Joshua Foust ← Writer in international affairs

Human Agency and the Moral Imperative of Robot Warfare

May

2013

There have been a number of responses to my FP article on robot autonomy and warfare — some serious, some laughably unserious. Among the more serious and considered is Jay Adler. Writing for The Algemeiner, he brings up the biggest and, I think, most serious objection to increasing automation in warfare: human agency. He also, perhaps ...

A Note on the AP Scandal

May

2013

It’s a good thing a US president has never shuttered newspapers (Lincoln), suspended habeas corpus (Lincoln again), prevented their distribution through the mail (Wilson), arrested tens of thousands of war dissidents (Wilson again) or imprisoned tens of thousands of Americans because of their ethnicity (Roosevelt), because otherwise we might have had a precedent to work ...

Unanswered Questions on Benghazi

May

2013

Over at Medium, I have a piece asking why we’re not focusing more on the CIA’s role in Benghazi. Again, none of these issues are being raised in Congressional hearings or the media, or by the public.The CIA created the facility in Benghazi but barely defended it. They did not have local forces capable of ...

Do Drones Work?

May

2013

For the American Prospect, I ask do drones actually accomplish the goal they’re meant to? Taken as a whole, drones seem to be quite good at what they’re supposed to do: disrupting terrorist groups. But that isn’t enough to actually end the threat posed by terror groups. Are the civilian and psychological costs drones incur ...

Why Drone Autonomy Might Actually Be Good for Human Rights

May

2013

Over at Foreign Policy, I have a piece suggesting autonomous drones might actually be good for us. Yet many experts are uncertain whether autonomous attack weapons are necessarily a bad thing, either. “Can we program drones well? I’m not sure if we can trust the software or not,” Samuel Liles, a Purdue professor specializing in ...

Quoted in Business Insider

May

2013

Business Insider’s Michael Kelley quoted me extensively in this article on why targeted killings came to dominate Obama’s counterterrorism policy. “The outcry over extraordinary rendition — which was how President Bush went about capturing and interrogating a lot of these suspected individuals — was incredibly unpopular … abroad [and] in the U.S.,” Foust said. “Frankly, killing people ...

Deconstructing a DC Op-Ed

May

2013

I write op-eds for a living, more or less, though I like to tell myself that what I do is more analytic and researched than simply slinging around an opinion. That being said, there is a specific genre of op-ed writing, one meant to float trial balloons for policymakers while propping up the influence and ...

What Obama Can Do to Close Guantanamo

May

2013

I have a piece up for the new site Medium, analyzing what steps Obama can take to address the Guantanamo prison crisis. But, looming behind all of these piecemeal decisions is an important underlying factor: the war on terrorism. The Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) — passed days after the September 11th ...

The Chechen Connection: The Boston bombers have put the region and U.S.-Russia relations in the spotlight

Apr

2013

Over at The American Prospect, I have a brief article asking if the ethnicity of the Boston bombers will effect U.S.-Russia relations. Russian officials are quick to underscore that they are victims of Chechen terrorism, not causes of it. As if to underscore this point, Ramzan Kadyrovv—the Moscow-approved strongman who currently governs Chechnya–left a comment on ...

Displaced: What happened to the people who fled the terror in Chechnya.

Apr

2013

For Foreign Policy, I explained how Chechnya’s experience of war led to displacement, and that it is eventually what brought the Tsarnaev brothers to America. As a result, many Chechens who fled to Central Asia did not find refuge, just harassment and continued uncertainty. It should not be surprising that thousands moved on, as apparently the Tsarnaev ...