment, generating more terrorists than are killed. These statements, which may at ﬁrst seem “obviously true,” are not supported by data. In fact, the resentment of the United States has many sources, and this resentment was high before drones were used and is high in several nations in the Middle East where drones were never used.

For example, a comparison of drone strike frequency in Pakistan and anti-American sentiment in the country reveals little correlation. From 2004 to 2007, there were few drone strikes in that country (only 10 over the four year span).53 However, starting in 2008 the United States carried out a total of 36 drone strikes, with this number increasing in subsequent years to 54 strikes and 122 strikes, respectively.54 From this peak in 2010, the number of drone strikes per year began to decline with 73 strikes in 2011 and 48 in 2012. 55 In the same years, data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project reveals that the percentage of Pakistanis who held an “unfavorable” view of the United States remained relatively steady from 2008 to 2010, beginning to increase only after the United States scaled back the number of drone strikes starting in 2011.56 Moreover anti American sentiments were as high or higher in the same years in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and the Palestinian territories.57

Thus, in 2007, 2009, and 2010, the United States’ unfavorability in Pakistan held steady at 68 percent (dropping brieﬂy to 63 percent in 2008), but then began to increase, rising to 73 percent in 2011 and 80 percent in 2012—even as the number of drone strikes was dropping signiﬁcantly.58 At the same time, anti-American sentiment was on the rise in countries where no drone strikes were taking place. In Jordan, for example, U.S. unfavorability rose from 78 percent in 2007 to 86 percent in 2012 while Egypt saw a slight rise from 78 percent to 79 percent over the same period.59 Notably, the percentage of respondents reporting an “unfavorable” view of the United States in these countries is as high, or higher, than in drone-targeted Pakistan.

No tangible impact to local blowback---and even if drones are unpopular, local populations are more afraid of alternatives like Pakistani military strikes

Kenneth Anderson 13, Professor of International Law at American University, June 2013, “The Case for Drones,” Commentary, Vol. 135, No. 6

THE MOST PROMINENT CRITIQUE TODAY, HOWEVER, is that drone warfare is counterproductive because it produces "blowback." What is blowback?

Blowback comprises the supposed bad consequences of drones that swamp the benefits, if any, of drone warfare itself -- the anger of villagers whose civilian relatives have been killed, for instance, or the resentment among larger populations in Pakistan or Yemen over drone strikes. The anger, we are told, is fanned by Islamist preachers, local media, and global Web communities, and then goes global in the um-mah about the perceived targeting of Muslims and Islam. This leads to radicalization and membership recruitment where the strikes take place. Or maybe it leads to independently organized violence -- perhaps the case of the Boston bombers, though it is too early to say. All this bad public perception outweighs whatever tactical value, if any, drone strikes might have.

Blowback can never be dismissed, because it might be true in some cases. But even when true, it would exist as a matter of degree, to be set against the benefits of the drone strikes themselves. By definition, blowback is a second-order effect, and its diffuse nature makes its existence more a matter of subjective judgment than any other evaluation of drone warfare. As a hypothesis, the possibility of blowback arises in two distinct settings: "narrow" counterinsurgency and "broad" global counterterrorism.

The narrow blowback hypothesis concerns those in communities directly affected by global counterterrorism drone strikes while the United States is trying to carry out a ground-level counterinsurgency campaign. The question is whether civilians, women and children especially, are being killed by drones in such numbers -- because collateral damage is a fact, including from drone strikes -- that they make these local communities even more fertile ground for anti-American operations. Do the drone strikes make things unacceptably more difficult for ground forces attempting to carry out a hearts-and-minds campaign to win over the local population?

Direct and immediate concerns about villagers' perceptions during the counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan led, at some points, to extraordinary (from the standpoint of lawful targeting and acceptable collateral damage) measures against using air power and even infantry to fire back at insurgents. But local counterinsurgency is not the long-term concern today; global counterterrorism is. Village-level resentments fueling recruitment might be a concern, but this type of blowback matters far less in terms of war fighting when the United States no longer has infantry in those places (and is no longer making its counterterrorism policy rest upon the chimera of a stable, democratic Afghanistan).

It is sharply contested, to say the least, whether and to what extent drone strikes are creating blowback among villagers, or whether and to what extent, as a former British soldier recently returned from Afghanistan remarked to me, villagers are sad to see the Taliban commander who just insisted on marrying someone's young daughter blown up in an airstrike. There is also debate about the degree to which villagers are aware that the American drones are undertaking strikes that the Pakistani government might otherwise undertake. Critics often neglect to focus on the Pakistani government's regular and brutal assaults in the tribal zones. Despite a general perception that all of Pakistan is united against drone strikes, voices in the Pakistani newspapers have often made note that the tribal areas fear the Pakistani army far more than they fear U.S. drones, because, despite mistakes and inevitable civilian casualties, they see them as smaller and more precise. But the blunt reality is that as the counterinsurgency era ends for U.S. forces, narrow blowback concerns about whether villages might be sufficiently provoked against American infantry are subsiding.

AT: Terror Recruitment Blowback

No blowback or increased terrorist recruitment from drones---painstaking field interviews confirm

Christopher Swift 12, fellow at the University of Virginia's Center for National Security Law, 7/1/12, “The Drone Blowback Fallacy,” http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137760/christopher-swift/the-drone-blowback-fallacy

Critics argue that drone strikes create new adversaries and drive al Qaeda's recruiting. As the Yemeni youth activist Ibrahim Mothana recently wrote in The New York Times, "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." The Washington Post concurs. In May, it reported that the "escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes [in Yemen] is stirring increasing sympathy for al Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States." The ranks of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have tripled to 1,000 in the last three years, and the link between its burgeoning membership, U.S. drone strikes, and local resentment seems obvious.

Last month, I traveled to Yemen to study how AQAP operates and whether the conventional understanding of the relationship between drones and recruitment is correct. While there, I conducted 40 interviews with tribal leaders, Islamist politicians, Salafist clerics, and other sources. These subjects came from 14 of Yemen's 21 provinces, most from rural regions. Many faced insurgent infiltration in their own districts. Some of them were actively fighting AQAP. Two had recently visited terrorist strongholds in Jaar and Zinjibar as guests. I conducted each of these in-depth interviews using structured questions and a skilled interpreter. I have withheld my subjects' names to protect their safety -- a necessity occasioned by the fact that some of them had survived assassination attempts and that others had recently received death threats.

These men had little in common with the Yemeni youth activists who capture headlines and inspire international acclaim. As a group, they were older, more conservative, and more skeptical of U.S. motives. They were less urban, less wealthy, and substantially less secular. But to my astonishment, none of the individuals I interviewed drew a causal relationship between U.S. drone strikes and al Qaeda recruiting. Indeed, of the 40 men in this cohort, only five believed that U.S. drone strikes were helping al Qaeda more than they were hurting it.

AT: Global Blowback

No global blowback

Kenneth Anderson 13, Professor of International Law at American University, June 2013, “The Case for Drones,” Commentary, Vol. 135, No. 6

That leaves the broader claim of global blow-back -- the idea that drone campaigns are effectively creating transnational terrorists as well as sympathy for their actions. That could always be true and could conceivably outweigh all other concerns. But the evidence is so diffuse as to be pointless. Do Gallup polls of the general Pakistani population indicate overwhelming resentment about drone strikes -- or do they really suggest that more than half the country is unaware of a drone campaign at all? Recent polls found the latter to be the case. Any causal connections that lead from supposed resentments to actual terrorist recruitment are contingent and uncertain. Discussing global blowback is also an easy stance for journalists writing about U.S. counterterrorism -- Mark Mazzetti's new book, The Way of the Knife, is a good example -- because it automatically frames an oppositional narrative, one with dark undertones and intimations of unattractive, unintended consequence. The blowback argument is also peculiarly susceptible to raising the behavioral bar the United States must meet in order to keep the local population happy enough not to embrace suicide bombing and terrorism. It defines terrorist deviancy down, while U.S. and Western security behaviors are always defined up.

From a strategic standpoint, however, the trouble with the blowback theory is simple: It will always counsel doing nothing rather than doing something. It's the kibitzer's lazy objection. Whether one knows a lot or a little about the action and its possible blowback consequences, whether one has an axe to grind or is reasonably objective, one can always offer the blow-back scenario.

There might be situations in which to give it priority; Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert, for example, says that a particular form of strike in Yemen causes blowback because it hits low-level fighters whose families cannot understand the American justification. (The response is, usually, that we are effectively fighting as the air arm of the Yemen government against its insurgents, including its low-level fighters.) That bears attention; whether it outweighs the strategic concern of supporting the Yemeni government, which does have to fight even low-level insurgents who in effect offer protection to the transnational terrorist wing, is another question. But we should consider it carefully.

Blowback is a form of the precautionary principle. But it's awfully difficult to conduct war, after all, on the basis of "first do no harm." As it happens, the United States once had a commander driven largely by considerations of blowback from a restive local population. His name was George McClellan. If he had not been replaced by Abraham Lincoln, the Union would have lost the Civil War.

No data supports the blowback or radicalization thesis

Michael Aaronson 13, Professorial Research Fellow and Executive Director of cii – the Centre for International Intervention – at the University of Surrey, and Adrian Johnson, Director of Publications at RUSI, the book reviews editor for the RUSI Journal, and chair of the RUSI Editorial Board, “Conclusion,” in Hitting the Target?: How New Capabilities are Shaping International Intervention, ed. Aaronson & Johnson, http://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/Hitting_the_Target.pdf

Unintended detrimental consequences of intervention – ‘blowback’– are by no means a new phenomenon, nor an inherent feature of drone versus other kinds of strikes. A widespread view holds that drones are fuelling a political and societal backlash against the US.15 Worse, unintended civilian deaths may be creating new grievances, driving new recruits to join terrorist groups, and undermining the legitimacy of the very governments the US is trying to bolster.16 In other words, the covert drone programme is radical Islamism’s latest recruiting sergeant.17

This is contested, as is inevitable when relying on anecdotal evidence. Some data suggest that the effect is overblown – one analyst conducting fieldwork in Yemen found very little causation between drone strikes and radicalisation.18 The lack of information is a major problem for both policymakers and the public in attempting to definitively determine the strategic impact of any intervention, not just drone strikes. Here, again, the secrecy of the CIA programme is an obstacle – what data we do have on it comes from leaks, rather than systematic analysis.19 Neither is the US alone guilty of secrecy; in the aftermath of the UN Special Rapporteur’s report on the legality of drone strikes in Pakistan, one might note that the Pakistani government’s complaints to the Special Rapporteur seem to be contradictory given what is known from WikiLeaks documents about private approval.20

A lack of data may mean that talk of blowback is misguided, or it might not; Hastings Dunn and Wolff offer some clarity on the relationship between targeting policy and public anger in this regard. A bigger issue is that media reports tend to be unreliable from regions like the FATA, particularly when weapons forensics experts – who would be able to determine, for instance, what kind of weapon system has caused what kind of damage – cannot reach these areas.21 Ultimately, the information problem may mean that we cannot conclude whether anti-Americanism or fragile support for local regimes is caused by or coincident with drone strikes. This highlights the importance of casualty-recording and damage assessment, outlined in this report, to the strategic conduct of intervention.

Drones DA---2NC

Expansive targeted killing policies provide and unparalleled to strike at terrorist groups without the downsides of large-scale interventions or counterinsurgency campaigns---drones disrupt leadership and make planning large-scale attacks impossible---that means even if they win their offense that drones make some people join terror groups who otherwise wouldn’t, there’s no effective leadership or capacity for those groups to actually do anything---that’s Anderson.

There’s a high risk of unchecked terrorism going nuclear---theft of material, unguarded research reactors, dirty bombs, etc are all high-risk internal links to nuclear strikes---but they obviously require high-value leadership and global coordination---that’s Dvorkin.

The impact’s extinction---even a single terrorist nuclear detonation in a city could cause global cooling on-part with nuclear winter---terrorists would look to maximize damage and hit in the densest cities---it’s equivalent to full-scale superpower nuclear exchange---that’s Toon.

More Impact

Terrorism causes extinction---hard-line responses are key

Nathan Myhrvold 13, PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton, and founded Intellectual Ventures after retiring as chief strategist and chief technology officer of Microsoft Corporation , July 2013, "Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action," The Lawfare Research Paper Series No.2, http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Strategic-Terrorism-Myhrvold-7-3-2013.pdf

Several powerful trends have aligned to profoundly change the way that the world works. Technology now allows stateless groups to organize, recruit, and fund themselves in an unprecedented fashion. That, coupled with the extreme difficulty of finding and punishing a stateless group, means that stateless groups are positioned to be lead players on the world stage. They may act on their own, or they may act as proxies for nation-states that wish to duck responsibility. Either way, stateless groups are forces to be reckoned with. At the same time, a different set of technology trends means that small numbers of people can obtain incredibly lethal power. Now, for the first time in human history, a small group can be as lethal as the largest superpower. Such a group could execute an attack that could kill millions of people. It is technically feasible for such a group to kill billions of people, to end modern civilization—perhaps even to drive the human race to extinction. Our defense establishment was shaped over decades to address what was, for a long time, the only strategic threat our nation faced: Soviet or Chinese missiles. More recently, it has started retooling to address tactical terror attacks like those launched on the morning of 9/11, but the reform process is incomplete and inconsistent. A real defense will require rebuilding our military and intelligence capabilities from the ground up. Yet, so far, strategic terrorism has received relatively little attention in defense agencies, and the efforts that have been launched to combat this existential threat seem fragmented.History suggests what will happen. The only thing that shakes America out of complacency is a direct threat from a determined adversary that confronts us with our shortcomings by repeatedly attacking us or hectoring us for decades.

AT: Mueller

Mueller’s wrong about everything and ignores contrary evidence

Allison 9 – Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government (Graham “A Response to Nuclear Terrorism Skeptics” Brown Journal of World Affairs, Hein Online)

What drives Mueller and other skeptics to arrive at such different conclusions? They make four major claims that merit serious examination and reflection. CLAIM 1: No ONE IS SERIOUSLY MOTIVATED TO CONDUCT A NUCLEAR TERRORIST ATTACK. More than a decade ago, no one could have imagined that a Japanese doomsday cult would be sufficiently motivated to disseminate sarin gas on the Tokyo subway. Indeed, at the time of that attack, the consensus among terrorism experts was that terrorists wanted an audience and sympathy-not casualties. The leading American student of terrorism, Brian Jenkins, summarized the consensus judgment in 1975: "terrorists seem 34 to be more interested in having a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead."" As intelligence officials later testified, an inability to recognize the shifting modus operandi of some terrorist groups was part of the reason why members of Aum Shinrikyo "were simply not on anybody's radar screen."" This, despite the fact that the group owned a 12-acre chemical weapons factory in Tokyo, had $1 billion in its bank account, and had a history of serious nuclear ambitions.'9 Similarly, before the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that extinguished 3,000 lives, few imagined that terrorists could mount an attack upon the American homeland that would kill more Americans than the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. As Secretary Rice testified to the 9/11 Commission, "No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon and into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile." 20 For most Americans, the idea of international terrorists mounting an attack on our homeland and killing thousands of citizens was not just unlikely, but inconceivable. But assertions about what is "imaginable" or "conceivable" are propositions about individuals' mental capacities, not about what is objectively possible. In fact, Al Qaeda's actions in the decade prior to the 9/11 attacks provided clear evidence both of intent and capability. While its 1993 attack on the World Trade Center succeeded in killing only six people, Ramzi Yousef, the key operative in this case, had planned to collapse one tower onto the second, killing 40,000. In the summer of 1996, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa declaring war upon the United States. Two years later, Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing more than 200 people. In October 2000, Al Qaeda attacked the warship USS Cole. Throughout this period, Al Qaeda's leadership was running thousands of people through training camps, preparing them for mega-terrorist attacks. Notwithstanding Aum Shinrikyo's brazen attack, Al Qaedas audacious 9/11 attack, and the recent attacks in Mumbai that killed 179 people, Mueller maintains that "terrorists groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire... they have discovered that the tremendous effort required is scarcely likely to be successful." He asserts that the evidence about Al Qaedas nuclear intentions ranges from the "ludicrous to the merely dubious," and that those who take Al Qaeda's nuclear aspiration seriously border on "full-on fantasyland."1 Even scholars who would have been inclined to agree with this point of view have revised their judgment as new facts have accumulated. In 2006, for example, Jenkins reversed the basic proposition that he had set forth three decades earlier. In his summary: "In the 1970s the bloodiest incidents caused fatalities in the tens. In the 1980s, fatalities from the worst incidents were in the hundreds; by the 1990s, attacks on this scale had become more frequent. On 9/11 there were thousands of fatalities, and there could have been far more. We now contemplate plausible scenarios in which tens of 35 thousands might die." Underlining the contrast with his own 1975 assessment, Jenkins now says: "Jihadists seem ready to murder millions, if necessary. Many of today's terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead."22 (Emphasis added.) Al Qaeda has been deadly clear about its ambitions. In 1998, Osama bin Laden declared that he considered obtaining weapons of mass destruction "a religious duty."" In December 2001, he urged his supporters to trump the 9/11 attacks: "America is in retreat by the grace of God Almighty..but it needs further blows."2 A few months later, Al Qaeda announced its goal to "kill four million Americans."5 It eVen managed to gain religious sanction from a radical Saudi cleric in 2003 to kill "ten million Americans" with a nuclear or biological weapon.26 We also now know that Al Qaeda has been seriously seeking a nuclear bomb. According to the Report of the 9/11 Commission, "Al Qaeda has tried to acquire or make nuclear weapons for at least ten years... and continues to pursue its strategic goal of obtaining a nuclear capability." It further reveals "bin Laden had reportedly been heard to speak of wanting a 'Hiroshima." The Commission provides evidence of Al Qaedas effort to recruit nuclear expertise-including evidence about the meeting between two Pakistani nuclear weapon scientists, bin Laden, and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan to discuss nuclear weapons.2 These scientists were founding members of Ummah Tamer-e-Nau (UTN), a so-called charitable agency to support projects in Afghanistan. The foundation's board included a fellow nuclear scientist knowledgeable about weapons construction, two Pakistani Air Force generals, one Army general, and an industrialist who owned Pakistan's largest foundry.28 In his memoir, former CIA Director George Tenet offers his own conclusion that "the most senior leaders of Al Qaeda are still singularly focused on acquiring WMD" and that "the main threat is the nuclear one." In Tenet's view, Al Qaedas strategic goal is to obtain a nuclear capability. He concludes as follows: "I am convinced that this is where Osama bin Laden and his operatives desperately want to go."2 9 CLAIM 2: IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR TERRORISTS TO ACQUIRE FISSILE MATERIAL. Assuming that terrorists have the intent-could they acquire the necessary materials for a Hiroshima-model bomb? Tenet reports that after 9/11, President Bush showed President Putin his briefing on UTN. In Tenet's account of the meeting, Bush "asked Putin point blank if Russia could account for all of its material." Putin responded that he could guarantee it was secure during his watch, underlying his inability to provide assurance about events under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.3o When testifying to the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2005, Commit- 36 tee Vice-Chairman John Rockefeller (D-WV) asked CIA Director Porter Goss whether the amount of nuclear material known to be missing from Russian nuclear facilities was sufficient to construct a nuclear weapon. Goss replied, "There is sufficient material unaccounted for that it would be possible for those with know-how to construct a weapon.. .I can't account for some of the material so I can't make the assurance about its whereabouts." Mueller sidesteps these inconvenient facts to assert a contrary claim. According to his telling, over the last 10 years, there have been only 10 known thefts of highly enriched uranium (HEU), totaling less than 16 pounds, far less than required for an atomic explosion. He acknowledges, however, that "There may have been additional thefts that went undiscovered."32 Yet, as Matthew Bunn testified to the Senate in April 2008, "Theft of HEU and plutonium is not a hypothetical worry, it is an ongoing reality." He notes that "nearly all of the stolen HEU and plutonium that has been seized over the years had never been missed before it was seized." The IAEA Illicit Nuclear Trafficking Database notes 1,266 incidents reported by 99 countries over the last 12 years, including 18 incidents involving HEU or plutonium trafficking. 130 research reactors around the world in 40 developing and transitional countries still hold the essential ingredient for nuclear weapons. As Bunn explains, "The world stockpiles of HEU and separated plutonium are enough to make roughly 200,000 nuclear weapons; a tiny fraction of one percent of these stockpiles going missing could cause a global catastrophe." Consider the story of Russian citizen Oleg Khinsagov. Arrested in February 2006 in Georgia, he was carrying 100 grams of 89-percent enriched HEU as a sample and attempting to find a buyer for what he claimed were many additional kilograms. Mueller asserts that "although there is a legitimate concern that some material, particularly in Russia, may be somewhat inadequately secured, it is under lock and key, and even sleepy, drunken guards, will react with hostility (and noise) to a raiding party."" CLAIM 3: IT IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT TO CONSTRUCT A NUCLEAR DEVICE THAT WORKS. Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former director of the Department of Energy's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, testified that, "The 21s' century will be defined first by the desire and then by the ability of non-state actors to procure or develop crude nuclear weapons."6 In contrast, Mueller contends that, "Making a bomb is an extraordinarily difficult task... the odds, indeed, are stacked against the terrorists, perhaps massively so." 37 Mueller argues that his conclusion follows from an analysis of 20 steps an atomic terrorist would have to accomplish in what he judges to be the most likely nuclear terrorism scenario. On the basis of this list, he claims that there is "worse than one in a 37 million" chance of success. 38 His approach, however, misunderstands probabilistic risk assessment. For example, some of the steps on the list would have to be completed before an attempt to acquire material could begin (therefore, the success rate for any of those steps during the path would, by definition, be 100 percent). Other steps are unnecessary, such as having a technically sophisticated team pre-deployed in the target country. Although he assumes that stolen materials will be missed, in none of the 18 documented cases mentioned earlier had the seized material been reported missing." At U.S. weapons labs and among the U.S. intelligence community, experts who have examined this issue largely agree. John Foster, a leading American bomb maker and former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, wrote a quarter century ago, "If the essential nuclear materials are at hand, it is possible to make an atomic bomb using information that is available in the open literature." 4 Similarly, Theodore Taylor, the nuclear physicist who designed America's smallest and largest atomic bombs, has repeatedly stated that, given fissile material, building a bomb is "very easy. Double underline. Very Easy." 4 Inquiring into such claims, then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) asked the major nuclear weapons laboratories whether they could make such a device if they had nuclear materials. All three laboratories answered affirmatively. The laboratories built a gun-type device using only components that were commercially available and without breaking a single U.S. law. The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, known as the Silberman-Robb Commission, reported in 2005 that the intelligence community believed Al Qaeda "probably had access to nuclear expertise and facilities and that there was a real possibility of the group developing a crude nuclear device." It went on to say that "fabrication of at least a 'crude' nuclear device was within Al Qaedas capabilities, if it could obtain fissile material."43 Skeptics argue that terrorists cannot replicate the effort of a multi-billion dollar nuclear program of a state. This claim does not distinguish between the difficulty of producing nuclear materials for a bomb (the most difficult threshold) and the difficulty of making a bomb once the material has been acquired. The latter is much easier. In the Iraq case, for example, the CIA noted that if Saddam Hussein had stolen or purchased nuclear materials from abroad, this would have cut the time Iraq needed to make a bomb from years to months.1 Moreover, terrorists do not require a state-of-the art weapon and delivery system, since for blowing up a single city a crude nuclear device would suffice. The grim reality of globalization's dark underbelly is that non-state actors are 38 increasingly capable of enacting the kind of lethal destruction heretofore the sole reserve of states. CLAIM 4: IT IS TOO DIFFICULT TO DELIVER A NUCLEAR DEVICE TO THE UNITED STATES. In the spring of 1946, J. Robert Oppenheimer was asked whether units of the atom bomb could be smuggled into New York and then detonated. He answered, "Of course it could be done, and people could destroy New York." As for how such a weapon smuggled in a crate or a suitcase might be detected, Oppenheimer opined, "with a screwdriver." He went on to explain that because the HEU in a nuclear weapon emits so few radioactive signals, a bomb disguised with readily available shielding would not be detected when inspectors opened the crates and examined the cargo.41 The nuclear weapon that terrorists would use in the first attack on the United States is far more likely to arrive in a cargo container than on the tip of a missile. In his appearance before a Senate subcommittee in March 2001, six months before 9/11, National Intelligence Officer Robert Walpole testified that "non-missile delivery means are less costly, easier to acquire, and more reliable and accurate."' 6 Citing the 1999-2003 U.S. Congressional Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction (the Gilmore Commission), Mueller states that transporting an improvised nuclear device would require overcoming "Herculean challenges."" He does not explain, however, why bringing a crude nuclear weapon into an American city would be materially different than the challenge faced by drug smugglers or human traffickers. According to the Government Accountability Organization, an average of 275 metric tons of cocaine have arrived in Mexico each year for transshipment to the United States since 2000. Reported seizures averaged about 36 tons a year, a 13 percent success rate for the intelligence and law enforcement community. Three million illegal immigrants enter the country each year, and only one in three gets caught."

Consensus of experts thinks Mueller’s wrong

Graham Allison 7, Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Professor of Government, and Faculty Chair of the Dubai Initiative – Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, “Symposium: Apocalypse When?”, The National Interest, November / December 2007, Lexis

MUELLER IS entitled to his opinion that the threat of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is "exaggerated" and "overwrought." But analysts of various political persuasions, in and out of government, are virtually unanimous in their judgment to the contrary. As the national-security community learned during the Cold War, risk = likelihood x consequences. Thus, even when the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon was small, the consequences were so catastrophic that prudent policymakers felt a categorical imperative to do everything that feasibly could be done to prevent that war. Today, a single nuclear bomb exploding in just one city would change our world. Given such consequences, differences between a 1 percent and a 20 percent likelihood of such an attack are relatively insignificant when considering how we should respond to the threat. Richard Garwin, a designer of the hydrogen bomb who Enrico Fermi once called "the only true genius I had ever met", told Congress in March that he estimated a "20 percent per year probability [of a nuclear explosion-not just a contaminated, dirty bomb-a nuclear explosion] with American cities and European cities included." My Harvard colleague Matthew Bunn has created a model in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science that estimates the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack over a ten-year period to be 29 percent-identical to the average estimate from a poll of security experts commissioned by Senator Richard Lugar in 2005. My book, Nuclear Terrorism, states my own best judgment that, on the current trend line, the chances of a nuclear terrorist attack in the next decade are greater than 50 percent. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry has expressed his own view that my work may even underestimate the risk. Warren Buffet, the world's most successful investor and legendary odds-maker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but catastrophic events, concluded that nuclear terrorism is "inevitable." He stated, "I don't see any way that it won't happen." To assess the threat one must answer five core questions: who, what, where, when and how? Who could be planning a nuclear terrorist attack? Al-Qaeda remains the leading candidate. According to the most recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Al-Qaeda has been substantially reconstituted-but with its leadership having moved from a medieval Afghanistan to Pakistan-a nation that actually has nuclear weapons. As former CIA Director George J. Tenet's memoir reports, Al-Qaeda's leadership has remained "singularly focused on acquiring WMDs" and that "the main threat is the nuclear one." Tenet concluded, "I am convinced that this is where [Osama bin Laden] and his operatives want to go." What nuclear weapons could terrorists use? A ready-made weapon from the arsenal of one of the nuclear-weapons states or an elementary nuclear bomb constructed from highly enriched uranium made by a state remain most likely. As John Foster, a leading U.S. bomb-maker and former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wrote a quarter of a century ago, "If the essential nuclear materials are at hand, it is possible to make an atomic bomb using information that is available in the open literature." Where could terrorists acquire a nuclear bomb? If a nuclear attack occurs, Russia will be the most likely source of the weapon or material. A close second, however, is North Korea, which now has ten bombs worth of plutonium, or Pakistan with sixty nuclear bombs. Finally, research reactors in forty developing and transitional countries still hold the essential ingredient for nuclear weapons. When could terrorists launch the first nuclear attack? If terrorists bought or stole a nuclear weapon in good working condition, they could explode it today. If terrorists acquired one hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium, they could make a working elementary nuclear bomb in less than a year. How could terrorists deliver a nuclear weapon to its target? In the same way that illegal items come to our cities every day. As one of my former colleagues has quipped, if you have any doubt about the ability of terrorists to deliver a weapon to an American target, remember: They could hide it in a bale of marijuana.

1NC---High Risk

Nuclear terrorism is feasible --- high risk of theft and attacks escalate

Vladimir Z. Dvorkin 12 Major General (retired), doctor of technical sciences, professor, and senior fellow at the Center for International Security of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Center participates in the working group of the U.S.-Russia Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism, 9/21/12, "What Can Destroy Strategic Stability: Nuclear Terrorism is a Real Threat," belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/22333/what_can_destroy_strategic_stability.html

Hundreds of scientific papers and reports have been published on nuclear terrorism. International conferences have been held on this threat with participation of Russian organizations, including IMEMO and the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies. Recommendations on how to combat the threat have been issued by the International Luxembourg Forum on Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe, Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, Russian-American Elbe Group, and other organizations. The UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism in 2005 and cooperation among intelligence services of leading states in this sphere is developing.¶ At the same time, these efforts fall short for a number of reasons, partly because various acts of nuclear terrorism are possible. Dispersal of radioactive material by detonation of conventional explosives (“dirty bombs”) is a method that is most accessible for terrorists. With the wide spread of radioactive sources, raw materials for such attacks have become much more accessible than weapons-useable nuclear material or nuclear weapons. The use of “dirty bombs” will not cause many immediate casualties, but it will result into long-term radioactive contamination, contributing to the spread of panic and socio-economic destabilization.¶ Severe consequences can be caused by sabotaging nuclear power plants, research reactors, and radioactive materials storage facilities. Large cities are especially vulnerable to such attacks. A large city may host dozens of research reactors with a nuclear power plant or a couple of spent nuclear fuel storage facilities and dozens of large radioactive materials storage facilities located nearby. The past few years have seen significant efforts made to enhance organizational and physical aspects of security at facilities, especially at nuclear power plants. Efforts have also been made to improve security culture. But these efforts do not preclude the possibility that well-trained terrorists may be able to penetrate nuclear facilities.¶ Some estimates show that sabotage of a research reactor in a metropolis may expose hundreds of thousands to high doses of radiation. A formidable part of the city would become uninhabitable for a long time.¶ Of all the scenarios, it is building an improvised nuclear device by terrorists that poses the maximum risk. There are no engineering problems that cannot be solved if terrorists decide to build a simple “gun-type” nuclear device. Information on the design of such devices, as well as implosion-type devices, is available in the public domain. It is the acquisition of weapons-grade uranium that presents the sole serious obstacle. Despite numerous preventive measures taken, we cannot rule out the possibility that such materials can be bought on the black market. Theft of weapons-grade uranium is also possible. Research reactor fuel is considered to be particularly vulnerable to theft, as it is scattered at sites in dozens of countries. There are about 100 research reactors in the world that run on weapons-grade uranium fuel, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).¶ A terrorist “gun-type” uranium bomb can have a yield of least 10-15 kt, which is comparable to the yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion of such a bomb in a modern metropolis can kill and wound hundreds of thousands and cause serious economic damage. There will also be long-term sociopsychological and political consequences.¶ The vast majority of states have introduced unprecedented security and surveillance measures at transportation and other large-scale public facilities after the terrorist attacks in the United States, Great Britain, Italy, and other countries. These measures have proved burdensome for the countries’ populations, but the public has accepted them as necessary. A nuclear terrorist attack will make the public accept further measures meant to enhance control even if these measures significantly restrict the democratic liberties they are accustomed to. Authoritarian states could be expected to adopt even more restrictive measures.¶ If a nuclear terrorist act occurs, nations will delegate tens of thousands of their secret services’ best personnel to investigate and attribute the attack. Radical Islamist groups are among those capable of such an act. We can imagine what would happen if they do so, given the anti-Muslim sentiments and resentment that conventional terrorist attacks by Islamists have generated in developed democratic countries. Mass deportation of the non-indigenous population and severe sanctions would follow such an attack in what will cause violent protests in the Muslim world. Series of armed clashing terrorist attacks may follow. The prediction that Samuel Huntington has made in his book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” may come true. Huntington’s book clearly demonstrates that it is not Islamic extremists that are the cause of the Western world’s problems. Rather there is a deep, intractable conflict that is rooted in the fault lines that run between Islam and Christianity. This is especially dangerous for Russia because these fault lines run across its territory. To sum it up, the political leadership of Russia has every reason to revise its list of factors that could undermine strategic stability. BMD does not deserve to be even last on that list because its effectiveness in repelling massive missile strikes will be extremely low. BMD systems can prove useful only if deployed to defend against launches of individual ballistic missiles or groups of such missiles. Prioritization of other destabilizing factors—that could affect global and regional stability—merits a separate study or studies. But even without them I can conclude that nuclear terrorism should be placed on top of the list. The threat of nuclear terrorism is real, and a successful nuclear terrorist attack would lead to a radical transformation of the global order. All of the threats on the revised list must become a subject of thorough studies by experts. States need to work hard to forge a common understanding of these threats and develop a strategy to combat them.

AT: Impact Critique

Their epistemology is incorrect---

Gregory D. Koblentz 11, Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs and Deputy Director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University, 2011, “Predicting Peril or the Peril of Prediction? Assessing the Risk of CBRN Terrorism,” Terrorism & Political Violence, Vol. 23, No. 4

Availability and Hindsight Bias’ — “think that it hasn’t happened yet, so it will never happen”

Discount Black Swans

Prefer our Author

Dear god Mcneal is just so much better than your authors

Gregory McNeal 13, Associate Professor of Law, Pepperdine University, 3/5/13, “Targeted Killing and Accountability,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1819583

To date scholars have lacked a thorough understanding of the U.S. government’s targeted killing practices. As such, their commentary is oftentimes premised on easily describable issues, and fails to grapple with the multiple levels of intergovernmental accountability present in current practice. When dealing with the theoretical and normative issues associated with targeted killings, scholars have failed to specify what they mean when they aver that targeted killings are unaccountable. Both trends have impeded legal theory, and constrained scholarly discourse on a matter of public import.

This article is a necessary corrective to the public and scholarly debate. It has presented the complex web of bureaucratic, legal, professional, and political accountability mechanisms that exert influence over the targeted killing process. It has demonstrated that many of the critiques of targeted killings rest upon poorly conceived understandings of the process, unclear definitions, and unsubstantiated speculation. The article’s reform recommendations, grounded in a deep understanding of the actual process, reflect an assumption that transparency, performance criteria, and politically grounded independent review can enhance the already robust accountability mechanisms embedded in current practice.

It’s the most comprehensive review of the process possible

Gregory McNeal 13, Associate Professor of Law, Pepperdine University, 3/5/13, “Targeted Killing and Accountability,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1819583

To overcome the lack of empirical evidence which plagues theoretical discourse regarding targeted killings, I conducted field research using proven qualitative research techniques employed by case study researchers.18 The results of that research are contained in Parts II and III of this article, which explain how targeted killings are conducted. Part II addresses how kill-lists are made and Part III addresses how targeted killings are executed. The case study began with a review of hundreds of pages of military policy memoranda, disclosures of government policies through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by NGOs and filings in court documents, public statements by military and intelligence officials, and descriptive accounts reported by the press and depicted in non-fiction books. I supplemented these findings by observing and reviewing aspects of the official training for individuals involved in targeted killings and by conducting confidential interviews with members of the military, special operations, and intelligence community who are involved in the targeted killing process. An earlier version of this article included citations to the confidential interviews, however every piece of information gathered in an interview has been substantiated by a publicly available source, obviating the need to cite to any individual interview. These research techniques resulted in a richly detailed depiction of the targeted killing process, the first of its kind to appear in any single publication. As such, these sections are quite lengthy, but the description is essential to legal theory as it is impossible to accurately critique on accountability grounds a process for which no empirical account exists.

Low-Level Militants Key

Targeting low-level militants is key to all aspects of counter-terror---in-depth network analysis means the people we target don’t seem important to observers, but they’re actually vital to the effectiveness of terror groups

Gregory McNeal 13, Associate Professor of Law, Pepperdine University, 3/5/13, “Targeted Killing and Accountability,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1819583

This becomes obvious when one considers that national security bureaucrats will look beyond criticality and vulnerability, and also engage in network-based analysis. Network-based analysis looks at terrorist groups as nodes connected by links, and assesses how components of that terrorist network operate together and independently of one another.143 Contrary to popular critiques of the targeting process that liken it to a “haphazardly prosecuted assassination program,” in reality modern targeting involves applying pressure to various nodes and links within networks to disrupt and degrade their functionality.144

To effectively pursue a network-based approach, bureaucrats rely in part on what is known as “pattern of life analysis” which involves “connecting the relationships between places and people by tracking their patterns of life.” This analysis draws on the interrelationships among groups “to determine the degree and points of their interdependence,” it assesses how activities are linked and looks to “determine the most effective way to influence or affect the enemy system.”145 While the enemy moves from point to point, reconnaissance or surveillance tracks and notes every location and person visited. Connections between the target, the sites they visit, and the persons they interact with are documented, built into a network diagram, and further analyzed.146 Through this process links and nodes in the enemy's network emerge.147 The analysis charts the “social, economic and political networks that underpin and support clandestine networks,”148 identifying key decision-makers and those who support or influence them indirectly.149 This may mean that analysts will track logistics and money trails, they may identify key facilitators and non-leadership persons of interests, and they will exploit human and signals intelligence combined with computerized knowledge integration that generates and cross-references thousands of data points to construct a comprehensive picture of the enemy network.150 “This analysis has the effect of taking a shadowy foe and revealing his physical infrastructure . . . as a result, the network becomes more visible and vulnerable, thus negating the enemy’s asymmetric advantage of denying a target.”151

Viewing targeting in this way demonstrates how seemingly low-level individuals such as couriers and other “middle-men” in decentralized networks such as al Qaeda are oftentimes critical to the successful functioning of the enemy organization.152 Targeting these individuals can “destabilize clandestine networks by compromising large sections of the organization, distancing operatives from direct guidance, and impeding organizational communication and function.”153 Moreover, because clandestine networks rely on social relationships to manage the trade-off between maintaining secrecy and security, attacking key nodes can have a detrimental impact on the enemy’s ability to conduct their operations.154 Thus, while some individuals may seem insignificant to the outside observer, when considered by a bureaucrat relying on network based analytical techniques, the elimination of a seemingly low level individual might have an important impact on an enemy organization. Moreover, because terrorist networks rely on secrecy in communication, individuals within those networks may forge strong ties that remain dormant for the purposes of operational security.155 This means that social ties that appear inactive or weak to a casual observer such as an NGO, human rights worker, journalist, or even a target’s family members may in fact be strong ties within the network.156 Furthermore, because terrorist networks oftentimes rely on social connections between charismatic leaders to function, disrupting those lines of communication can significantly impact those networks.157

Drones Key---General---2NC

Prefer our evidence---critics are wrong---drones are highly effective at CT, and don’t cause high civilian casualties or blowback

Alex Young 13, Associate Staff, Harvard International Review, 2/25/13, “A Defense of Drones,” Harvard International Review, http://hir.harvard.edu/a-defense-of-drones

The War on Terror is no longer a traditional conflict. The diffuse, decentralized nature of terrorist organizations had already made this an unconventional war; now, the use of unmanned aircraft has added another non-traditional layer. Conventional military strategies have failed in Iraq and Afghanistan: the United States has, in many cases, stopped sending people into combat, opting instead for airstrikes by unmanned aerial vehicles. Over the past decade, US military and intelligence agencies have expanded their use of unmanned Predator and Reaper drones; these robotic aircraft are generally used to carry out targeted strikes against known members of terrorist groups. US reliance on drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and other countries has changed the nature of the war on terror.

This strategy is not without controversy. The Obama administration’s heavy use of unmanned drones in the War on Terror has come under fire from a variety of opponents, including human rights groups, think tanks, and even foreign governments. Critics claim that drone strikes cause civilian casualties, incorrectly target only the most prominent leaders of terrorist groups, and create backlash against the US. To hear some tell it, the use of drones exacerbates, rather than solves, the problem of terrorism.

The reality is not so bleak: drones are very good at what they do. Unmanned attacks are highly effective when it comes to eliminating specific members of terrorist organizations, disrupting terrorist networks without creating too much collateral damage. Their effectiveness makes drone strikes a vital part of US counterterrorism strategy.

Predator and Reaper drones are not the indiscriminate civilian-killers that some make them out to be: strikes are targeted and selective. This has become increasingly true as drone technology has improved, and as the military has learned how best to use them. A confluence of factors has made drone strikes much better at eliminating enemy militants while avoiding civilians: drones now carry warheads that produce smaller blast radiuses, and the missiles carrying those warheads are guided using laser, millimeter-wave, and infrared seekers. The result has been less destructive drone strikes that reach their intended target more reliably. A number of non-technological shifts have also made drones a more useful tool: Peter Bergen, a national security analyst for CNN, summarized on July 13th, 2012 that more careful oversight, a deeper network of local informants, and better coordination between the US and Pakistani intelligence communities have also contributed to better accuracy. Data gathered by the Long War Journal indicates that the civilian casualty rate for 2012 and the beginning of 2013 is only 4.5 percent. Even Pakistani Major General Ghayur Mehmood acknowledges that, “most of the targets [of drone strikes] are hard-core militants.” Imprecise drone strikes that cause many civilian casualties are now a thing of the past. This improved accuracy may also help to mitigate anti-American sentiment that stems from civilian casualties.

Targeted killings play several irreplaceable functions in CT:

1) Leadership decapitation

a) Drones are key---militants can’t replace senior leaders

Patrick B. Johnston 13, Associate Political Scientist, RAND Corporation, and Anoop Sarbahi, postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, July 2013, “The Impact of U.S. Drone Strikes on Terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” http://patrickjohnston.info/materials/drones.pdf

We expect drone strikes that kill terrorist leaders will be associated with reductions in terrorist attacks. Previous research convincingly demonstrates that conducting effective terrorist attacks requires skilled individuals, many of whom are well-educated and come from upper middle- class backgrounds. 21 Indeed, captured documents containing detailed biographical data on foreign al Qa’ida militants in Iraq illustrate that among the foreign terrorists—who are conventionally known to be more sophisticated than local fighters—their most commonly listed “occupation” prior to arriving in Iraq was that of “student.” For militants for whom information on “experience” was available, “computers” was the most commonly listed experience type, just ahead of “weapons.”22

In the context of northwest Pakistan, where militant freedom of movement is limited by the threat of drone strikes, we expect that militant groups will be unable to replace senior leaders killed in drone strikes because recruiting and deploying them, perhaps from a foreign country with a Salafi jihadist base, will be costly and difficult. This is not to say that leaders killed in drone strikes are irreplaceable. On the contrary, other militants are likely to be elevated within their organization to replace them. But we also anticipate that those elevated to replace killed leaders will be, on average, of lower quality to the organization than their predecessors. Thus, we predict that the loss of leaders will be associated with the degradation of terrorists’ ability to produce violence. This logic implies Hypothesis 3:

H3: All else equal, drone strikes that kill one or mor e terrorist leader(s) will lead to a decrease in terrorist violence.

b) Data supports our decapitation args

Patrick B. Johnston 13, Associate Political Scientist, RAND Corporation, and Anoop Sarbahi, postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, July 2013, “The Impact of U.S. Drone Strikes on Terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” http://patrickjohnston.info/materials/drones.pdf

Given that killing terrorist leaders or HVIs in terrorist organizations is the purpose of drone strikes, we evaluate whether patterns of militant attacks differ following strikes in which a militant leader was killed. Table 3 provides tests of Hypotheses 3 and 4 against the four metrics of militant violence examined here using the same 2FESL specifications as in table 2. The results are largely consistent with Hypothesis 3—that killing militant leaders is associated with decreased violence. There is little support for Hypothesis 4, that killing HVIs has counterproductive effects on violence. Controlling for the number of drone strikes per agency-week, the first column of table 3 shows that drone strikes that kill a HVI are associated with reductions in the number of militant incidents that occur. This result is statistically significant at the one-percent level. There is, however, weaker evidence that HVI removals reduce militant lethality and IED attacks.45

Overall, the evidence is somewhat consistent with the argument that individuals matter for a terrorist organization’s ability to produce violence at sustained rates. Along with other evidence from macro-level studies of leadership decapitation, the present results suggest that critics who argue against the efficacy of removing key figures may be overemphasizing the extent to which such individuals can be readily replaced.46

2) Signaling resolve

a) Drones are key to effective power projection and demonstrations of resolve---both key to global counter-terrorism

Jacqueline L. Hazelton 13, visiting professor in the University of Rochester Department of Political Science and was previously a research fellow at the Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School, Winter-Spring 2013, “Drones: What Are They Good For?,” Parameters, Vol. 42.4/43.1

Drones, like other air and sea platforms, are a form of power projection. They give the United States the ability to mount tactical assaults without necessarily putting US personnel directly in harm’s way, potentially evoking domestic opposition. They also allow the United States to avoid putting its forces in foreign territory, potentially eliciting a nationalistic response. Drones are similar to Special Forces in their direct targeting ability, but they can reach remote locations and, again, do not place US troops directly in peril. Nevertheless, drone strikes do require cooperation by individuals and states on the ground. The United States needs, for example, basing rights, agreements to host launch and recovery personnel and search-and-rescue teams, and overflight permissions.7

A significant concern raised in the public debate is that drones make killing too easy. This is a critical issue that connects to questions about US grand strategy and whether drones encourage imperial overreach.8 But because the United States uses a variety of tools to conduct targeted killings—from the Special Forces raid on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani compound to the missile strike on Dora Farms, where Saddam Hussein and his sons were believed to be sheltering early in the Iraq War—I suggest there is more to gain analytically by first focusing on understanding the tactic, that is, what targeted killing may and may not achieve as a foreign policy tool, then addressing concerns specific to the platform.9

The second core question pertains to the strategic utility of drone strikes for a state. What political goals can drone strikes achieve? In considering this question, I use a theoretical prism that identifies the fundamental political goals of the state’s use of force to defend, deter, compel, and, sometimes, swagger.10

It is possible to consider targeted killings, specifically those conducted by drones, as an element in a defensive strategy. This strategy would be intended to ward off attack and reduce possible damage by killing leaders and facilitators plotting violence against the United States, and disrupting their operations. It is also possible to argue targeted killings deter future attacks by denying armed groups the capability to conduct those attacks, and punishing those planning violence against the United States and its interests. The deterrence-by-denial argument requires consideration not only of targeted killings but also drone strikes to directly degrade targeted groups’ capabilities in other ways (e.g., cause equipment and supply shortages, operational and strategic paralysis, and disruption of operations).

Drone strikes in this analysis might also deter cooperation with a group based on fear or doubt about the group’s likely success.11 It is harder to argue that targeted killings might exercise a compelling effect by threatening greater pain if the targeted organization does not change its behavior.12 Successful compellence requires displaying to the adversary the will and capability to cause terrible pain if the adversary does not change its behavior. The ethical and legal context of drone use by the United States make it unlikely at first glance that policymakers would choose to use drone strikes to cause pain to an adversary by deliberately targeting innocents. In terms of causing pain to the adversary directly, the death or threat of death to a plotter is an organization’s cost of doing business, not a taste of suffering to come if it does not change its behavior.13

There are several other possible strategic effects of drone strikes. Swaggering, here displaying US military power and its seemingly effortless global reach, arguably demonstrates resolve, a quality that has been underlined as an element of US counterterrorism policy.14 Drone strikes can also be seen as the straightforward use of brute force to destroy those who would threaten the United States or its allies.15 In addition, they are an alliance tool supporting other states, such as Yemen and Pakistan.

b) Signaling resolve’s key to deterrence

Gabriella Blum 10, Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, and Philip Heymann, the James Barr Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, June 27, 2010, “Law and Policy of Targeted Killing,” Harvard National Security Journal, http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Vol-1_Blum-Heymann_Final.pdf

At the most basic level, targeted killings, which are generally undertaken with less risk to the attacking force than are arrest operations, may be effective. According to some reports, the killing of leaders of Palestinian armed groups weakened the will and ability of these groups to execute suicide attacks against Israelis. By deterring the leaders of terrorist organizations and creating in some cases a structural vacuum, waves of targeted killing operations were followed by a lull in subsequent terrorist attacks, and in some instances, brought the leaders of Palestinian factions to call for a ceasefire. The Obama administration embraced the targeted killing tactic, holding it to be the most effective way to get at Al-Qaeda and Taliban members in the ungoverned and ungovernable tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border or in third countries.

Despite the adverse effects such operations may have on the attitudes of the local population toward the country employing targeted killings, the demonstration of superiority in force and resolve may also dishearten the supporters of terrorism.

Publicly acknowledged targeted killings are furthermore an effective way of appeasing domestic audiences, who expect the government “to do something” when they are attacked by terrorists. The visibility and open aggression of the operation delivers a clearer message of “cracking down on terrorism” than covert or preventive measures that do not yield immediate demonstrable results. The result in Israel has been to make a vast majority of citizens supportive of targeted killings, despite the latter’s potential adverse effects. And, perhaps surprisingly, of all the coercive counterterrorism techniques employed by the United States, targeted killings have so far attracted the least public criticism.

3) Drones have psychological and operational impacts on terror organizations---makes them unable to carry out plots

Stratfor 12 – Strategic Forecasting, global intelligence firm, 1/12/12, “Armed UAV Operations 10 Years On,” http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/armed-uav-operations-10-years

One of the most notable uses of the Predator and Reaper has been in the counterterrorism role, both as an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platform and as an on-call strike platform. These armed UAVs are operated both by the U.S. Air Force and, in some cases (as with operations conducted over Pakistan), the CIA. Even before the 9/11 attacks, the armed Predator then in development was being considered as a means not only of keeping tabs on Osama bin Laden but also of killing him. Since then, armed UAVs have proved their worth both in the offensive strike role against specific targets and as a means of maintaining a constant level of threat.

The value of the counterterrorism ISR that can be collected by large UAVs alone is limited since so much depends on how and where they are deployed and what they are looking for. This mission requires not only sophisticated signals but also actionable human intelligence. But as a front-line element of a larger, integrated collection strategy, the armed UAV has proved to be a viable and enduring element of the U.S. counterterrorism strategy worldwide.

The ability to loiter is central and has a value far beyond the physical capabilities of a single airframe in a specific orbit. Operating higher than helicopters and with a lower signature than manned, jet-powered fighter aircraft, the UAV is neither visibly nor audibly obvious (though the degree of inconspicuousness depends on, among other things, weather and altitude). Because UAVs are so discreet, potential targets must work under the assumption that an armed UAV is orbiting within striking distance at all times.

Such a constant threat can place considerable psychological pressure on the prey, even when the predator is large and loud. During the two battles of Fallujah, Iraq, in April and November 2004, AC-130 gunships proved particularly devastating for insurgents pinned in certain quadrants of the city, but AC-130s were limited in number and availability. When it was not possible to keep an AC-130 on station at night (in order to keep the insurgents' heads down), unarmed C-130 transports were flown in the same orbits at altitudes where the distinctive sound of a C-130 could be clearly discerned on the ground, thus maintaining the perception of a possible AC-130 reprisal against any insurgent offensive.

Indeed, it is difficult to overstate the psychological and operational impact of this tactic on a group that experiences successful strikes on its members, even if the strikes are conducted only rarely. Counterterrorism targets in areas where UAVs are known to operate must work under tight communications discipline and constraints, since having their cellular or satellite phone conversations tapped risks not only penetration of communications but immediate and potentially lethal attacks.

The UAV threat was hardly the only factor, but consider how Osama bin Laden's communiques declined from comparatively regular and timely videos to rare audiotapes. In 2001, bin Laden was operating with immense freedom of maneuver and impunity despite the manhunt already under way for him. That situation changed even as he fled to Pakistan, and the combination of aggressive signals as well as UAV- and space-based ISR efforts further constrained his operational bandwidth and relevance as he was forced to focus more and more on his own personal survival.

The UAV threat affects not only the targeted individuals themselves but also their entire organizations. When the failure to adhere to security protocols can immediately yield lethal results, the natural response is to constrict communications and cease contact with untrusted allies, affiliates and subordinates. When the minutiae of security protocols start to matter, the standard for having full faith, trust and confidence among those belonging to or connected with a terrorist organization become much higher. And the more that organization's survival is at stake, the more it must focus on survival, thereby reducing its capacity to engage in ambitious operations. On a deeper level, there is also the value of sowing distrust and paranoia within an organization. This has the same ultimate effect of increasing internal distrust and thereby undermining the spare capacity for the pursuit of larger, external objectives.

Drones are highly effective in CT

Alex Young 13, Associate Staff, Harvard International Review, 2/25/13, “A Defense of Drones,” Harvard International Review, http://hir.harvard.edu/a-defense-of-drones

The Obama Administration shows no signs of slowing down its drone war. A drone strike killed two prominent Al Qaeda members in South Waziristan on January 3rd, and four more on January 10th. Contrary to common criticisms of drone warfare, though, this continued use of unmanned airstrikes is absolutely a good course of action from the CIA and the White House. Drone warfare has proved to be a step forward, not backward, in the United States’ struggle to subdue international terrorist organizations. Unmanned airstrikes are highly accurate and effective at disrupting terrorism; drones are and must remain an integral part of the War on Terror.

Case

1NR

Alternatives

The state will not give up violence

Amitai Etzioni 12, senior advisor to the Carter White House; taught at Columbia University, Harvard and The University of California at Berkeley; and is a university professor and professor of international relations at The George Washington University, 4/2/12, “In Defense of Drones,” http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/defense-drones-6715

In short, we all share the vision of a world in which swords will be turned in ploughshares, and we shall know war no more. We would surely rather use drones to find missing children or lost skiers than to kill anyone. However, if fight we must, especially in places in which the terrain and the sociology is as unforgiving as it is in the areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan—drones are the best tool du jour, bar none.

Signature strikes

Targeted killings are strikes carried about against pre-meditated, individually designated targets---signature strikes are distinct

Kenneth Anderson 11, Professor at Washington College of Law, American University, Hoover Institution visiting fellow, Non-Resident Visiting Fellow at Brookings, “Distinguishing High Value Targeted Killing and ‘Signature’ Attacks on Taliban Fighters,” August 29 2011, http://www.volokh.com/2011/08/29/distinguishing-high-value-targeted-killing-and-signature-attacks-on-taliban-fighters/

From the US standpoint, it is partly that it does not depend as much as it did on Pakistan’s intelligence. But it is also partly, as a couple of well-publicized incidents a few months ago made clear, that sharing targeting decisions with Pakistan’s military and ISI runs a very considerable possibility of having the targets tipped off (as even The Onion has observed). The article notes in this regard, the U.S. worries that “if they tell the Pakistanis that a drone strike is coming someone within Pakistani intelligence could tip off the intended target.” However, the Journal’s reporting goes from there to emphasize an aspect of targeted killing and drone warfare that is not sufficiently appreciated in public discussions trying to assess such issues as civilian collateral damage, strategic value and uses, and the uses of drones in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency as distinct activities. The article explains:¶ The CIA carries out two different types of drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan—those against so-called high-value targets, including Mr. Rahman, and “signature” strikes targeting Taliban foot-soldiers who criss-cross the border with Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces there.¶ High-value targets are added to a classified list that the CIA maintains and updates. The agency often doesn’t know the names of the signature targets, but it tracks their movements and activities for hours or days before striking them, U.S. officials say.¶ Another way to put this is that, loosely speaking, the high value targets are part of a counterterrorism campaign – a worldwide one, reaching these days to Yemen and other places. It is targeted killing in its strict sense using drones – aimed at a distinct individual who has been identified by intelligence. The “signature” strikes, by contrast, are not strictly speaking “targeted killing,” because they are aimed at larger numbers of fighters who are targeted on the basis of being combatants, but not on the basis of individuated intelligence

MARKED

. They are fighting formations, being targeted on a mass basis as part of the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, as part of the basic CI doctrine of closing down cross-border safe havens and border interdiction of fighters. Both of these functions can be, and are, carried out by drones – though each strategic function could be carried out by other means, such as SEAL 6 or CIA human teams, in the case of targeted killing, or manned aircraft in the case of attacks on Taliban formations. The fundamental point is that they serve distinct strategic purposes. Targeted killing is not synonymous with drone warfare, just as counterterrorism is analytically distinct from counterinsurgency. (I discuss this in the opening sections of this draft chapter on SSRN.)¶ This analytic point affects how one sees the levels of drone attacks going up or down over the years. Neither the total numbers of fighters killed nor the total number of drone strikes – going up or down over months – tells the whole story. Total numbers do not distinguish between the high value targets, being targeted as part of the top down dismantling of Al Qaeda as a transnational terrorist organization, on the one hand, and ordinary Taliban being killed in much larger numbers as part of counterinsurgency activities essentially part of the ground war in Afghanistan, on the other. Yet the distinction is crucial insofar as the two activities are, at the level of truly grand strategy, in support of each other – the war in Afghanistan and the global counterterrorism war both in support of the AUMF and US national security broadly – but at the level of ordinary strategic concerns, quite distinct in their requirements and conduct. If targeted killing against AQ leadership goes well in Pakistan, those might diminish at some point in the future; what happens in the war against the Afghan Taliban is distinct and has its own rhythm, and in that effort, drones are simply another form of air weapon, an alternative to manned aircraft in an overt, conventional war. Rising or falling numbers of drone strikes in the aggregate will not tell one very much without knowing what mission is at issue.