The data science website 'FiveThirtyEight' just published a new 'What's the Point' podcast about the limits of Drone Warfare, and especially the difference between tactical tools and strategic thought. Their guest is William Arkin, a former intelligence minder and current journalist. The prompt for the discussion is Arkin's new book, Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare. an awkward title with an important theme.

The gist of the discussion is that the U.S. security forces have, with the aid of drones, amassed mountains of data which they comb through to find targets to destroy. The United States has devoted tremendous resources to this ongoing project, and it has led to a large number of deaths, and a comparable amount of controversy among ethics watchdogs. Drone strikes though, compared with 'boots on the ground' soldiering, consumes relatively few resources, does not immediately risk the lives of U.S. soldiers, and so receives little media attention. The film Good Kill and the play Grounded explore the moral costs of these issues for those who pilot and command drone operations, but little time is spent understanding the conflicts that we enter.

Arkin argues that an investment in drones cannot displace an intensive investigation of the purpose and end-goal of the conflicts we enter. Good data can lead to good knowledge, but when that data lacks a coherent framework to understand it, it may simply help perpetuate the slack fighting that we have been involved in since September 2001. It's true that drones have created a tempestuous legal debate, and discussions about the morality of assassination. But these debates lack the purposeful depth of strategic discussion.

Why do our leaders want us to engage in violence on the far side of the world? Can the violence we are capable of actually help us achieve the objectives laid down by our leadership? Is the public fully informed of the costs and dangers of entering such a conflict? Can we achieve better outcomes using different tools, including diplomacy, or an alternative military action? How do people interpret our drone strikes, both those that succeed, and those that fail?

When data displaces debate, we silence the most important questions, and replace strategy with rote task management.

This is not, of course, a new trend. It can occur whenever technology or workforce expertise permit rapid gains in data gathering and data analysis. As Lawrence Freedman describes in Strategy: A History (a wonderful read and door-stopper of a book), former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara led a similar data-driven revolution during the 1960s, one that encouraged tremendous introspection and self-justification within the Pentagon, but also one that failed to consider the dark spots in American knowledge and strategic thinking. Pentagon leaders spent more time justifying their beliefs than they did altering them. Here in lies the hard problem: smart thinking does not necessarily lead to strategic thinking. Strategic thinking, even when it takes place, may very well fail due to the overwhelming complexity of enforcing one's political will against an opponent. 

Given that strategy is, at best, a coping mechanism rather than a master stroke, it is tempting to fall into the bureaucratic trap of pursuing further drone attacks as a good unto themselves. Commanders, not knowing how to win the war, may therefore settle for continuous attacks via drone.

Drones (of course) will not go away. Within the military, I suspect that in a few years time they will be  relegated to company and battalion command: a more efficient version of mortar fire. Drones will also likely assume a dominant role in domestic policing--a quiet, efficient accompaniment to traffic patrol and police helicopters.

Drones may also encourage a new crop of useful close air support aircraft to replace the A10. Ground troops have been clamoring for years for air support that flies low and slow, and (unlike Apache helicopters) are not such expensive toys that they cannot afford to take risks in heavy ground combat.

But tactical weapons are not the same as strategy: the pursuit of strategy requires a steady, moderate march disciplined with human dignity and a reasonable hope for peace.

Ever since Basil Liddel Hart's glowing statements on T.E. Lawrence strategic genius, Lawrence's reputation has centered on his military accomplishments, rather than his achievements in art. This is a mistake. 

Orde Wingate despised Lawrence's record as a war-leader, possibly because Wingate recognized something of his own failings in Lawrence. But Wingate also felt that Lawrence abdicated his personal responsibilities as an officer to play too much the desert warrior. There are no records of Wingate actually shooting an enemy in combat--he was too busy maintaining his supply line and keeping his troops on the march. Lawrence fired his weapon often, and preferred the emotional rush of battle to the more mundane tasks typically required of officers in combat. Lawrence's emphasis on action, in Wingate's view, was an abdication of responsibility. 

Lawrence's campaigns are often held up as a positive example of irregular warfare, and as a better way of fighting than what soldiers faced in the trenches of the First World War. Lawrence himself was not so sure that he was actually preserving life, or winning battles more efficiently. The numbers, in fact, indicate that he lost men at a higher rate than most British units that faced action on the Western front. This is not surprising. State control and industrial efficiency seems to reduce  casualties, either because men lose their willingness to die as a mere part of a 'machine' rather than as an individual warrior, or else because industrial society provides soldiers with better access to medicine and stable rations. State control also increases the number of prisoners taken, and reduces the number of prisoners slaughtered. 

British methods of warfare and 'state control' might outright reduce the 'proportion' of people who die violently. Lawrence noticed this, which explains why he heaps praise upon Allenby above and beyond any other soldier in the First World War, and why he denigrates Allenby's rival commanders not as butchers, but as unimaginative sticks-in-the-mud. 

So why does Lawrence seem attracted to desert warfare? His writings indicate that he appreciated the straightforward human practicality of 'desert' warfare. Yes, the violence in the desert was terrible, but it was coupled with a familiarity, a spirit of adventure, and a sense of honor that Lawrence never felt while working for the British military in Cairo prior to his desert campaigns. 

The Arab 'irregulars' that fought beside Lawrence risked hearth and home in an immediate way. More than one of Lawrence's fighters, in fact, saw their homes destroyed by the Turks in retaliation for joining with the Arab revolt. More than one Arab also saw his village destroyed, and his family annihilated, during the panicked Turkish retreats from Palestine and western Jordan. And so the Arabs often risked not only their lives, but their families and tribes to fight the Turks--and sometimes each other. The Arab revolt involved a type of warfare that was less organized in the sense of mass bureaucracy and written protocol, and yet no less sophisticated in its nuance and complexity. 

And so Lawrence wrestles with the following, implicit idea throughout Seven Pillars of Wisdom: He senses that the Arab way of war is more virtuous, honorable, and personally fulfilling than the sort of violence that destroyed the lives of his friends and brothers along the European Western Front. But given that Lawrence knows the superiority of British warfare for battlefield outcomes (Lawrence always suspects the British will emerge triumphant), is it morally acceptable for him to dabble in Arab nationalism and 'desert warfare'? Lawrence believes that Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia rightfully belong to the Arabs--but he is a student of history, and knows that even as he props up a certain brand of Arab nationalism, he is setting in motion a thousand difficulties for hundreds of extant ethnic and religious groups living in the same region.

Throughout Seven Pillars Lawrence examines his conscience, and recognizes that ultimately he has fought this war to satisfy his own peculiar appetite for violence, warfare, and chivalry. Many of his Arab friends admire him for it, but he considers himself a sham. The Arab irregulars, in Lawrence's eyes, live with the virtues of the desert; but he, their leader, merely wears the costume--he possesses the heart, but not the mind.

The Arabs who followed Lawrence died at tremendous rates--nearly sixty of Lawrence's two-hundred personal bodyguards perished within a year. Their villages burned. Their children and wives lived unprotected, and hungry. 

The European powers, on the other hand, featured stronger, centralized state governments compared with Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Syria-Palestine. Even on the Western and Eastern fronts, preserved a macabre sense of decorum. Yes, terrible acts took place in the First World War--murder, rape, pillaging, poison gas and vicious trench fighting. But even then, the war in Europe obeyed strange rules: the taking of prisoners, the feeding of troops, and the separation between the war-front and the home-front. 

I conclude this letter with a couple of quotes from General Archibald Wavell, a man who fought alongside Lawrence in the Palestine campaign. 

 That is to say, Lawrence was too aware of who he was, and who he was not. He was British, and a bastard-born, and not of Arabia. His education positively dripped with the soaking benefits wrought from state-sanctioned security and comfort. But he fought alongside his friends as though he were an Arab prince. He never forgave himself. He loathed the Turks, and often justified his actions in the war as a chance to destroy something he loathed. In this light, Wavell viewed Lawrence as "a Hamlet who had slain his uncle neatly and efficiently at the beginning of Act II, and spent the remainder of the play in repenting his act and writing a long explanation of it to Horatio." (Wavell The Good Soldier, 1948, 59-61).

I think most people would say 'no.' Just like most people would refuse to follow Lawrence into Syria in 1911, before the war, much less in 1916, when the Arab revolt faced destruction along the shores of the Red Sea. But the people in our lives almost always say 'no.' That is what makes leadership, and art, and astonishing success so very rare. People say 'no,' because they are weak, and saying 'no' is easy.

And yet, people said 'yes' to making 'Lawrence of Arabia.' Perhaps it was perhaps, the sort of British thing to do, as when Lionel de Rothschild loaned Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli the money to purchase the Egyptian shares of the Suez Canal.

To return to Roger Ebert: