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Don't TNT Me, BroThe moral logic of suicide bombing.

By William SaletanPosted Monday, April 28, 2008, at 8:38 AM ET

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Are suicide bombings increasing around the world? If so, why? What can we do about it?

The latest warning sign comes from data reported a week ago by Robin Wright of the Washington Post:

Suicide bombers conducted 658 attacks around the world last year … more than double the number in any of the past 25 years … More than four-fifths of the suicide bombings over that period have occurred in the past seven years, the data show. The bombings have spread to dozens of countries on five continents, killed more than 21,350 people and injured about 50,000 since 1983 … [S]ince 1983, bombers in more than 50 groups from Argentina to Algeria, Croatia to China and India to Indonesia have adapted car bombs to make explosive belts, vests, toys, motorcycles, bikes, boats, backpacks and false-pregnancy stomachs. Of 1,840 incidents in the past 25 years, more than 86 percent have occurred since 2001, and the highest annual numbers have occurred in the past four years.

To make sense of these numbers, we need to understand how they connect to recent developments in military technology. If you follow the daily Human Nature News updates, you've seen several such developments over the past month. Here's a short list:

1. U.S. commanders are seeking authority to launch drone attacks on Pakistani militants.

2. A Georgian drone was shot down by Russia, but not before relaying video that identified the aircraft that had fired on it.

3. The U.S. military has launched an initiative to regenerate lost body parts.

4. The United States is developing walking military robots.

5. Scientists are learning how to remotely detect explosives using chemicals.

6. We're developing a way to detect bombs by tethering animals to robots.

How do these developments fit together? What do they mean? They fit into a framework I sketched two years ago and updated last fall. Here are some of its key concepts:

1. Morality is expensive. It's easier to destroy things than to preserve or build them. It's even easier when you don't care whom you kill. In Iraq, a major purpose of suicide bombings and "improvised explosive devices" has been to kill enough Americans with enough regularity to make the public demand that our troops come home. The bombers have the edge because they care less about death than we do.

2. Machines are crucial to defeating terrorism. The main advantage of machines isn't that they're brilliant. It's that they don't bleed. We can't stand death, so we replace our soldiers with lifeless proxies. Nobody demands a pullout because some bomb-defusing gizmo got blown up in Baghdad today. And in general, the ideal mode of warfare is hunting our enemies in their own territory at little or no risk to ourselves.

3. Machines are still primitive. The process of engineering machines to see and move the way we do is moving along slowly. In the case of IEDs, the United States has found that humans, particularly those who have hunting experience, are more agile and discerning.

4. Machines can be combined with animals. Animals have the agility and sensory precision that machines lack. Animals have hunting experience. Animals, like machines, are regarded as morally expendable. That's why the military has explored remote control of IED-sniffing dogs through radio receivers attached to their collars.

Here's how this framework makes sense of the current news reports. First, the United States wants to use drones against Pakistani militants because it's too politically dangerous at home and in Pakistan to have our troops doing the dirty work on the ground. We need to operate from a safe distance.

Second, as the Georgian case illustrates, there are going to be a lot of drone shoot-downs in the years ahead. Shoot down a plane with a live pilot in it, and you risk war. Shoot down a drone piloted by some guy in a remote booth, and the worst you risk, probably, is condemnation. But don't expect to get away with it completely: Video-equipped drones, unlike people, can incriminate you even as you kill them.

Third, the United States is trying to reduce its fatalities and casualties in every possible way. Military medicine is already saving the lives of soldiers who would have died in previous conflicts. Yesterday's death is today's wound. Now, with tissue regeneration, we're raising the ante: Today's "permanent" wound will be tomorrow's bad memory.

Fourth, we're trying to insulate American soldiers altogether by developing robots to absorb risks previously shouldered by troops. Likewise, we're mechanizing bomb detection.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker. Photograph of suicide-bombing aftermath on the Slate home page by Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images.

COMMENTS

Notes from the Fray Editor

Here's time-saving: a post called "Where does not invading Iraq enter into Saletan's calculus", from the estimable Dilan Esper, and one called "the use of animals in war is immoral" from thedog: so you know where to look for those particular arguments. The first post below led to a long thread on the ethics of war, as did this post.

Comments from the Fray

1. The strategic and tactical value of IED's is not killing American soldiers, per se. It's in exponentially increasing the financial costs associated with maintaining logistics and supply. Roads have to be traveled in convoys, vehicles are disabled and wounded have to be evacuated, helicopters have to be used for valuable payloads and VIPs. That's the real value of the IED's--that's a large part of the reason it's now costing about $3 billion a week to operate there. Killing the soldiers is incidental--wounding them is what costs.

2. Drones and even most laser guided ordnance [are] great at hitting a prescribed spot. They are terrible at actually identifying who happens to be on that spot. In that sense, the suicide bomber, contrary to the car bomb, is actually a theoretically more moral weapon because the targeting software--the brain and eyes of the bomber--are able to accurately discern his target and identify them. Now, if the bomber is interested in killing only civilians, a car bomb would do just as well. Suicide bombers are tactically more useful only when you want to reduce collateral damage by ensuring who's around when it goes off and who isn't. Now, they don't always let it work out that way and civilians do die in suicide bombings, But I'd wager that the collateral damage ratio is actually smaller with a suicide bomber than it is with either drone directed or laser guided munitions.

3. You fail to note the mismatch in life values. You use the term "morality" as though we equally value Iraqi civilian lives as well as our own. That's nonsense. Coalition rules of engagement are all about force protection. We're willing to use remote devices precisely because we're willing to incur much higher levels of Iraqi civilian deaths than US soldier deaths. That's not morality as far as I understand the term. It's more convenience.

--doodahman

(To reply, click here)

Just put yourself into the shoes of someone who has been wronged (real or perceived) by the US, or any other country that has a modern military. How are you going to avenge the death of your baby brother, your hard-working, studiously unpolitical father, your loving mother? It is simple. If you decide to take up arms against the US, you will die. It may take a day, it may take a year, perhaps 5. The survival rate of insurgents against the US is very, very small. So when you decide to take a stand against overwhelming force, you have decided to commit suicide. It then becomes simply a matter of which way you can inflict the most damage on your opponent. Asymmetric warfare breeds suicide attacks. The better US military technology gets, the more rational suicide attacks become. The more complete the enemy's hold is, the more acceptable a "scorched earth" tactic becomes. The perfectly logical desire to reduce US casualties may be the main reason why US military power is counterproductive to US policy.

--endorendil

(To reply, click here)

Not really the heart of the article, but I think it deserves some thought anyways. When deciding if someone's actions are "rational," from whose perspective are we deciding this? Everything anyone does is rational according to their current state of mind. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. That doesn't mean I would think what they did was rational. But who gets to judge? It's similar to when economists try to say that people's decisions are not always rational, but it is only because the economists' model is too simple to model human behavior. It's irrational according to the economic model but rational according to the person's own point of view.

--Firstinlastout

(To reply, click here)

(4/30)

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