Sanger discusses Obama’s drone policy, Operation Olympic Games

The United States has yet to determine a coherent policy on the use of war tactics such as drone strikes and cyber weapons, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times David Sanger said in a lecture in Robertson Bowl on Monday.

Sanger said that the American public was essentially engaged in a debate over how drone strikes and cyber weapons should be used in warfare and that it was crucial that this debate soon result in a coherent policy.

Sanger cited domestic policy debates on the use of tactics like nuclear weapons and landmines as historical lessons to understand how public debate can help resolve present-day challenges. The American public managed to conduct a debate over how nuclear weapons should be used in war over the course of about 25 years, although these programs were classified, Sanger said.

“We’re way overdue for having it decided because we don’t have 25 years this time,” Sanger said, explaining that the United States urgently needs to develop a policy on cyber weapons because other nations already have similar technology. “It’s our political debate that is running behind the technological advances.”

The U.S. military program of making air strikes using unmanned aircraft vehicles known as “drones” is officially classified but is widely reported in the press. It is one of two war tactics that, according to Sanger, Obama inherited from the Bush administration. The other, known as Operation Olympic Games, is a covert and still unacknowledged campaign to disrupt the workings of Iranian nuclear facilities with a computer virus. The operation, which was begun by the Bush administration in 2006, became public in the summer of 2010 when it spread around the Internet worldwide due to a programming error and was used in an attack carried out against the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz. Operation Olympic Games is the first publicly known use of cyber weapons by the United States against another state.

Sanger’s most recent book, “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” recounts how the President has shaped his policy around the use of weapons like drones and cyberwarfare.

Sanger said he expected the President to move toward resolving this and other foreign policy challenges during his second term.

“If we’ve learned one thing about second terms, it’s that they bear very little resemblance to first terms,” he commented. “My suspicion is that after a year of battling with Congress over everything from the sequester to long-term cuts to the budget, that President Obama will probably turn into more of a foreign policy president than ever before because it’s the one area where he can operate freely.”

In the first four years of his presidency, Sanger said, Obama “ended up being far more aggressive than anybody would have expected” in his embrace of what the White House calls the “light footprint strategy” and what Sanger calls “remote control war.” This strategy refers to tactics, such as drones and cyberwarfare, that have allowed the President to defend U.S. interests and influence events abroad by making quick strikes that are cost-effective in terms of both expenses and casualties.