Would Lincoln use drones? [View all]

[arely staircase]

Lincoln probably would have loved drones, but may have held off using them to kill for strategic reasons

First off, Lincoln was obsessed with military technology and innovation, so there’s little question that he would have been intrigued by drones, had they been invented in the 1860s. He often personally witnessed demonstrations of new inventions and pushed for their advancement and field testing through the War Department bureaucracy, in part by promoting officers who held a similar love of innovation. Under his tenure, the Union became one of the world’s first militaries to use repeating rifles (a vast improvement over the single-shot muzzle-loaders it replaced), rifled artillery, machine guns, rockets, armored “ironclad” warships, and torpedoes, and he made advanced strategic use of railroads and especially the telegraph.


He would have loved to have had drones’ surveillance power, as he championed the unprecedented use of balloons to spy on the enemy. When the aging head of the Army initially rejected the balloon idea, Lincoln personally marched inventor Thaddeus Lowe to the War Department and declared that he would be head of the new Aeronautics Corps for the Army. “I have pleasure in sending you this first dispatch ever telegraphed from an aerial station and in acknowledging indebtedness to your encouragement for the opportunity of demonstrating the availability of the science of aeronautics in the military service of the country,” Lowe telegraphed to the president from a balloon over the National Mall.
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We asked Yale Law School professor John Witt, who wrote a popular book about Lincoln’s code of war. As it turns out, Lincoln spent a lot of time thinking about these kinds of questions. On the eve of Emancipation, the president commissioned New York lawyer Francis Lieber to write the first modern code of war. The resulting guidelines (often called the Lieber Code) are more complicated that today’s left or right like to remember them, Witt argues, banning torture and poison gas on one hand, but also clearly designed to help the North win, on the other.

The code prohibited assassination, but what exactly counts as “assassination” is a debate that remains open to this day and started in antiquity. For instance, the Lieber Code was based on the thinking of 18th century Swiss philosopher Emmerich de Vattel, who laid the foundations for international law with his seminal treatises on the Law of Nations. In Volume III, he has a lengthy parsing of what it means to assassinate an enemy. A true “assassination,” on the other hand, must involve treachery, Vattel wrote. Usually, this would be someone who deceives in order to gain access to his target, such as an “emissary, introducing himself as a supplicant, a refugee, a deserter.” That, Vattel wrote, “is infamous and execrable, both in him who executes and in him who commands it.”


http://www.salon.com/2013/02/11/would_lincoln_use_drones/