Inhuman Weapons: Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles and the Moral Salience of Culture to Their Use in Central Asia

Just war literature largely rejects asymmetry of military capability between combatants as a valid moral ground for prohibiting the use of lethal uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) in combat. In this chapter, I apply Richard Miller’s “ethics of ordinary life” to defend the ethical salience of the “asymmetry objection.” Miller’s “ethics of ordinary life” foregrounds insights from cultural studies and ethnography, as well as the particularities of lived religion and local custom to qualify abstract concepts and widely held moral norms. Following an “ethics of ordinary life” approach, I examine the deployment of lethal UAVs in support of counterinsurgency efforts in Pashtun dominated regions of Afghanistan. I argue that the asymmetry objection gains force in this context because UAV use insulates operators from any battlefield risks, violating Pashtun conceptions of honorable combat to such a degree that it undermines the legitimacy of counterinsurgency operations. More than an affront to Pashtun values, the centrality of legitimacy to successful counterinsurgency operations means that UAV use in this context makes it impossible to satisfy the just war criterion of “reasonable chance of success,” calling into question the moral permissibility of deploying lethal UAVs in this theater of war and highlighting the importance of cultural knowledge to ethical inquiry in general.