Raymond Kuo, PhD, an assistant professor of political science who joined Fordham in September, focuses his scholarship on international relations, with a focus on security and grand strategy. Before working in academia, Kuo worked for the National Democratic Institute as a program officer overseeing political party development projects in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa. He also worked for the United Nations and the Democratic Progressive Party of Taiwan as a foreign policy analyst and organizational strategist.

We asked Kuo to share his thoughts on what The Intercept‘s findings mean for the U.S. drone program.

Fordham News: The first drone was used by the U.S. military in 2000. Why hasn’t the targeting technology improved much?

Kuo: The technology has definitely improved since 2000. In addition to arming the MQ-1 Predator (the drone we commonly associate with these strikes) with Hellfire missiles, the U.S. has upgraded its sensor and targeting platforms. But the U.S. military has stopped acquiring Predators and is focusing more on the MQ-9 Reaper, its bigger, badder cousin. It is significantly faster and larger, able to carry a larger payload, and has a substantially longer operational range and loiter time (i.e. the time it can monitor an area before it has to refuel).

However, we could think that unintended civilian deaths or “collateral damage” are a sign that the program needs improvement. But the issue is not technology, but targeting: Are we hitting the right people and avoiding killing innocent bystanders? And that requires good intelligence. The MQ-9 and other strike vehicles have impressive signals intelligence collection capabilities. However, human intelligence is just as, if not more, important in effective targeting.

But developing human intelligence is not easy nor cheap. The U.S. would either need boots on the ground or rely upon local governments and informants to provide us the targeting information, which they may not have or may not be equipped to acquire.

You should always evaluate policy in comparison to other alternatives, never in isolation. Are we as Americans willing to pay the cost of a more accurate, but costly and assertive strategy? If not, are we willing to walk away and let terrorist networks potentially grow in power and membership? If we decide that the drone program is the best way to balance these costs and benefits, then we need a clear understanding of its actual effects, as I’ll address in the next question.

FN: Aside from more accurate intelligence, and stealth technology, despite the Intercept’s report, and the ongoing protests against the usage of drones, will the U.S. stop using them?

Kuo: The short answer is no. The U.S. will continue to use drones in battlefields or countries where it has already established air superiority (either militarily or through agreement with a host government) and does NOT want to commit troops in a direct combat role.

But the deeper answer is no, the U.S. will continue the program because it seems to work. Both the Pakistani Defense Ministry and the U.S. Army War College claim that a relatively small number of civilians have been killed by the strikes. Somewhere around 3-4 percent of those killed are civilians. Now, the Intercept is correct that America’s targeting rules are far too loose. The “signature strike” policy – where we target people simply because they are male and seem to be of a certain age group – is counterproductive and ultimately harmful to our interests.

Moreover, overall the program seems fairly successful, at least in Pakistan. C. Christine Fair of Georgetown University has described how locals in that country’s tribal areas come outside when they hear drones overhead. They consider the drones to be accurate and generally targeting foreign fighters, allowing them to reassert control over their villages and get on with their lives.

So the policy is widely popular in the Pakistani districts in which it operates. Christopher Swift makes a similar finding in Yemen, and I would hope that other operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula are also successful. However, the program has created enormous public backlash within the wider Pakistani public. This is a significant strategic headache for the U.S., but one which I think can be partially addressed, as I’ll discuss later.

FN: If we schedule a drone strike and it doesn’t achieve its goal, and/or kills innocent civilians, it’s not surprising if it inspires new recruits for ISIS and the like. Why doesn’t that change our tactic? Are ‘boots on the ground’ just that much less well received by the American public? [Ed. It was announced on Oct. 30 that the U.S. will be sending special ops troops to Syria.]

Kuo: Any civilian deaths in war are tragic, particularly among the wounded and children. But it’s also important to note that civilian casualties are completely allowed under the laws of war. They cannot be intentional or directly targeted, however. So if the deaths are truly accidental, the result of bad intelligence, poor targeting, or some other factor, it’s a horrible situation but they are still legally and even morally allowed. Military necessity – the desire to bring a conflict to a close sooner and potentially save even more lives – unfortunately means that civilians can be caught in the crossfire. Effective militaries want to minimize that as much as possible, but recognize that innocent deaths may occur in the course of their duties.

But you ask a deeper question about the strategic effects of strikes. Do they cause more harm than good? Preliminary results from my research suggest that strikes actually stabilize the areas in which they fall, so long as we kill the right people. The opponents of the program are correct if we only concern ourselves with “regular” militants. For each one the U.S. has killed in Pakistan, 47 civilians leave their districts, suggesting that they are moving for safer or better prospects elsewhere. However, killing a militant leader acts as an enormous brake on this outward migration. Over 1,100 people stay in their districts for each leader killed. And finally, killing a civilian means that 98 people want to stay. That is, the public seems willing to absorb a certain degree of innocent deaths so that the program can achieve its objectives.

Again, these are preliminary results, and I’m still subjecting the data to more tests. But I should note that the region of Pakistan where the numbers are drawn from is an active conflict area. The U.S. doesn’t have a military presence there, and it’s difficult for journalists to make their reports. So the numbers that organizations like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (one of the sources the Intercept report relied upon) receives come from the people on the ground. In other words, the militants themselves. So even using their numbers, we’re still seeing evidence suggesting the drone program is having a positive effect overall.

FN: Is it possible that our drone strategy would change if a Republican president were to take office in 2016?

Kuo: Drones have been used under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. I actually don’t think the party in office matters too much to the drone program per se. The operations are in place because they are a relatively cheap option which seem to achieve some of their goals while preventing American casualties. If a more aggressive or militaristic president or Congress emerges, I suspect they’ll commit actual troops to these battlefields, rather than rely upon drones as the primary intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and strike vehicles.

But as I mentioned earlier, the program does have a substantial political drawback: It engenders extreme dislike in the wider public. But we should keep in mind that drones – for all the terror and awe they may induce – are actually pretty weak combat platforms. The Predator was originally designed as a surveillance and reconnaissance platform. Drones in general are relatively slow and unmaneuverable, which you want since they will be loitering over an area. But even a minimally competent air force or air defense network could swat them out of the sky. Drones can only operate where the U.S. has air superiority, typically by reaching an agreement with the host government.

And it is those individuals who need to take more responsibility for the program. In Pakistan and Yemen at least, the U.S. operates with the consent and even active (though hidden) support of the government. As an illustration, consider that in 2008, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani reportedly stated “I don’t care if they (the Americans) do it (the drone program) as long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.” There are even suggestions that the program has been manipulated by these groups to selectively strike at political enemies, rather than target all insurgents.

So host governments have been playing both sides: protesting against the strikes, even urging their people to do so, while secretly pushing for more drone operations. That is pure political cowardice, but it also makes political sense given the incentives these politicians face. So if (and that’s a big if) this is an important enough issue, the U.S. needs to push these individuals to be open about their decisions to deal with the general public backlash against strikes.

Learn more about, and contact, Kuo on his website.

On Thursday night, Philip Gourevitch told an audience of nearly 120 Fordham students at the McGinley Ballroom on the Rose Hill campus that the speech was part a deliberate plan by the Bush Administration.

The idea, Gourevitch said, was to change the conflict from one in which people captured by the American military were called prisoners of war to another in which they were called detainees.

The Geneva Conventions mandate that a nation must treat prisoners of war humanely, but may be rougher with spies and saboteurs, a label which Gourevitch said the administration simply affixed to everyone they arrested after May 1.

The decision to exploit this loophole is one of the reasons why American soldiers were told to torture Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.

“Inside that speech was a kind of legal pivot from one kind of war to another kind of war—a kind of war that we never quite admitted openly was the new structure, but which was immediately seen as being in effect,” said Gourevitch, whose book Standard Operating Procedure (Penguin Press, 2008) is based on interviews with the soldiers who appeared in photographs showing the abuse.

Earlier in the day, Gourevitch, editor of The Paris Review and a staff writer for The New Yorker, discussed the overriding theme of his work with a panel of Fordham professors at the McNally Amphitheatre on the Lincoln Center Campus. His appearence was sponsored by the Fordham Campus Activities Board’s American Age Lecture Series and the American Studies department.

Like Standard Operating Procedure, his book We Wish To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (Picador, 1999) addressed what he called his fascination with false stories that Americans tell about themselves.

Most Americans would tell themselves that they would never force naked men to form a human pyramid, or drag them around on dog leashes. But Gourevitch noted that history tells a different story.

After the genocidal rampage that took the lives of at least 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, the refrain of “Never Again” was repeated, even as similar events were unfolding in Serbia, and continue today in the Darfur region of Sudan.

“In the case of Abu Ghraib, we collectively vilified all the people who appeared in the photographs. Even if we knew that these things seemed to be somehow connected to American policy, the idea was, ‘Those guys were scum, and I would never do that,’” he said. “Yet the history of the world tells us that the great mass of people do these things, that the people who actually behave well when the pressure comes down are comparatively few.”

He did not defend the actions of the soldiers, but suggested that Americans delude themselves by refusing to identify with them.

“In the name of giving ourselves a sense of security, we’re placing ourselves in more dangerous positions politically, morally and practically, by blinding ourselves to a certain kind of reality,” he said.

“It is absolute, arrant nonsense that everything is new and that the world is far more dangerous than it was prior to September 11,” Owen said. “In 1962 we had nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them in Cuba. We know now that invading Cuba would have triggered a nuclear attack, because the [Cuban and Soviet] forces there were inadequate. Nuclear war was averted because President Kennedy ignored the advice of his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, to invade Cuba.”

Owen, a neurologist who went into politics in 1966, is the former European Union co-chairman of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia. In a lecture that covered the intertwined histories of conflict and humanitarian intervention since World War II, he told IDHA students and faculty that “America is a pretty crucial country,” when it comes to humanitarian intervention, and that he fears the war in Iraq is forcing Washington to shift away from foreign policy based on moral considerations.

“We no longer have ‘humanitarian intervention,’ but ‘liberal intervention,’ he said. “It will be hard to get the United States involved in humanitarian interventions outside its immediate sphere of influence, Latin America.”

As a member of Parliament for 26 years, Owen served as navy minister, health minister and foreign secretary under Labour governments. He has served on a number of independent commissions, including the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, and the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Armed Conflict.

The month long IDHA program trains aid workers and their organizations to function more effectively in times of war or natural disaster. The highly intensive, multidisciplinary course simulates a humanitarian crisis, and includes lectures, workshops and field experiences, 10 to 12 hours daily, up to six days a week. It is run by the University’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs.

In discussing “The Role of Economics in the Political Arena,” Krugman told the audience that filled McNally Amphitheatre that the president’s plan is too risky, shifting the nation’s fiscal safety net for retirees from a guaranteed payment to an expectation based on stock market performance.

Currently, the average retiree receives annual social-security payments equal to 35 percent  of their income at retirement. Under the private-account proposal expected from Pres. Bush, that guaranteed payment could drop as low as 8 percent for those people who shifted the maximum contribution into a private account.

Krugman admits that social security has financial problems, but the situation is not dire, he said. What many people don’t realize is that the Congressional Budget Office has calculated that social security will be able to pay full guaranteed benefits through 2052, at which point benefits would be reduced to 81 percent. Krugman said it’s possible that a few technical adjustments could address that situation and blames the media for not clearly laying out the problem.

“Broadcast media buys into the crisis idea and is more hostile to social security than the average Republican member of Congress,” said Krugman. “If [private accounts]happen, it will be because the public has not been properly informed.”

The Hazen Polsky Foundation Lecture Series will bring two prominent figures in business and economics to Fordham each year that enhance the student experience as well as enlighten faculty and alumni.