Analyzing the Drone Debates

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0001
 Analyzing the Drone
Debates: Targeted
Killing, Remote
Warfare, and Military
Technology
James DeShaw Rae
Associate Professor, California State University,
Sacramento

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0001
analyzing the drone debates
Copyright © James DeShaw Rae, 2014.
Foreword © John T. Crist, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–1–137–38159–0 EPUB
ISBN: 978–1–137–38157–6 PDF
ISBN 978-1-349-48353-2 ISBN 978-1-137-38157-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-38157-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from
the Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
First edition: 2014
www.palgrave.com/pivot
 For my family
Xiaodan, Maitreya, and Aidan

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0001
 Contents
Foreword vii
Acknowledgments ix

1 Introduction 1
2 National Security and the Efficacy of
Drone Warfare 19
3 Targeted Killing and the Legality of
Drone Warfare 51
4 Remote Killing and the Ethics of
Drone Warfare 79
5 Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone
Technology 98
6 Conclusion 120

Bibliography 130
Index 143

vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0001
 Foreword
As James Rae suggests in the first few pages of his com-
prehensive and accessible monograph, there is not much
authentically new about the strategic and moral dilemmas
raised by drone warfare and drone technology. Since the
invention of the bow and arrow, questions about the ambi-
guity of killing from a distance during wartime have per-
sisted, only to be amplified by the astounding destructive
power that has been devised since then. The 20th century’s
horrific history of nuclear weapons, carpet bombing, and
ground warfare in urban settlements long posed the same
unresolvable questions that drone warfare now does—and
with much deadlier consequences—about the incidental
killing of civilians in wartime. Similarly, while the mag-
nitude of the intrusive capacity of surveillance that drone
technology affords is much greater than anything regimes
have had at their disposal thus far, the foundational ques-
tions this raises about privacy and the acceptable limits of
spying by government remain essentially the same as in
earlier eras.
That drone warfare and technology do not pose new
ethical questions does not then mean that our institutions
and conceptions are currently able to contain or even
comprehend the social impact of this new technology.
Rae’s accounts of debates about drones makes it painfully
clear that the institutional actors at the center of these
discourses—the military, the intelligence establishment,
law enforcement, the court system, and the international
legal system—are still in the early stages of adapting their
organizations, practices, and understandings to this new

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0002 vii

viii Foreword

reality. The book perfectly illustrates the long lag time between adop-
tion of technology and the adaptation of the institutions and people who
wield it. This theme is seen repeatedly throughout the book. The U.S.
military has yet to appreciate what drones may do to our conceptions of
soldiering and the refined traditions of martial values. The intelligence
establishment in the United States, formally barred from military action,
is now at the vanguard of U.S. military strategy, even while they operate
thousands of miles away from the locales they monitor and attack. This
collapses the line between civilian and military actors and creates mul-
tiple uncertainties about the protections afforded them by international
law. In fact, the use of armed drones confounds even the legal definition
of war as ensconced in the UN charter and treaties that govern behavior
during war, and this may ultimately require a deep revision of the legal
assumptions at the heart of those documents. Across the globe, driven
in no small part by the irrefutable tactical successes delivered by the U.S.
drone campaigns, the diffusion of drone technology—nearly half of the
member states of the United Nations now possess drone technology—
will likely strengthen the hand of authoritarian regimes against trouble-
some minority populations. In the United States, the rapid adoption of
drone technology by American law enforcement agencies has outpaced
the capacity of chiefs of police to understand the appropriate limits to
their use in routine civilian policing. These are only a few of the fascinat-
ing issues examined in James Rae’s book.
How long do such lags last? Probably for a long time. The troubling
ethical questions about drones do not lend themselves to technical
fixes or easy moral consensus. We have after all suffered the anguish of
civilian deaths in war for quite some time, and those caused by drone
warfare will not break the back of our tolerance for atrocities when com-
mitted during what are thought to be legitimate fights. This makes it all
the more crucial that lay people and students—in America and around
the world—understand as much as possible the likely consequences of
drone technology for warfare, global security, and society. Otherwise we
risk being led into ever more treacherous terrain by a rapidly proliferat-
ing and advancing technology. This book helps us catch up.
John T. Crist
Georgetown University
School of Foreign Service in Qatar

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0002
 Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Brian O’Connor and Scarlet Neath
of Palgrave Macmillan for their interest in this research
and support in the publishing process. I would also like to
thank Andrej Zwitter for his comments and feedback on
an early draft at the 2013 International Studies Association
(ISA) annual conference in San Francisco. John Crist was a
valuable partner in formulating the research plan and dis-
cussing shared concerns over the ramifications of drones
in peace and war. Matthew Kielty provided helpful com-
ments on drafts and Emad Hassan collected useful data
on drone specifications. Research support from California
State University at Sacramento during my sabbatical leave
was essential in concluding the manuscript. Finally, Nancy
Kielty provided a Shangri-la like sanctuary for the comple-
tion of the book for which I am ever grateful.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0003 ix
 1
Introduction
Abstract: This chapter describes the scope of the
scholarly debates over drone warfare and introduces the
broad positions favoring and opposed to their usage. It
briefly summarizes the organization of the book, which
encompasses perspectives from national security, law,
ethics, and public policy. Finally, this chapter traces the
modern historical development of unmanned aerial
vehicles, their employment as part of a revolution in
military affairs, and their functions in military operations.

Keywords: development of unmanned aerial vehicles;

history of drones; types of drones

Rae, James DeShaw. Analyzing the Drone Debates:

Targeted Killing, Remote Warfare, and Military
Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
doi: 10.1057/9781137381576.0004.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0004 
 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Day and night, the wasps buzz overhead watching and listening. Families
in earthen homes try to fall asleep but the machay, wasps in the Pashtun
language, continue their ominous sound. Without notice or warning, a
sudden explosion leaves severed body parts strewn across the landscape
while blood soaks the dusty earth. Halfway around the world, young
men sit down for a long, dreary shift watching distant images on a video
screen of night vision green globs, multi-colored infrared shapes, and
grainy figures of people gathering. Others in distant reaches collectively
observe and new voices join the refrain with more information from
unknown sources while lawyers offer advice on the propriety of taking
a decision; a joystick is depressed to begin the kinetic activity. The chair
is warm for the next on duty when the tired “pilot” is finally relieved and
drives along the dusty highway back home for a night of sleep. Such is
the battlefield in contemporary asymmetric conflict where the United
States’ expansive use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a.k.a. drones,
is radically altering the nature and morality of warfare and could have
far reaching social consequences as commercial applications become
more affordable.
The precision of drones promises risk-free war that is so accurate as
to eliminate collateral damage and so remote as to remove virtually all
threat to the pilot. Yet this yawning asymmetry pitting machine against
man threatens to lose the hearts and minds of those who live in the ter-
rain where these automatons commonly patrol in modern interventions.
The secretive, if not covert, aspect of these shadow wars in the name of
self-defense that execute constant surveillance and “targeted killings” of
those who endanger national security overseas and may soon find cur-
rency in domestic law enforcement and public safety belies the professed
customs of a free and open democratic society that enshrines funda-
mental civil liberties like the rights to privacy and due process. Dramatic
technological advances and rapid global production of unmanned
systems will likely transform international affairs, state-society relations,
and people’s everyday life. Among the contested aspects of the new
national security apparatus and its commensurate policies are profiling
distinctions based on group membership, monitoring domestic religious
and political meetings, mining metadata, intercepting communications,
acquiring biometric information, trying suspected terrorists in military
commissions or civilian courts, detaining suspected enemies and terror-
ists sometimes in secret “black sites” or transferred to third countries as
extraordinary renditions for enhanced interrogation, and killing alleged

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0004
 Introduction 

terrorists using hit squads or drones.1 Already, these practices of state

violence have legitimized the acceptability of discourse in the United
States regarding the merits of assassination and torture.
This book examines the primary arguments for and against the
development and use of unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and
targeted killing. Targeted killing is the “use of lethal force attribut-
able to a subject of international law with the intent, premeditation and
deliberation to kill individually selected persons who are not in physical
custody of those targeting them.”2 A targeted killing may be accom-
plished by sniper fire, shooting at close range, missiles from helicopters
or gunships, car bombs, poison, and now with a drone.3 Advocates for
the use of drones argue principally on the basis of efficacy and utilitarian
ethics, while finding legal defenses to justify their conformity to the laws
of war. Drone technology is less expensive and less risky (i.e., deadly) to
U.S. operatives than special operations, conventional counter-terrorism,
or military intervention. Advocates also believe that drones are more
effective, killing more terrorists per dollar spent than any other form of
counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism technique. President Barack
Obama declared “our actions are effective” in a speech on counter-
terrorism at the National Defense University in May 2013 and Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan summarized the
benefits of drone warfare:

compared against other options, a pilot operating this aircraft remotely,

with the benefit of technology and with the safety of distance, might actu-
ally have a clearer picture of the target and its surroundings, including
the presence of innocent civilians. It’s this surgical precision, the ability,
with laser-like focus, to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al-Qaida
terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it, that makes this
counterterrorism tool so essential.4

Finally, and more broadly, the use of drones for killing suspected ter-
rorists is seen as no more objectionable ethically than the bombing of
civilians in Germany and Japan during the course of World War II, an
unpleasant but necessary tactic to prevent enemies from implementing
their plans. Ironically, targeted killing in the Obama administration
has been less controversial than torturing detainees was in the Bush
administration.
Opposition to U.S. policy regarding drones, targeted killing, and espe-
cially “signature strikes” are founded on a variety of objections based on

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

the veracity of efficacy claims, questionable legal bases, multiple ethical

perspectives, and the logic of unintended consequences. This book pro-
vides a concise yet thorough overview of these disparate positions for a
general readership who may know only a little about the coming changes
associated with drone capabilities and their current practice as part of a
controversial national security strategy but who are nevertheless curious
about what transformations in daily life and public policy may result.
The goal is to arrange the scope of debates into categories and offer a bal-
anced analysis of the merits of each in light of security, legal, ethical, and
political perspectives on other aspects of warfare, intelligence gathering,
and counter-terrorism. Thus, the overall questions investigated include
the following: What are the parameters of the drone debate among schol-
ars, policymakers, and analysts? What are the real costs and benefits of
the current use of drones? Are drones different than other technological
innovations in warfare? What are some future unintended consequences
of advancing technologies related to unmanned aerial vehicles?
Most of these debates have followed war and foreign policy around
for decades if not centuries and are not so unique to drones. Distance
between killer and victim began with some rudimentary tool, perhaps
the bow and arrow, a slingshot, or a poison dart, but drones are a culmi-
nation of a technological revolution in military affairs that changes the
equation for future combat and in effect empties the battlefield. Christian
Enemark describes drone technology as the first complete surmounting
of physical limits of time and space in military affairs.5 Drones uniquely
track human behavior over long periods of time using relatively sophis-
ticated cameras and other receptors to observe targets. Their surveillance
capabilities are so effective and their strikes are accurate enough that
they enable policymakers to draw up lists of individuals they would like
to kill and allow agents of government to remotely execute that homi-
cide. They are also part of a broader trend in industrialized democracies
where invasive technological advances enable government officials to
deliver ever greater security in public places by monitoring, tracking,
and watching society writ large. As Mark Bowden writes, “The drone
is new only in that it combines known technology in an original way;
aircraft, global telecommunications links, optics, digital sensors, super-
computers ... a weapon that employs simple physics to launch a missile
with lethal force from a distance, a first step into a world where going to
war does not mean fielding an army, or putting any of your own soldiers,
sailors, or pilots at risk.”6

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0004
 Introduction 

Although written while considering the Balkan wars of the 1990s,

never truer was Michael Ignatieff ’s statement: “we now wage wars and
few notice or care.”7 YouTube videos of drone strikes are easily accessed
and still photos of drones now appear in magazines and newspapers,
yet few images of drone warfare appear in the American media or
government public information systems. At most, government officials
offer oxymoronic platitudes, exhibited in the words of Pentagon spokes-
woman Victoria Clark: “We’re convinced that it was an appropriate tar-
get ... We do not know yet exactly who it was.”8 A deeper understanding
of these debates is hindered by a glaring absence of field research both
inside the small rooms on military bases and intelligence installations
where drone pilots execute their operation as well as in the villages across
the countries where death from above rings true. In Mark Mazzetti’s
book, The Way of the Knife, former CIA officer Richard Blee says starkly,
“every drone strike is an execution. And if we are going to hand down
death sentences, there ought to be some public accountability and some
public discussion about the whole thing.”9 While I offer my own reaction
to the expansion of drones and unmanned systems in conclusion, the
book’s primary purpose is to engage the reader by providing a summa-
tion of the range of debates that arise in various academic disciplines,
ideological camps, and public policy quarters in order to contribute to
greater deliberation on the current and future role of this new technology
in American public life and global affairs. The arguments are intended to
go beyond a narrow analysis of the war on terror to examine the larger
place of unmanned systems in both military and non-military settings
cognizant of the need to differentiate the automation of warfare from
U.S. foreign policy per se and to distinguish signature strikes from drone
deployment generally, though signature strikes are largely enabled by
drones.

Organization of the Book

This introduction explains the main themes of the book and provides
a short historical explanation of the development and acquisition of
unmanned vehicles. Chapter 2 describes a consensus in the national
security community that the advances in drone capabilities are trans-
forming the definition of the battlefield and warfare generally and enable
and extend an inherent advantage in asymmetrical warfare. Collateral

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0004
 Analyzing the Drone Debates

damage may be limited as targets can be identified more clearly, the deci-
sion to strike can be put off until a moment that minimizes casualties,
and the payload of the strike itself can be more accurate. By avoiding
“boots on the ground,” drones minimize the risk to the prosecuting side
and allow plausible deniability in conducting foreign policy. Questions
to this narrative have arisen regarding the veracity of field reporting after
a strike, the lack of independent oversight or evaluation, the reliability
of the technology, and the possibility of human error. Others examine
the deleterious effects on diplomatic and public relations in countries
like Pakistan and Yemen where so many such strikes have occurred.
Moreover, the United States does not have a monopoly on this capacity;
other countries will acquire the technology and capability to employ
drones and these new trends will be expanded geometrically, though
conventional warfare is not as amenable to drones where airspace is
more heavily contested.
Next, Chapter 3 explains the legal justifications and defenses for the
use of drones and targeted killing in combat and non-combat zones.
Principally, defenders of the legality of American drone usage rest their
case on self-defense claims emanating from the September 11, 2001
attacks on the United States by al Qaeda and the host state consent
that has been tacitly or privately afforded to American operations in
non-combat areas. This new instrument of war is situated within the
understanding of existing laws on various weapons systems, whose
defenders argue that the accuracy and sophistication of the technology
implies that jus in bello standards in the laws of armed conflict such as
proportionality are maintained. Some go further to suggest that the rules
themselves have changed; in a global war on terror, national sovereignty
may not endure though an almost permanent state of war may. To the
contrary, many legal scholars question the foundational principles of
the war itself. Since al Qaeda is not a state, the laws of armed conflict
may not even apply; rather domestic law enforcement and human rights
law should take precedence. The temporal scope of self-defense is not
permanent while host state consent has not always been made public,
nor may forever provide a restraint, particularly in countries labeled
failed states. The targets themselves may not be al Qaeda, nor necessarily
affiliated with al Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban, and rather than specific
intelligence to determine culpability, signature strikes are based on pat-
terns of life such as “military aged males” gathering in a certain region or
meeting in groups.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0004
 Introduction 

Beyond the legal considerations, Chapter 4 explores the range of

moral, ethical, and philosophical debates related to warfare without
threat of direct retaliation. The standards of the just war doctrine, with
its legal and religious precepts, are applied to the case of drone warfare,
and how this new instrument of killing comports with the democratic
tradition of public accountability and transparency in the resort to force
is considered. The asymmetric aspect of current capabilities between the
combatants in drone warfare raises basic questions of fairness along with
the psychological complexities of killing from a distance. While influ-
enced by the trope of man versus machine, grave questions will appear
in the future if unmanned systems become autonomous and robots are
programmed to not only follow the laws and ethics of war but also to
make lethal decisions. Aware that past objections to new technologies
largely dissipated over time, the focus here is on the nature of decision-
making and not simply the vehicle.
Chapter 5 explains the civilian uses, public policy debates, and poten-
tial unintended consequences of unmanned aerial vehicles. Commercial
and scientific applications for drones are ubiquitous and will raise many
economic considerations regarding public goods and efficiencies as well
as regulatory and safety measures. Law enforcement applications of
high-powered zoom lenses, night vision, and see-through imaging such
as synthetic aperture radar may be a pathway to greater domestic security
or the road to an even greater surveillance state. This trade-off between
security and liberty constitutes the primary domestic concern for any
country, as unmanned systems may invade privacy and potentially be
employed to kill a citizen as when the United States lethally targeted
one of its own nationals overseas in a drone strike. Thus, it explores the
nascent and hypothetical changes that the inevitable diffusion of drone
technology has set in motion. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes with a culmi-
nating analysis of the author’s perspective on the transformative effects
of drones in military affairs and public policy.

Boys with Toys: The Development of UAVs

A drone is an unmanned aircraft that does not carry a human
operator and is capable of flight under remote control or autonomous
programming.10 Although as far back as the 4th century B.C.E., the
Greek mathematician Archytas reputedly designed a steam-powered

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0004
 Analyzing the Drone Debates

mechanical pigeon, some tinkering began in earnest in the 19th century

and was greatly advanced when Serbian engineer Nikola Tesla demon-
strated a radio-controlled motorboat at an 1898 exposition in Madison
Square Garden.11 Tesla’s innovation inspired Charles Kettering as
World War I approached to create an aerial torpedo for perhaps the first
true drone, the Kettering Bug, but the war came to a conclusion before it
could be employed. World War II ushered in new advances in unmanned
systems. Hollywood actor Reginald Denny helped to promote radio-
controlled planes that became target drones in the war, while Germany
developed the Fieseler Fi-103 Reichenberg glide bomb and the U.S. Navy
experimented with assault drones.12 In one American naval experiment
with unmanned aircraft, Operation Anvil sought to remotely control
B-24 bombers packed with explosives to crash at targets in Germany and
Vichy France; naval lieutenant and political scion Joe Kennedy died in a
premature explosion near Suffolk, England as part of the mission.13
After the war, the United States continued to develop unmanned
systems during the Cold War in seeking a strategic advantage over the
Soviet Union. In the 1970s, the concept of the Revolution in Military
Affairs (RMA) called for more precision weapons and advanced sensors,
applying informational superiority, and reducing the risk to military
personnel by keeping them away from the battlefield.14 Nuclear physicist
and former head of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, John
Stuart Foster Jr., was an early advocate for drones and his concept spurred
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to build two
prototypes, the Praeire and Caleré, which could stay aloft for two hours
while carrying a 28-pound payload.15 In fact, the Lightning Bug drone was
used over Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1975 and drones flew around 3,500
reconnaissance missions in Vietnam during the conflict there, including
the first use of the future camera-fitted cruise missile in 1972.16 Similar
to drones, cruise missiles are unmanned aircraft capable of guided flight
and often affixed with cameras, though they can neither linger over a
battlefield nor return to base since they themselves are the weapons.17
The Air Force further developed two attack drones, the BGM-34A and
BGM-34B Firebee, but their sensors could not accurately identify and
strike camouflaged targets and they were never used in combat.18
The drone industry began to systematically advance in the mid-1980s.
Israeli engineer Abraham Karem produced numerous drones and ulti-
mately developed the Gnat-750, which was renamed the Predator by
former fighter pilot Thomas Cassidy before General Atomics completed

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0004
 Introduction 

the prototype. Israel itself successfully used Mastiff drones as bait in 1982
to get Syria to deploy its forces and reveal its location in the Israeli war
with Lebanon.19 At the same time, the Israeli air force sold several of
its models to the Pentagon, including a drone later called the Pioneer.
Although the United States used the Pioneer drone in over 500 missions
during the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq and continued to monitor Saddam
Hussein thereafter, the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s displayed
an even greater need for intelligence and, combined with exponential
technological advances such as satellite connectivity and autonomous
navigation, saw new investments in unmanned systems. A 1993 memo
from intelligence adviser John Deutsch provided the specifications of
UAVs that led to the final version of the Predator and in 1994 DARPA
initiated a high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) drone program.20
Meanwhile, other scientific advances were integrated with unmanned
surveillance drones, such as refined explosives, lasers to guide and target,
better propulsion, computers, and the global positioning system (GPS),
the latter was begun in 1973 and came to fruition in 1995.21 The Predator
was first used successfully in Bosnia to spy on Serbians for Operation
Nomad Vigil in 1995 despite two being shot down, and the high altitude,
long-range Global Hawk surveillance drone debuted in during the
Kosovo conflict in 1999.22
Concurrently, the United States began to ponder using drones against
non-state actors like al Qaeda that threatened the country. In 1998,
U.S. President Bill Clinton authorized both Predator drones to fly into
Afghanistan from a secret base in Uzbekistan to observe al Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden and for him to be killed, though weaponized drones
were not yet operational.23 Over the subsequent decade, drones became
ubiquitous in American overseas operations against al Qaeda and
groups linked to that movement. After September 11, 2001, the United
States greatly accelerated its drones program, building bases around
the world, diversifying the types of drones in production, and affixing
some with greater weapons capabilities. The United States has at least 16
drone operating and training sites domestically along with another 12
American drone bases or support facilities abroad in Djibouti, Ethiopia,
Kuwait, Niger, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Seychelles, Qatar, and the United
Arab Emirates (UAE).24 The United States uses other country’s air bases
for drone deployments as well, such as Turkey’s Incirlik airbase to track
movements in Iraq and Pakistan’s Shamshi airbase to launch strikes in
Waziristan.25 In total, the United States possesses at least 60 military and

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

CIA drone bases and is expanding its drone reach into Latin America
and East Asia, and will deploy Global Hawks from Japan in 2014 to
monitor North Korea, which is certain to irritate China as it builds its
own drone armada.26
One can anticipate a widespread diffusion of drone technology across
the globe owing to its relatively low technological barriers and inexpen-
sive cost. Peter Asaro suggests that “autonomous weapon systems also
have the potential to cause regional or global instability and insecurity,
to fuel arms races, to proliferate to non-state actors, or initiate the
escalation of conflicts outside of human political intentions.”27 Israel
is the world’s largest national exporter of drones and its state-owned
Israeli Aerospace Industries is already selling UAVs to India, Mexico,
Nigeria, Russia, and Turkey.28 The United States provides countries such
as Australia, Burundi, Japan, New Zealand, and other NATO (North
Atlantic Treaty Organization) nations with drones, and has approved
sales of more Predators to countries in the Middle East and South Asia. In
2010, General Atomics received export licenses to sell unarmed versions
of the Predator drone to Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United
Arab Emirates, and in 2012 the United States agreed to arm Italy’s six
Reaper drones but rejected Turkey’s request to purchase armed Predator
drones.29 In fact, the United States maintains 75 percent of global research
and development and 60 percent of the global market share is held by
American companies.30 China has developed around 3,000 drones, its
own export industry, and a desire to patrol its maritime claims; some
mimic the Predator and Global Hawk like the Yilong/Pterodactyl and
Xianglong/Soaring Dragon respectively; others are sui generis such as the
new Anjian/Dark Sword.31 Russia possesses an indigenous force capable
of weaponization, while Iran’s rudimentary drone arsenal was neverthe-
less delivered to Hizbollah in Lebanon. Brazil, Canada, France, Germany,
India, Japan, Pakistan, and Turkey also have significant unmanned sys-
tems development.32 As of 2012, nearly 80 countries are believed to have
acquired a complete drone system of some sort in their arsenals; 16 of
them have drones that can be armed with bombs or missiles.33
Perhaps the genie is out of the bottle and no country can ignore this
future tactic of warfare, intelligence gathering and espionage, domestic
law enforcement, and perhaps commercial application. Ironically,
Americans tend to hold a supposition that other countries would do even
worse with commensurate power. Brennan explained that the United
States is the first nation to regularly conduct strikes using remotely

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 Introduction 

piloted aircraft in an armed conflict, but that not all other nations who
may acquire them will share American interests or the premium put on
protecting human life, including innocent civilians.34 As David Sanger
writes, “other countries ... are unlikely to be similarly conscientious”
about the precision of cyber-attacks.35 Much of this relative fear is over
what China may do internally whereas the United States is already using
drones for lethal operations in sovereign countries not at war. Such is
the parallel over nuclear weapons, where many contest the hypocrisy of
the United States as the only country ever to have dropped an atomic
bomb demanding other countries not seek to acquire weapons of mass
destruction. To date, only the United Kingdom, United States, and Israel
have used drones to kill people in attacks outside its own territory: the
United Kingdom in Afghanistan and Israel in Gaza.36
Drones can broadly be classified into two categories (see Table 1.1).
First, those such as the Global Hawk, Wasp, and Fire Scout are primarily
or exclusively for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR)
missions and engage in electronic warfare, provide communication for
troops, and eavesdrop on the enemy. Second, the hunter-killer drones
such as the Predator and the Reaper provide light attack capabilities
including launching armor-piercing Hellfire missiles, and for the latter,
a larger payload that includes laser-guided weapons, air-to-air AIM-9
Sidewinder missiles, and 500-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions
(JDAM) bombs. The U.S. military designates drones into RQ (recon-
naissance) and MQ (multi-purpose) varieties. Drones can also offer

Table 1.1 Specifications of select drones

Name Maker Cost Purpose Capacity

Global Northrup  High-altitude, long- speed:  knots

Hawk Grunman million endurance ISR wingspan: m
weight: ,kg
payload: ,kg
altitude: ,m
range: ,km
FireScout Northrop  million Helicopter speed:  knots
Grunman reconnaissance wingspan: N/A
and targeting weight: kg
support payload: kg
altitude: ,m
range: km

Continued

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Table 1.1 Continued

Name Maker Cost Purpose Capacity

Reaper General  million Intelligence speed:  knots
Atomics collection in wingspan: m
support of strike, weight: ,kg
coordination, and payload: ,kg
reconnaissance altitude: ,m
missions range: ,km
Predator General  million Armed speed:  knots
Atomics reconnaissance, wingspan: m
airborne weight: kg
surveillance, target payload: kg
acquisition altitude: ,m
range: ,km
ScanEagle Boeing & Insitu  million Reconnaissance, speed: – knots
surveillance, and wingspan: m
target acquisition weight: kg
payload: camera
altitude: ,m
range: km
Puma AeroVironment , Close range speed: – knots
(approx.) reconnaissance wingspan: m
weight: kg
payload: camera
altitude: m
range: km
Switchblade AeroVironment , kamikaze drone that speed: – knots
(approx.) fits in backpack for wingspan: N/A
close-range assault weight: .kg
payload: small
explosive
altitude: ft
range: km
Wasp III AeroVironment , Reconnaissance and speed:  knots
surveillance with wingspan: .m
low-altitude weight: .kg
operation payload: camera
altitude: m
range: km
Raven AeroVironment , Reconnaissance speed: – knots
and surveillance wingspan: .m
with low altitude weight: kg
operation payload: camera
altitude: m
range: –km

Source: U.S. Air Force (www.af.mil/AboutUs/FactSheets) and AeroEnvironment (www.avinc.

com).

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 Introduction 

transport capabilities and provide close air support, interdiction, damage

assessment, combat search and rescue such as locating downed pilots,
and force protection like locating improvised explosive devices (IEDs).37
Drones collect visual data from their camera, infrared imagery, and sig-
nals intelligence (SIGINT) using electronic eavesdropping devices and
other sensors such as LIDAR (light and radar) to map large areas in three
dimensions (3-D).38 In these efforts, drones are assisted by much greater
signals intelligence such as emails, phone calls, and text messages deliv-
ered from the National Security Agency (NSA).39 Although unmanned,
drones require a great deal of support in their complex missions. At a
minimum, each Predator has a three-person crew of pilot, sensor opera-
tor, and mission intelligence coordinator along with a team of imagery
analysts to follow the video feeds.40 Fred Kaplan explains that a drone
flying combat air patrol requires 43 service members rotating in three
shifts, including seven joystick pilots, seven system operators, and five
mission coordinators, backed by a 66-person intelligence unit, including
18 intelligence analysts and 34 video crew members.41
Drones are now deeply part of the defense giants within the military-
industrial complex, along with some outside start-ups and hobby
enthusiasts that began to tailor their products to the world’s largest con-
sumer of remote piloted aircraft (RPA), the U.S. Defense Department.
Procurement of unmanned systems promises to be a growth industry as
commercial leaders continue their competition, shrinking into micro-air
vehicles (MAVs) of a backpack size like AeroVironment’s Hummingbird
and Honeywell’s Tarantula Hawk, expanding with high-altitude long-
endurance UAVs such as Boeing’s planned Solar Eagle, Gorgon Stare,
and Vulture that are intended to stay aloft for up to five years, and per-
haps combining multi-purpose functions as in Boeing’s stealth combat
Phantom Ray.42 Raytheon is also developing smaller bombs like the
Griffin for smaller drones and trying to forge its own Monsoon missile
to compete with Lockheed Martin’s Hellfire. Specializing in mini-drones
that cost a few hundred thousand dollars or less, AeroVironment pos-
sesses 85 percent of the military’s drones, but accounts for just 2 percent
of the Pentagon’s drone budget.43 Nearly one-third of all military aircraft
are now unmanned, up from just 5 percent in 2005, thus from less than
200 drones, now over 7,000 are operable with plans to purchase an addi-
tional 700 mini-, medium-, and large-size drones.44 Private enterprise is
not the only driver of advancement; academic and research institutions
like the University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Automation,

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Sensing and Perception (GRASP) lab invented small autonomous quad-

rotors called “robobees” that can fly, flip, dart through hoops, find their
own power supply, and fly in formation.45 The military itself is conduct-
ing drone research at key installations like the Wright-Patterson airbase,
which holds the Air Force Institute of Technology. Even the general pub-
lic was encouraged to design a drone when DARPA launched a crowd
sourcing competition called UAVForge in 2011, while an iPhone app was
developed to control small drones and 3-D printers are now capable of
producing a rudimentary drone.46 By the 2020s, the U.S. military plans
to introduce the next-generation remotely piloted aircraft, develop more
missiles of varying types, improve guidance and navigation systems,
prepare greater durability in hostile air defense environments, increase
maximum loiter time, and formulate in-air refueling capability by
unmanned tankers.47 Already in 2013, the U.S. Air Force and Boeing sent
their first unmanned F-16 jet plane into the air, while the U.S. Navy’s
X-47B became the first unmanned aircraft to land on an aircraft carrier.
While the primary usage of drones has been surveillance, and perhaps
only 2.5 percent of Reaper sorties resulted in firing weapons, their lethal
role in both combat and non-combat zones has raised many legal and
ethical questions. The initial flight of an armed U.S. drone was October
7, 2001, when a Predator took off from Pakistan on a mission into
Afghanistan. The first major target of a drone strike was the fatal attack
on al Qaeda military commander Muhammad Atef in Kabul, Afghanistan
in November 2001.48 The first known U.S. drone strike outside armed
conflict occurred on November 4, 2002, when a CIA pilot at a French
military base in Djibouti launched a Hellfire missile from a Predator
drone over Marib, Yemen killing six, including Abu Ali al-Harithi, chief
of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and believed to be respon-
sible for the 2000 USS Cole bombing, and an American citizen, Abu
Ahmad al-Hijazi (a.k.a. Kamal Derwish).49 Since 2004, the United States
has conducted nearly 400 drone strikes in Pakistan and since 2009,
around 100 combined in the Philippines, Somalia, and Yemen, along
with hundreds more in the military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Libya. Since September 11, 2001, 95 percent of all non-battlefield targeted
killings have been by drones; well over 3,000 have perished in strikes
outside of combat theaters and uncounted more in the three zones of
armed conflict.50
Kill lists with suspects assigned serial numbers and code names are
maintained separately by the CIA, National Security Council (NSC),

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 Introduction 

and military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) before they

funnel up to the commander-in-chief; JSOC runs the military drone
program using Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) targets while the CIA
has its own target lists and conducts many of its own strikes independ-
ently and some jointly with the military. As Dana Priest and William
Arkin observe, in this case the U.S. government has truly created real
life “death panels.”51 Those on the list must pose a current and ongoing
threat to the United States and intelligence placing them there must be
less than six months old; the list is refreshed biannually.52 Private security
firms like Academi, formerly Blackwater, play a significant role in the
drone program as well, loading missiles onto drones and flying them
from takeoff to landing, though they transfer control inside the “kill
box” when approaching targets.53
This ongoing transformation from manned to unmanned aircraft has
not been without tensions within the U.S. government itself, among the
branches of the armed services, and between the military and intelligence
agencies. While the Army has been the most resistant to the revolution
in military affairs, the Air Force was the most opposed to the introduc-
tion of drones into airspace, declining or ignoring Army and Marine
commanders’ pleas for more drones.54 Meanwhile, the CIA under George
Tenet preferred the military to conduct targeted killing, but again the Air
Force was not so keen.55 Much of the disdain has to do with the culture
of the Air Force itself, where pilots relish the lust and excitement of fly-
ing a fast, manned jet fighter, perhaps even in a dog fight; flying remotely
with slow, hovering drones is not part of the warrior ethos. Although
modern aerial dog fights are virtually extinct, when an award for drone
pilots was originally introduced, a backlash among veterans killed the
idea.56 Nevertheless, from 1947 to 1981, every Air Force chief of staff was
a nuclear bombardier in Strategic Air Command followed by a quarter
century of fighter pilots from Tactical Air Command all of whom may not
have appreciated the shift toward adopting unmanned capabilities against
non-state threats. Due to perceived slowness in getting more drones to
Afghanistan and Iraq, Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired both Air
Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley and Secretary of the
Air Force Michael Wynne and instead chose Norton Schwartz (as Chief
of Staff) to speed the process as he was the first chief to not be a fighter
or bomber pilot but rather flew C-130 transports.57 Thus, the first drone
debate is situated within the parameters of national security and further
explores the logic of defense planning and the question of efficacy.

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Notes
 Philip B. Heymann and Juliette N. Kayyem, The Long-Term Legal Strategy
Project for Preserving Security and Democratic Freedoms in the War on Terrorism
(Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1.
 Nils Melzer, Targeted Killing in International Law (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 5.
 United Nations, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial,
Summary, or Arbitrary Execution, Philip Alston (May 28, 2010), A/HRC/14/24/
Add.6, 3.
 John Brennan, The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy, Speech
at Woodrow Wilson Center (April 30, 2012).
 Christian Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War: Military Virtue in a
Post-Heroic Age (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2013), 3.
 Mark Bowden, “The Killing Machines: How to Think about Drones,” The
Atlantic (September 2013).
 Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York, N.Y.: Henry
Holt, 2000), 184.
 John F. Burns, “A Nation Challenged: The Manhunt; U.S. Leapt Before
Looking, Angry Villagers Say,” New York Times (February 17, 2002).
 Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, A Secret Army, and a War at the
Ends of the Earth (New York, N.Y.: Penguin, 2013), 319.
 Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (New York, N.Y.:
Nation Books, 2013), 177. CIA officers in Pakistan called the drone
campaign “boys with toys.” Department of Defense, 331 Joint Publication
1–02, Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (2010, amended July 15,
2012).
 Nick Paumgarten, “Here’s Looking at You: Should We Worry about the Rise
of the Drone?” The New Yorker (May 14, 2012).
 Bill Yenne, Attack of the Drones: A History of Unmanned Aerial Combat (St.
Paul, M.N.: Zenith Press, 2004), 17.
 Peter Singer, “Drones Don’t Die,” Military History (July 2011), 66–69; John
Sifton, “Drones: A Troubling History,” The Nation (February 27, 2012), 12.
 Ignatieff, Virtual War, 164.
 Fred Kaplan, “The World as Free Fire Zone,” MIT Technology Review 116, no. 4
(June 7, 2013), 38.
 Ignatieff, Virtual War, 165.
 Sifton, “Drones,” 12.
 Michael Hastings, “The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War
in Secret,” Rolling Stone (April 16, 2012).
 Lawrence Spinnetta, “The Rise of Unmanned Aircraft,” Aviation History
(January 2011), 36.

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 Introduction 

 John G. Drew, Russell Shaver, Kristin F. Lynch, Mahyar A. Amouzegar, and

Don Snyder, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle End-to-End Support Considerations
(Santa Monica, C.A.: Rand, 2005), 8.
 Ignatieff, Virtual War, 166.
 Brian Glyn Williams, Predators: The CIA’s Drone War on Al Qaeda (Lincoln,
N.E.: Potomac Books, 2013).
 Scahill, Dirty Wars, 17. Williams, Predators. Krishnan provides conjecture
of whether a drone ever spotted bin Laden; two former CIA officers who
saw the footage have doubts, saying “They just jumped to conclusions. You
couldn’t see his face. It could have been Joe Schmo. Believe me, no tall man
with a beard is safe anywhere in Southwest Asia.” Armin Krishnan, Killer
Robots: Legality and Ethicality of Autonomous Weapons (Burlington, V.T.:
Ashgate, 2009), 27.
 Audrey Kurth Cronin, “Why Drones Fail,” Foreign Affairs (July 1, 2013);
Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (London, U.K.:
Verso, 2013), 68.
 Craig Whitlock, “U.S. Military Drone Surveillance is Expanding to Hot Spots
beyond Declared Combat Zones,” Washington Post (July 20, 2013). Turkey
and the United States labeled the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) a terrorist
group.
 David Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use
of American Power (New York, N.Y.: Crown, 2012), 249; Craig Whitlock and
Anne Gearan, “Agreement will allow U.S. to Fly Long-Range Surveillance
Drones from Base in Japan,” Washington Post (October 2, 2013).
 Peter Asaro, “On Banning Autonomous Weapon Systems: Human Rights,
Automation, and the Dehumanization of Lethal Decision-making,”
International Review of the Red Cross 94, no. 886 (Summer 2012), 691.
 Benjamin, Drone Warfare, 50; Peter Bergen, “Drone Wars: The Constitutional
and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing,” (April 23, 2013),
Testimony presented before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights. <www.
Newamerica.net>, 10.
 Peter Bergen, “Drone Wars,” 10.
 Brian Jackson, David Frelinger, Michael Lostumbo, and Robert Button,
Evaluating Novel Threats to the Homeland: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Cruise
Missiles (Santa Monica, C.A.: Rand, 2008), 3.
 Singer, Peter W., “Inside China’s Secret Arsenal,” Popular Science (January
2013), 44–49.
 John Villasenor, “Observations from Above: Unmanned Aircraft Systems and
Privacy,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 36, no. 2 (2013), 466.
 Micah Zenko, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” Council on Foreign
Relations Special Report no. 65 (January 2013), 18.

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

 Brennan, The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy.

 Sanger, Confront and Conceal, 266.
 Kaplan, “The World as Free Fire Zone,” 43.
 Orville F. Desjarlais, Jr., “Unmanned, Unmatched, Unafraid,” Airman (July
2005), 40.
 Bowden, “The Killing Machines.”
 Greg Miller, Julie Tate, and Barton Gellman, “Documents Reveal NSA’s
Extensive Involvement in Targeted Killing Program,” Washington Post
(October 17, 2013).
 Spinnetta, “The Rise of Unmanned Aircraft,” 37.
 Kaplan, “The World as Free Fire Zone,” 45.
 Stephen J. Mraz, “The Military Drafts the Drones,” Machine Design.com
(December 10, 2009), 44.
 Paumgarten, “Here’s Looking at You.”
 Zenko, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” 8. The remainder of attacks
has been JSOC raids, AC-130 gunships, and offshore sea and air launched
missiles. Peter Finn, “Rise of the Drone: From California Garage to Multi-
billion Dollar Defense Industry,” Washington Post (December 23, 2011).
 Paumgarten, “Here’s Looking at You.”
 Micah Zenko, “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Drones,” Foreign Policy
(March/April 2012); Benjamin, Drone Warfare, 76.
 Zenko, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” 24.
 Bergen, “Drone Wars,” 10.
 Bowden, “The Killing Machines”; Stuart Casey Maslen, “Pandora’s Box?
Drone Strikes under Jus ad Bellum, Jus in Bello, and International Human
Rights Law,” International Review of the Red Cross 94, no. 886 (June 2012), 614.
 Zenko, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” 8. The remainder of attacks
has been JSOC raids, AC-130 gunships, and offshore sea and air launched
missiles.
 Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New
American Security State (New York, N.Y.: Little, Brown and Co, 2011), 206.
Navy Seal Team 6, Delta Force, the army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation
Regiment, the army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, and the air force’s 24th Special
Tactics squadron comprise JSOC.
 Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 208.
 Wali Aslam, The United States and Great Power Responsibility in International
Society: Drones, Rendition, and Invasion (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2013), 81;
Benjamin, Drone Warfare, 63; Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 210.
 Kaplan, “The World as Free Fire Zone,” 39; Ignatieff, Virtual War, 172.
 Williams, Predators.
 Bowden, “The Killing Machines.”
 Spinnetta, “The Rise of Unmanned Aircraft,” 30.

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 2
National Security and the
Efficacy of Drone Warfare
Abstract: This chapter examines arguments on a series
of national security issues including the role of drones in
conventional armed conflict. First, it questions efficiency,
finding that material and human costs are significantly
lowered, though unmanned aircraft still require a great
deal of technical support, remote pilots still face traumas
and stresses, and many agree that a country pays a
diplomatic price for the wanton use of drones in counter-
insurgency operations and could undermine credibility
with its own or foreign publics. This chapter also evaluates
claims of accuracy and precision, comparing drones
positively with other types of warfare, but uncertain of
whether high value targets are really emphasized over low
level militants and cognizant of serious civilian casualties
despite lower degrees of collateral damage.

Keywords: collateral damage; cost of drone warfare;

drones and sovereignty; drone accuracy and precision

Rae, James DeShaw. Analyzing the Drone Debates:

Targeted Killing, Remote Warfare, and Military
Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
doi: 10.1057/9781137381576.0005.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0005 
 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Mark Bowden wrote how since David slew Goliath with the new
technology of the slingshot, advancement and innovation have been
determining factors in military affairs.1 In the 21st century, Goliath just
invented the new slingshot; the United States’ development of armed
unmanned aerial vehicles and associated cyber innovations has fortified
its standing as the world’s unrivaled superpower. Since they can collect
intelligence and serve as strike platforms while avoiding placing military
personnel at risk, drones are more “flexible and effective technologies
of violence.”2 Some observers suggest that owing to their accuracy,
drones can employ their “persistent stare” and “unblinking eye” to put
“warheads on foreheads” and actually reduce the likelihood of civilian
casualties in warfare. Drones can detect troop deployments, naval exer-
cises, the movement of weapons systems, and terrorist training camps.
They possess the advantage of enormous intelligence collection and
data analysis capabilities as warfare turns to disrupting command and
control, computer centers, and communication networks.3 Drone strikes
prevent threats to the United States by eliminating terrorists so they can-
not engage in future operations, deter potential terrorists by their ability
to kill at great distances, and punish those who have attacked the United
States or U.S. interests.4 In fact, the U.S. Air Force is seeking the ability
to find, fix, assess, track, target, and engage anything of military signifi-
cance anywhere in the world.5 Certainly the primary hypothesis of many
national security planners is that drones are effective; indeed they are the
“only game in town” in the words of then U.S. Director of the CIA Leon
Panetta.6 President Barack Obama’s speech on drone strikes summed up
the current U.S. outlook:
To begin with, our actions are effective ... Simply put, these strikes have
saved lives ... Remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians,
and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any
estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes. Conventional airpower
or missiles are far less precise than drones, and are likely to cause more
civilian casualties and more local outrage. And invasions of these territories
lead us to be viewed as occupying armies, unleash a torrent of unintended
consequences, are difficult to contain, result in large numbers of civilian
casualties and ultimately empower those who thrive on violent conflict ... So
it is false to assert that putting boots on the ground is less likely to result
in civilian deaths or less likely to create enemies in the Muslim world. The
results would be more U.S. deaths, more Black Hawks down, more confron-
tations with local populations, and an inevitable mission creep in support
of such raids that could easily escalate into new wars.7

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 National Security and the Efficacy of Drone Warfare 

Bowden summarizes the scope of thinking:

The drone is effective. Its extraordinary precision makes it an advance in

humanitarian warfare. In theory, when used with principled restraint, it is
the perfect counterterrorism weapon. It targets indiscriminate killers with
exquisite discrimination. But because its aim can never be perfect, can only
be as good as the intelligence that guides it, sometimes it kills the wrong
people, and even when it doesn’t, its cold efficiency is literally inhuman.8

Many observers who oppose drone warfare reject the U.S. govern-
ment’s claims about the efficacy and success of the killing program.
Drone technology is not fool-proof and the performance of drones is
not perfect. Jeffrey Sluka argues “that UAVs are more cost effective in
lives and money and the sunny view that they will someday take our
soldiers entirely out of harm’s way are now appearing to be questionable
propositions,” and asserts that the costs of drones outweigh the benefits
because they create a “siege mentality” and casualties among civilians,
lead to support for insurgents, and generate widespread public outrage.9
Without any independent public oversight of the circumstances of each
attack, any claims about efficacy are dubious at best, impossible for
citizens and independent observers to substantiate or refute. Although
the CIA won approval for signature strikes back in 2008, only in April
2012 did the Obama administration acknowledge the existence of the
drone attacks but denied almost all attempts to scrutinize the program
either by the public or Congress. While the government readily reports
instances in which a drone attack kills a prominent target, for the major-
ity of attacks little or no information is released, in large part because
little or no information exists. By the very nature of the targeted killing
policy, in almost no cases do U.S. authorities have direct access to the
scene of the strike. Several independent sources collect newspaper and
other unofficial reports about the aftereffects in order to estimate the
magnitude of the killing operation. While these sources are undoubtedly
also riddled with error, they are the only data available to citizens from
which to make judgments about the wisdom of the policy.
This chapter evaluates the accuracy and precision of drone strikes
from the available evidence, describing attempts to kill high value tar-
gets, to minimize civilian casualties, and to greatly reduce the risk to the
forces launching attacks. Next, it will try to measure the effectiveness of
counter-terrorism policy that widely employs drones through the impact
on the local population, public opinion (hearts and minds), and the

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

strategic implications of interstate relations. Finally, this chapter intro-

duces the place of drones in conventional warfare before summarizing
these debates in conclusion.

More Bang for the Buck: Efficiency, Cost

Effectiveness, and Minimizing Risk

Material Costs and Efficiencies

Drones provide clear economic efficiencies, offering a highly valued
product at discounted costs compared to the alternatives. Simply put,
drones kill more terrorists per dollar spent while preserving lives for
those on the prosecuting side that arguably equate to risk-free warfare.
They also comport well with the new Effects-Based Operations (EBO)
used by the military that employs mathematical methods and metrics
to predict and gauge outcomes with a business model approach to war-
fare.10 Armin Krishnan suggests that military robots are more efficient,
effective, and even environmentally friendly, cutting down on the mili-
tary’s gluttonous consumption of oil, and calculates that a human soldier
costs the Pentagon around $4 million over a lifetime while a robot would
be a fraction of that.11 The price tag from an unmanned system comes
in far cheaper than a fighter plane with an ace pilot who will be paid a
pension and health care well into the future. Whereas Lockheed Martin’s
F-16 Fighting Falcon or F-35 Joint Strike fighter planes cost around
$150 million, a Predator can be purchased for around $5 million and a
Reaper for $28 million. For Matt Martin, the Predator is simply a longer-
duration, lightly armed F-16 that is more deliberate and thus saves more
lives.12
Humans themselves are not materially efficient instruments of war
since they are prone to error, have lower response times, suffer from
information overload, become fatigued, and have difficulty communicat-
ing with machines.13 Thus, some believe the process can be streamlined
even further; Kenneth Andersen and Matthew Waxman suggest a single
controller could maneuver many drone aircraft simultaneously while
George Lucas is a bit more modest and envisions one pilot rather than
the current four operating a plane.14 Since drones do not require cockpit
pressurization and temperature control they allow more space for pay-
load capacity and fuel.15 Krishnan explains that future airplanes will be

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 National Security and the Efficacy of Drone Warfare 

hyper-sonic and encompass physical stresses incapable of supporting a

human pilot, especially if the battle area moves into space and even in
the near term as stealth technology disappears with improved detection
methods, pilots may be more at risk.16 The march toward efficiency and
automation may know no limits. The “kill chain” or “sensor-to-shooter
cycle” from target acquisition, to deployment of force, order to attack,
and destruction of target has shrunk from three days in the Gulf War
to now about five minutes thanks to drones.17 Andersen and Waxman
also suggest that tiny surveillance robots equipped with facial recogni-
tion technology might have helped affirmatively identify Osama bin
Laden much earlier and that such systems could be weaponized and
then perhaps allowed to act autonomously, perhaps initially with a
human remote-observer as a fail-safe but with very little time to override
programmed commands.18 Already the Navy’s Phalanx close-in weapon
system (CIWS) provides an automated defense against incoming mis-
siles.19 Owing to their greater commercial application, drones may prove
to be a worthy investment as a public good like other military-initiated
technologies from GPS to the internet, while further refinement might
see them become solar or nuclear-powered and thus even more fuel
efficient.
Yet the question of material cost is not settled; without an active war,
unmanned weapons systems may no longer be cost efficient. The U.S.
Defense Department is not known for the cost effectiveness of its pro-
curement process and reports of inflated expenditures already proliferate.
In fact, some earlier drone programs had to be cancelled due to faulty
performance and cost overruns, including Boeing’s notorious Dark Star.
More than one-third of the 200 Predators delivered to date have crashed
catastrophically, due to both aircraft malfunction and human error.20 The
Air Force reports that its three main drones, the Predator, Global Hawk,
and Reaper, have been involved in at least 120 “mishaps,” 76 of which
destroyed the drone.21 According to Micah Zenko, through July 2010,
79 drone accidents were reported by the U.S. government, each cost-
ing roughly $1 million, including a 2011 collision between a 400-pound
Shadow drone and C-130 Hercules transport plane over Afghanistan and
the mysterious crash of an RQ-170 Sentinel stealth surveillance drone in
Iran.22 While larger drones are not designed to be disposable, they are
expendable and thus a fleet may be exhausted more quickly which alters
the one-to-one price tag ratio between manned and unmanned aircraft.
Moreover, thousands of new Predator squadrons will require thousands

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

of more drone pilots with countless hours spent on analysis, maintenance,

and operation; their training alone may amount to $685,000 per person,
not counting salary, bonuses, and equipment costs for refresher flights.23

Human Costs and Efficiencies

Ground troops occupying territory obviously cost much more in men
and material than air patrols. If one figures in the cost in human lives for
armed forces operating in a combat area or danger zone, drones quickly
become incomparable. Soldiers on the ground are dependent on the
intelligence gained from their small hand-launched drones which can
spot enemy fighters or an ambush. Likewise, targeted killing is a bargain
compared to commando raids in remote locations to either kill or cap-
ture, exemplified by the long preparatory training by SEAL Team Six for
the May 2011 Operation Neptune Spear raid on bin Laden’s Abbottobad
compound which lost a helicopter that was later shared with Chinese
intelligence. Even then, drones like Lockheed’s RQ-170 Sentinel pro-
vided video feed for the expedition. Moreover, Dana Priest and William
Arkin reported that JSOC night raids were successful only about half of
the time.24 As John Brennan concludes, “Forces might have the ability
to attempt capture, but only by putting the lives of our personnel at too
great a risk.”25 Obama further laid the groundwork for the benefits of
drones, stating “it’s also not possible for America to simply deploy a team
of Special Forces to capture every terrorist. Even when such an approach
may be possible, there are places where it would pose profound risks to
our troops and local civilians, where a terrorist compound cannot be
breached without triggering a firefight with surrounding tribal commu-
nities ... that pose no threat to us.”26
Creating unmanned systems does not automatically exempt human
personnel from risk nor foster greater efficiency in combat situations.
Remote pilots are not completely immune to the trepidations and trau-
mas of the battlefield. Wayne Chappelle and Kent McDonald completed
the first clinical study of drone pilots and found that nearly half of them
reported high stress and burnout primarily due to long, overloaded
work hours and excessive stimuli and information competing for their
attention.27 Remote crew members also lack deployment rhythm and may
be unable to clearly demarcate between combat and personal or family
life (i.e., combat compartmentalization), face fatigue and sleep distur-
bances, are employed in austere geographic locations, experience social

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isolation during work, and sedentary behavior with prolonged screen

time. Nevertheless, Jean Otto and Bryant Webber found that remote
combat does not increase the risk of mental health outcomes beyond
that seen in traditional combat and only 3 to 5 percent of remote pilots
suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) compared with up
to 20 percent of soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq.28 Jack Beard
describes how this new “virtual distance” between humans and the bat-
tlefield allows more time to consider targets and have a legal review, but
also provides a video record of the activities that could weaken former
claims of fatigue, emotion, or psychological distress and impairment as
defenses of civilian casualties, citing a 2008 case when a drone recorded
the accidental killing of Pakistani troops in Afghanistan by the United
States as an example of the risk for military planners.29

Geopolitical Costs and Efficiencies

The effectiveness of drones must also be balanced against the strategic
and political costs of war and occupation from a geopolitical standpoint.
At least temporarily, drone technology may be a strategic breakthrough
in both limiting risk to pilot or crew and to gathering unlimited intel-
ligence. Anxious to wind down two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, drone
strikes allow the United States to pursue its strategic aims without the
public scrutiny that comes from American casualties, expense, and
abuse. Obama emphasized the challenges when putting U.S. boots on
the ground may trigger a major international crisis, as “the cost to our
relationship with Pakistan, and the backlash among the Pakistani public
over encroachment on their territory, was so severe that we are just now
beginning to rebuild this important partnership.”30 Many times raids are
too risky and costly, thus killing suspects is more politically acceptable
than capture and detention and the risk of a civilian trial or perhaps
militants taking hostages to protest detention of a seminal leader like bin
Laden.31 Furthermore, the secretive nature of UAVs allows countries to
conduct combat operations hidden from public debate, as when Obama
launched nearly 150 American drone strikes on Libya in 2011 without any
congressional approval. In fact, the Obama administration was adopting
the use of targeted killing as first rather than last resort instead of other
anti-terrorist actions such as capture and trial.32 As David Klaidman
points out, Obama was choosing to kill, not capture, while receiving the
2009 Nobel Peace Prize.33

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Although currently operating in the shadows, drones still may present

political problems beyond the small opposition movement that they
have currently engendered. Drones expand the potential list of targets
that can be effectively attacked and may complicate military planning by
creating an overload of data which may not be distributed effectively in
the military hierarchy, while an overreliance on drone technology may
marginalize any emphasis on human intelligence and foster a depend-
ence on electronic data.34 As Audrey Cronin articulates, choosing drone
attacks eliminates the possibility of arresting and interrogating suspects,
capturing hard drives, organizational charts, strategic plans, or secret
correspondence, while losing access to intelligence on the ground that
may undermine a terrorist group.35
A few analysts believe that the precision of drones that target only
militant forces will come as a relief to the rest of the population suf-
fering under their tyranny. James Walsh claims that compared to other
types of force, the selective violence of drone strikes can deter potential
recruits, current members, and other supporters of an insurgency who
fear death or injury from a missile.36 Walsh explains how drone strikes
raise the costs for insurgents, since they kill leaders and rank-and-file
members, destroy safe houses and equipment, force militants to rely on
inefficient and unreliable means of communication, change their loca-
tions frequently, and create mistrust within the organization of those
suspected of providing intelligence to the United States or its proxies.37
Brennan highlights the “strategic consequences” of deploying large
armies abroad that may undermine American standing. “Countries
typically don’t want foreign soldiers in their cities and towns. In fact,
large, intrusive military deployments risk playing into al Qaeda’s strat-
egy of trying to draw us into long, costly wars that drain us financially,
inflame anti-American resentment, and inspire the next generation of
terrorists. In comparison, there is the precision of targeted strikes.”38
Walsh also found that drone strikes were associated with decreases
in the incidence and lethality of terrorist attacks, including suicide
and IED attacks.39 The data itself seems questionable as it accepts U.S.
government calculations of combatant status and measures attacks in
and around Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the plots of greatest con-
cern are against the American homeland and have taken years to plan
and execute. Moreover, the evidence is unclear whether drone strikes
encourage negotiations out of greater fear, or stymie talks and curtail
such efforts.40

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Several strategists argue that the killings create a situation in which

local populations are more, not less, likely to oppose U.S. policy or even
join terrorist networks and organizations. As a tactic, it may be counter-
productive to U.S. strategic interests by alienating allies and partners
as popular sentiment in Pakistan turned against U.S. drone strikes. In
counter-insurgency, the entire population serves as the strategic center
of gravity, so “angering the population by mistakenly targeting them
and their families is not an effective route.”41 Citing the U.S. counter-
insurgency manual, Beard states that “while air strikes may be useful and
permitted by the rules of engagement, the U.S. military establishment has
been forced to recognize that an attack causing incidental harm to civil-
ians potentially ‘turns people against the host-nation (HN) government
and provides insurgents with a major propaganda victory’.”42 Bowden
suggests that U.S. strikes and particularly those that kill civilians are
sowing the seeds of future generations of terrorists.43 Thus, Cronin finds
that “drones are killing operatives who aspire to attack the United States
today or tomorrow. But they are also increasing the likelihood of attacks
over the long term, by embittering locals and cultivating a desire for
vengeance.”44 Kaplan writes, “If the most prominent weapon in this war
alienates the people who live under its shadow, in some cases driving
them into the arms of the enemy, either for protection or on the principle
that the enemy of their enemy is their friend, then it is a lousy weapon.”45
Retired American Marine Corps General James Cartwright pronounced,
“If you’re trying to kill your way to a solution, no matter how precise you
are, you’re going to upset people even if they’re not targeted.”46
Like other forms of aerial bombing, drone strikes on the unsuspecting
are certainly as terrifying as any other act of violence known to man.
Civilians and children in a war zone suffer from post-traumatic stress
disorder at least as much as soldiers do.47 Desires to retaliate may cer-
tainly lead some to join groups fighting the United States; it is difficult to
deny that drone strikes increase support for and membership in violent
organizations. Anytime civilians are killed, family and compatriots will
covet justice and revenge and their thirst may be satiated only by some-
how participating in the singular organization that could even hope to
give some measure of retribution, al Qaeda. Faisal Shahzad, a married
financial analyst and naturalized U.S. citizen, tried to bomb New York’s
Times Square in May 2010 by loading a car with explosives, claiming
that he was motivated by drone strikes in his native Pakistan when he
pleaded guilty.48 Amnesty International relays another challenge faced

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

by civilians in Pakistan’s tribal areas where social pressure and fear or

reprisals compel locals to host armed groups and then become victims
themselves in drone strikes at such gatherings or in private homes.49
Although many locals despise the Taliban, they have no choice but to
comply when the Taliban kill suspected spies.50 As one Yemeni framed
the dilemma during an interview with Human Rights Watch, “We are
caught between a drone on one side and al Qaeda on the other.”51
For U.S.-Pakistan relations, the politics are quite complicated.
Employing drone strikes in Pakistan are better than boots on the
ground for both sides; they leave a plausible deniability for the Pakistani
government to argue its sovereignty is not being violated in the same
way as more visible occupying forces or the raid by commandos to kill
bin Laden and they avoid American casualties in the hostile terrain of
the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Under a 2002 deal,
then President Pervez Musharraf allowed the United States to violate
Pakistan’s sovereignty in hot pursuit, when troops were in contact with
the enemy, personnel recovery, and actions against the “Big Three” (bin
Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, or Mullah Mohammed Omar). In such cases,
American forces were only to encroach ten kilometers and to notify the
government after the fact, but lack of Pakistani commitment led the
United States to adopt unmanned drone strikes, even using the Shamshi
airbase in Baluchistan to launch such attacks inside Pakistan.52 Senior
Pakistani military officer Major General Ghayur Mehmood defended
CIA drone strikes as causing few civilian casualties and eliminating
many terrorists, many of whom were foreign fighters.53
Pakistani complicity in America’s war on terror, and more specifically
drone strikes in Waziristan, may have escalated domestic terrorism in
Pakistan, and U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter asserted
that the drone war could be undercutting relations with the American
ally.54 Former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair opined that
“drone strikes are no longer the most effective strategy for eliminating al
Qaeda’s ability to attack us” and they damage the “ability to work with
Pakistan to achieve other important security objectives like eliminating
Taliban sanctuaries, encouraging Indian-Pakistani dialogue, and mak-
ing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal more secure.”55 Likewise, Gregory Johnsen
documented how drone attacks in Yemen tended to have the opposite
of their intended effect, particularly when people other than extrem-
ists were killed or hurt.56 Even official U.S. reports show a correlation
between increasing drone strikes and more reputed terrorists in Yemen.57

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According to Zenko, some State Department and U.S. Agency for

International Development (USAID) officials strongly believe that such
attacks undermine the effectiveness of civilian assistance programs.58
Yemenis have frequently demonstrated against American drone strikes
which appear to weaken the pro-American Yemeni government and
assist AQAP, themselves popular former mujahideen returnees from
Afghanistan.59
In fact, all of the primary targets for drone assaults have migrated
rather far away from core al Qaeda and many drone strikes are now on
groups with primarily localized concerns such as the Taliban in Pakistan,
the off-shoot al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, al Shabaab
in Somalia, and Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines. Despite claims that only
foreign fighters are targeted, most of the drone strikes’ primary victims
are Taliban, other warlords, and the tribesmen of northwest Pakistan.
Differentiating an indigenous national liberation movement like the
Taliban from a largely Arab-directed ideological movement with little
desire to govern a territory such as al Qaeda is essential for evaluating
the merits of drone strikes. Pakistan denies that the Taliban are terror-
ists, unlike al Qaeda which has pursued a global jihad against the United
States. Of course, the Taliban of Mullah Omar that governed Afghanistan
from 1996 to 2001 could be said to have provided material support for
al Qaeda in its September 11 attack on the United States. As Sikander
Shah argues, today the Taliban attack U.S. forces in combat operations
in Afghanistan but they are not perpetrating global terrorism against the
United States.60
Like-minded groups may be Islamic-inspired nationalists, but most set
their sights squarely on their internal goals. Though based in Pakistan’s
North Waziristan, Jalaluddin Haqqani’s network has attacked U.S. forces
in Afghanistan, is allied to the Afghan Taliban, has cooperated with al
Qaeda, and may be supported by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI). As part of the mujahideen that drove out the Soviet Union, Haqqani
is also a nationalist, was added to the U.S. list of terrorist groups only
in September 2012, and has not been known to target the U.S. home-
land though he does seek to overthrow the Pakistani government. The
network’s second in command Badruddin Haqqani was targeted in a
drone strike on a funeral he was believed to be attending, but the CIA
hit his younger brother Mohammad instead before killing Badruddin
over a year later.61 Other targeted groups include the Pakistani Taliban
and Lashkar e-Jhangvi, both of whom focus on the Pakistan central

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

government but do not direct attacks on the U.S. homeland.62 Nearly all
of these groups employ violence and abuse international standards of
human rights, but their people are living and fighting in their own home-
land, the overlapping mostly Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan and
northern Pakistan.
Another danger of becoming too deeply involved in domestic politics
is the tit-for-tat responses that often lead to intractable conflicts. Wali
Aslam argues that drone strikes contribute to fractures in Pakistani soci-
ety between Punjabis and Pashtuns and lead to tension in the army among
Pashtuns while uniting militants and tribesmen in the FATA.63 Targeting
may undermine the fabric of society among those in the tribal areas, as
informants are killed by the Taliban, leading to more lawlessness and
chaos and thus more terrorism.64 Moreover, Pir Zubair Shah reported that
in one instance the ISI agency killed a Pakistani journalist who reported
on drone strikes before either the United States or Pakistan had officially
acknowledged the covert program.65 Indeed, Pakistan’s military has spon-
sored the various Taliban while those same groups perpetrate violence
against the civilian government. Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, widely
believed to be the architect of Benazir Bhutto’s 2007 assassination, was
killed in a drone strike after years of such favor.66 His replacement as
leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, orchestrated the
killing of seven Americans at a CIA outpost in eastern Afghanistan by a
Jordanian double agent before the United States killed him in November
2013 as he was planning to join peace negotiations with President Nawaz
Sharif. In May 2013, the Pakistani Taliban’s number two Wali ur-Rehman
was killed and in response ten foreign mountain climbers, including an
American, were killed in June of the same year.
Certainly anti-American sentiment is on the rise. A 2010 poll by the
New America Foundation conducted in Pakistan’s FATA found that
almost 90 percent of the respondents opposed U.S. military operations
in the region, while a Pew poll conducted in June 2012 found that just
17 percent of Pakistanis supported the U.S. conducting drone strikes
to help combat militancy in their country.67 Populist cricketer-turned-
politician Imran Khan called for an end to drone attacks (the Pakistan
parliament voted to ban all drone strikes in April 2012), and for the gov-
ernment to cut off NATO supply lines through northwest Pakistan and
suggested planes would be shot down if he was prime minister; Khan
was detained on a flight to the United States and interrogated regard-
ing his views on drones.68 Even teenage activist Malala Yousafzai, who

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 National Security and the Efficacy of Drone Warfare 

was shot by the Taliban for promoting girl’s education in Pakistan, con-
fronted Obama at the White House about U.S. drone strikes. Ultimately,
the United States may not be able to kill its way to a successful resolution
of its current conflict as drone strikes are more tactic than strategy.

Accuracy and Precision

Drones can do the dirty work, taking on risky missions without fear,
adopting the most boring tasks without losing focus, and possessing
the capacity to accurately strike a precise target almost anywhere in the
world given the right conditions, limited mostly by administrative policy
guidelines and the capability of human operators. Measuring the fallout
from drone strikes figuratively and literally takes some difficult account-
ing. Nevertheless, “Any history of how the United States destroyed
Osama bin Laden’s organization will feature the drone. Whatever ques-
tions it has raised, however uncomfortable it has made us feel, the drone
has been an extraordinarily effective weapon for the job.”69 The most
apparent advantage of drones is in the realm of surveillance and their
primary function for countries that have unmanned programs is to pro-
vide constant usable intelligence at cut-rate prices for decision-makers
to process before formulating policy.
Although the overwhelming benefit of drones generally is the ability
to gather intelligence, their lethal capabilities have primarily spurred this
debate. Here, two sets of targeted killings can be distinguished: personal-
ity strikes and signature strikes. The former identifies specific targets on
the basis of evidentiary conclusions; the latter simply targets military age
men in a given geographic location who appear to follow a pattern that
represents the “signature” of a terrorist and is sometimes called “crowd
killing,” or “terrorist attack disruption strikes” by CIA officials. In 2008,
President George W. Bush adopted signature strikes against anonymous
suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Pakistan “that bear the char-
acteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run;” Obama extended
and expanded this practice into Yemen.70 The U.S. government asserts
that such strikes encompass only those groups or people with a link to
the terrorist attacks on September 11, or associated forces, specifically an
organized, armed group that has entered the fight alongside al Qaeda
and is a co-belligerent with al Qaeda in hostilities against the United
States or its coalition partners.71

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Comparing Drones and Other Technologies of Warfare

Evaluating the accuracy of drones invites a comparison to other forms of
warfare. The munitions of yesteryear were larger, “dumber,” inaccurate,
and exploded with greater force and scale. A singular drone strike on a
correctly identified target with a laser-guided Hellfire missile or a GPS-
tracking small diameter bomb is certainly more accurate than carpet
bombing wide geographic areas as measured by the circular error prob-
able (CEP) radius within which half of the bombs fall.72 Bowden suggests
that drone strikes or ground assaults are far more precise than manned
bombers or missiles and Daniel Byman concurs that drones are more
discriminate than other types of force and far less bloody than asking
allies to hunt down terrorists for the United States.73 Drones may be
more precise and humane than Pakistani and Yemeni militaries that are
known to regularly torture and execute detainees and often indiscrimi-
nately bomb civilian areas or use scorched-earth tactics against militant
groups.74 Even in modern counter-insurgency, unmanned systems
improve intelligence collection capability, helping to ensure that those
targeted with lethal force are combatants in continuous combat func-
tion or directly participating in hostilities.75 Drones can also coordinate
operations more efficiently and employ force with greater precision, dra-
matically accelerating the tempo of battle.76 In a permissive environment
free from anti-aircraft artillery, surface to air missiles (SAMs), or fighter
jets, drones can move uninhibited to approach, observe, and strike its
target. Prior to drone usage, high value targets could escape while wait-
ing for independent verification or for cruise missiles to be fired from
distant platforms.77 As Brennan outlined in his speech on drones,
Targeted strikes are wise. Remotely piloted aircraft in particular can be a
wise choice because of geography, with their ability to fly hundreds of miles
over the most treacherous terrain, strike their targets with astonishing pre-
cision, and then return to base. They can be a wise choice because of time,
when windows of opportunity can close quickly and there just may be only
minutes to act ... They can be a wise choice because they dramatically reduce
the danger to U.S. personnel, even eliminating the danger altogether. Yet
they are also a wise choice because they dramatically reduce the danger to
innocent civilians, especially considered against massive ordnance that can
cause injury and death far beyond their intended target.78

Nevertheless, questions over the accuracy of drone strikes remain and

technical challenges are still present. For instance, a comprehensive

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investigation by Stanford and New York universities’ law schools chal-

lenged this “false narrative of precision and effectiveness” and argued
that drones kill and injure civilians.79 Some challenges are surely due to
the hardware, as faulty mechanical or electronic engineering may cause
system failure as described earlier regarding costs. Drones fly worse in
poor weather and ice can bring one down, their battery life is limited, and
the quality of imagery is still not high resolution.80 Martin describes how
unmanned aircraft are more difficult to fly than manned and recounts
numerous technical glitches in his biographical sketch of his career as a
drone pilot.81 A study at the University of Texas at Austin demonstrated
the vulnerabilities of the GPS navigation systems, where a group of hack-
ers (a.k.a. spoofers) took over operation of a test drone, raising concern
over hijacking or crashing drones.82 Moreover, John Gentry expressed
that sensors cannot identify human motives, measure human emotions,
quantify the coherence of human organizations, or assess the importance
of the data they gather, but can provide limited amounts of relevant data
to people for analysis if they are so targeted.83
Accuracy and precision may also suffer based on the “software”: pilot
skill, motivation, attention span, or data analysis capability. Human fal-
libility ensures that no complex system will operate without error. Pilots
may be overzealous and too quick to pull the trigger, or lose their focus,
become bored, and therefore less likely to recognize a potential threat.
Some feel that too many hurdles are placed before armed forces can go
kinetic and take action; drone pilot Matt Martin implied that drones
may have offered too much deliberation in referencing the 2004 bat-
tle of Fallujah in Iraq.84 In some targeting programs, contractors have
performance metrics and must review a certain number of possible
targets in a given period of time so they have a financial incentive to
make life-or-death decisions about possible kill targets.85 Without know-
ing the cause, the United States 15 times missed Taliban leader Baitullah
Mehsud with drone strikes resulting in up to 321 deaths before he was
killed along with 11 others including his wife in the penultimate attack.86
Drones reputedly even killed American medics in “friendly fire” in April
2011 in Afghanistan.87 Furthermore, operators may misunderstand the
intelligence, misread what they are observing, or become overconfident
from small bits of data. American drone operators informed Turkey of
a caravan moving across its border into Iraq, but Turkish jets waved off
the drones and then mistakenly bombed smugglers instead of alleged
terrorists.88 Despite the mistake, a U.S. official contended that the

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

program was successful since it allowed Turkey to use fewer troops and
conduct fewer cross-border operations.89

High Value or Low Level Targets

Another primary debate regarding the efficacy of drones is whether they
are primarily killing high value targets or low level militants. The United
States wishes to decapitate the head of an organization or nation that is
necessary for fighting a war, leaving only replacements from the shal-
lowest end of the talent pool that will be ineffective and easy to defeat.90
Avery Plaw proposes that drones are effective in obtaining the immediate
goal, killing enemy operatives and especially leaders, and degrading ene-
my’s organizational capacity, with al Qaeda Central Command (AQCC)
believed to be seriously weakened.91 One study identified the approxi-
mately 350 strikes since 2004 that have cut the number of core al Qaeda
members in the tribal areas of Pakistan by about 75 percent, to roughly 50
to 100 and that drone strikes in northwestern Pakistan from 2007 to 2011
resulted in a decrease in the number and lethality of militant attacks in
those areas.92 Brennan explained that al Qaeda’s strength is waning since
its most skilled and experienced commanders are being lost so quickly
that they cannot be easily replaced and that bin Laden even urged his
leaders to flee the tribal regions and go to places like remote Afghanistan
away from aircraft photography and bombardment.93 After al Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula’s failed attempt to bring down U.S.-bound cargo
planes in October 2010, drone strikes in Yemen caused the al Qaeda
affiliate to lose control of towns in the country’s south as well as a senior
leader. Human Rights Watch reported that a Yemeni government official
acknowledged U.S. airstrikes had killed at least nine alleged “high-value”
targets, including American Anwar al-Awlaki and deputy commander
Said al-Shihri, though three of AQAP’s four founders remain at large:
AQAP commander Naser al-Wuhayshi, military commander Qasim
al-Raymi, and bombmaker Ibrahim al-Asiri.94 Owing to this avowed
progress, President Obama asserted that the need for unmanned strikes
will be reduced by the end of 2014.95
Many others believe that lower level militants are primarily being
killed and are skeptical of drone strikes’ impact on the overall goal of
eradicating al Qaeda. Of the several thousand people killed by U.S.
drones worldwide, few are believed to be al Qaeda or Taliban lead-
ers but rather were low- or mid-level foot soldiers and most were not

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 National Security and the Efficacy of Drone Warfare 

plotting attacks against the United States.96 In congressional testimony,

Peter Bergen claimed that during the Bush administration, “the drone
campaign appeared to put emphasis on killing significant members of al
Qaeda but under Obama, it underwent a quiet and largely unheralded
shift to focus increasingly on killing Taliban foot soldiers.”97 Pakistan
itself released death tolls of terrorists broken down by foreign fighters or
locals; about four times more deaths were local rather than foreign. In a
McClatchy review of U.S. intelligence reports covering most of the drone
strikes during 2006–2008 and 2010–2011, at least 265 of up to 482 people
whom the CIA killed during a 12-month period ending in September 2011
were not senior al Qaeda leaders but instead were “assessed” as Afghan,
Pakistani, and unknown extremists; perhaps only six top al Qaeda lead-
ers were killed at that time. Moreover, 43 of 95 drone strikes reviewed for
that period hit groups other than al Qaeda, including the Haqqani net-
work, several Pakistani Taliban factions, and the unidentified individu-
als described only as “foreign fighters” and “other militants,” with only
one identified as a civilian casualty.98 An estimated 81 targeted strikes by
manned aircraft, drones, or sea-launched cruise missiles in Yemen are
believed to have killed at least 473 people; the majority of those killed are
likely combatants but many of them were also civilians.99
Noel Sharkey contends that it may be impossible to measure the
amount of talent in the deep end of the pool, that it “assumes a meri-
tocratic system in which the leaders are the most talented rather than
the most ideologically committed; in actuality, their replacements could
turn out to be more talented” and others could be trained before leaders
are eliminated in any case.100 Moreover, lists may be developed duplici-
tously as when the Vietnam War era’s Operation Phoenix assassination
campaign saw South Vietnamese officials target individuals for personal
reasons such as erasing gambling debts or resolving family quarrels.101
Leaked documents indicate that analysts infer the culpability of many
targets from their sex and age, their interaction with terrorist operatives,
or their presence in sites thought to be controlled by terrorist networks.
These are not sufficient criteria for determining the culpability of vic-
tims, let alone the value of the victims. Fred Kaplan asserts that drone
targets lack a formal list of the criteria that a suspected terrorist must
meet before he can be targeted by a drone, nor a quantitative technique
to measure the degree of confidence in this signature, but rather only a
database of correlations between certain types of behavior and the pres-
ence of terrorist leaders.102 Cronin also argues that al Qaeda was never

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

too dependent on bin Laden’s leadership, has proven adept at replacing

dead operatives, and that killing its members does not restrict its ability
to perpetuate its message as al Qaeda’s propaganda branch Sahab (the
Clouds) has been able to attract recruits and resources by broadcasting
footage of drone strikes and portraying them as indiscriminate violence
against Muslims.103

Civilian Casualties and Collateral Damage

One of the core debates over the use of drones in warfare is the degree
to which civilians’ lives are being protected. In countries that are not
officially in combat, any loss of life caused by a drone strike may seem
outrageous, whereas in a combat zone a certain level of civilian casualties
may be expected. The nature of warfare has changed greatly over the past
century, with far more cognition of avoiding harm to civilians, especially
in asymmetric war where public opinion matters more. As Michael Lewis
reminds, during World War II cities and towns of no military value were
bombarded and the Allies even declared that “the purpose of aerial
bombardment was to undermine civilian morale by killing civilians and
destroying their cities.”104 Now, beginning with cherry-picking video
images of precision-guided munitions hitting their intended targets dur-
ing the 1991 Iraq war, the public expects greater protection of civilians
than may be the battlespace reality.105
With their real-time video streaming, only a few seconds lag, and array
of sensor readings and intercepts, drones offer the capacity to greatly
reduce civilian casualties. Brennan declared that remotely piloted aircraft
offer the unprecedented ability to have greater proximity to a target for
a longer period of time and to precisely target a military objective while
discriminating between civilian and militant and minimizing collateral
damage and the risk to civilians.106 Obama concurred, stating that drones
“have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” though numerous
civilians were killed from the very first drone strike of his presidency.107
For Rebecca Johnson, “The ability to loiter on target, verify targets by
multiple pilots and analysts, and review strikes after the fact improves
both the ability and incentive to distinguish combatants from noncom-
batants in a way that is simply superior to other methods.”108 Estimates
that more than 35 civilians would be killed trigger an external review
process before a strike and Gregory McNeal emphasizes the mitigation
steps taken by the U.S. military to greatly reduce collateral damage and

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 National Security and the Efficacy of Drone Warfare 

asserts that in Afghanistan a rigorous process to seek higher approval

when more than one non-combatant may be killed was instituted and
that on the ground confirmation from a human source is required before
a strike.109 The requirement for human confirmation before launching
missiles would appear dubious when considering the many failures to
hit targets like Mehsud, particularly since McNeal makes no mention
of signature strikes. Many contend that ground combat operations are
more likely to kill more civilians than drone strikes and the CIA report-
edly lobbied for a shift to drones from JSOC Tomahawk missiles after
civilians were killed in December 2009 at al Majalah and Shabwani in
Yemen.110 Furthermore, William Arkin recalls the precision of a coordi-
nated strike in Afghanistan from a Qatar base that was followed by A-10
Gatling gun strafing in an indiscriminate manner, and still the targeted
Taliban commander escaped.111
Civilian casualties may result from either personality or signature
strikes. The accuracy of signature strikes on true militants may be quite
low, as many as one out of every four killed in CIA drone strikes are
labeled “other militants” identified with circumstantial evidence and no
direct confirmation of who the targets truly were. In fact, David Kilcullen,
adviser to General David Petraeus, claimed in congressional testimony
that 700 civilians had been killed while only 14 senior leaders had per-
ished and wrote that drones are anything but precise and the numbers
of civilian casualties have not been limited, saying that the United States
was killing 50 unintended targets for each intended target.112 During
Brennan’s confirmation hearings to head the CIA in February 2013,
he asserted that no civilians were killed in an active 12-month period
of drone strikes, despite over 600 deaths. Senator Dianne Feinstein,
chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee responsible for oversight of
the targeted killing program, claimed that the committee has done its
“utmost to verify” the figures obtained from the executive branch and
concluded that “the number of civilian casualties that have resulted from
such strikes each year has typically been in the single digits.”113 Virtually
all persons in a signature strike zone are defined as combatants; hence
no civilians could be killed. Zenko found such statistics to be incredible
and unbelievable and Brennan later retracted this claim and admitted
that civilians have been accidently injured or killed.114
Part of the problem in identifying who is targeted and killed is the lack
of accounting in the aftermath of a strike. Without any public oversight
or independent reporting of the circumstances of each attack based on

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

free and safe access to the site of an assault, any claims about efficacy
are dubious at best, impossible for citizens and independent observers to
substantiate or refute. While the U.S. government seems to undercount
civilian death tolls, estimates of total civilian casualties range from
0 to 60, the Pakistan press tends to report much higher civilian casualty
counts.115 According to current and former U.S. officials, the CIA does
not remove someone from the combatant category and place them in the
non-combatant category unless a preponderance of explicit evidence is
produced after the strike showing that the person killed was an innocent
civilian.116 Since virtually no post-strike investigation is conducted, few
civilians are likely to be tallied; Human Rights Watch found no evidence
of any post-strike investigations to verify civilian casualties.117 Death
tolls, certainly of fighting age men, are likely undercounted further as
the Taliban considers itself to look weak in the face of drone casualties
so the bodies of victims are often hidden. The Islamic practice of wash-
ing, wrapping, and burying an individual on the date of death may also
minimize death tolls in these inaccessible regions.118
Four major organizations track casualties from drone strikes, the
Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the New America Foundation, the
Long War Journal, and UMass DRONE, though all reporting must be
taken with a grain of salt.119 Some of the data for drone strikes in Pakistan
and Yemen as well as comparative measurements are compiled in
Tables 2.1 and 2.2.
Based on comparative analysis of these four databases, the United
States likely conducted nearly 400 drone strikes in Pakistan leading
to about 3,000 deaths and over 1,000 injured as of January 2014. The
Conflict Monitoring Center, a Pakistan-based group, reported 352 drone
strikes and 3,049 total human beings killed in the same time period. The
ratio of civilian to militant death is less clear, though on the low end

Table 2.1 Drone strike data, Pakistan (2004–2013)

Bureau New America Long War UMass

Total strikes    

Total killed ,–, ,–, , ,
Militants killed N/A ,–, , ,
Civilians killed – –  
Civilians killed/total – –  

Source: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the New America Foundation, the Long War
Journal, and UMass DRONE.

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 National Security and the Efficacy of Drone Warfare 

Table 2.2 Drone strike data, Yemen (2002–2013)

Bureau New America Long War UMass

Total strikes –   

Total killed – –  
Militants killed N/A –  
Civilians killed – –  
Civilians killed/total – –  

Source: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the New America Foundation, the Long War
Journal, and UMass DRONE.

are estimates of 4 or 6 percent of deaths being civilian to higher range of

about one quarter. If the four data sets are averaged using the midpoint
for the two that report ranges, the collected evidence would be that
around 10 percent of those killed were civilians, roughly 300 people.
Agreement on the number of drone strikes in Yemen is less apparent,
though the total is nearing 100. The number killed also varies a great deal;
several hundred deaths would appear to be the common view.120 Civilian
fatalities range from estimates of 5 percent up to 20 percent of a much
smaller total death toll; the average using the midpoint for the two ranges
would be 12 percent of those killed being civilians, slightly higher than
in Pakistan. No meaningful data exist for Somalia, as only the Bureau of
Investigative Journalism and UMass DRONE record strikes there, and
they identify less than ten total strikes resulting in 8 to 30 deaths.
By comparison, NATO bombing of Serbia reported 495 civilians killed
and 820 civilians wounded in a bombing campaign that lasted several
months and involved more than 38,000 sorties, 10,000 strike sorties, and
the release of more than 23,000 air munitions.121 If correct, the ratio of
civilians killed to air strikes undertaken appears dramatically higher in
the drone wars than the NATO intervention in 1999.122 Yet by another
standard, non-drone operations in the FATA may kill more civilians
(38 percent) than do drones and the rate for the Pakistan army is reput-
edly 31 percent and even Israeli targeted killings reach 41 percent.123
Another study found that from 2002 to 2008, 234 of 387 Israeli targeted
killing operations against Palestinians were considered militants but
that over 100 were collateral casualties.124 Plaw compares drone strikes
to fatalities by al Qaeda, though ignores all other weapons systems used
by the United States and NATO in the war on terror.125 Of course, civilian
deaths as a response to September 11 are extraordinary; at least 137,000

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

civilians have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined since the
U.S. invasions though few of those deaths were caused by drones, or
even directly by the U.S. military.126 Overall, such casualty ratios may
be acceptable in a formal armed conflict but would seem extraordinary
if the given areas are not considered war zones. Again, the data do not
provide a definitive metric to determine the accuracy or effectiveness of
drone warfare.
Individual accounts support the notion of civilian casualties and tar-
geting errors. In a single strike at Datta Khel on a jirga, or community
meeting, in which locals were negotiating with a small group of mili-
tants over mining rights on March 17, 2011, Pakistani villagers reported
that about one-third killed were either civilians or tribal police, leaving
around 70 percent as militants, and Pakistani officials and villagers
claimed that 38 non-combatants were killed.127 Zabet Amanullah, a
human rights advocate supportive of the U.S.-backed government, was
killed in a 2010 drone strike by U.S. forces in Afghanistan after the U.S.
military had tracked the wrong mobile phone for months, mistaking
him for a senior Taliban leader.128 While foraging for scrap metal worth
50 cents per camel load, Daraz Khan and two friends were killed near
Zhawar Kili, Pakistan because he was tall and thus resembled bin Laden
despite being six inches shorter.129 David Cloud reported another major
mistaken attack in February 2010, when 15 or 16 men by U.S. count (23
according to local elders) were killed and 12 people were wounded,
including a woman and three children.130 The U.S. military itself found
that “inaccurate and unprofessional” reporting by Predator drone
operators led to this airstrike on a group of innocent men, women, and
children based only on the fact that the convoy included military-age
men.131 Each survivor received about $2,900 while families of the dead
received $4,800; as a result, General Stanley McChrystal banned the
term “military age male” saying it implied that every adult man was a
combatant.132
Nearly all sources agree that civilian death tolls are declining in recent
years; since 2009, drone strikes have become more accurate and resulted
in relatively low to moderate civilian casualties. Obama argues that drone
strikes are being used more judiciously already, to protect urban popu-
lations and to patrol less inhabited areas in combat zones; in fact, U.S.
policy may already be evolving toward traditional law-enforcement-style
counter-terrorism with limited deployment of drones and special-forces
capabilities.133 Plaw argues that civilian deaths are down because more

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 National Security and the Efficacy of Drone Warfare 

U.S. spies in the Pakistan tribal areas are providing intelligence along
with improved technology like homing beacons, more CIA safeguards,
and the adoption of more accurate 35-pound Scorpion missiles instead
of the 100-pound Hellfire variety.134
If ordinary people die from attacks inside countries not in combat, the
trade-off between military necessity and protection of civilians becomes
all the more palpable as drones afford few excuses for collateral damage.
As Beard explains, civilian death may now be incidental but cannot be
accidental.135 For instance, U.S. military officials said that they were aware
of a child’s presence but that the commander was such a “high-value tar-
get” that it was worth the risk that some children might be casualties.136
According to Zenko, although the vast majority of collateral deaths were
unintentional, children, individuals attempting to rescue drone strike
victims, and the funeral processions of deceased militants were know-
ingly attacked (leading to civilian deaths) when a senior member of al
Qaeda was the intended target.137 Sharkey goes further to say perhaps “it
would be useful to have decision makers draw up a table of how many
civilian casualties/deaths would be acceptable for each of the al Qaeda
suspects thought to be in the deeper end of the talent pool. How many
children is a given leader worth?”138 Rhetoric such as performing “surgi-
cal strikes” with “pinpoint accuracy” using “smart bombs” has always
belied the reality that non-combatants will die and in many cases that
innocents will lose their life. Even if drones are better able to abide
distinction, combatants may hide among non-combatants which always
leave a risk of unintentional civilian deaths.139 This “collateral damage” is
often a fact of war, but in the asymmetric contests that the United States
regularly engages in, standards of proportionality are heightened. This
is especially true when the United States is “fighting” for the “hearts and
minds” of a population suffering from bombing campaigns and other
tactics of warfare.

Drones in Conventional Warfare

With the strategic advantage of asymmetric war, drones can operate

effectively in a permissive environment where no air defense can inter-
dict them and thus countries have the opportunity to be more discerning
of targeting. Since most wars the United States fights are against inferior
foes or in failed states that often lack even rudimentary defense forces,

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

drones can operate easily. The use of drones differs greatly in a total war
with a wide range of conventional forces including anti-aircraft capa-
bilities that could render drones relatively ineffective. While one could
conceive of drone-versus-drone warfare, a UAV can neither reliably
defend itself nor consistently elude a determined attack and is therefore
“not good in a dog-fight.”140 Pioneer drones were shot down in both Gulf
Wars with Iraq, as well as in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Somalia; indeed a
manned Iraqi MiG-25 pilot defeated a Stinger missile-equipped Predator
in December 2002 prior to the U.S. invasion.141 Drones would need a
larger engine to become more maneuverable, but in order to do so must
carry more fuel which drives up size and weight and means the aircraft
will lose flight time. Drones also need to maintain connectivity and are
susceptible to being jammed, yet more sensors would probably increase
its radar reflection, reduce its stealth, and add costs to the project.142
Some of the resistance to drone usage in conventional air warfare comes
from those devoted more to the martial arts and personal heroism of
combat and loathe being replaced by remote control, though these cri-
tiques still assume frequent air engagements in a conventional setting
against a sophisticated foe despite the reality that most wars are asym-
metric. In current conventional operations, piloted aircraft will perform
better at some missions, though unmanned vehicles may at a minimum
provide air transport and air refueling, suppress enemy air defenses and
establish forward air control, and conduct combat search and rescue.143
Regardless, any major power wishing to effectively project its forces will
incorporate drones into its arsenal.
Although strong countries must prepare for the threats from cruise
missiles and UAVs to the homeland, drones overall are less useful for
conventional attacks against states and only internally operated remotely
piloted aircraft could present a serious challenge.144 Brian Jackson et al.
provide some options to defend against drones: counter-proliferation
efforts to limit technology acquisition, counter-terrorism targeting
groups’ procuring the devices, and recovery plans to mitigate the results
of such an attack, and recommend a focus on counter-terrorism and
law enforcement to prevent incursions since defending at the point of
attack would be too costly and defenses could protect only small areas.145
Moreover, asymmetric foes are not likely to employ drone technology
since conventional terrorism tactics such as truck bombs have a bigger
payload, though critical infrastructure remains a potential target.146
Nevertheless, drones could lead other actors to similarly adopt targeted

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 National Security and the Efficacy of Drone Warfare 

killing both during armed conflict and as a general foreign policy

stratagem.147

Conclusion
Drones are only a platform just as a submarine or silo can launch a
missile; yet with their surveillance technology, drones suggest even
more accuracy. Even critics of the legality of current U.S. policy admit
that “drones can enable states to carry out targeted killings efficiently, at
relatively little cost, and at minimal risk.”148 For Cronin, “drone strikes
offer the ideal, poll-tested counterterrorism policy: cheap, apparently
effective, and far away.”149 Of course, assassination was once considered
not only precise and efficient but also humane as it avoided war.150
Nevertheless, collateral damage is not removed from the equation. Real
questions remain unanswered regarding how many have died that were
not intended, what percentage of civilians were killed as compared
to those who were targeted, and what is the ultimate rationale for the
continuance of drone strikes in Pakistan against local warlords and of
expanding the operations into non-combat zones. As Michael Ignatieff
writes, “technological superiority is thus not a guarantee of national
security and there is no reason to believe the zero-casualty, zero-risk,
zero-defect warfare will actually result in a safer world, or even a world
safer just for Americans.”151
Moreover, America’s unique standing may not last long; a widespread
diffusion of drone technology across the globe is resulting in a drone
arms race that seems to be in its infancy but is rapidly expanding as
other nations advance. Ironically, during insurgencies where hearts and
minds are the center of gravity, drones offend sensibilities owing to their
asymmetry and may be counter-productive; in conventional war where
strategic defeat of enemy is the goal, drones should be more tolerated but
would be unable to effectively operate in a non-permissive environment.
Echoing long-held institutional attitudes, many argue that the national
security community should not be micro-managed in its core mission
of defending the U.S. homeland from attack, thus targeting decisions are
best left to the executive branch and are not appropriate for submission
to a court.152 The next chapter will examine the legality of drone warfare
and targeted killing in light of the supposed effectiveness of this new
technology.

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Notes
 Mark Bowden, “The Killing Machines: How to Think about Drones,” The
Atlantic (September 2013).
 James Igoe Walsh, The Effectiveness of Drone Strikes in Counterinsurgency and
Counterterrorism Campaigns (Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War
College Press: September 2013), 9.
 Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York, N.Y.: Henry
Holt, 2000), 169; Kristin Roberts, “When the Whole World has Drones,”
National Journal (March 21, 2013); Lawrence Spinnetta, “The Rise of
Unmanned Aircraft,” Aviation History (January 2011), 31.
 Leila Nadya Sadat, “America’s Drone Wars,” Case Western Reserve Journal of
International Law 45 (2012), 230.
 Armin Krishnan, Killer Robots: Legality and Ethicality of Autonomous Weapons
(Burlington, V.T.: Ashgate, 2009), 63.
 Leon Panetta, Speech at Pacific Council on International Policy, May 18,
2009.
 Barack Obama, Speech at National Defense University, May 23, 2013.
 Bowden, “The Killing Machines.”
 Jeffrey A. Sluka, “Death from Above: UAVs and Losing Hearts and Minds,”
Military Review (May–June 2011), 71, 73.
 Milan N. Vego, “Effects-Based Operations: A Critique,” Joint Forces Quarterly
no. 41 (2nd Quarter 2006), 51–57.
 Krishnan, Killer Robots, 40–41.
 Matt Martin, Predator: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan:
A Pilot’s Story (Minneapolis, M.N.: Zenith, 2010), 104.
 Krishnan, Killer Robots, 40–41.
 George Lucas, “Engineering, Ethics, and Industry: The Moral Challenges of
Lethal Autonomy,” in Bradley Jay Strawser, ed., Killing by Remote Control: The
Ethics of an Unmanned Military (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2013),
216; Kenneth Andersen and Matthew Waxman, “Law and Ethics for Robot
Soldiers,” Policy Review (December 2012 and January 2013), 37.
 Christian Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War: Military Virtue in a
Post-Heroic Age (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2013), 98.
 Krishnan, Killer Robots, 62.
 Noah Shachtman, “Attack of the Drones,” Wired 13, no. 6 (June 2005).
 Andersen and Waxman, “Law and Ethics for Robot Soldiers,” 38.
 Patrick Lin, George Bekey, and Keith Abney, Autonomous Military Robotics:
Risk, Ethics, and Design (U.S. Department of Navy, Office of Naval Research,
2008), 73.
 Eric Hagerman, “Point, Click, Kill: The Future of Air Combat,” Popular
Science (December 2009), 38.

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 National Security and the Efficacy of Drone Warfare 

 John Horgan, “The Drones Come Home,” National Geographic (March 2013).
 Micah Zenko, “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Drones,” Foreign Policy
(March/April 2012); Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote
Control (London, U.K.: Verso, 2013), 22–23; Horgan, “The Drones Come
Home.” The C-130 landed safely with the drone poking out of its wing.
 Shachtman, “Attack of the Drones.”
 Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New
American Security State (New York, N.Y.: Little, Brown and Co, 2011), 229.
 John Brennan, The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy, Speech
at Woodrow Wilson Center (April 30, 2012).
 Obama, Speech at National Defense University.
 Sara Reardon, “Drone School: Tough Lessons for Rookie Remote Pilots,” New
Scientist (January 31, 2013).
 Jean L. Otto and Bryant J. Webber, “Mental Health Diagnoses and
Counseling Among Pilots of Remotely Piloted Aircraft in the United States
Air Force,” Medical Surveillance Monthly Report 20, no. 3 (March 2013), 7.
 Jack Beard, “The Law and War in the Virtual Era,” The American Journal of
International Law 103, no. 3 (July 2009), 413, 419, 421.
 Obama, Speech at National Defense University.
 Daniel Byman, “Why Drones Work: The Case for Washington’s Weapon of
Choice,” Foreign Affairs (July 1, 2013); Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 211.
 Jeff McMahan, “Targeted Killing: Murder, Combat, or Law Enforcement?”
in Claire Finkelstein, Andrew Altman, and Jens David Ohlin, eds., Targeted
Killings: Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical World (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 150.
 Daniel Klaidman, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama
Presidency (Boston, M.A.: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2012).
 Beard, “The Law and War in the Virtual Era,” 414, 419.
 Audrey Kurth Cronin, “Why Drones Fail,” Foreign Affairs (July 1, 2013).
 Walsh, The Effectiveness of Drone Strikes in Counterinsurgency and
Counterterrorism Campaigns, 6–7, 11, 13–14, 45.
 Ibid., 6.
 Brennan, The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy.
 Johnston and Sarbahi, The Impact of US Drone Strikes on Terrorism in Pakistan
and Afghanistan.
 Tim Craig, “Mehsud; Pakistan Accuses U.S. of Derailing Peace Talks,”
Washington Post (November 2, 2013).
 Rebecca Johnson, “The Wizard of Oz Goes to War: Unmanned Systems in
Counterinsurgency,” in Bradley Jay Strawser, ed., Killing by Remote Control:
The Ethics of an Unmanned Military (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press,
2013), 159, 170.
 Beard, “The Law and War in the Virtual Era,” 423.

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

 Bowden, “The Killing Machines.”

 Cronin, “Why Drones Fail.”
 Kaplan, “The World as Free Fire Zone,” 42.
 James Cartwright, Discussion at Chicago Council on Global Affairs (March
21, 2013).
 Daniel R. Brunstetter with Megan Braun, “State of the Union: A Decade of
Armed Drones,” Prepared for “War and Peace as Liberal Arts,” University of
California, Irvine (2013).
 Cronin, “Why Drones Fail.”
 Amnesty International, “Will I Be Next?”: US Drone Strikes in Pakistan
(London, U.K.: 2013), 32.
 Ibid., 33.
 Human Rights Watch (Letta Tayler), “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda”: The
Civilian Cost of US Targeted Killings in Yemen (New York, N.Y.: Human Rights
Watch, 2013), 3.
 Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (New York, N.Y.: Nation
Books, 2013), 169; Wali Aslam, The United States and Great Power Responsibility
in International Society: Drones, Rendition, and Invasion (New York, N.Y.:
Routledge, 2013), 81. Benjamin, Drone Warfare, 79. In mid-April 2013,
Pakistan’s former president Pervez Musharraf acknowledged to CNN that his
government had secretly signed off on U.S. drone strikes.
 Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 219.
 Steven Coll, “Remote Control: Our Drone Delusion,” The New Yorker (May 6,
2013).
 Dennis Blair, “Drones Alone Are Not the Answer,” New York Times (August 4,
2011).
 Gregory Johnsen, The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in
Arabia (New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2012).
 Zenko, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” 11.
 Ibid., 11.
 Human Rights Watch (Tayler), “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda,” 24.
 Sikander Ahmed Shah, “War on Terrorism: Self Defense, Operation
Enduring Freedom, and the Legality of U.S. Drone Attacks in Pakistan,”
Washington University Global Studies Law Review 9, no. 1 (2010), 124.
 Jonathan S. Landay, “Obama’s Drone War Kills ‘Others’, Not Just Al Qaida
Leaders,” McClatchy DC (April 9, 2013).
 Ibid.
 Aslam, The United States and Great Power Responsibility in International Society,
92–94.
 Ibid., 91–92.
 Pir Zubair Shah, “My Drone War,” Foreign Policy (March/April 2012).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0005
 National Security and the Efficacy of Drone Warfare 

 In one attempt, the CIA reportedly killed a mid-ranking Pakistan Taliban

commander Khwaz Wali Mehsud in a plan to use his body as “bait” to target
Baitullah Mehsud, who was expected to attend his comrade’s funeral.
 Peter Bergen, “Drone Wars: The Constitutional and Counterterrorism
Implications of Targeted Killing,” (April 23, 2013), Testimony presented
before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the
Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights. <www.Newamerica.net>.
 Glenn Greenwald, “US Detention of Imran Khan Part of Trend to Harass
Anti-drone Advocates,” The Guardian (October 28, 2012).
 Bowden, “The Killing Machines.”
 Micah Zenko, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” Council on Foreign
Relations Special Report no. 65 (January 2013), 12.
 Jeh Johnson, National Security Law, Lawyers, and Lawyering in the Obama
Administration, Speech at Yale University (February 22, 2012).
 Fred Kaplan, “The World as Free Fire Zone,” MIT Technology Review 116, no. 4
(June 7, 2013), 41.
 Bowden, “The Killing Machines;” Byman, “Why Drones Work.”
 Byman, “Why Drones Work.”
 Johnson, “The Wizard of Oz Goes to War,” 161.
 Robert Sparrow, “War Without Virtue?” in Bradley Jay Strawser, ed., Killing
by Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 87.
 Brian Glyn Williams, Predators: the CIA’s Drone War on Al Qaeda (Lincoln,
N.E.: Potomac Books, 2013).
 Brennan, The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy.
 International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law
School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, Living Under Drones:
Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from U.S. Drone Practices in Pakistan
(2012).
 James Chiles, “Drones for Hire,” Air and Space Smithsonian 27, no. 6
(December/January 2012), 32–39.
 Martin, Predator, 200, 245.
 Daniel Shepard, Jahshan A. Bhatti, and Todd E. Humphreys, “Drone Hack:
Spoofing Attack Demonstration on a Civilian Unmanned Aerial Vehicle,”
GPS World (August 1, 2012).
 John A. Gentry, “Doomed to Fail: America’s Blind Faith in Military
Technology,” Parameters (Winter 2002–2003), 91.
 Martin, Predator, 131.
 Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law (New York, N.Y.:
Routledge, 2013), 217; Joshua Foust, “More Than Just Drones: The Moral
Dilemma of Covert Warfare,” The Atlantic (January 23, 2012).

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

 Stuart Casey Maslen, “Pandora’s Box? Drone Strikes Under Jus ad Bellum, Jus
in Bello, and International Human Rights Law,” International Review of the Red
Cross 94, no. 886 (June 2012), 613; Benjamin, Drone Warfare, 107.
 David Swanson, “Drones in U.S. Flight Paths: What Could Go Wrong?,” The
Humanist (July–August 2012), 8.
 Craig Whitlock, “U.S. Military Drone Surveillance is Expanding to Hot Spots
beyond Declared Combat Zones,” Washington Post (July 20, 2013).
 Ibid.
 Noel Sharkey, “Death Strikes from the Sky: The Calculus of Proportionality,”
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine (Spring 2009), 19.
 Avery Plaw, “Counting the Dead: The Proportionality of Predation in
Pakistan,” in Bradley Jay Strawser, ed., Killing by Remote Control: The Ethics of
an Unmanned Military (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2013), 144–145.
 Patrick B. Johnston and Anoop K. Sarbahi, The Impact of U.S. Drone Strikes on
Terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan (July 14, 2013).
 Brennan, The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy.
 Human Rights Watch (Tayler), “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda,” 18.
 Obama, Speech at National Defense University.
 Roberts, “When the Whole World has Drones;” Bergen, “Drone Wars,” 3;
Zenko, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” 10, 21.
 Bergen, “Drone Wars,” 3.
 Landay, “Obama’s Drone War Kills ‘Others’, Not Just Al Qaida Leaders.”
 Human Rights Watch (Tayler), “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda,” 35.
 Sharkey, “Death Strikes from the Sky,” 19.
 Noel Sharkey, “Saying ‘No!’ to Lethal Autonomous Targeting,” Journal of
Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (2010), 376.
 Kaplan, “The World as Free Fire Zone,” 41.
 Cronin, “Why Drones Fail.”
 Michael W. Lewis, “The Law of Aerial Bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War,”
The American Journal of International Law 97, no. 3 (July 2003), 482.
 Beard, “The Law and War in the Virtual Era,” 425.
 Brennan, The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy.
 David Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of
American Power (New York, N.Y.: Crown, 2012), 251.
 Johnson, “The Wizard of Oz Goes to War,” 177.
 Gregory S. McNeal, “Are Targeted Killings Unlawful? A Case Study in
Empirical Claims Without Empirical Evidence,” in Claire Finkelstein,
Andrew Altman, and Jens David Ohlin, eds., Targeted Killings: Law and
Morality in an Asymmetrical World (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press,
2012), 328–329, 331, 337; Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 214.
 Bowden, “The Killing Machines”; Scahill, Dirty Wars, 358.
 Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 218.

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 National Security and the Efficacy of Drone Warfare 

 David McKillen, “Drones of War,” International Institute for Strategic Studies
15, no. 5 (May 2009); Mary Ellen O’Connell, “Unlawful Killing with Combat
Drones: A Case Study of Pakistan, 2004–2009,” in Simon Bronitt, Miriam
Gani, Saskia Hufnagel, eds., Shooting to Kill: Socio-Legal Perspectives on the
Use of Lethal Force (Portland, O.R.: Hart Publishing, 2012), 263–291; David
Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum, “Death from Above, Outrage down
Below” New York Times (May 16, 2009).
 Dianne Feinstein, Hearing Before the Select Committee on Intelligence of
the U.S. Senate, One hundred thirteenth Congress, First Session, February 7,
2013.
 Brennan, The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy; Richard
Engel and Robert Windrem, “CIA Didn’t Always Know Who It Was
Killing in Drone Strikes, Classified Documents Show” NBC News (June 5,
2013).
 Zenko, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” 33; Plaw, “Counting the
Dead,” 126–128.
 Engel and Windrem, “CIA Didn’t Always Know Who It Was Killing in Drone
Strikes, Classified Documents Show.”
 Human Rights Watch (Tayler), “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda,” 92; Engel and
Windrem, “CIA Didn’t Always Know Who It Was Killing in Drone Strikes,
Classified Documents Show.”
 Zenko, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” 12.
 Data collected from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (http://www.
thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones), the New America
Foundation (http://natsec.newamerica.net/about), the Long War Journal
(http://www.longwarjournal.org/pakistan-strikes.php), and UMass DRONE
(http://www.umassdrone.org).
 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism identifies 85–104 possible extra
drone strikes in Yemen resulting in 300–481 total deaths and 23–46 civilian
fatalities. Brian Glyn Williams reports at least two drone strikes on the
island of Jolo in the Philippines against members of Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah
Islamiyah, Williams, Predators, 161, 163.
 Sadat, “America’s Drone Wars.”
 Ibid.
 Plaw, “Counting the Dead,” 148.
 United Nations, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or
Arbitrary Execution, Philip Alston (May 28, 2010), A/HRC/14/24/Add.6, 6.
 Plaw, “Counting the Dead: The Proportionality of Predation in Pakistan,”
146.
 Johnson, “The Wizard of Oz Goes to War,” 155.
 Sebastian Abbot, “Study: Militants, Not Civilians, are Primary Victims of
Drone Strikes,” Associated Press (February 26, 2012).

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

 Michael Hastings, “The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War
in Secret,” Rolling Stone (April 16, 2012).
 John Sifton, “Drones: A Troubling History,” The Nation (February 27, 2012), 11.
 David Cloud, “Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy,” Los Angeles Times (April
10, 2011).
 Dexter Filkins, “Operators of Drones Are Faulted in Afghan Deaths,” New
York Times (May 29, 2010).
 Cloud, “Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy.”
 Jeffrey A. Sluka, “Virtual War in the Tribal Zone: Air Strikes, Drones,
Civilian Casualties, and Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan and
Pakistan,” 173, in Neil L. Whitehead and Sverker Finnström, eds., Virtual
War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013); Bowden, “The Killing
Machines.”
 Plaw, “Counting the Dead,” 151.
 Beard, “The Law and War in the Virtual Era,” 438.
 Sharkey, “Saying ‘No!’ to Lethal Autonomous Targeting,” 17.
 Zenko, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” 12, 13, 35.
 Sharkey, “Saying ‘No!’ to Lethal Autonomous Targeting,” 19.
 Johnson, “The Wizard of Oz Goes to War,” 172.
 C.J. Chivers, “The Human Element: Why Drones Won’t Be Taking over
Our Wars Anytime Soon,” Popular Science (May 2012), 60–61; International
Institute for Strategic Studies, “Drones of War,” 15, no. 5 (May 2009).
 Krishnan, Killer Robots, 27.
 Chivers, “The Human Element,” 62–63.
 Spinnetta, “The Rise of Unmanned Aircraft,” 30.
 Brian Jackson, David Frelinger, Michael Lostumbo, and Robert Button,
Evaluating Novel Threats to the Homeland: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Cruise
Missiles (RAND 2008), xiii, 29.
 Jackson, et al., Evaluating Novel Threats to the Homeland, xvi, xvii, 29.
 Jackson, et al., Evaluating Novel Threats to the Homeland, 90, 93.
 Jeff McMahan, “Targeted Killing: Murder, Combat, or Law Enforcement?”,
152.
 Maslen, “Pandora’s Box?,” 623.
 Cronin, “Why Drones Fail.”
 Coll, “Remote Control.”
 Ignatieff, Virtual War, 212.
 Johnson, National Security Law, Lawyers, and Lawyering in the Obama
Administration.

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 3
Targeted Killing and the
Legality of Drone Warfare
Abstract: This chapter discusses whether the war on al
Qaeda and terrorism generally is part of an armed conflict
or better addressed through law enforcement mechanisms.
It then dissects the laws of war (jus ad bellum) regarding
self-defense, host state consent, and UN Security Council
authorization, and the laws in war (jus in bello) standards
on drones as a weapon system, distinction between
civilian and combatant, military necessity and signature
strikes, proportionality, responsibility, and due process. It
also introduces suggestions that human rights norms or
domestic law bind state behavior regarding targeted killing.
Ultimately, strikes against some non-state actors in non-
combat zones fall afoul of international law, though the
U.S. government argues that targeted killing with drones
fully complies with all applicable laws.

Keywords: drones in self-defense; human rights and

drones; jus ad bellum; jus in bello; proportionality; targeted
killing

Rae, James DeShaw. Analyzing the Drone Debates:

Targeted Killing, Remote Warfare, and Military
Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
doi: 10.1057/9781137381576.0006.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0006 
 Analyzing the Drone Debates

This chapter juxtaposes competing views on the legality of drone war-

fare. Debates animate the legal questions relating to the use of armed
drones for targeted killing at multiple stages of a conflict and across
different bodies of law. The first dividing line is whether the response to
a transnational non-state threat is more properly conducted under a law
enforcement model, akin to domestic policing with arrests, trials, and
killing as a last resort, or a military contingency operation that brings
to bear all the might of the armed forces and intelligence services to kill
or capture terrorists who stand outside the law. Most legal scholars are
divided between those more inclined to a national security perspective
that offers a legal pathway for the government to continue its aggressive
policies and the alternative viewpoints that cluster around opposition to
these practices and find varying degrees of illegality among the govern-
ment’s efforts.
The legal underpinnings of targeted killings using drones depend
either on accepting the “war on terror” as a true armed conflict to justify
this particular use of force or by placing al Qaeda outside the bounds
of traditional warfare as unlawful combatants who are not entitled to
virtually any rights. Those who deny the existence of an armed conflict
since al Qaeda is not a state thus find fault at every stage thereafter by
adopting a human rights outlook. Therefore, from a law enforcement
perspective the intentional lethal use of firearms may be made only when
strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.1 Yet treating transnational
terrorism as a law enforcement problem faces the difficulty of relying on
willing and capable police forces in a wide range of countries from allies
to hostile nations. Colonel Mark Maxwell criticizes the law enforcement
model for treating members of an armed group as civilians with related
protections and thus privileging them over legal combatants themselves.2
This schism has materialized regularly since September 11 regarding each
step in the war on terror, from surveillance to torture to targeted killing.
Regarding drones and targeted killing, President Barack Obama has
definitively stated, “America’s actions are legal,” and prominent figures
in his administration have made that case through a series of policy
speeches beginning in 2010.3
The primary starting point for legal judgments on drone warfare in the
context of the fight against terrorism is the definition of “armed conflict.”
Common Article 2 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions defines international
armed conflict as between two or more high contracting parties to the
treaty, that is states, and is less clear on the role of non-state actors and

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 Targeted Killing and the Legality of Drone Warfare 

whether non-state actors must be sponsored by a state. In this regard, the

Geneva Conventions recognize non-international armed conflict (NIAC),
the use of force between a state and rebel groups inside of a country in
which the non-state actor should possess an organized military force, a
responsible authority, and act within a defined territory. A NIAC also
requires armed violence to maintain a consistent and protracted level
of intensity beyond sporadic internal disturbances, isolated events, and
occasional tensions and may require state sponsorship to constitute an
armed attack. Article 8 of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Rome
Statute codifies the existence of an armed conflict not of an international
character when “protracted armed conflict between governmental
authorities and organized armed groups or between such groups” exists.
The Bush administration wished to avoid the guarantees for prisoner of
war status and other restrictions of the Geneva Conventions and in a
Department of Justice memo from January 9, 2002, and a Presidential
Order of February 7, 2002, argued that the war on terrorism was nei-
ther an international nor a non-international armed conflict and that
“none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al Qaeda
in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world.”4 This allowed more
latitude for aggressive interrogation techniques, but also raised questions
about the applicable standard of international law. Following Hamdan v.
Rumsfeld (2006), the Obama administration accepted that the war against
al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces is a non-international armed
conflict since the Geneva Conventions use the term interstate conflict
and al Qaeda is not a state. For the Obama administration, the nexus to
an armed conflict was a fundamental aspect to trigger the laws of war
rather than the ordinary corpus of human rights law that has developed
in the past half century or more.
Many legal scholars discount the contention that an armed conflict of
any variety exists. In this regard, Mary Ellen O’Connell argues that the
U.S. war against al Qaeda violates the laws of war since all killings are
illegal without an armed conflict between states, even with permission
from a government. For Stuart Casey Maslen, a clear nexus to an armed
conflict with a clearly defined non-state party is necessary, not an ill-
defined globalized “war against terror.”5 Human Rights Watch accepts
that the fighting between the Yemeni government and AQAP has since
at least 2011 reached the level of an armed conflict, though whether a
distinct armed conflict between the United States and AQAP exists is
less clear.6

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Under the Obama administration, senior officials began to discuss

the legality of the drone wars after years of official secrecy dating back
to the Bush administration and would rely heavily on U.S. domestic
law. At a keynote speech to the American Society of International
Law in March 2010, U.S. State Department legal adviser Harold Koh
offered a legal justification, framing the ongoing war on terror as self-
defense within the meaning of Article 51 of the UN Charter and within
the domestic legal authority to prosecute the war against al Qaeda, the
Taliban, and associated forces by all means deemed necessary by the
president under the September 18, 2001 congressionally approved
Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). The AUMF
authorizes the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force
against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned,
authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on
September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order
to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United
States by such nations, organizations or persons.” 7 Although the AUMF
only authorizes the U.S. armed forces to conduct operations, President
George W. Bush signed a classified Memorandum of Notification on
September 17, 2001, authorizing the CIA to use lethal covert action
against al Qaeda and other terrorist networks anywhere in the world.8
In 2004, al Qaeda Network Executive Order (AQN ExOrd) allowed
JSOC to operate anywhere in the world.9 Legal review of targeted kill-
ings is performed by the CIA’s general counsel in consultation with
White House counsel.10
Much of the legal wrangling is fact dependent, very American-centric,
and susceptible to shifting political tides. In July 2001, U.S. Ambassador
to Israel Martin Indyk stated that targeted killing of Palestinians was ille-
gal and that “the United States government is very clearly on record as
against targeted assassinations ... They are extrajudicial killings, and we
do not support that.”11 By the end of that year, American foreign policy
and legal opinions were dramatically different. Certainly, al Qaeda does
not fit the traditional definition of an insurgent group within a state, but
nor does it limit itself to internal riots and disturbances as described in
the Geneva Conventions for those acts not subject to their oversight.
In practice, the United States is in rather unchartered territory so the
application of laws is somewhat sui generis, as Koh called it, the “The
Law of 9/11.”12 Of course, the United States has a long history employ-
ing covert operations, enhanced interrogation, and assassination of

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 Targeted Killing and the Legality of Drone Warfare 

foreign leaders; prior to September 11, the United States launched direct
attacks on known residences of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and Osama
bin Laden. Overall, the legality of drones under the law of war must be
considered according to international humanitarian law of jus ad bellum,
the decision to go to war, and jus in bello, the conduct in war, as well as
international human rights law that is arguably in effect at all times.

Jus Ad Bellum

The dominant norm of international relations is the sovereign equality

of nation-states that is bound by the UN Charter’s Articles 2 and 51 and
disallows violations of political independence or territorial integrity,
thus the starting point of considering drone strikes and targeted killing
is the inherent illegality of war. Under international law, in just three
circumstances is it legal for a country to use force: self-defense, a UN
Security Council authorization to use force, or the invitation of the host
state. Many scholars of international law would argue that drone strikes
in countries not in an armed conflict with another country are thereby
violations of sovereignty and by consequence acts of aggression in viola-
tion of the UN Charter and customary international law.13 In 1974, UN
General Assembly Resolution 3314 defined aggression to include an
attack, bombardment, or use of any weapons by the armed forces of a
state against the territory of another state. Casey Maslen agrees, “Almost
certainly, a more intensive cross-border use of drone strikes, akin to a
bombardment, would be an armed attack on another state and therefore
constitute aggression, absent Security Council authorization or being an
action being taken in legitimate self-defence.”14 Similar acts have been
labeled aggression by the UN Security Council, such as Israel’s viola-
tion of Tunisian sovereignty twice in the 1980s which were both passed
without a dissenting vote. In 1985, UN Security Council Resolution 573
condemned Israeli violations of Tunisia’s sovereignty and territorial
integrity when its air forces bombed the headquarters of the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO) killing dozens in addition to the assas-
sination of PLO strategist Khalil al-Wazir at his home in Tunisia in 1988
that was labeled “aggression” by UN Security Council Resolution 611.
The notion of aggression is also contested since UN General Assembly
resolutions are not considered binding and negotiations over the Rome
Statute of the International Criminal Court could not reach a consensus

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

on a definition of aggression when great powers sought to avoid such

constraint on their actions.
The United States builds its case for drone strikes on three legal pil-
lars: domestic statutory authority, self-defense, and host state consent.
The primary legal justification frames the ongoing war on terror as
self-defense within the meaning of Article 51 of the UN Charter buffeted
by the domestic legal authority to prosecute the war against al Qaeda,
the Taliban, and associated forces by all means deemed necessary under
the AUMF. The U.S. Congress is enshrined with the power to declare
war and the War Powers Act compels the executive branch to inform the
Congress when armed forces are used by the president. While the use of
American armed forces overseas falls under this standard and the CIA
must notify Congress of its overseas special activities, the JSOC is ultra-
secretive and does not report its clandestine or covert operations.15 In this
case, the AUMF authorizes the commander-in-chief to use military force
with few limits and without any geographic restriction and was passed
with only one dissenting vote in either chamber. Moreover, UN Security
Council 1373 of September 28, 2001 recognizes terrorism as threats to
international peace and security. Thus, the U.S. government argues that
it is abiding by its self-defense claims as recognized at the UN Security
Council following an attack by al Qaeda against its homeland with full
domestic legal authority from the AUMF and any U.S. drone strikes were
conducted in active combat zones or with the explicit or tacit consent of
the host state.
The U.S. government lawyers have also claimed that this armed
conflict operates in a global theatre where national boundaries cannot
protect non-state threats and some scholars have gone further to also
argue that if a state does not have the capacity or willingness to interdict
terrorism within their border, they essentially forfeit their sovereignty
and a different meaning of the responsibility to protect arises where
foreign powers can intervene to defend their homelands from threats
emanating in distant lands through preemptive targeted killing. The U.S.
government suggests the new battlefield is global and therefore non-state
terrorists carry it with them wherever they go; in essence everywhere is
a battlefield and site of (non-international) armed conflict since it does
not occur between nation-states. Attorney General Eric Holder asserted
that the use of force in foreign territory would be consistent with these
international legal principles if conducted with the consent of the nation
involved or after a determination that the nation is unable or unwilling

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 Targeted Killing and the Legality of Drone Warfare 

to deal effectively with a threat to the United States.16 Although Michael

Schmitt asserts that some of the drone strikes in Pakistan have come
without permission, which raises the legal specter of aggression, he
contends that if the territorial state which hosts violent non-state actors
does not act to stop their activities or is incapable, then the “victim” state
can do so and thus “consent” is not necessary for legal purposes.17
Each of these legal benchmarks is equally questioned by critics of
the policy. The UN Charter recognizes only self-defense rights after an
armed attack has transpired and does not portend to accept an unlim-
ited response forever. The 2001 attacks should not be seen as unending
grounds for self-defense, particularly toward a movement like the
Taliban which neither has global ideological aspirations nor is pursu-
ing terrorism against the U.S. homeland. If a new threat is identified,
a country is obliged to inform the UN Security Council of their use of
force in self-defense as soon as possible. Indeed, Article 51 applies only
to attacks or imminent attacks by other states, not by terrorist groups.18
Casey Maslen avows that “the use of an armed drone by a state against
another or in another’s territory purporting to be in self-defence must at
least be immediately reported to the Security Council if it is to be lawful.
This is not known to have happened yet.”19 Regarding the AUMF, some
question the authority conferred on the executive branch to conduct a
war with no end in sight and the legality of the legislation to contem-
porary realities where core al Qaeda is largely defeated and suggest at a
minimum a renewal is in order. Despite President Obama’s assurances
that like all wars this too will come to an end and that he wants to “ulti-
mately repeal” the AUMF’s mandate, the nature of the threat does not
easily lend itself to definitive endings.20 Finally, some argue that a state
not in armed conflict cannot simply invite a military-style drone strike
on its citizens, or that it may be unlawful for a state to privately consent
but publicly dissent. Sorting out these questions of legality requires an
examination on a case-by-case basis.
American drone strikes are known to have occurred in at least seven
countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia,
and Yemen; yet the primary targets of the drone strikes have been non-
state actors like the Taliban or al Qaeda and its affiliates, off-shoots,
and like-minded organizations. Of course, the United States operates
drones in other countries without invitation, such as Iran, but those
are only for spying purposes. The legality of the sustained military
operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya are each questionable, while

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U.S. drone strikes in non-combat zones such as Pakistan, Somalia, or

Yemen may be considered an attack, an act of war, and thus an act of
aggression in violation of the UN Charter that could proffer self-defense
rights for these countries. As O’Connell asserts, “international law
does not recognize the right to kill without warning outside an actual
armed conflict,” though U.S. armed forces could be lawful combatants
if Pakistan requested American assistance in a civil war.21 Although the
United States may have tacit permission from these countries to conduct
such operations and a state may consent to a violation of its sovereignty,
human rights law applies nonetheless.22
The use of force including drone strikes in Afghanistan appears to
be the least disputed as they pass the threshold of self-defense since the
United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, by a non-state actor, al
Qaeda, based in Afghanistan that operated with the support and protec-
tion of the Taliban government of that country, and most of the world
including the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 1368 on
the following day recognized the legitimacy of the American response.
Yet as American targets have shifted to the Taliban and other groups
seeking to attack American forces based in Afghanistan or to destabilize
their own national governments there or in Pakistan, doubts have grown
whether these groups are really fighting a global jihad against America
and targeting the U.S. homeland and its civilian population.
On the surface, drone strikes in the non-combat theaters like Pakistan,
Somalia, and Yemen are illegal; indeed even using their national airspace
without authorization is a violation of sovereignty. Pakistan did not attack
the United States; in fact they are an ally, though one could argue that
Pakistan provided sanctuary to al Qaeda and Taliban elements including
their leadership that participated in the September 11 attack and indeed
supported various mujahideen of the 1980s and the Taliban government
during its five-year reign in neighboring Afghanistan during the 1990s.
Officially no armed conflict existed in Pakistan because there was no
intense armed fighting between organized armed groups nor was there
interstate warfare among countries. Since the Pashtun tribes of the FATA
were not complicit in September 11, the focus of drone strikes on their
territory and people is simply an illegal act of reprisal, a violent response
serving as a form of punishment. The same holds true for Somalia and
Yemen, where neither country made any attempt to attack the United
States as Somalia has no central government and Yemen has friendly
relations with America; at most non-state militias attempted to launch

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 Targeted Killing and the Legality of Drone Warfare 

occasional raids against American forces in the region or plotted attacks

against the U.S. homeland in the latter case. The Somali militia, known
as al Shabaab, and Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are
anti-American and inspired by the original al Qaeda though they have
not conducted a direct attack against the United States. Certainly the
United Nations has not authorized Chapter VII use of force in any of
these three locations.
Although some conjecture about the existence of armed conflict can
be made in these cases, the legal justification primarily rests on permis-
sion and consent from the host country. The governments of Yemen and
Somalia, as represented by the Transitional Federal Government, are
believed to have provided either public or private consent for U.S. drone
strikes within their territories.23 While publicly Pakistan has protested
drones strikes inside its own borders, it is understood that privately the
government and military have granted tacit approval for such strikes.
According to a Wikileaks cable, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza
Gilani expressed, “I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right
people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.”24
Moreover, in 2008 President Asif Ali Zardari signed off on drone strikes
stating, “Kill the seniors. Collateral damage worries you Americans. It
does not worry me,” and former President Pervez Musharraf admitted
to authorizing drone strikes during his own tenure.25 Another 2010
Wikileaks cable noted that Yemen’s Deputy Prime Minister for Defense
Rashad al-Alimi joked about lying to his own parliament over U.S.
responsibility for the attack and former President Ali Abdullah Saleh
told General David Petraeus, “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours,
not yours.”26
The use of drone strikes in Iraq and Libya are both more straightfor-
ward as they were combat zones, but also more complicated in that both
wars were not necessarily legal under international law. Drones were used
over Libya for six months, employing 146 strikes and providing targets
for NATO warplanes. Peter Singer observed that the operations in Libya
violated the War Powers resolution, which requires notifying Congress
of military operations within 48 hours and getting its authorization after
60 days, though the United States argued that hostilities did not trigger
the War Powers Act since it did not “involve the presence of U.S. ground
troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof.”27 The war in Libya
was partially endorsed by the UN Security Council to protect civilians
from harm though not to perform regime change and decapitate the

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

head-of-state Colonel Qaddafi’s caravan, which was struck by a drone

that ultimately led to his beating to death by Libyan rebels on the streets
of Sirte.
The 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq was judged to be illegal
by most in the international community including Secretary-General
Kofi Annan as it was not in self-defense, was not authorized by the UN
Security Council, and was certainly not at the invitation of the Iraqi gov-
ernment which was neither sponsoring global terrorism nor responsible
for September 11. The general statement of preventive self-defense is the
1837 Caroline test, requiring the threat to be instant, overwhelming, and
leaving no choice of means or moment for deliberation. During the days
of the Cuban missile crisis, the United States put forward a theory of
anticipatory self-defense suggesting that with modern technology, states
cannot wait until a threat is imminent in order to act. The Bush admin-
istration pushed the preventive notion further to regime change when it
publicly claimed that Iraq was violating international norms by seeking
weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear capabilities and thus a
new standard of preventive war was applied along with Bush administra-
tion claims that they were enforcing unexpired former Security Council
resolutions from the first Gulf War of 1991. As a result, drone strikes and
those by other weapons systems in Iraq and Libya could be challenged
as violations since the war itself was called into question. In many ways,
this interstate debate regarding legality is contingent on the power of the
actors involved. Subsequently, the newly constituted Iraqi and Libyan
governments have privately consented to ongoing drone patrols over
their territory.
Coming full circle, the final category to examine is the non-state actor
that precipitated the enhancement of drone technology and targeted
killing with their global jihad against the United States. The question of
status for an armed conflict also addresses the primary justification for
the American war against al Qaeda, the Taliban, and affiliated groups.
The United States and its defenders argue that since the United States
was attacked on September 11, all further military responses toward
al Qaeda and affiliated groups are acts of self-defense recognized in
customary international law as well as codified under Article 51 of the
UN Charter. If the original al Qaeda has largely vanished, well then the
Obama administration continues to rely on the Bush era preventive
standard of self-defense to argue for drone strikes against al Qaeda
targets elsewhere. Holder framed it this way: “the Constitution does not

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 Targeted Killing and the Legality of Drone Warfare 

require the President to delay action until some theoretical end-stage of

planning, when the precise time, place, and manner of an attack become
clear. Such a requirement would create an unacceptably high risk that
our efforts would fail, and that Americans would be killed.”28 Drone
strikes therefore reflect the unprecedented nature of modern terrorism
where fighters operate in sleeper cells inside countries not in an armed
conflict with the United States, perhaps even within allied nations or
the United States itself. One may wonder as Medea Benjamin does, if
the war is global, why sites in Europe and the United States are immune
from drone strikes.29 Purportedly those countries have the capacity and
willingness to interdict such activities, though traditional state-centric
concepts of international law appear to be crumbling under the weight
of the superpower’s new standards.

Jus in Bello
The fundamental principles of jus in bello are military necessity,
distinction, proportionality, and humanity. Military necessity calls
for “securing the prompt submission of the enemy, with the least pos-
sible expenditures of economic and human resources.”30 Distinction
between combatant and civilian requires identifying proper status
before launching an attack while proportionality balances civilian
deaths against the value of the target killed and prohibits “any attack
which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to
civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which
would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military
advantage anticipated.”31 The notion of humanity considers generally
appropriate behavior toward all persons and largely encompasses the
former three standards. Ryan Vogel specifies related questions of the
rank or importance of the targeted individual, the foreseeability of
civilian losses, whether the suspect can be captured or detained, the
location of the strike and the operator, and the status of the operator
as civilian, military, or intelligence agent.32 Below, the laws in war will
be applied to drone strikes and targeted killing, examining the weapon
system itself, the status of the target (civilian or combatant), whether
they comport with the aforementioned standards of military necessity,
distinction, proportionality, and due process, and whether they amount
to assassinations.

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Weapon System
Outlawing weapons has a long history in international relations. In fact,
the crossbow was once banned for being too dangerous and not sporting
since one was without the risk of being struck, nor was it a fitting way
to kill a Christian so it was reserved only for pagans.33 More recently,
conventional weapons like anti-personnel landmines (1998) and blind-
ing lasers (1995) were proscribed. Of course, lawful weapons can be
used in an unlawful manner; drones could be made to carry less dis-
criminate conventional arms like cluster bombs or even weapons of mass
destruction.34 Most recently, the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions
prohibits the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of cluster muni-
tions and requires clearance of remnants as well as assistance to victims
of the weapons and has been ratified by 84 countries as of January 2014,
though neither by Yemen nor the United States. In December 2009, U.S.
Navy Tomahawk cruise missiles armed with cluster munitions (or “com-
bined effects bomblets”) struck the town of al-Majalah in the southern
Abyan province of Yemen and caused indiscriminate and possibly dis-
proportionate civilian casualties; several villagers died when unexploded
bomblets detonated years later.35
In contrast, most legal scholars agree that drone strikes are legal under
jus in bello as long as they occur during armed conflict. Nothing is inher-
ently illegal by using drones to kill in warfare; just as other airplanes are
not forbidden, neither are unmanned aircraft. Drones themselves are not
really weapons and the armaments they do carry, Hellfire missiles, are
generally lawful. No prohibition exists against using innovative devices
in armed conflict and Koh advises that in fact “using such advanced
technologies can ensure both that the best intelligence is available for
planning operations, and that civilian casualties are minimized in
carrying out such operations.”36 Echoing Koh, Holder states “the use
of advanced weapons may help to ensure that the best intelligence is
available for planning and carrying out operations, and that the risk of
civilian casualties can be minimized or avoided altogether.”37
Article 36 of the 1977 Geneva Conventions Additional Protocol I
requires that in the study, development, acquisition, or adoption of a
new weapon, means, or method of warfare, a High Contracting Party
is under an obligation to determine whether its employment would in
some or all circumstances be prohibited.38 While some suggest a preven-
tive ban on robotic weapons, drones may operate within a conventional

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 Targeted Killing and the Legality of Drone Warfare 

arms control framework. The familiar challenges of arms control would

thus reappear, the security dilemma that encourages further advance-
ment and refinement to stay ahead of rivals often leading to arms races
and an inspection framework which ensures that other countries are
not cheating. Drones could be further regulated under existing legal
frameworks such as the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), a
voluntary association of 34 countries that seeks to limit the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction delivery systems such as ballistic and
cruise missiles and UAVs and the voluntary Wassenaar agreement of 41
countries which tries to limit the export of certain conventional weapons
and sensitive technologies with both civilian and military uses.39

Distinction: Civilian or Combatant

Defining the subject of the targeting has been fraught with rhetorical
and legal controversy: terrorist, rebel, irregular, civilian, combatant,
unlawful combatant, enemy combatant, unprivileged belligerent, etc.
International law essentially recognizes two classes of persons in an
armed conflict: combatants and civilians. Combatants are regular forces
wearing uniforms or distinctive signs, carrying arms openly, following a
chain of command, and fighting according to the rules of warfare; as a
result, they can legitimately be targeted and killed at any time during the
hostilities.40 Extrajudicial killings are “deliberated killing not authorized
by a previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court
affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispen-
sable by civilized peoples” and normally illegal under international law.
Targeted killings may be permissible against legitimate military targets,
that is, combatants in a continuous combat function subject to military
necessity, or civilians directly participating in hostilities.41 Individuals
who do not qualify as lawful combatants are civilians and cannot be
targeted unless they are materially part of the planning and execution
of violence.42 Milena Sterio explains that those who directly participate
in hostilities on a merely spontaneous, sporadic, or unorganized basis
may only lawfully be targeted while they participate; thus, “if al Qaeda
members were considered civilians, they could be targeted only if they
participate directly in the hostilities,” though they could be arrested and
prosecuted under a domestic law enforcement process.43 The Red Cross
determines the standard as to whether a civilian is a legitimate target by
threshold of harm, direct causation, and belligerent nexus.

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For a specific act to reach the threshold of harm required to qualify as direct
participation in hostilities, it must be likely to adversely affect the military
operations or military capacity of a party to an armed conflict. In the
absence of military harm, the threshold can also be reached where an act is
likely to inflict death, injury, or destruction on persons or objects protected
against direct attack. In both cases, acts reaching the required threshold of
harm can only amount to direct participation in hostilities if they addition-
ally satisfy the requirements of direct causation and belligerent nexus ... The
requirement of direct causation is satisfied if either the specific act in
question, or a concrete and coordinated military operation of which that
act constitutes an integral part, may reasonably be expected to directly, in
one causal step, cause harm that reaches the required threshold. However,
even acts meeting the requirements of direct causation and reaching the
required threshold of harm can only amount to direct participation in hos-
tilities if they additionally satisfy the third requirement, that of belligerent
nexus ... In order to meet the requirement of belligerent nexus, an act must
be specifically designed to directly cause the required threshold of harm in
support of a party to an armed conflict and to the detriment of another.44

Thus, Red Cross guidelines require individuals to have been recruited,

trained, and equipped to equate with a continuous combat function. Jens
David Ohlin recommends some linking principles like direct participa-
tion in an armed conflict, military membership, co-belligerency, control,
complicity, and conspiracy; finding that although direct participation
is ill-defined, the possible co-belligerency of the Taliban is not publicly
declared and it is unclear whether al Qaeda controls other groups so
conspiracy or complicity by various affiliates would be an easier standard
to attain.45
On the other hand, some suggest that since al Qaeda and affiliated
groups are not regular forces of nation-states they lack the lawful status
as combatants and thus do not deserve the limited rights of a prisoner-of-
war or protection under the Geneva Conventions. Michael Gross claims
that because non-state actors do not wear uniforms, targeted killing of
“militants, insurgents, guerillas, and terrorists” is legal once they have been
identified by intelligence operations and named on a list.46 Mike Dreyfus
argues that when a combatant ceases active participation in an armed con-
flict, he does not regain the status of a non-combatant civilian, essentially
denying that “terrorists” are either civilians or lawful combatants and lack
any rights as a consequence.47 He further contends that extrajudicial kill-
ings can be legal in certain extraordinary situations, including self-defense
cases in which the state addresses due process concerns.48 Yoram Dinstein

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asserts that al Qaeda members neither qualify as lawful combatants

because they do not fight pursuant to the rules of the laws of war, nor do
they qualify as civilians either precisely because they are engaged in a fight
against the United States.49 If one accepts that this is an armed conflict and
that al Qaeda members are civilians who are essentially always in the plan-
ning for another act of violence, they become legitimate targets up and
down their chain of command. Owing to this complexity, Jeff McMahan
offers the possibility of formulating a new status for those terrorists with
features of both combatancy and criminality.50
Although generally avoiding the term “unlawful enemy combatant,” the
Obama administration uses the same legal analysis as its predecessor to
adopt a “presumption of guilt” rather than innocence for terror suspects
and further claim that they only target those who are materially part of
plots to attack the United States and that drone strikes disrupt al Qaeda
and Taliban leadership from planning and perpetrating further acts of
violence.51 Citing a World War II era American attack on Japanese admi-
ral Isoroku Yamamoto, Koh and Holder argue that individuals, specific
senior operational leaders in Holder’s version, who are part of an armed
group are belligerents and therefore lawful targets under international law.
Koh explained that “targeting particular individuals serves to narrow the
focus when force is employed and to avoid broader harm to civilians and
civilian objects,” and U.S. military lawyer Jeh Johnson asked rhetorically,
“Should the legal assessment of targeting a single identifiable military
objective be any different in 2012 than it was in 1943?”52 Of course, World
War II was a declared war against a state enemy and many of the policies
related to that war no longer apply: interning Japanese Americans, using
weapons of mass destruction like atomic bombs and incendiary devices
to indiscriminately kill civilians, and executing war criminals is no longer
a penalty in any international criminal court. Once the United States has
taken advantage of this legal black hole for individuals in al Qaeda, it
has gone beyond to even include drug traffickers suspected of donating
money to the Taliban on kill lists.53 Geoffrey Robertson warns, “Suppose
the suspicion was unreasonable, or the donation had been at gunpoint, or
of a negligible amount? What the Pentagon is doing is secretly sentencing
people to death for an unproven crime.”54

Military Necessity and Signature Strikes

Drone strikes may indeed use fewer resources, but gaining the prompt
submission of the enemy may be more difficult. In the case of al Qaeda,

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

whose ideological struggle encourages suicide attacks against civilian

targets, a negotiated solution may be impossible, granting greater leeway
to lethal actions. An overly aggressive posture may be counter-productive
regarding groups that could bargain toward a compromise solution, like
the Taliban and Haqqani network whose ambitions are usually to impose
their religious values onto a local or national government, long avoided
suicide attacks, and indeed were formerly co-belligerents with the
United States against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. When calculating
military necessity, one must judge whether these strikes are preemp-
tive attempts to destabilize terrorist plots or reprisals for past actions,
raising more questions about evidence and due process. Furthermore,
counter-terrorism accepts greater killing; counter-insurgency must limit
casualties to achieve the objective of gaining allegiance among the local
population. Attacks based on the suspected identity or perceived threat of
a group of men rather than their deeds are problematic, yet by American
reckoning, high value targets justify greater civilian casualties.
Signature strikes do not have a reasonable legal standard of suspicion
of guilt from a law enforcement perspective. The government has not
divulged how many of those targeted had solid evidence of being part of
an active hostility against, or participated in planning or executing attacks
on, the United States. The accidental killing by NATO of 24 Pakistani
soldiers at Salala in Mohmand district in November 2011 may reflect this
weak intelligence link.55 Though Zenko explains that drone strikes in
Pakistan are more discriminate since the CIA employs a Pashtun militia
of 3,000 men there to capture, kill, and collect intelligence, along with
cooperation from the Pakistani military, and JSOC forces on the ground.
He also asserts that since drone strikes can be relayed at the last moment
and diverted almost to the last minute, they reflect greater scrutiny than
other platforms such as cruise missiles or high altitude bombing, though
he is more skeptical of U.S. intelligence capabilities in other zones such
as Somalia and Yemen.56 Zenko nevertheless calls for a complete end
to all signature strikes, asserting that only limited strikes on terrorists
with transnational ambitions who are engaged in direct or ongoing plots
against the United States and its allies should be continued.57

Proportionality
Protection of civilians is a fundamental aspect of international humani-
tarian law and proportionality impacts the legality of an attack that

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may incidentally kill or injure civilians.58 Geneva Convention Protocol I

mandates limiting the loss of civilian life and damage to civilian property
during attacks on military targets and prohibits attacks on installations
containing dangerous forces, though the United States has not ratified
this protocol as it seems to favor irregular forces.59 Under Protocol I,
those subject to an attack should also separate civilians from military
targets to limit the risk as well. Martin describes the rules of engagement
for drones in the early days of the Iraq war as positive identification of a
weapon, hostile intent or action, and limiting collateral damage.60 Casey
Maslen cites several reasons for how it could be argued that drone strikes
might fulfill the requirements for precautions to minimize incidental loss
of civilian life in attacks: video can verify the absence of civilians close
to the target, some targets are located using a tracking device, nearby
military forces monitor the target, and most missiles have a smaller
blast radius than other conventional munitions that might typically be
deployed from a fighter jet.61 Vogel argues that “remotely firing Hellfire
missiles from thousands of feet in the air on belligerents engaged in
lethal operations using rudimentary explosives does not by itself violate
the principle of proportionality,” yet because most strikes occur in civil-
ian settings and cause civilian casualties, he suggests that the population
should be warned before a strike to mitigate the civilian loss of life.62
Striking a combatant from a drone would be acceptable under this
standard, but again in the absence of armed conflict and outside a war
zone, drone attacks would not appear to be proportional against often
defenseless persons on the ground.

Assassination
Some argue that drone strikes amount to a policy of extrajudicial kill-
ing and violate U.S. presidential executive orders that forbid the United
States from conducting political assassination. Assassinating opponents
during peace time is traditionally an unacceptable practice in foreign
policy. President Gerald Ford’s 1976 Executive Order 11,905 prohibited
“political assassination,” while both Presidents Jimmy Carter (Executive
Order 12,036 of 1978) and Ronald Reagan (Executive Order 12,333 of
1981) gave subsequent orders to ban “assassination” without the term
“political.”63 Reagan’s order states, “No person employed by or acting on
behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to
engage in, assassination,” though none of the executive orders defines

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

assassination.64 Even many defenders of the program have referenced the

current tactics as amounting to the same; drone pilot Matt Martin called
them “stealthy aerial assassination snipers in the sky.”65 Indeed, drones
are a new form of cloak and dagger and are uniquely well-suited to the
dark art of eliminating those hostile to the United States; their role in the
death of the Libyan head-of-state or the direct strike on Taliban chief
Baitullah Mehsud’s private home as he received an intravenous drip for
his diabetes furthers the notion. Other countries have tried to eliminate
subversive elements and Israel in particular has aggressively practiced
killing Palestinian leaders of groups like Hamas that could be considered
acts of assassination.
Pro-government lawyers suggest that targeted killing in drone strikes is
not assassination, and in any case that executive orders can be over-ruled
by later executive orders or policies, or even secretly modified.66 The U.S.
Army defines assassination generally as a covert murder for political rea-
sons and not as a targeted killing during a time of armed conflict or when
an individual poses an immediate threat to the United States; “assassina-
tions are killings that are politically motivated and use subterfuge, while
targeted killings are military strikes.”67 Dreyfus argues that targeted kill-
ing is based strictly on security concerns while assassination is political.68
For Holder it is simple: assassinations are unlawful; America’s current
targeted killing is lawful so it cannot be an assassination.69 Koh adds that
the use of lawful weapons systems consistent with the applicable laws of
war for precision targeting of specific high-level belligerent leaders when
acting in self-defense or during an armed conflict is not unlawful and
hence does not constitute assassination.70 Rebecca Johnson continues on
to say that “lethal force against a valid military objective, in an armed
conflict, is consistent with the law of war and does not, by definition,
constitute an ‘assassination.’”71 Ultimately, assassination is a politically
loaded term not easily quantified into a legal equation and is therefore
left to subjective interpretation.

Operator and Responsibility

The American military and intelligence drone programs operate largely
independently; the CIA conducts strikes from its headquarters in
Langley, Virginia, while the military operators are primarily based at
Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and other global military installations.
Ironically, the technological improvement that gives rise to the drones

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 Targeted Killing and the Legality of Drone Warfare 

also increases the potential legal impact on the pilots or those directing
the mission; civilian operators face greater legal jeopardy whereas sol-
diers are lawful combatants bound by Geneva protections and respon-
sibilities and must adhere to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. As
mentioned previously, video captured of the entire kill chain with judge
advocate general (JAG) lawyers present to scrutinize decision-making is
a recipe for greater legal oversight and accountability for violations of jus
in bello standards. Of course, much less oversight of covert CIA drone
attacks is surmised than over military pilots.
Some observers wonder since al Qaeda fighters are considered
unlawful combatants because they are engaged in violence but not
accepted as part of the uniformed military, whether CIA agents who
employ lethal force outside a military chain of command, do not wear
uniforms, nor operate under the laws of war are equally unlawful com-
batants and argue that drone strikes are illegal in non-combat zones
when conducted by the CIA.72 CIA operatives are not trained in the
law of armed conflict nor have to respect the laws and customs of war;
thus, they “are not lawful combatants and do not enjoy any Geneva
Convention protections; they are either civilians or unlawful enemy
combatants, as discussed above in the context of the status of al Qaeda
members.”73 O’Connell does not equivocate in stating, “Killing without
warning is only tolerated during the hostilities of an armed conflict,
and, then, only lawful combatants may lawfully carry out such killing.
Members of the CIA are not lawful combatants, and their participation
in killing persons, even in an armed conflict, is a crime.”74 By conse-
quence, an equal right to kill in combat by non-state groups could be
assumed; “after all, the United States cannot be the only true warrior in
the armed conflict against al-Qaeda.”75
Prosecutions are unlikely but noted human rights lawyer Geoffrey
Robertson and Senator John McCain concur that overall authority for
drone operations should rest with the Defense Department, leaving the
CIA and the other intelligence agencies to collect information overseas
and provide it to Congress and not carry out military-like operations
around the globe. Other prominent congressmen across the political
spectrum believe the program should remain under CIA control, includ-
ing Senator Feinstein, Senator Kelly Ayotte, and House Armed Services
Committee Chairman Buck McKeon.76 In January 2014, the Congress
signaled its opposition to any transfer by inserting a secret provision in
the budget to prevent changing authority from the CIA to the Defense

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

department.77 With the exponential growth of domestic agencies as well

as other countries seeking to acquire drones, command and control will
remain important standards of legal accountability.

Due Process
Determining what constitutes due process is a final reckoning before a
targeted killing takes place and is rather vague in its implementation.
Because the process is secretive and in many cases operated clandestinely
by the CIA, evidence to a grand jury or similar panel is not presented
before taking action. Koh asserts that “a state that is engaged in an
armed conflict or in legitimate self-defense is not required to provide
targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force.”78 The
kill lists target specific individuals, not just soldiers, on a battlefield and
of course no surrender is possible once a targeting decision has been
taken.79 Thus, the criteria to select persons for a kill list should be speci-
fied and could reasonably be publicized. As Robertson declares, “there
must be transparency in respect of both the target list and criteria for
listing, and an opportunity for those listed to surrender or seek judicial
review of whether the evidence against them proves they are an active
combatant.”80 Supposedly, the U.S. military requires “two verifiable
human sources” and “substantial additional evidence” that the person is
an enemy before adding them to their kill list, along with a computer
algorithm that evaluates whether a school, hospital, or mosque is within
the likely blast radius of a missile before a lethal strike is authorized.81
Whether or not non-state actors like al Qaeda are beyond Geneva
Convention protections and are thus free game wherever they may be
found should it be outside the United States is contested. If they are
detained, they shall not be tortured according to the Torture Convention,
U.S. domestic law, and international customary law. Vogel points out that
drones cannot accept surrender, while Robertson asserts that “rules of
engagement must exclude any killing if civilians are likely to be present,
and finally, rules must prevent killing of a target who can be captured
or arrested.”82 Brennan argued that drones kill only when capture is not
feasible, but in October 2009 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on
Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions Philip Alston expressed
concern over U.S. practice in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and sug-
gested the policy is not in compliance with international law.83 The UN
Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial Killings argued that whether or
not they recognize this as a legal obligation, states should capture rather

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 Targeted Killing and the Legality of Drone Warfare 

than kill during armed conflict where reasonable.84 In Yemen, AQAP

members could be captured rather than killed since they are in full
public view, regularly pass government checkpoints, or may even work
for the government.85 The lengthy process of near constant surveillance
of targets may even approximate custody and could appear as a violation
of the prohibition on executing prisoners. If no attempt to detain them
is made, they cannot legally be summarily executed. More of the due
process concerns as it relates to U.S. citizens are explored in Chapter 5.

Human Rights and Domestic Law

Most legal scholars agree that outside of armed conflict, killing is mur-
der; even with host state consent to an operation, human rights law
would still apply. They adopt international policing standards such as the
United Nations Basic Principles for the Use of Force and Firearms by Law
Enforcement Officials which states in Article 9 that “law enforcement
officials shall not use firearms against persons except in self-defense or
defense of others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury,
to prevent the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving
grave threat to life, to arrest a person presenting such a danger and
resisting their authority, or to prevent his or her escape, and only when
less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives.” Milena
Sterio writes that human rights law such as the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which prohibits “arbitrary” killing
is violated during the drone campaigns, as well as punitive or deterrent
killings of terrorists, and goes on to say that targeted killings of al Qaeda
operatives are not absolutely necessary unless they pose an imminent
threat.86 According to the former UN Special Rapporteur of the Human
Rights Commission, targeted killings are only allowed in concrete and
immediate circumstances under human rights law.87 Alston further states
that under human rights law, intentional, premeditated, and deliberate
killing by law enforcement officials cannot be legal because killing can-
not be the sole objective of an operation unlike in armed conflict, rather
attempts to capture or incapacitation with non-lethal force are required,
adding that drone killing of anyone other than the target such as family
members or others nearby would be an arbitrary deprivation of life under
human rights law and could result in state responsibility and individual
criminal liability.88

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Some assert that human rights standards are not necessarily suspended
during armed conflict and could apply in regard to considerations of
humanity for the protection of human life and humane treatment. Casey
Maslen says that respect for the right to life cannot be ignored and may
also apply during hostilities; although they may comply during armed
conflict, “away from the battlefield, the use of drone strikes will often
amount to a violation of fundamental human rights.”89 The UN Special
Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions issued a
report clearly stating that “international human rights law continues to
apply during armed conflict, as a complement to international humani-
tarian law,” specifically the right to life.90 In 1996, the International Court
of Justice (ICJ) argued that ICCPR protections do not cease in times of
war, except by operation of Article 4 of the covenant whereby certain
provisions may be derogated from during a time of national emergency.
Paul Kahn says that “the problem is the confusion of the traditional
morality of the battlefield with the appropriate morality for contempo-
rary, international policing. If the military is engaged in policing, then
it needs to rethink its rules of engagement. When a criminal seizes a
hostage, we don’t destroy the house in which both are occupants.”91
Others believe that human rights law is distinct and separate from
humanitarian law, with the former essentially defunct during hostilities.
Thus, if some form of an armed conflict is present, the U.S. policies of
targeted killing must only comply with the aforementioned standards and
not with broader human rights conventions. Marshall Thompson accepts
that the ICCPR requires specific forms of process when dealing with the
deprivation of life, but he argues that it is not a self-executing treaty.92
Although very contested since the U.S. Constitution states that treaties
are part of the law of the land, some legal scholars contend that in the
United States after the president has signed and the Senate has ratified a
treaty that it still remains “un-executed,” requiring further domestic statu-
tory authority to become law, otherwise it remains non-self-executing
and hence not part of American law. Finally, drones raise questions over
the separation of powers and the use of force. Legal scholar Benjamin
Wittes remarked that a consensus exists among the three branches of the
government that the United States is in an armed conflict that involves
co-belligerent forces and can follow the enemy to any new territorial
ground it stakes out.93 He uses the standard of what is feasible, arguing
that countries like France, the United Kingdom, or Mexico have the capa-
bility to arrest terrorists and “legal constraints such as sovereignty come

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 Targeted Killing and the Legality of Drone Warfare 

into play”, but that in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or Mali, capture is not
feasible so killing is acceptable.94 It appears that capability and feasibility
are a new standard of sovereignty in international law, harkening back to
the 19th century when countries were “civilized” or “uncivilized,” the lat-
ter terra nullius, empty land where Western powers could plunder without
legal constraint. Philip Heymann and Juliette Kayyem believe that the
president may authorize targeted killing outside of an active combat zone
but must provide Congress with “evidence that the killing was necessary
to prevent a greater, reasonably imminent danger to U.S. lives, that there
was no reasonable alternative to save U.S. lives and that the action would
not unreasonably endanger innocent individuals.”95

Conclusion

The United States has stretched the legality of targeted killing to its
maximum reach in each of the foregoing debates, setting new norma-
tive standards for other actors to follow while risking a dangerous
precedent for future applications of drone warfare. Although plausible
and reasonable arguments support the American viewpoint in favor of
its current practices and unmanned systems are generally accepted as
lawful instruments of modern warfare, the killing of non-state actors
is more contested and the commensurate impact on civilian popula-
tions is seriously challenged. Disagreements persist over the legality of
drone strikes in countries not in combat with the United States, such
as Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, whether al Qaeda members who nei-
ther wear uniforms nor follow a strict chain of command are legitimate
targets, whether they are actively part of hostilities, and how direct
and how imminent the link is to an attack on the United States. Law is
always malleable and international law is perhaps as flexible as rubber
with little enforcement capability. Semantics related to the definition of
armed conflict, combatant, and civilian shape the discourse yet are in
continual flux depending on the desired outcome. The U.S. government
has claimed that no armed conflict existed when it desired to torture
detainees, but asserted that an armed conflict did exist when it preferred
to kill rather than capture the same category of persons. At a minimum,
the tenuous legality claims provide cover to extend the aforementioned
national security priorities that give rise to drone warfare, but are still
impacted by ethical considerations related to remote killing.

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Notes
 Mary Ellen O’Connell, “Unlawful Killing with Combat Drones: A Case
Study of Pakistan, 2004–2009,” in Simon Bronitt, Miriam Gani, and Saskia
Hufnagel, eds., Shooting to Kill: Socio-Legal Perspectives on the Use of Lethal
Force (Portland, O.R.: Hart Publishing, 2012), 263–291.
 Colonel Mark “Max” Maxwell, “Rebutting the Civilian Presumption:
Playing Whack-a-Mole without a Mallet?” in Claire Finkelstein, Andrew
Altman, and Jens David Ohlin, eds., Targeted Killings: Law and Morality in an
Asymmetrical World (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2012), 59.
 Barack Obama, Speech at National Defense University (May 23, 2013).
 Bush Presidential Order of 2002.
 Stuart Casey Maslen, “Pandora’s Box? Drone Strikes under Jus ad Bellum, Jus
in Bello, and International Human Rights Law,” International Review of the Red
Cross 94, no. 886 (June 2012), 614.
 Human Rights Watch (Letta Tayler), “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda”: The
Civilian Cost of US Targeted Killings in Yemen (New York, N.Y.: Human Rights
Watch, 2013), 84.
 The AUMF was passed 98–0 in the Senate and 420–1 in the House, only
Barbara Lee dissented.
 Daniel R. Brunstetter with Megan Braun, “State of the Union: A Decade of
Armed Drones,” prepared for “War and Peace as Liberal Arts” University of
California, Irvine (2013).
 Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (New York, N.Y.: Nation
Books, 2013), 170.
 David Ignatius, “The Price of Becoming Addicted to Drones,” Washington
Post (September 22, 2011).
 Jane Mayer, “The Predator War: What are the Risks of the C.I.A.’s Covert
Drone Program?” New Yorker (October , .
 Harold Hongju Koh, The Obama Administration and International Law,
Keynote Speech at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of
International Law (March 25, 2010).
 See Craig Martin, “Going Medieval: Targeted Killing, Self-Defense, and
the Jus ad Bellum Regime,” in Claire Finkelstein, Andrew Altman, and Jens
David Ohlin, eds., Targeted Killings: Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical
World (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2012), 223–252; Jordan Paust,
“Self-Defense Targetings of Non-State Actors and Permissibility of U.S. Use
of Drones in Pakistan,” Journal of Transnational Law and Policy 19 (2010).
 Casey Maslen, “Pandora’s Box?” 602.
 Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New
American Security State (New York, N.Y.: Little, Brown and Co, 2011), 230.
 Eric Holder, Speech delivered at Northwestern University (March 5, 2012).

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 Targeted Killing and the Legality of Drone Warfare 

 Michael Schmitt, “Drone Attacks under the Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello:
Clearing the ‘Fog of Law’,” Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law 13
(December 2010), 4, 6.
 Geoffrey Robertson, “Trial by Fury,” New Statesman (June 18, 2012), 26.
 Casey Maslen, “Pandora’s Box?” 605.
 Obama, Speech at National Defense University.
 O’Connell, “Unlawful Killing with Combat Drones.” The ICJ ruled in the
Nicaragua case in 1986, the Congo case in 2005, and Bosnia v. Serbia in 2007
that a state must be in control of a non-state actor group for the state to
bear legal responsibility and be the legitimate target of the use of force in
self-defense following a significant armed attack. Pakistan has not attacked
the United States; the only attack on the United States that could give rise
to the right of self-defense since the drafting of the UN Charter occurred
on September 11. The Security Council stated in Resolution 1368 that those
attacks gave rise to the right, but it did not determine who was responsible
for the attacks or whether a response in self-defense would meet the
principles of necessity and proportionality.
 United Nations, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or
Arbitrary Execution, Philip Alston (May 28, 2010), A/HRC/14/24/Add.6, 11–14.
 Micah Zenko, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” Council on Foreign
Relations Special Report no. 65 (January 2013), 11.
 Pir Zubair Shah, “My Drone War,” Foreign Policy (March/April 2012).
 Peter Bergen, “Drone Wars: The Constitutional and Counterterrorism
Implications of Targeted Killing” (April 23, 2013), Testimony presented
before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the
Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights. <www.Newamerica.net>, 7.
 Human Rights Watch (Tayler), “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda,” 76.
 Peter Singer, “Do Drones Undermine Democracy?” New York Times (January
21, 2012).
 Eric Holder, Speech delivered at Northwestern University (March 5, 2012).
 Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (London, U.K.:
Verso, 2013), 140.
 Michael W. Lewis, “The Law of Aerial Bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War,”
The American Journal of International Law 97, no. 3 (July 2003), 487.
 Lewis, “The Law of Aerial Bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War,” 487.
 Ryan Vogel, “Drone Warfare and the Law of Armed Conflict,” Denver Journal
of International Law and Policy 39, no. 1 (2011), 101–138.
 Armin Krishnan, Killer Robots: Legality and Ethicality of Autonomous Weapons
(Burlington, V.T.: Ashgate, 2009), 95.
 Krishnan, Killer Robots, 113.
 Human Rights Watch (Tayler), “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda,” 71–73.
 Koh, The Obama Administration and International Law.

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

 Holder, Speech delivered at Northwestern University.

 Casey Maslen, “Pandora’s Box?” 600.
 Government Accounting Office (GAO), Report to the Ranking Member,
Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense, and Foreign
Operations, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House of
Representatives, Nonproliferation: Agencies Could Improve Information
Sharing and End-Use Monitoring on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Exports, July
2012, 3–4.
 Geneva Convention III, Article 4.
 Casey Maslen, “Pandora’s Box?” 610–611; Nils Melzer, Targeted Killing in
International Law (Oxford, U.K., Oxford University Press, 2008), 56.
 Milena Sterio, “The United States’ Use of Drones in the War on Terror:
The (Il)Legality of Targeted Killing Under International Law,” Case Western
Reserve Journal of International Law 45 (2012), 206; Casey Maslen, “Pandora’s
Box?” 609.
 Sterio, “The United States’ Use of Drones in the War on Terror,” 207.
 Peter Asaro, “On Banning Autonomous Weapon Systems: Human Rights,
Automation, and the Dehumanization of Lethal Decision-making,”
International Review of the Red Cross 94, no. 886 (Summer 2012), 697.
 Jens David Ohlin, “Targeting Co-Belligerents,” in Claire Finkelstein,
Andrew Altman, and Jens David Ohlin, eds., Targeted Killings: Law and
Morality in an Asymmetrical World (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press,
2012), 65.
 Michael L. Gross, “Assassination and Targeted Killing: Law Enforcement,
Execution or Self-Defence?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 23, no. 3 (2006),
323–335.
 Mike Dreyfus, “My Fellow Americans, We Are Going to Kill You: The
Legality of Targeting and Killing U.S. Citizens Abroad,” Vanderbilt Law Review
65, no. 1 (2012), 261, 263.
 Ibid., 252.
 Yoram Dimstein, “The Principle of Distinction and Cyber War in
International Armed Conflicts,” Journal of Conflict Security Law 17, no. 2
(Summer 2012), 261–277.
 Jeff McMahan, “Targeted Killing: Murder, Combat, or Law Enforcement?”
in Claire Finkelstein, Andrew Altman, and Jens David Ohlin, eds., Targeted
Killings: Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical World (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 155.
 Leila Nadya Sadat, “America’s Drone Wars,” Case Western Reserve Journal of
International Law 45 (2012), 221, 223.
 Koh, The Obama Administration and International Law; Jeh Johnson, National
Security Law, Lawyers, and Lawyering in the Obama Administration, Speech at
Yale University (February 22, 2012).

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 Targeted Killing and the Legality of Drone Warfare 

 Sadat, “America’s Drone Wars,” 226. Reportedly, in 2009 the CIA added 50
Afghan drug dealers to the Pentagon’s kill list of 367 persons.
 Robertson, “Trial by Fury,” 26.
 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), “Pakistan Outrage after ‘Nato
Attack Kills Soldiers’,” BBC (November 26, 2011).
 Zenko, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” 5–7.
 Ibid., “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” 4.
 Casey Maslen, “Pandora’s Box?” 610–611.
 Lewis, “The Law of Aerial Bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War,” 483.
 Matt Martin, Predator: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan:
A Pilot’s Story (Minneapolis, M.N.: Zenith, 2010), 238.
 Casey Maslen, “Pandora’s Box?” 607.
 Vogel, “Drone Warfare and the Law of Armed Conflict,” 124.
 Dreyfus, “My Fellow Americans, We Are Going to Kill You,” 254–255.
 Ibid., 254–255.
 Martin, Predator, 21.
 Dreyfus, “My Fellow Americans, We Are Going to Kill You,” 257.
 Marshall Thompson, “The Legality of Armed Drone Strikes against U.S.
Citizens within the United States,” Brigham Young University Law Review
(2013), 166–167.
 Dreyfus, “My Fellow Americans, We Are Going to Kill You,” 256.
 Holder, Speech delivered at Northwestern University.
 Koh, The Obama Administration and International Law.
 Johnson, National Security Law, Lawyers, and Lawyering in the Obama
Administration.
 Brunstetter with Braun, “State of the Union.”
 O’Connell, “Unlawful Killing with Combat Drones”; Sterio, “The United
States’ Use of Drones in the War on Terror,” 212.
 O’Connell, “Unlawful Killing with Combat Drones.”
 Sterio, “The United States’ Use of Drones in the War on Terror,” 206.
 Robertson, “Trial by Fury,” 27; Jordy Yager, “FBI Admits Using Drones to Spy
in US,” The Hill (June 20, 2013).
 Greg Miller, “Lawmakers Seek to Stymie Plan to Shift Control of Drone
Campaign from CIA to Pentagon,” Washington Post (January 15, 2014).
 Koh, The Obama Administration and International Law.
 Sadat, “America’s Drone Wars,” 227.
 Robertson, “Trial by Fury,” 27.
 Mayer, “The Predator War.”
 Vogel, “Drone Warfare and the Law of Armed Conflict,” 128; Robertson,
“Trial by Fury,” 27.
 United Nations, “UN Rights Expert Voices Concern over Use of Unmanned
Drones by United States,” UN News Centre (October 28, 2009).

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

 United Nations, Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, September 13,

2013. A/68/382.
 Human Rights Watch (Tayler), “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda,” 3.
 Sterio, “The United States’ Use of Drones in the War on Terror,” 205, 208.
 Melzer, Targeted Killing in International Law, 59; January 13, 2013 E/
CN/.4/2003/3.
 United Nations, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or
Arbitrary Execution, Philip Alston, 11–14, 25.
 Casey Maslen, “Pandora’s Box?” 599, 620.
 United Nations, Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions.
 Paul W. Kahn, “The Paradox of Riskless Warfare,” Philosophy and Public Policy
Quarterly 22, no. 3 (Summer 2002), 4.
 Thompson, “The Legality of Armed Drone Strikes against U.S. Citizens
within the United States,” 167.
 U.S. House of Representatives, Drones and the War on Terror: When can
the U.S. Target Alleged American Terrorists Overseas?, Hearing before the
Committee on the Judiciary House of Representatives One Hundred
Thirteenth Congress, First session, February 27, 2013, Serial No. 113–2.
 U.S. House of Representatives, Drones and the War on Terror.
 Philip B. Heymann and Juliette N. Kayyem, The Long-Term Legal Strategy
Project for Preserving Security and Democratic Freedoms in the War on Terrorism
(Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University, 2004), 5.

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 4
Remote Killing and the
Ethics of Drone Warfare
Abstract: This chapter considers the ethical aspects of
remote killing with drones through the just war doctrine,
the psychology of distance and killing, the role of machines
in warfare, and public consent to the covert use of force.
American counter-terrorism against al Qaeda that includes
the tactical use of drones generally follows the just war
doctrine, but the vast distance between combatants and
ease of sending in unmanned and robotic instruments
lends itself to the increasing willingness to use force without
public or legislative participation in overseas military
operations. Many also fear the decline of martial virtues
with the advent of remote controlled warfare and a video
game mentality, though the current U.S. military practice is
strict on the rules of engagement and lethal action.

Keywords: asymmetric conflict and drones; democracy

and drones; distance and killing; just war; naming
drones; remote killing; robotic warfare

Rae, James DeShaw. Analyzing the Drone Debates:

Targeted Killing, Remote Warfare, and Military
Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
doi: 10.1057/9781137381576.0007.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0007 
 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Much of the ethical concern about drone warfare revolves around the
lack of proximity and relationship between the principal adversaries
which manifests itself both on a psychological and philosophical level.
Many scholars borrow from legal and moral considerations of just war
doctrine and apply it foremost to the American war on terror and use of
drones. Some have also explored the nature of warfare and killing and
the impact of such new technologies, including the idea of automating
machines to conduct robotic warfare against targets that create such vast
distances between combatants and insulate the aggressor to a virtually
risk-free degree. These concerns also raise questions over the role of
making war nearly invisible to the publics in whose name they are fought
and whether it may encourage decision-makers to adopt more militant
positions while immunizing themselves from the political obstacles
that often limit the resort to war. Building on these debates, this chapter
examines the application of just war doctrine, public consent, and the
decision to use force, distance and killing, and the role of machines in
warfare. As John Sifton writes, “What makes drones disturbing is an
unusual combination of characteristics: the distance between killer and
killed, the asymmetry, the prospect of automation and, most of all, the
minimization of pilot risk and political risk ... Drones foreshadow the
idea that brutality could become detached from humanity, and yield
violence that is, as it were, unconscious.”1 Drone pilot Matt Martin dis-
cusses the occasional feeling that a targeted man was not “really a human
being,” despite his remorse over accidentally killing an elderly bystander
in a particular strike.2

Just War
Many philosophers often fuse together drone warfare and the war on
terror and ponder whether either qualifies as a just war. In reference to
Kosovo where Serbs still actually fired air defenses, Michael Ignatieff
observed that “a war ceases to be just when it becomes a turkey shoot.”3
The ethical disconnect of the American kill list in non-combat zones
within countries with which the United States is not at war troubles many,
particularly with the permissive aspect of drone use in such asymmetric
settings. Christian Enemark wonders whether just war is obsolete when
risk is transferred from combatants to non-combatants in non-combat
territories that lead to more terrorism, expressing that although war

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 Remote Killing and the Ethics of Drone Warfare 

does not have to be fair, it must be a fight; non-war cannot be a just war.4
In contrast, President Barack Obama has said, “this is a just war, a war
waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense.”5
The following discussion of just war doctrine overlaps and intersects
with the previous review of the legality of modern warfare, though it
explores new avenues outside the strict constraints of juridical applica-
tions. The just war framework customarily includes the following: just
cause, legitimate authority, last resort, proportional means, and reason-
able chance of success. When drones are viewed as a weapon system,
just war doctrine is ill-fitting; otherwise, one must insert drones into
this formula and evaluate each interstate conflict specifically, or the war
on al Qaeda broadly as below. The United States would seem justified in
using retaliatory force against al Qaeda for its series of attacks on U.S.
installations and the American homeland, though as drone attacks have
moved beyond core al Qaeda and toward a preemptive strategy the just
cause element becomes more debatable. Although the U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan was endorsed by the UN Security Council, further actions
in non-combat zones without international sanction would raise seri-
ous doubts as to whether the United States possesses the legitimate
authority to conduct its drone attacks in sovereign countries. By their
technological advancement, drones can use force much earlier than the
last resort. While an active plot nearing execution may require the use of
force without much deliberation, few drone attacks seem to be interdict-
ing terrorism at that stage. Rather, anyone involved in plots, donating
money, adhering to jihadi outlooks, or perhaps even simply having the
appearance of a military age male on a given plot of land regardless of
their current disposition or planning may be susceptible to violence.
The means used must be proportional; Michael Walzer emphasizes
that non-combatants cannot be attacked at any time, never the objects
or targets of military activity.6 Certainly, any aerial bombing essentially
runs the risk of forfeiting discrimination. Drone strikes are stealth
attacks on unsuspecting individuals that sometimes includes innocent
civilians; terrorism operates in much the same way, though more fre-
quently targets civilians directly. Andrew Altman frames this standard
by arguing that the intentional killing of civilians is worse than killing
civilians foreseeably but unintentionally, thus terrorists are more repre-
hensible than whatever state violence has occurred.7 Enemark suggests
that the death in war of a non-combatant civilian living in the enemy’s
territory is a greater tragedy than the death of a military combatant from

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

one’s own country.8 The threshold is still impacted by the category of the
combatant; al Qaeda may not receive the standard of moral innocence
that true soldiers who pose no risk to the United States could possess.
Faith in the technology also impacts whether a reasonable expectation
of success can be ascertained and was considered in the chapter on effec-
tiveness. Currently, drones provide a relatively risk free means to deliver
lethal results and on the surface one could expect a successful outcome
tactically, though victory in the war on terror is no sure bet. Ground
operations that risk U.S. troops but minimize civilian casualties may be
more ethical than air strikes that accomplish similar goals but risk civil-
ian lives.9 The whole notion of this guideline is to not send soldiers into
hopeless situations where they become martyred at best; so absent any
real danger, the metric shifts easily toward acceptability.
Some suggest that a restrictive notion such as the just war doctrine is
impractical against an implacable foe not bound by the same customs,
or in dire circumstances like a supreme emergency in which one can
ignore non-combatant status as Britain did in bombing German cities.10
Alex Bellamy argues from Walzer’s idea that nations face a supreme
emergency only when defeat would result in the annihilation of a
political community or its way of life.11 Few would suggest that al Qaeda
represents an existential threat to the United States, but its activities
have already triggered responses that have indeed changed the way of
life in democratic societies. Moreover, a tendency to apply moral rela-
tivism that implies taking the “gloves off ” to pursue a bare-knuckled
approach often foregoes these ethical exhortations. U.S. adviser Jeh
Johnson provided an anecdote regarding an accused American guard
in Iraq citing a friend that questioned why Americans must be held to a
different criterion compared to the “atrocities inflicted by our enemies”
and answered that America has a higher standard.12 This example was
an odd choice since many Americans consistently conflated al Qaeda’s
atrocities with those in Iraq, a country that was invaded, saw 100,000
civilians die, and had never attacked the U.S. homeland. Perhaps they
were imaging the Jordanian “al Qaeda in Iraq” leader Abu Musab al-
Zarqawi sawing the heads off of hostages captured there, which did
raise the stakes of what was allowed in hostilities. The scale of atrocities
committed under the guise of jihad lends itself to dogmatic disputes
and generalities about justice and retribution but the specifics of the
tactical use of unmanned weapons systems is not easily analyzed by
the just war framework.

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 Remote Killing and the Ethics of Drone Warfare 

Democracy and the Ease of War

The covert nature of the drone program also inhibits robust public
debate in a democratic society about the effectiveness, legality, and
morality of organized political violence and war. The humiliation of
Iraqi prisoners-of-war at Abu Ghraib or the treatment and detainment
of fighters captured in Afghanistan and placed at the Guantanamo naval
base sparked far greater outcry than the summary execution of persons
who will receive no judicial investigation and may occasionally cause
accompanying civilian deaths. As Peter Singer writes, formerly the
downing of an American aircraft might lead to capture or killing of the
crew and public debate about the merits of war, but now presidents only
need to seek approval for “operations that send people into harm’s way,
not for those that involve waging war by other means.”13 He explains that
more than 350 air strikes into Pakistan have been conducted by covert
intelligence operations that were not voted on by Congress and lack
the level of transparency and accountability that a military engagement
would have.14
Because they so minimize the risk to the country prosecuting a war
using drones, where among the few inhibitions are the material loss of
aircraft and muted public disaffection, many worry that this new tech-
nology appears to encourage the use of force with impunity. Peter Asaro
contends that “insofar as such weapons tend to remove the combatants
who operate them from area of conflict and reduce the risks of causalities
for those who possess them, they tend to also reduce the political costs
and risks of going to war.”15 Claire Finkelstein expects that “drone tech-
nology locks the aggressor into a killing scenario.”16 Likewise, Ignatieff
warns that “if war becomes virtual, and without risk, democratic elector-
ates may be more willing to fight.”17 Thus, the use of unmanned systems
and precision weapons may actually encourage more bellicosity and
longer wars; in particular private contractors face few inhibitions, killing
gets them more work.
The risk to the perpetrators of war may become so minimal as to make
the persistence of armed conflict permanent. Singer explains that “in a
democracy, we used to think of war both as people going into harm’s way
and as bad things happening on the battleground. Now, technology has
allowed us to disentangle the two, or at least led us to think that we can
disentangle the two.”18 Military historian Edward Luttwak suggests that
war in the 19th and early 20th centuries was fought for a grand purpose

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and an implicit willingness to accept greater casualties, partially since

pre-industrial societies had many children and expected some to die
from the harsh living conditions.19 Now, war becomes a spectator sport.20
Many in the military are the most skeptical of foreign adventurism.
As Army Chaplain D. Keith Shurtleff has noted, “as wars become safer
and easier, as soldiers are removed from the horrors of war and see the
enemy not as humans but as blips on a screen, there is a very real danger
of losing the deterrent that such horrors provide.”21
Remote pilots miss key chances to gain honor since they do not
directly confront enemy warriors or civilians.22 Former soldier Andrew
Exum says he sympathizes with those living in Pakistan’s Federally
Administered Tribal Areas, “as a military person...there’s something
about pilotless drones that doesn’t strike me as an honorable way of
warfare.”23 Luttwak suggests this post-heroic warfare resembles the
restraint of 18th-century warfare that was oftentimes half-hearted and
timid, retiring to winter quarters even after promising advances, ending
battles before any casualties, and holding a great concern for casualties
itself, and asks “how therefore, can armed forces, staffed by professional,
salaried, pensioned, and career-minded military personnel who belong
to a nation intolerant of casualties, cope with aggressors inflamed by
nationalism or religious fanaticism?”24 Former British Air Chief Marshal
Sir Brian Burridge refers to this new type of conflict as “a virtueless war,”
requiring neither courage nor heroism.25
Robert Sparrow also worries about the loss of martial virtues that are
etched into a warrior class: physical and moral courage, loyalty, honor,
mercy, and willingness to risk their life for the group. He finds that there
is little moral courage required to kill from a distance and that physical
courage or indeed physical fitness may be unnecessary as they bear no
risk and have a greatly reduced capacity for sacrifice.26 Enemark finds
that the warrior ethos is built on the moral equality of combatants in
a relationship of mutual risk with the enemy, but that the fair fight
threshold was crossed long ago.27 Armin Krishnan contemplates whether
modern society still needs warriors, suggesting future models may look
more like Bill Gates and less like John Rambo; in fact, despite the sense
of chivalry and honor, he gives examples of U.S. generals declaring that
they do not want a fair fight, citing General Barry McCaffrey’s leadership
of bombing what became Iraq’s “highway of death.”28 Likewise, bin Laden
himself was shot unarmed along with one of his wives in a special forces
tactical operation of targeted killing. Russell Christopher describes the

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icon of a Hollywood Western where the bad guy always draws first in a
shoot-out, but that in reality the right to effective self-defense does not
require such high standards.29
For the vast majority who opt not to volunteer in the armed forces,
one may choose whether or not to have an opinion on, or even be
aware of, overseas hostilities involving the American military. Despite
little publicly available information, a March 2013 Pew Research Center
poll nonetheless found that 61 percent of Americans approve of lethal
drone attacks in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia and
only 30 percent oppose; both Republicans (69 percent) and Democrats
(59 percent) approved of U.S. drone policy.30 Meanwhile, at least half of
the publics in 31 of the 39 countries surveyed opposed the American use
of drones and only two other countries had majorities supporting drones,
Israel (64 percent) and Kenya (56 percent). Opinion polls are notoriously
suspect on issues of which the public has little knowledge, and by only
referencing drones to “target extremists” no mention is made of civilian
casualties or the rank of combatants killed.
Others suggest that drones can actually improve the ethics of war. Zack
Beauchamp and Julian Savulescu argue that drones offer more opportu-
nities to launch justified humanitarian interventions since they are more
likely to be deterred by fear of casualties than other wars, will improve
their moral conduct, and that robot guardians and unmanned combat
ground vehicles (UCGVs) could have helped to stop the genocides in
Rwanda and Darfur.31 Yet drones will be ineffective at nation-building in
a post-conflict environment which has proven to be the greatest barrier
to successful intervention, and the current reality of drone usage is for
targeted killing in the war on terror. Regardless, employing unmanned
systems also represents an improvement over the zero-casualty doctrine
in Kosovo that led to more than 38,000 high altitude bombing sorties
and consequent civilian casualties but none for NATO forces.32 Drones
solve this problem with more accuracy but maintain the same risk free
environment. Krishnan even offers that it may be unethical to send
soldiers onto the modern battlefield, facing risks from environmental
agents, biological or chemical toxins, torture and murder by terrorists,
and psychological trauma; thus he speculates that future wars may be
fought entirely by robots or in cyberspace, perhaps even running a
computer simulation.33 Such an idea reflects the civilized warfare of
a futuristic civilization in the 1960s Star Trek series episode “A Taste
of Armageddon,” where following a simulated armed attack citizens

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voluntarily submit to a disintegration booth for execution reflecting the

expected casualty count.

Language and Discourse

Even in an open society the manner of discourse can easily be captured
by a single prevailing narrative, especially if the public is ill-informed.
When thinking about the ethics of drone warfare one may contemplate
the naming practices for unmanned aerial vehicles themselves and the
rhetoric of policymakers who routinely execute life-and-death decisions.
Twin dangers arise: one that adopts a belligerent posture that both over-
celebrates violence and is insensitive to the human costs and another
becoming so non-descript that the gruesome reality is rendered invisible.
Drone wars already conjure images of science fiction films and novels of
countless robots loyal to some mysterious force about to unleash grave
harm on an unsuspecting world. As with much U.S. military nomencla-
ture that either portends great doom or besmirches indigenous culture
by naming missiles (Tomahawks) and attack helicopters (Apache and
Blackhawk) after war instruments and ethnic identity respectively that
suggest a savage war-like disposition, unmanned aircraft seem to follow
the same formula. The martial naming techniques of drones reflect their
almost supernatural powers. General Atomics built and named the two
most well-known drones: the Predator and the Reaper. Sifton posits that
the weapons’ names suggest ruthless and inhumane characteristics: the
Predator implies that “the enemy was not human but merely prey, that
military operations were not combat subject to the laws of war but a
hunt,” the Reaper is “a moniker implying that the United States was fate
itself, cutting down enemies who were destined to die. That the drones’
payloads were called Hellfire missiles, invoking the punishment of the
afterlife, added to a sense of righteousness.”34 In fact, most unmanned
systems employ names owing to flying fowl from cute hummingbirds to
scavengers and birds of prey such as eagles, hawks, ravens, or vultures,
to insects like wasps and tarantulas, but the prominence of the Predator
and Reaper brand capture the imagination more dramatically.
Joseph Pugliese examines the hyper-masculinization of language, with
one reported popular phrasing, the “sensor is in let the party begin,” and
one young remote pilot expressing appreciation for his profession by
describing it as “fucking cool!”35 Lest one imagine that such hyperbole
or enthusiasm was limited to newly minted cadets, at the White House
Correspondents Dinner, President Obama joked to the Jonas Brothers

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 Remote Killing and the Ethics of Drone Warfare 

musical group about the use of Predator drones if they flirted with
his daughters, “you’ll never see it coming,” or in the puffed up words
of Attorney General Holder, “we will be reading Miranda rights to
the corpse of Osama bin Laden.”36 The U.S. military and CIA refer to
the collateral effects radius of a bomb zone as the “bug splat,” before
pilots fire on the “squirters,” those who run away to escape further
carnage, and Martin refers to killing bugs in his description of life as
a drone pilot.37 Pugliese explains that people are thus rendered as an
abstract human subject, a generic figure, or an anonymous person; “the
‘bugsplat’ reduces the human victims of drones to nothing more than
liquefied entomological waste generated via a technology driven by a
more highly evolved species-qua the human as opposed to the insect.”38
Fears of regularized violence, militarized society, or disconnected youth
strung out on inhuman video games permeate worries about robotic
warfare. In the local public library, a book in the Cool Military Careers
series asks “do you like to play video games?”, before describing how
adolescents can learn the five skills of a drone pilot: DRONE: Dedicated,
Responsible, Organized, Never out of control, Eager to get the job done
right.39 Beyond such mnemonic devices, Sluka suggests that video games
developed by the military such as America’s Army and Close Combat: First
to Fight contribute to a separation between virtual and reality and risk
normalizing more violence in society.40
Another danger is using too bureaucratic phraseology that minimizes
the finality of these decisions. Certainly “drones” are not a winning
brand for current military uses or future commercial applications;
the Air Force already prefers the more neutral term “remotely piloted
aircraft systems” (RPAS). With an influx of technologically savvy kids
raised on science fiction and video games, a clever new term for a drone
operator has entered the lexicon, a “96 Uniform,” apparently referring
to Star Trek: Voyager’s 96th episode entitled “Drone.” Euphemisms are
employed to deflect responsibility for actions about to be undertaken,
whether the desire of American operatives to go “kinetic,” the movement
and energy of firing a weapon, or to “excise” a terrorist in the words
of John Brennan as if a simple surgery was about to be performed to
cleanly remove the tumor.41 Obama discarded the phrase “war on ter-
ror” in favor of overseas contingency operations (OCO), which implies
a systematic exercise in exploring options and not necessarily the use of
armed force. “Contingency” targets do not justify the use of the sweeping
military tactics, but only Network Centric Warfare (NCW) and Effects

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Based Operations, whereas “evil” is ubiquitous, can hide anywhere, and

by definition should be destroyed.42 For all the simplicity of the Bush
administration’s “with us or against us” and fight against evil rhetoric,
the global war on terror (GWOT) made it clear to Americans and oth-
ers that this would be a violent battle. In reality, American efforts are
prosecuted as a war often under the laws of armed conflict, so perhaps it
is best to at least call it a war, “the Long War,” and long wars will require
a new generation of fighters.

Asymmetry and Distance from Killing

Two major ethical considerations are the inequity of capabilities
between rival combatants and the commensurate distance between such
adversaries. One may feel an almost instinctive revulsion to an unfair
fight prosecuted at such dramatic advantage, such great asymmetry, as
reflected in computer-directed, remotely guided weaponry like drones.
On the surface, it is disturbing to imagine a world where a single global
or regional superpower polices the world or even its own neighborhood
using a tool unavailable to the opponent. Pugliese considers drones to
be the prosthetics of U.S. empire, predicated on violent asymmetries of
power.43 One may even posit that the outcome of aerial attack is a psy-
chology of terror and drones could be considered a tactic of terrorism
as well.44 As Leila Sadat describes, “the drones were terrifying. From
the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are track-
ing as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant
reminder of imminent death. Drones fire missiles that travel faster than
the speed of sound. A drone’s victim never hears the missile that kills
him.”45
Striking victims in what amounts to a sneak attack raises moral
issues and one may recall Franklin Roosevelt’s denunciation of Japan’s
“dastardly” raid on Pearl Harbor. Of course, the U.S. military actions
are in response to September 11, though not all of the new targets
have plans to assault the U.S. homeland. Moreover, the steadfast com-
mitment of jihadi fighters to martyr themselves in pursuit of their
mission and their ongoing indoctrination in madrasas, the mosque,
and elsewhere suggests that American defense planners must remain
vigilant to ongoing plots. Military dispositions certainly favor material
supremacy and overwhelming force to quickly subdue an opponent,

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 Remote Killing and the Ethics of Drone Warfare 

but in such cases the legitimacy of the rationale for war becomes even
more important, as described in the previous section on just war.
Moreover, Bradley Strawser argues that there is nothing inherently
wrong with killing by a drone and commanders should not add risk
to pilots by flying unnecessary missions.46 In fact, unmanned systems
may better enable operators to make morally informed decisions about
using their weapons.47 Drones start to bring the stress back in due to
the remote camera and the length of the relationship built up between
the pilot and his prey, even if completely one-sided. Former Air Force
drone pilot Brandon Bryant asked rhetorically “how many of you have
killed a group of people, watched as their bodies are picked up, watched
the funeral, then killed them too?”48 Researchers have proposed creat-
ing an interface like Apple’s Siri to deflect responsibility for killing and
lessen the moral weight of the lethal decision; responsibility can be dif-
fused so individuals themselves do not feel guilt, more so with robots
in the loop.49
One of the great deterrents to war is combat itself, the degradation
and misery of filth, blood, and guts; war is supposed to be hell. Soldiers’
stories of coming upon a dead fighter from the enemy camp and find-
ing a picture of his family in his belongings that led to a realization that
this person was not so different are replete in military men’s diaries
from any war. The dehumanization that often precedes organized
killing may be transformed on a battlefield, in face-to-face combat,
or in the emotional memories of those traumatic experiences. In fact,
another risk of associating or fraternizing with the enemy is losing the
killing ability.50 Moral remorse is hard to avoid in the human character
for those that find the victims, the bodies of the fallen and those of
the innocents. The remote-controlled console that provides a distant
video image of a victim who will never be experienced directly by
natural senses places whatever ethics of war exists in peril. For Sifton,
the distance between targets and CIA executive officers at Langley is
the defining characteristic of drones, which possess the distance of
an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) but can be used on an
everyday basis in a “new area of entirely risk-free, remote and even
potentially automated killing detached from human behavioral cues.”51
Ignatieff likened the 1991 Iraq war to a video-arcade game offering the
intoxicating reality of risk-free warfare, while drone pilot Matt Martin
compared his experience to the computer game Civilization, directing
armies into the battlefield.52 The “virtual presence of joystick pilots of

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

remote-controlled drones searching for victims to kill” is pervasive

in countries that are believed to harbor terrorists or are incapable of
preventing it,53 where shadow wars “generate geopolitical sites of extra-
judicial violence.”54
Just as we have seen through the partition that separated would be
torturer and victim in Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment, moral
choices are easily abandoned with the sanitizing distance afforded by
drone technology. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman describes fac-
tors that can overcome the average individual’s resistance to killing
and may also characterize drone operations: the demands of authority,
group absolution, and the distance from the victim. For Grossman,
detachment from the victim includes various conceptions of distance:
physical, emotional, cultural (which includes racial and ethnic differ-
ences that permit the killer to dehumanize the victim), moral (which
takes into consideration intense belief in moral superiority and venge-
ful actions), social (which considers the impact of a lifetime of viewing
a particular class as less than human in a culturally stratified environ-
ment), and mechanical (i.e., drone, which includes the sterile video
game unreality of killing through a television screen, night vision,
thermal imagery, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical
buffer).55 Grossman says there is a psychological desensitization to
killing in modern war, as “every aspect of killing on the battlefield is
rehearsed, visualized, and conditioned,” and identifies four reactions
humans undertake when under threat: fight, flee, posture, or submit,
though usually someone needs a legitimate authority giving orders to
kill and soldiers are more likely to kill due to accountability to com-
rades on the battlefield.56 He identifies a clear resistance to killing one’s
fellow man, “as men draw this near it becomes extremely difficult to
deny their humanity,” but finds it to be significantly easier to kill from
a distance; he did not find any cases of not killing the enemy when
from long range physical distance such as with artillery, bomber, or
missile crews.57 A revealing story in the Los Angeles Times described
drone pilots discussing an operation that resulted in killing civilians as
they got bored, wanted action, and wished for insurgents to kill hoping
to spot a weapon that would justify lethal force; when they mistakenly
killed innocents they then offered only that there was “no way to tell
from here.”58 Martin admits that “blowing up things was much more
interesting than watching men sit around in the dark smoking ciga-
rettes, dancing, and holding hands.”59

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 Remote Killing and the Ethics of Drone Warfare 

Man versus Machine

Underpinning the debates over the ethics of drones in warfare is the
question of who is more ethical or resistant to killing, man or machine,
and how much autonomy should robots be given on the battlefield and
its airspace. The use of precision-guided munitions and armed drones
increase the moral burden to ensure that targets are properly selected and
civilians are spared.60 Drones are not the only weapons system that could
be used without human control, for instance, mines, guided missiles, and
some automatic defense systems, but they are the most agile and mobile.
Krishnan distinguishes three degrees of autonomy: pre-programmed
autonomy such as that found in mines, smart bombs, and cruise missiles,
limited or supervised autonomy that may apply to drones, and complete
autonomy where a robot may employ its own artificial intelligence and
behave independently.61 Each level of autonomy is affected by the trigger
mechanism, target selection, and mobility and navigational abilities of
the weapon.62
Few have great faith in the dependability of machines and the total
removal of humans from operating military equipment. Some have fur-
ther wondered about the legality of drone strikes and the responsibility for
mistaken killings or violations of the laws of war if humans are removed
from the six steps in the kill-chain, find, fix, track, target, engage, and
assess, especially if they become completely automated. Asaro writes,
“we cannot claim that an autonomous weapon system would be morally
superior to a human soldier on the basis that it might be technologi-
cally capable of making fewer errors in a discrimination task, or finding
means of neutralizing military targets that optimally minimize the risk
of disproportionate harms ... Any automated process, however good
it might be, and even if measurably better than human performance,
ought to be subject to human review before it can legitimately initiate
the use of lethal force.”63 Krishnan finds that machines are ultimately
dumb and lack empathy, and thus they cannot be moral actors since
they do not comprehend the finality of death.64 The uniformed military
remains skeptical of the impact of great technological change and has
cautiously emphasized that autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon
systems should allow commanders to have control over the use of force
and keep a “human-in-the-loop.”65 Currently, pilots operate drones and
commanders deploy them, but that responsibility would become unclear
if they become more autonomous. Some have hypothetically reversed

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

accountability back to software programmers or engineers, or perhaps

the robots themselves.
George Bekey however highlights a great many technical risks with
autonomous military robotics, from discriminating among targets,
inputting competing ethical frameworks, and typical first generation
glitches, to robots running amok and thus requiring a kill switch and
unauthorized overrides where someone takes over a drone army.66
Noel Sharkey believes that robots may identify whether something is a
human or an animal, but could not distinguish combat status and that
computers cannot be programmed to distinguish civilians.67 As soldiers
come to be under constant centralized surveillance, they may develop
tensions with the machines and commanders may become accustomed
to commanding robots that do not talk back and never question orders.
Other potential risks may ensue, such as a commander micro-managing
the battle space and losing initiatives from lower-level leaders.68 Robots
may also refuse an unjust order and harm unit cohesion since they will
regularly watch soldiers.69 George Lucas suggests that a safe and reliable
autonomous system would be acceptable or even a morally responsible
action, but requires safety, reliability, and due care and must perform at
least as well or better than humans.70
Another supposition is that humans already behave poorly in war so
perhaps machines can do better. Ronald Arkin has tracked some of the
elements of human weaknesses in war as they may behave unethically
due to seeking revenge for friendly losses, weak leadership, dehumanizing
the enemy, poorly trained troops, no clearly defined enemy, and unclear
orders and suggests ethical programming into robots such as an “ethical
governor” and a “responsibility advisor.”71 Kenneth Andersen and Matthew
Waxman claim that machine programming might eventually capture the
two fundamental principles of distinction and proportionality.72 At a
minimum, drone operators may be more immune to irrational pressures
owing to peer pressure or hatred of the enemy.73 Some have suggested
that ultimately it may be necessary to give robots some rights, such as not
treating them as slaves, using them to spy, or having sex with them, or
conversely employing comfort robots that would allow soldiers to avoid
the exploitation of women and prisoners of war.74 Asaro has helped to
forge an International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC)
and called for an autonomous weapon systems ban, while Andersen and
Waxman oppose prohibitions but rather prefer the “gradual development
of internal state norms and best practices.”75 For the latter, the United

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 Remote Killing and the Ethics of Drone Warfare 

States will need to resist its own impulses toward secrecy and reticence
with respect to military technologies, yet the United States can lead in
forging a common export control regime and standards of acceptable
autonomous weapons available on international markets.76
Drones are part of this great transformation in military affairs brought
about by technological advancement and raise all sorts of new and
profound issues. Ultimately, demographic factors like age may impact
how one perceives the threat of a new technology like robotic warfare.
Moreover, Singer describes the cultural understanding of machines and
robots in the West that imagine a more fearful mechanical servant that
wised up and then “rised up,” as contrasted to Japan where after the end
of the World War II the robot emerged as almost always a humanitarian
actor like Astro Boy.77

Conclusion
The gap between the quality of human lives in modern and traditional
worlds has never been as dramatic as in the asymmetric encounters that
define the war on terror. Many recoil at robotic drone warfare, almost
instinctively averse to the futuristic aspect of one of the world’s oldest
contests. Yet armed conflict may become so routinized and sanitized
that even a democratic society willingly accepts a de facto permanent
state of war as long as it amounts to a risk-free choice for those pull-
ing the trigger. Pugliese paints a stark picture: “the imperial right to kill
those ‘patterns of life’ whose identities remain ‘unknown’ can now be
exercised ... from the safety of home turf without putting the lives of US
personnel at risk.”78 Hundreds of years of state practice to establish the
principle of national sovereignty may also be forfeited with the advancing
tentacles of cyber-security. To the contrary, advanced technology may
offer a more professional and ethical process to prosecute war that can
greatly minimize the impact on civilians and reduce the mistreatment of
combatants. The virtual reality of video technology affixed to unmanned
aircraft holds the potential to capture a recording of war itself and thus
places more responsibility on participants to follow the laws and customs
of war, should those who possess and control the source material choose
to release it for public scrutiny or an oversight investigation. While these
transformations appear remote from most people’s lives, domestic soci-
ety will soon confront a brave new world as well.

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Notes
 John Sifton, “Drones: A Troubling History,” The Nation (February 27,
2012), 15.
 Matt Martin, Predator: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan:
A Pilot’s Story (Minneapolis, M.N.: Zenith, 2010), 43–44, 54.
 Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York, N.Y.: Henry
Holt, 2000), 161.
 Christian Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War: Military Virtue in a
Post-Heroic Age (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2013), 60–62.
 Barack Obama, Speech at National Defense University, May 23, 2013.
 Alex Bellamy, “The Ethics of Terror Bombing: Beyond Supreme Emergency,”
Journal of Military Ethics 7, no. 1 (2008), 43, citing Michael Walzer, Just and
Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York, N.Y.:
Basic Books, 1977), 151.
 Andrew Altman, “Introduction,” in Claire Finkelstein, Andrew Altman, and
Jens David Ohlin, eds., Targeted Killings: Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical
World (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4.
 Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War, 63.
 Sarah Kreps and John Kaag, “The Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and
Contemporary Conflict: A Legal and Ethical Analysis,” Polity 44, no. 2 (April
2012), 282.
 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars.
 Bellamy, “The Ethics of Terror Bombing,” 44.
 Jeh Johnson, National Security Law, Lawyers, and Lawyering in the Obama
Administration, Speech at Yale University (February 22, 2012).
 Peter Singer, “Do Drones Undermine Democracy?” New York Times (January
21, 2012).
 Vincent Bernard, “Interview with Peter W. Singer,” International Review of the
Red Cross 94 (2012), 471.
 Peter Asaro, “On Banning Autonomous Weapon Systems: Human Rights,
Automation, and the Dehumanization of Lethal Decision-making,”
International Review of the Red Cross 94, no. 886 (Summer 2012), 691.
 Claire Finkelstein, “Targeted Killing as Preemptive Action,” in Claire
Finkelstein, Andrew Altman, and Jens David Ohlin, eds., Targeted Killings:
Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical World (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 172.
 Ignatieff, Virtual War, 179.
 Bernard, “Interview with Peter W. Singer,” 472.
 Edward N. Luttwak, “Toward Post-Heroic Warfare,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 3
(May–June 1995), 115.
 Ignatieff, Virtual War, 191.

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 Remote Killing and the Ethics of Drone Warfare 

 Peter Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-
First Century (New York, N.Y.: Penguin, 2009), 396.
 Robert Sparrow, “War Without Virtue?” in Bradley Jay Strawser, ed., Killing
by Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 97.
 Mayer, “The Predator War.”
 Luttwak, “Toward Post-Heroic Warfare,” 115–116.
 Jane Mayer, “The Predator War: What are the Risks of the C.I.A.’s Covert
Drone Program?” New Yorker (October , .
 Sparrow, “War Without Virtue?” 89–92, 96, 104.
 Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War, 73–77.
 Krishnan, Killer Robots, 135–138.
 Russell Christopher, “Imminence in Justified Targeted Killing,” in Claire
Finkelstein, Andrew Altman, and Jens David Ohlin, eds., Targeted Killings:
Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical World (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 258, 261.
 Pew Research Center, Global Attitudes Project (July 18, 2013).
 Zack Beauchamp and Julian Savulescu, “Robot Guardians: Teleoperated
Combat Vehicles in Humanitarian Military Intervention,” in Bradley Jay
Strawser, ed., Killing by Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military
(Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2013), 106, 110, 118–119, 120.
 Beauchamp and Savulescu, “Robot Guardians,” 112.
 Armin Krishnan, Killer Robots: Legality and Ethicality of Autonomous Weapons
(Burlington, V.T.: Ashgate, 2009), 122–125.
 Sifton, “Drones,” 13.
 Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law (New York, N.Y.:
Routledge, 2013), 208, 210.
 Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (London, U.K.:
Verso, 2013), 139.
 Martin, Predator, 200.
 Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law, 210.
 Nancy Robinson Masters, Drone Pilot [Cool Military Careers series] (Ann
Arbor, M.I.: Cherry Lake Publishing, 2013), 15, 19.
 Jeffrey A. Sluka, “Virtual War in the Tribal Zone: Air Strikes, Drones,
Civilian Casualties, and Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan and
Pakistan,” in Neil L. Whitehead and Sverker Finnström, eds., Virtual War and
Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 187.
 John Brennan, The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy, Speech
at Woodrow Wilson Center (April 30, 2012).
 Kreps and Kaag, “The Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Contemporary
Conflict,” 280.

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

 Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law, 185.

 Sluka, “Virtual War in the Tribal Zone,” 186.
 Leila Nadya Sadat, “America’s Drone Wars,” Case Western Reserve Journal of
International Law 45 (2012), 221.
 Bradley Jay Strawser, “Introduction: The Moral Landscape of Unmanned
Weapons,” in Bradley Jay Strawser, ed., Killing by Remote Control: The Ethics of
an Unmanned Military (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8, 16.
 Jeff McMahan, “Foreword,” in Bradley Jay Strawser, ed., Killing by Remote
Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University
Press, 2013), ix.
 Matthew Power, “Confessions of an American Drone Operator,” Gentleman’s
Quarterly (October 23, 2013).
 Power, “Confessions of an American Drone Operator”; Krishnan, Killer
Robots, 129.
 Grossman, On Killing, 159.
 Sifton, “Drones,” 13.
 Ignatieff, Virtual War, 168; Martin, Predator, 31.
 Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law, 184.
 Sluka, “Virtual War in the Tribal Zone,” 192.
 Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War
and Society (New York, N.Y.: Back Bay Books, 2009), 160.
 Grossman, On Killing, 5, 147, 149, 253, 256.
 Ibid., 38–40, 99, 108, 119.
 Benjamin, Drone Warfare, 93–94, 98.
 Martin, Predator, 112.
 Asaro, “On Banning Autonomous Weapon Systems,” 703.
 Krishnan, Killer Robots, 43–44.
 Ibid., 45.
 Asaro, “On Banning Autonomous Weapon Systems,” 701, 702.
 Krishnan, Killer Robots, 132–133.
 Department of Defense Directive Number 3000.09, November 21, 2012.
 Patrick Lin, George Bekey, and Keith Abney, Autonomous Military Robotics:
Risk, Ethics, and Design (U.S. Department of Navy, Office of Naval Research,
2008), 73.
 Noel Sharkey, “Saying ‘No!’ to Lethal Autonomous Targeting,” Journal of
Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (2010), 379.
 Krishnan, Killer Robots, 137.
 Lin et al., Autonomous Military Robotics, 73.
 George Lucas, “Engineering, Ethics, and Industry: The Moral Challenges of
Lethal Autonomy,” in Bradley Jay Strawser, ed., Killing by Remote Control: The
Ethics of an Unmanned Military (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2013),
219, 220, 226.

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 Remote Killing and the Ethics of Drone Warfare 

 Ronald Arkin, Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid

Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture, Technical Report (Atlanta, G.A.:
Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007).
 Kenneth Andersen and Matthew Waxman, “Law and Ethics for Robot
Soldiers,” Policy Review (December 2012 and January 2013), 41.
 Sparrow, “War Without Virtue?” 95.
 Krishnan, Killer Robots, 139; Lin, et al, Autonomous Military Robotics, 73.
 Andersen and Waxman, “Law and Ethics for Robot Soldiers,” 46.
 Ibid., 48.
 Bernard, “Interview with Peter W. Singer.”
 Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law, 216.

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 5
Public Policy, Privacy,
and Drone Technology
Abstract: This chapter briefly describes the commercial and
public service applications for drone technology in domestic
society along with the desire on the part of law enforcement
to acquire such capabilities that could be used for public
safety. These coming transformations challenge traditional
civil liberty notions of privacy and due process and even
raise the specter of governments executing their own
citizens with drones. The public policy and constitutional
issues raised by drones in the domestic sphere are explored
and the current status of unmanned aircraft in the United
States and their forthcoming inclusion into the national
airspace in 2015 are succinctly summarized.

Keywords: civil liberties; commercial use of drones; due

process; law enforcement and drones; privacy; using
drones domestically

Rae, James DeShaw. Analyzing the Drone Debates:

Targeted Killing, Remote Warfare, and Military
Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
doi: 10.1057/9781137381576.0008.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0008
 Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone Technology 

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles outside of the sphere of national

security and military affairs also raises fundamental issues related to
civil liberties, law enforcement, and commercial application. The careful
integration of drones into the domestic realm will figure very promi-
nently in public policy debates over the coming years, from regulating
national airspace to ensuring measures to provide safety. Moreover, real
and future opportunities for commercial and public usage of unmanned
technology and the potential economic benefits of remotely piloted air-
craft will drive greater awareness of these issues. Following this trend, law
enforcement has a natural incentive to adopt the most effective security
measures developed by the military and is likely to be a willing customer
as well. The success of targeted killing with drones has even spurred calls
for bringing the same policy to Mexico’s drug wars.1 Indeed, tensions
and controversies over military applications may be overshadowed by
the challenges of accepting robots into domestic life. The unintended
consequences from the proliferation and expansion of drone capabili-
ties present risks to civil liberty protections of privacy and due process
among others.
Many countries now have the capacity to employ unmanned systems
for civilian uses and a few like Australia, Brazil, and Japan regularly
employ them for crop dusting and environmental monitoring.2 In 2002,
Australia was the first country to publish operational civil aviation safety
regulations for drones and six European countries (Czech Republic,
France, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) have regula-
tions in place with another half dozen (Belgium, Denmark, Finland,
the Netherlands, Norway, and Spain) preparing guidelines, though the
European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has not received a single
application for a commercial or non-governmental drone.3 Canada,
Israel, Russia, and Turkey are also seeking civil application of drones
while China and Singapore are considering the rules and regulations.4
In the United States, President Barack Obama signed the Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization bill to integrate drones
into the national airspace by September 2015. Indeed, under the
2012 Modernization and Reform Act (FMRA), the Federal Aviation
Administration is issuing permits to allow domestic drone use with
caveats that require they be flown only during the day, stay below an
altitude of 400 feet, remain within the direct line of sight of the operator,
and avoid airports. A relatively small trade group called the Association
for Unmanned Vehicles Systems International (AUVSI) has begun to

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

lobby in collaboration with a 50-member unmanned systems caucus that

promotes the strategic, tactical, and scientific value of drones.
Drone proponents say that the Federal Aviation Administration has
limited the domestic market because of safety questions and that the State
Department has shut off international trade by restricting the export of
defense technologies.5 Nevertheless, the U.S. Congress has authorized
putting up to 30,000 drones in American skies by the end of the decade
and the Federal Aviation Administration created an Unmanned Aircraft
Program Office in early 2006 within the Transportation Department.6
Public drone operators must obtain a “certificate of authorization” while
civil or private operators need a “special airworthiness certificate.” Most
of the 700 to 750 authorizations since the program began in 2006 have
been for federal agencies tied to national security, such as the U.S. Air
Force, U.S. Army, the DARPA, the Federal Bureau of Investigations
(FBI), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),
while some county and municipal law enforcement agencies, a few public
universities, and defense companies like Raytheon, Honeywell, General
Atomics, and others have been issued special airworthiness certificates.7
For regulatory purposes, drones are classified by those that weigh above
or below 150 kilograms; the larger models face greater certification and
regulation standards comparable to commercial piloted aircraft includ-
ing pilot or operator training and safety specifications.8
The seamless inclusion of unmanned aerial vehicles into national
airspace will require improved protective measures. Small accidents
have occurred even in this limited experience; the accident rate for
drones is over seven times higher than general aviation and 353 times
higher than in commercial aviation.9 The first fatality involving a civil-
ian drone occurred in August 2009 when a Yamaha RMAX helicopter
drone crashed while crop-dusting a field in South Korea; the rotor
sheared off and penetrated the abdomen of a bystander who bled to
death.10 Furthermore, a Predator surveillance drone crashed along the
U.S.-Mexican border in 2006 when an operator accidentally shut off its
engine, a Mexican drone crashed into an El Paso, Texas home’s back-
yard, and a Navy drone experienced a “software problem” and entered
Washington D.C.’s restricted airspace in 2010.11 Currently, drones lose
communications with operators too frequently, though they are typically
programmed to go into a holding pattern or return to base; attempts
to implement technology that will “sense and avoid” other aircraft are
advancing.12

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 Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone Technology 

Commercial Applications, Public Goods, and

Economic Efficiencies
Despite these regulatory burdens and safety concerns, drone advocates
have a nearly endless list of potential applications for the unmanned
aircraft: from environmental to public safety, health, and commercial.
Remote pilot enthusiasts promise revolutionary change in the nature of
society and many offer countless possibilities to improve public safety
and even public health by the connectivity of unmanned aerial vehicles,
including providing services to distant populations. Many business
enterprises for drone technology seem far-fetched, but excitement for the
potential of their use as a new start-up industry is boundless and range
from delivering pizza to fighting wildfires (see Table 5.1). The Global

Table 5.1 Possible applications for drones in the private sector

 overseeing archaeological sites,
 gathering geomagnetic data about natural resources,
 forecasting weather and recording atmospheric data,
 tracking wildlife populations and migration,
 evaluating environmental conditions and spotting polluters, illegal logging, or erosion,
 assessing damage after hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes,
 mapping, assessing, and fighting wildfires,
 monitoring pipelines and power lines,
 aiding disaster relief efforts,
 checking chemical and gas leaks,
 uncovering violations at a slaughterhouse,
 delivering medicine to remote villages,
 finding lost pets, missing persons, or Alzheimer’s patients,
 executing search-and-rescue operations,
 managing hostage situations,
 following traffic patterns,
 dusting crops, spraying pesticides, and finding lost livestock,
 guiding sea vessels to areas in which an icebreaker is needed,
 transporting equipment to drilling rigs,
 surveying mines,
 allowing real estate developers to remotely perform simple construction jobs,
 photographing real estate,
 scoping out public events or celebrity backyards by journalists, and
 delivering pizza and groceries

Source: Carl Von Wodtke, “Droning On,” Aviation History 24, no. 1 (September 2013), 22;
Mary Branham, “State Legislation, FAA Leave Drone Use Grounded,” Capitol Ideas (July/
August 2013), 18–19; Richard Conniff, “Drones are Ready for Takeoff,” Smithsonian (June
2011); John Horgan, “The Drones Come Home,” National Geographic (March 2013); Nick
Paumgarten, “Here’s Looking at You: Should We Worry about the Rise of the Drone?” The
New Yorker (May 14, 2012).

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Hawk provided aerial views for rescue operations after an earthquake

devastated Haiti in 2010 and supplied video footage after a tsunami in
Japan damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and unleashed
radioactive material in 2011.13 Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos, founder of the
mammoth online retailer Amazon.com, hopes to launch a delivery serv-
ice with small unmanned aircraft dropping packages at doorsteps only
30 minutes after an order is placed.14
Unmanned aircraft use less energy than a large aircraft doing the
same job and may become affordable as they do not receive pensions or
health-care benefits; Missy Cummings predicts that soon cargo planes
will fly without human pilots and that passenger jets will ultimately
follow.15 The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International
forecasts that during the first decade following integration, more than
100,000 new jobs will be created and the total economic impact could
reach $82 billion by 2025.16 Yet drones require multiple people to conduct
ground control for long hours and unmanned systems also have high
research and other start-up costs for a product manufactured in relatively
small numbers, and large drones are currently too expensive compared
to piloted airplanes for commercial purposes.17 More likely, drones will
be guided in their route by a piloted plane; United Parcel Service (UPS)
or Federal Express may employ one human pilot to communicate with
air traffic control and have three unmanned planes flying in formation
behind.18 Opposition to drone production is in its infancy, but the pos-
sibility of noise pollution and cluttering pristine aerial views may also
give pause before drones proliferate too widely. At least one conservation
group, Not 1 More Acre!, opposes the efforts of the Pentagon and private
ventures to claim fragile prairie lands for drone testing in Colorado and
New Mexico.19 Other organizations like Codepink’s Drone Watch strike
an anti-war posture that emphasizes the threats from drones, and anti-
war protesters were arrested for trespassing at Creech air base in Nevada
in 2009 and Hancock field in upstate New York in 2011. Certainly, one
notorious drone catastrophe could devastate any possibility of adopting
unmanned aircraft domestically.

Law Enforcement
With little public scrutiny, spy drones are well on their way to becoming
a staple tool of U.S. law enforcement. Police drone patrols may become

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 Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone Technology 

like the current use of helicopters, another tool of public safety to watch
for speeding automobiles on highways or to track criminals, but at more
affordable prices. An Associated Press and National Constitution Center
survey reported that 44 percent of respondents supported the idea of
law enforcement using drones to assist in police work with 36 percent
opposed.20 Since 2005, federal authorities like the Department of
Homeland Security and its U.S. Customs and Border Protection regularly
use unarmed versions of the Predator drone to monitor the international
border with Mexico for smugglers and illegal immigrants and in 2011 the
Defense Department sent drones deep into Mexico to collect informa-
tion on drug trafficking, though it banned the use of armed drones in
American airspace in December 2010.21 The Drug Enforcement Agency
(DEA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) are
both believed to have employed drones for investigations often related
to Mexican drug cartels. The U.S. Coast Guard watches coastal waters
with unmanned aerial vehicles and NASA employs them for imagery
collection and as sensors.22 Even outside the United States, a Northrop
Grumman Fire Scout quietly followed drug smugglers allowing agents
from the USS McInerney to arrest them, maintaining the pursuit when
a manned helicopter would have had to turn back and refuel.23 In June
2013, FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged that his agency had
employed surveillance drones inside the United States and claimed that
they were used only for specific investigations in a limited manner, but
the bureau had yet to produce guidelines to limit the effect on the pri-
vacy of Americans.24 Indeed, one-third of domestic drones are possessed
by the U.S. Defense Department, while U.S. Customs and Border patrol
operate another significant segment. The first example of domestic law
enforcement application was the June 2011 drone-assisted arrest in North
Dakota near the U.S.-Canada border of three cattle rustlers who also
turned out to be part of a separatist group called the Sovereign Citizens
movement.25
Drone advocates anticipate potential customers among all 18,000
law enforcement agencies in the United States.26 Although only a dozen
police departments, including ones in Miami and Seattle (the city council
terminated such prospects in 2013), have applied to the FAA for permits
to fly drones, some rural sheriff ’s departments have authority to operate
them.27 Police say they could use drones to find runaway fugitives, per-
form search and rescue, survey crime scenes, monitor hostage situations,
control or dispel protesters, stop a fleeing vehicle, or deploy weapons.28

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Drones may become increasingly linked to GPS, mobile phones, and

other devices that track people without a warrant or suspicion of guilt,
and can be affixed with cameras, thermal imaging devices, license
plate readers, laser radar, tasers, bean bags, tear gas, rubber bullets,
and other technologies capable of facial recognition or soft biometric
identification.29 If state and local law enforcement come to employ such
devices even if only for surveillance and not summary execution, what
oversight will be employed and what training will govern its application?
Many private security employees as well as uniformed police officers
are already over-anxious to use tasers on unsuspecting belligerents and
occasionally adopt lethal force. Armin Krishnan recommended prohib-
iting general police use of armed robots or small surveillance robots that
could enter and search homes stealthily.30 The American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) can imagine a nightmare scenario even without arming
them, where unmanned aircraft join police raids and chases before a
network of linked drones and computers automatically track multiple
vehicles and bodies moving around a city, combining drone video and
mobile phone tracking to build up databases of people’s routine patterns
to mine for suspicious behavior.31
Interestingly, public officials themselves are nervous about the pos-
sibility that drones could be used for persistent surveillance of U.S.
citizens. In 2012, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP)
published non-binding guidelines for the use of drones that strongly
discourage “equipping the aircraft with weapons of any type” and that
drone operators “secure a search warrant prior to conducting the flight”
if there is reason to believe the unmanned aircraft will collect criminal
evidence or intrude upon reasonable expectations of privacy.32 Many
legislative initiatives require police agencies to acquire a warrant before
using drones and some have sought to ban attaching a weapon to an
unmanned system.33 As of January 2014, 43 states had proposed bills to
regulate drones and nine had enacted legislation. For instance, Idaho
became the first state to prohibit police from using drones to conduct
investigations without a search warrant and North Carolina and Virginia
passed two-year moratoriums on the use of drones for law enforcement
or regulatory agencies. Florida, Illinois, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee,
and Texas also implemented laws to protect citizen privacy and limit
law enforcement from using drones to gather information and collect
evidence absent a search warrant.34 Aside from the scope of restricting
law enforcement use of drones, they may be used for criminal activity as

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 Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone Technology 

well. In 2003, border vigilantes in Arizona began testing two drones to

track illegal immigrants and in 2012, Rezwan Ferdaus of Massachusetts
was sentenced to 17 years in prison by a federal court for plotting to
attack the Pentagon with a drone loaded with C-4 explosives.35 Owing
to second amendment protections, perhaps police will soon be heard
demanding, “lay down your drone!” Clearly, the benefits of public safety
applications trigger commensurate concerns over civil liberties, privacy,
and due process.

Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Due Process

The technological innovations of mobile, remote-controlled surveillance
devices threaten the privacy of individuals in untold ways. Controversies
over traffic cameras and full-body scanners in airports may pale in
comparison to the backlash from hovering insect-sized drones watch-
ing over your backyard or outside the window. These new technologies
may manufacture a true police or national security state reminiscent
of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, allowing an omniscient government to
secure the population and provide public safety by voiding long-held
ideas of personal sovereignty where citizens sacrifice all rights except to
self-defense. The transformation of military hardware into domestic life
touches on fundamental freedoms like the right to life and privacy and
thus courts will be a primary arena where the constitutional safeguards
that protect civil liberties and due process are settled.

Due Process and Killing Citizens

Through their deployments in theaters of war, drones have stimulated
debate as to whether the U.S. government violates its constitution when
it summarily executes an American citizen without traditional standards
of due process. The U.S. constitution’s bill of rights guarantees that no
person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process
of law” (fifth amendment), that the “the accused shall enjoy the right to
a speedy and public trial” (sixth amendment), and no “cruel and unusual
punishments” should be inflicted (eighth amendment). Thus far, five
American civilians (father and son Anwar and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki,
Samir Khan, Jude Kenan Mohammad, and Kamal Derwish) are known
to have been killed in drone strikes, all of them Muslim Americans who

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

were living in Pakistan or Yemen, were believed to have some material

connection to al Qaeda, and were perceived to be enemy combatants
lacking in constitutional safeguards, though only one was intentionally
targeted for death according to the U.S. government (Anwar al-Awlaki).
Awlaki was known for inciting or inspiring attacks against the United
States, including U.S. Army Major Nidal Hassan’s mass shooting at Fort
Hood in 2009, the thwarted Nigerian “underwear” bomber Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab’s attempt to detonate an explosive device on a U.S.-bound
plane on Christmas Day the same year, and the failed Times Square car
bombing by naturalized-American Faisal Shahzad in 2010. The Director
of National Intelligence Dennis Blair claimed that Awlaki actively
directed the underwear bombing attempt under the pseudonym Abu
Tarek based on the interrogation of Abdulmutallab.36 The Department of
Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel secretly authorized the targeted killing
of Awlaki in Yemen for becoming a leader of an enemy force, AQAP,
ordered to death by President Obama on a “Terror Tuesday” when he
selected his “kill list,” now known as the “disposition matrix.” After at
least one failed attempt where Awlaki was ambushed by an aerial combi-
nation of Special Operations Dragon Spear aircraft, Harrier jets, armed
Predator drones, and a Global Hawk surveillance drone, the CIA killed
him in a successful operation involving joint intelligence and military
assets from a drone base in Saudi Arabia.37
Not everyone agrees that Awlaki represented a grave threat, or was
even a significant al Qaeda leader. Claire Finkelstein contends that
Awlaki was essentially a propagandist rather than an active belligerent
and was thus not a looming threat.38 Civil liberties groups question how
imminent the threat of attack from Awlaki was since he was targeted
for a full two years. Vince Warren contended that no specific evidence
existed to meet the legal threshold to justify killing under human rights
law.39 In fact, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU initi-
ated a legal attempt to prevent the killing, but in July 2010 the Treasury
Department labeled Awlaki a “specially designated global terrorist” and
his legal case was stymied by military and state secrets privileges and was
dismissed because his father supposedly lacked standing to bring suit on
behalf of his adult son.40
As described earlier, the United States considers itself to be in an
armed conflict with al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and associated forces
and thus applies the laws of war; therefore American citizens who have
enlisted with enemy forces and reside in the United States or abroad are

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 Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone Technology 

not immune from conventional attack in war time. The major restrictions
on the use of military force within the United States and against U.S.
citizens are due process rights, the Posse Comitatus Act, the ICCPR, and
Executive Order 12333; the latter two were discussed in Chapter 3.41 Jeh
Johnson traces the prohibition on willfully using the military as a posse
comitatus unless expressly authorized by Congress or the Constitution
back to the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Third
Amendment, and an 1878 federal criminal statute.42 American citizens
take their constitutionally mandated rights and protections such as life
and due process with them overseas; however the Supreme Court held in
Ex Parte Quirin (1942) and reaffirmed in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) that a
“citizen, no less than an alien, can be ‘part of or supporting forces hostile
to the United States or coalition partners’ and ‘engaged in an armed con-
flict against the United States.’”43 In World War II, a U.S. military tribunal
tried two Americans who had joined Nazi Germany according to the
laws of armed conflict rather than U.S. domestic criminal law; both were
found guilty and sentenced to death for violating the laws of war and
one was executed, and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld held, “there is no bar to this
Nation holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant.”44 The
U.S. government argues that such individuals are unlawful combatants
and forfeit their protected status when they take up arms or occupy a
position of leadership within al Qaeda, falling into the same class of
Bush-era detainees held at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba beyond the Geneva Conventions framework since they were
not prisoners of war and resident outside of U.S. territory and thus
removed from any U.S. constitutional protections afforded to persons on
American soil.
Defenders of the government’s authority to kill Americans overseas or
to execute anyone present in the United States without judicial process
assert that national security concerns during war time allow excep-
tional methods. Marshall Thompson suggests that the president may
review the evidence and determine that an al Qaeda member poses an
imminent threat of violence and that capture is not possible and could
invoke the AUMF to order domestic drone strikes, arguing that the
Posse Comitatus Act would not bar the government from using military
force within the borders of the United States.45 Thompson explains that
with congressional authorization, the president may use military force
against a U.S. citizen on American soil when that person is taking active
part in an armed conflict against the United States such as occurred in

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

19th-century America when the U.S. government killed 75,000 American

citizens in the Civil War. Although no congressional approval is sought
despite its power to determine criminal punishment, a “gang of eight”
members of the U.S. Congress, the Democratic and Republican leaders
of the House and Senate along with the chair and vice-chair of the Senate
and House Intelligence Committees, are informed about drone strikes
and targeted killing after the fact.46 He finds that “unless an independent
review is statutorily required by Congress, the current state of the law is
that the executive’s decisions to target a person, even a U.S. citizen, will
go unquestioned externally” due to the risk of imminent violence.47
Mike Dreyfus claims that the U.S. government can effectively target
and kill U.S. citizens who are participating in armed conflict against the
United States abroad while maintaining due process protections for all
citizens by notifying the target that he is suspected of being a traitor
or of committing some other crime and affording him an opportunity
for a hearing even if it makes continued intelligence gathering more
difficult: “Targeted killing is not punishment for treason. U.S. citizens
who serve as soldiers for the enemy can be shot without trial during
military operations but must be afforded a trial as traitors if they can be
captured. So too U.S. citizens who are leaders at the strategic level for
the enemy can be targeted and killed without trial.”48 The 2012 National
Defense Authorization Act hinted that the U.S. military could detain
a U.S. citizen on American soil in accordance with the laws of armed
conflict instead of through the criminal justice system if necessary.49
Congressional witness Robert Chesney said a judicial process could
be introduced during the detention of a suspect, but that it would be
too burdensome to provide judicial process to someone not in custody.
Dreyfus does argue that the government still needs to disclose a process
to determine whether a U.S. citizen will be killed that can survive strict
scrutiny, though it need not take the form of a trial in an Article III
court; he ultimately suggests either letting the military JAG offic-
ers present a case to a neutral decision-maker before killing a target,
leaving the commander to decide with the advice of the JAG Corps, or
allowing the executive to create a neutral decision-making body within
an agency.50
Consequently, the Obama administration narrowly defined due
process guarantees afforded to Americans by the Constitution as an
approach short of judicial process based on legal instruments and access
to courts, but may simply be the commander-in-chief deliberating over

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 Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone Technology 

a list provided after careful intelligence gathering. Holder argues that

“the Supreme Court has made clear that the Due Process Clause does
not impose one-size-fits-all requirements ... ‘due process’ and ‘judicial
process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national
security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”51
In February 2013, a leaked Justice Department white paper outlined the
legal justification and minimum standard before the U.S. government
will kill one of its citizens overseas: the U.S. citizen must be a senior
operational leader of al Qaeda or associated forces actively engaged in
planning to kill Americans, an informed high-level U.S. government
official must determine that the targeted individual poses an imminent
threat of violent attack against the United States, capture is infeasible,
and the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with
principles of the laws of war.52 In Holder’s words:

There are instances where our government has the clear authority, and, I
would argue, the responsibility, to defend the United States through the
appropriate and lawful use of lethal force ... United States citizenship alone
does not make such individuals immune from being targeted ... The evalu-
ation of whether an individual presents an “imminent threat” incorporates
considerations of the relevant window of opportunity to act, the possible
harm that missing the window would cause to civilians, and the likelihood
of heading off future disastrous attacks against the United States.53

Others find grave concern over the wanton disregard for basic civil
liberties by those arguing in favor of drone strikes or targeted killing of
American citizens. Under this new formulation, determinations over
one’s true identity, whether they pose a direct threat to the United States,
and are actively planning an attack are not adjudicated but rather sum-
marily executed with drone strikes. If someone is suspected of treason,
the U.S. Constitution states that no person shall be convicted unless on
the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or on confession
in open court. In a trial-like procedure, a suspected terrorist would be
able to present written and oral arguments, have access to the evidence
the state plans to use, be able to cross-examine witnesses, and to exclude
much hearsay evidence.54 The Supreme Court accepts that even though
U.S. citizens may lawfully be classified as enemy combatants, they are
due some form of process before they are deprived of life or liberty.55
Rasul v. Bush (2004) held that Guantanamo was still under American
sovereignty and that detainees there had certain basic rights including

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

to counsel and a hearing, and Hamdi guaranteed reasonable efforts to

place the accused on notice of being wanted for trial and an opportunity
to be heard by a neutral decision-maker over the government’s decision
to apprehend, though it does not necessarily require a prior review nor
an actual hearing.56
A wide range of commentators were surprised by this novel approach
to the signature protection of liberal government, the right to life. Steve
Coll believes that the U.S. Constitution’s fifth amendment is violated in
skeptically describing that “without trial, the President has the right to
kill any U.S. citizen who is judged, on the basis of unpublished criteria,
to have become an enemy combatant” using intelligence rather than
evidence that is not subject to a legal process like cross-examination or
judicial review and further questions whether hearsay can be used or
whether hate speech is enough to condemn.57 In hearings regarding the
legality of drone strikes in the United States, Congressman Jerrold Nadler
of New York remarked, “I don’t understand how a unilateral determina-
tion by an executive branch official without any judicial involvement can
be considered due process in any form.”58 Judge John Bates stated his
concern about making targeted killing decisions effectively unreview-
able by the judiciary: “How is it that judicial approval is required when
the United States decides to target a U.S. citizen overseas for electronic
surveillance, but that ... judicial scrutiny is prohibited when the United
States decides to target a U.S. citizen overseas for death?”59 As humor-
ist Stephen Colbert offered, “due process just means there is a process
that you do,” and went on to satirically summarize the process: “first, the
president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he
kills them.”60
If this narrow group of al Qaeda leaders or members is deprived of
their due process rights for threatening American national security
or conducting activities that are “anti-American,” other unsavory
characters deemed threats by the U.S. government from local mafia to
informal militias or ordinary criminal suspects may logically be sum-
marily executed through a missile strike on a private residence. Perhaps
a fringe person opposed to the American economic system and plotting
to overthrow it as was occasionally mooted in the 1970s or even an ani-
mal rights activist labeled a terrorist for raiding testing laboratories may
be simply vaporized somewhere, anywhere, in the world. Indeed, what
limits the president or even the Congress from extending its purview
beyond al Qaeda to other threats; immigrants to the United States are

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 Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone Technology 

already asked whether they support or have ever supported Nazism,

communism, or terrorism.
Since the public has little information about these matters and has not
fully weighed in to their legislators nor has lobbying been a prominent
force in the debate, the positions of most congresspersons do not seem
fixed. A large bipartisan coalition accepts drone strikes outside the United
States and seems to support the president’s authority to kill an American
for national security reasons to protect the homeland from attack. Even
former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat and champion
of civil liberties, expressed that he was very pleased when Awlaki was
killed.61 Such examples may lead one to question whether Democrats and
the public would have supported the same policies Obama practices if
they were applied under George W. Bush or John McCain.62 Yet libertar-
ian Republicans including Tea Party groups have aligned with leftward
oriented movements like the ACLU and some Democrats to fight for civil
liberties. Meanwhile, then Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio for-
mulated HR 6010 to prohibit extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens, but only
six colleagues supported it. In fact, the entire issue was largely ignored
before Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky launched a 13-hour filibuster to
stall John Brennan’s nomination for CIA Director until the administra-
tion said whether it believed the United States could legally kill American
citizens on U.S. soil using a drone strike.
While the Justice Department refused to send anyone to subsequent
hearings, the expert witnesses heavily favored the legality of drone strikes
against Americans overseas. Pro-government lawyer Benjamin Wittes
likened such killing to a hostage situation where a sniper kills a hostage
taker, though one may certainly question the parallel based on the wide
gap between imminent threats in both situations. Holder eventually
responded that the administration would not target Americans on U.S.
soil and Obama went on to say, “I do not believe it would be constitu-
tional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen, with a drone,
or with a shotgun, without due process, nor should any President deploy
armed drones over U.S. soil.”63 Of course, defining due process apparently
leaves a great deal of flexibility, though Obama is reportedly weighing a
formal process for external review of the target list to accommodate the
long-term need for drone strikes such as a military-justice panel or a
civilian review court modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court, which oversees requests to monitor suspected foreign spies and
terrorists in the United States.64

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

Privacy
Privacy is a primary concern since drone technology’s high resolu-
tion cameras, sophisticated sensors, mobility, and loiter time could
conceivably track interior or outdoor personal activities. Drones can
detect people inside buildings using infrared and radio-band sensors
and micro-drones can swarm through alleys, crawl across windowsills,
perch on power lines, or perhaps hover in a backyard and take pictures
through a window or hide within the house.65 The American Civil
Liberties Union concluded, “the prospect of cheap, small, portable fly-
ing video surveillance machines threatens to eradicate existing practical
limits on aerial monitoring and allow for pervasive surveillance, police
fishing expeditions, and abusive use of these tools in a way that could
eventually eliminate the privacy Americans have traditionally enjoyed
in their movements and activities.”66 Krishnan explains the risks from
robotic surveillance including discriminatory targeting, institutional
abuse, chilling effects on public gatherings, and even voyeurism, as when
in 2004 a New York police helicopter using night vision filmed a couple
having sex on a dark nighttime private rooftop balcony for nearly four
minutes.67
Although the constitution does not directly mention privacy per se,
the jurisprudence of privacy rights demonstrates such guarantees,
beginning with the fourth amendment’s protection from “unreason-
able searches and seizures.” Thus far, the Supreme Court has generally
tolerated invasions of privacy when they have occurred incidentally
from aerial flights and observations were made with ordinary devices
or the naked eye. Supreme Court decisions in the 1980s further upheld
the use of manned aerial surveillance in drug arrests on private property
without a warrant and created a rather simplistic test of privacy for such
a context where a person must “have exhibited an actual (subjective)
expectation of privacy” and that expectation must “be one that society
is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable’,” but such precedents will be
re-litigated within the context of unmanned systems.68 The standard was
set in United States v. Knotts (1983) that there is no expectation of privacy
in public when a short-range beeper tracked a car, but that if 24-hour
surveillance of any citizen became routine the court may respond differ-
ently. In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Dow Chemical v. United States
that the Environmental Protect Agency’s (EPA) aerial photography of a
Dow chemical plant without its consent and absent a warrant was not a

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 Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone Technology 

fourth amendment search since the government officials “lawfully in the

public airspace immediately above or sufficiently near the area for the
reach of cameras” observed the plant which was “open to the view and
observation of persons in aircraft.”69 In California v. Ciraolo (1986), police
officers aboard an airplane observed and photographed marijuana plants
growing in a backyard and used this evidence to obtain a search warrant
to seize the plants, while Florida v. Riley (1989) upheld the government’s
right to spy on one’s home and backyard when police used a helicopter
at 400 feet to view marijuana cultivation behind a house unobservable
from the street.
Intrusion into one’s privacy by aerial vehicles or remote sensors is not
unlimited. In Kyllo v. United States (2001), the Supreme Court supported
privacy when a government agent in a car suspected marijuana growing
and used a thermal imaging device to measure the external temperature
of Danny Lee Kyllo’s home, though Justice Antonin Scalia stated that the
“lawfulness of warrantless visual surveillance of a home has still been
preserved.”70 In United States v. Jones (2012), the Court unanimously found
that it was unconstitutional when joint FBI and Washington D.C. Police
Department narcotics investigators installed a GPS tracking device on a
vehicle used by Antoine Jones to collect location data for approximately
one month without a valid warrant.71 Thus, John Villasenor discerns
three tests for drone privacy: whether a technology is in general public
use, whether the observations are made from public navigable airspace,
and the nature of the imaging or other information-gathering system.72
Justices Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor concurred in expressing
doubts whether extended electronic surveillance of public movements
was constitutional and felt that it impinges on expectations of privacy
leading Villasenor to wonder how that reading impacts ground-level
cameras and license plate readers on public streets and intersections.73
As Krishnan writes, the government watches individuals by installing
surveillance cameras throughout public spaces while restricting individ-
uals’ ability to use that same technology as a check against their power
by attempting to prevent people from videotaping police.74 He further
describes how video analytics track individuals or vehicles using face
recognition or other bodily characteristics and that a group of cheap,
autonomous drones could provide surveillance capabilities. Aurora
Flight Sciences is testing a drone to conduct “wide area surveillance”
over cities using computer algorithms to “extract behaviors or patterns
of movement” that may imply criminal intent and could give probable

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

cause for a police search.75 One U.S. Air Force officer explained a new
system called “Gorgon Stare,” which uses multiple video cameras that
“will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary
to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.”76
Not all threats are from the government; since private actors are not
bound by the constitution, they may employ first amendment privileges
to gather information. Villasenor recommends adding specific language
to criminal trespassing statutes that one can reasonably expect views into
the interior of their residences from their own backyards to be private
to prevent a paparazzo or stalker from flying a drone into a backyard to
take pictures through a back window.77 Drones may perform corporate
espionage or capture images and other information in a public setting
and upon publication become an actionable invasion of privacy.78 In fact,
the second amendment may even enter the discussion if affixing weapons
to drones becomes a sacrosanct extension of one’s right to bear arms.
Although the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International
says existing legislation is sufficient to protect privacy, Democratic
Senator Dianne Feinstein of California called drones the “greatest threat
to the privacy of Americans” and Michigan Republican state senator
Tom McMillin sponsored a bill to restrict drones stating, “we want to
make sure we don’t create a system where Big Brother is always up there
watching us.”79 Some congressional attempts to introduce further bills are
still very preliminary, but in 2012 three pieces of legislation were intro-
duced to protect privacy in the United States. Senator Paul’s Preserving
Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act requires a warrant for
the government to use drones to gather evidence or other information,
Representative Ted Poe introduced the Preserving American Privacy
Act to prohibit the use of drones for law enforcement or for surveillance
of an American citizen or their property except pursuant to warrant and
in the investigation of a felony, and Representative Edward Markey’s
Drone Aircraft Privacy and Transparency Act requires a “data collection
statement” explaining whether the unarmed aircraft system will collect
information or data about individuals or groups of individuals and how
that would be used.80 At the state level, drone laws began to be adopted
in 2013 as discussed regarding law enforcement. Certainly, revelations
of NSA programs that collect metadata of telephone and email records
from compliant “corporate partners” like Apple, Verizon, Facebook,
Google, and Microsoft and listen in to overseas communications to
establish “patterns of life” already grossly undermine privacy and new

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 Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone Technology 

robotic technologies like unmanned aerial vehicles may work in tandem

to offer constant public surveillance.81 Such programs have been abused
in the past to target political activists or civil rights leaders and when
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper can offer only the “least
untruthful” answer many fear the scope of government watching.82

Conclusion
The American public needs to be informed of the ramifications of drone
technology and the trade-offs between security and liberty in public policy
debates. The directions taken by federal and state authorities to allow rea-
sonable commercial and public safety uses of drones while maintaining suf-
ficient protections of civil liberties will depend largely on public responses
to these enormous technological changes. As Leila Sadat expresses, fewer
than ten years since the war on terror began and with very little public
explanation or justification, government policy has been transformed
from accidentally killing U.S. citizens to targeting them.83 In essence, the
United States has found it both tactically convenient and legally acceptable
to execute rather than capture, or even to conduct an independent external
review before killing. Some fear that this formula does little to prevent the
United States from targeting its own citizens in friendly nations or even
on domestic soil. The transformation of modern societies into surveillance
states is greatly enhanced by unmanned aerial vehicles with ever more
observational capabilities. Indeed, former naval technician Donald Smith
says anything or anyone equipped with radio-frequency identification tags
can be read remotely.84 What began as a tactical enhancement of military
technology to identify and strike the architects of the September 11 attacks
has now morphed into a domestic start-up industry that may radically
transform the idea of freedom and privacy. The scope of debates over
drones is complex and involves forecasting future trends; the final chap-
ter concludes with a summary of the competing views and provides the
authors’ perspectives on these challenges.

Notes
 Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New
American Security State (New York, N.Y.: Little, Brown, 2011), 254.

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

 Government Accountability Office (GAO), Report to the Ranking Member,

Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense, and Foreign
Operations, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House of
Representatives, Nonproliferation: Agencies Could Improve Information
Sharing and End-Use Monitoring on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Exports,
July 2012, 16.
 Anne Paylor, “Make Way for the Drone,” Air Transport World 50, no. 6
(June 2013), 39–41.
 Ibid.
 Richard Conniff, “Drones are Ready for Takeoff,” Smithsonian (June 2011).
 David Swanson, “Drones in U.S. Flight Paths: What Could Go Wrong?” The
Humanist (July–August 2012), 87.
 John Villasenor, “Observations from Above: Unmanned Aircraft Systems and
Privacy,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 36, no. 2 (2013), 471.
 Paylor, “Make Way for the Drone,” 40.
 Jay Stanley and Catherine Crump, Protecting Privacy from Aerial Surveillance:
Recommendations for Government Use of Drone Aircraft (American Civil
Liberties Union December 2011), 10.
 Conniff, “Drones Are Ready for Takeoff.”
 Stanley and Crump, Protecting Privacy from Aerial Surveillance, 10.
 Conniff, “Drones Are ready for Takeoff.”
 Michael Hastings, “The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War
in Secret,” Rolling Stone (April 16, 2012).
 Charlie Rose, “Amazon,” 60 Minutes (December 1, 2013).
 Missy Cummings quoted in Conniff, “Drones Are ready for Takeoff ”;
Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, “Unfriendly Skies: Have We Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Drone?” Commonweal (May 3, 2013), 6.
 Carl Von Wodtke, “Droning On,” Aviation History 24, no. 1 (September 2013), 22.
 Conniff, “Drones Are ready for Takeoff.”
 Ibid.
 Swanson, “Drones in U.S. Flight Paths,” 6.
 James Chiles, “Drones for Hire,” Air and Space Smithsonian 27, no. 6
(December/January 2012), 32–39.
 Kevin Robillard, “Drone Wars Hit the States,” Politico (May 6, 2013); Stanley
and Crump, Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance, 7; Priest and Arkin,
Top Secret America.
 Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 116.
 Conniff, “Drones Are ready for Takeoff.”
 Richard A. Serrano and Brian Bennett, “FBI Uses Drones inside U.S. for
Spying, Director says,” Los Angeles Times (June 19, 2013).
 Micah Zenko, “10 Things You Didn’t Know about Drones,” Foreign Policy
(March/April 2012); Paumgarten, “Here’s Looking at You.”

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 Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone Technology 

 Horgan, “The Drones Come Home.”

 Robillard, “Drone Wars Hit the States.”
 Paumgarten, “Here’s Looking at You;” Branham, “State Legislation, FAA
Leave Drone Use Grounded;” 19.
 Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (London, U.K.:
Verso, 2013), 79–80. Paumgarten, “Here’s Looking at You;” Stanley and
Crump, Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance, 11.
 Armin Krishnan, Killer Robots: Legality and Ethicality of Autonomous Weapons
(Burlington, V.T.: Ashgate, 2009), 158.
 Horgan, “The Drones Come Home.”
 J. D. Tuccille, “Drone Rule,” Reason 44 no. 7 (December 2012).
 Robillard, “Drone Wars Hit the States;” Branham, “State Legislation, FAA
Leave Drone Use Grounded,” 18.
 Allie Bohm, “Status of Drone Legislation in the States,” American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU), https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/
status-domestic-drone-legislation-states, accessed January 9, 2014.
 Horgan, “The Drones Come Home.” Ferdaus already had the plane but was
arrested trying to procure the C4.
 Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage, and Scott Shane, “How a U.S. Citizen Came
to Be in America’s Crosshairs,” New York Times (March 9, 2013).
 Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (New York, N.Y.: Nation
Books, 2013), 454.
 Claire Finkelstein, “Targeted Killing as Preemptive Action,” in Claire
Finkelstein, Andrew Altman, and Jens David Ohlin, eds., Targeted Killings:
Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical World (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 159.
 Finn, “Rise of the Drone.”
 Ibid.; Al-Aulaqi v. United States, 727 F. Supp. 2d 1, 8 (D.D.C. 2010); Scahill,
Dirty Wars, 368.
 Marshall Thompson, “The Legality of Armed Drone Strikes against U.S.
Citizens within the United States,” Brigham Young University Law Review
(2013), 164.
 Johnson, National Security Law, Lawyers, and Lawyering in the Obama
Administration.
 Jeh Johnson, National Security Law, Lawyers, and Lawyering in the Obama
Administration, Speech at Yale University (February 22, 2012); Hamdi v.
Rumsfeld 542 U.S. 507 (2004); ex Parte Quirin 317 U.S. 1 (1942).
 Thompson, “The Legality of Armed Drone Strikes against U.S. Citizens
within the United States,” 163. The Supreme Court affirmed the military
tribunal’s jurisdiction in Ex parte Quirin.
 Ibid., 155, 166–167.
 Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 207.

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

 Thompson, “The Legality of Armed Drone Strikes against U.S. Citizens

within the United States,” 153, 169.
 Mike Dreyfus, “My Fellow Americans, We Are Going to Kill You: The
Legality of Targeting and Killing U.S. Citizens Abroad,” Vanderbilt Law Review
65, no. 1 (2012), 252, 260, 271–272, 274, 278.
 Thompson, “The Legality of Armed Drone Strikes against U.S. Citizens
within the United States,” 154.
 Dreyfus, “My Fellow Americans, We Are Going to Kill You,” 283, 284, 289.
 Eric Holder, Speech delivered at Northwestern University (March 5, 2012).
 Ibid.
 Ibid.
 Dreyfus, “My Fellow Americans, We Are Going to Kill You,” 277.
 Thompson, “The Legality of Armed Drone Strikes against U.S. Citizens
within the United States,” 164.
 Rasul v. Bush 542 U.S. 466 (2004); Dreyfus, “My Fellow Americans, We Are
Going to Kill You,” 281.
 Steven Coll, “Remote Control: Our Drone Delusion,” The New Yorker (May 6,
2013).
 U.S. House of Representatives. Drones and the War on Terror: When Can
the U.S. Target Alleged American Terrorists Overseas? Hearing before the
Committee on the Judiciary House of Representatives One Hundred
Thirteenth Congress First session, February 27, 2013, Serial No. 113–2.
 Al-Aulaqi v. Obama 727 F Supp. 2d 1 (2010).
 Stephen Colbert, Colbert Report (March 6, 2012), http://www.colbertnation.
com/the-colbert-report-videos/410085/march-06–2012/the-word---due-or-
die, accessed August 31, 2013.
 Thompson, “The Legality of Armed Drone Strikes against U.S. Citizens
within the United States,” 153, 169.
 Scahill, Dirty Wars, 516.
 Barack Obama, Speech at National Defense University (May 23, 2013).
 Mark Bowden, “The Killing Machines: How to Think about Drones,” The
Atlantic (September 2013).
 Horgan, “The Drones Come Home;” Villasenor, “Observations from Above,”
498.
 Stanley and Crump, Protecting Privacy from Aerial Surveillance.
 Ibid..
 Paumgarten, “Here’s Looking at You;” Villasenor, “Observations from
Above,” 478.
 Villasenor, “Observations from Above,” 476–477.
 Ibid., 482.
 Ibid., 484.
 Ibid., 486.

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 Public Policy, Privacy, and Drone Technology 

 Ibid., 496.
 Stanley and Crump, Protecting Privacy from Aerial Surveillance, 13.
 Conniff, “Drones Are ready for Takeoff.”
 Stanley and Crump, Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance, 6.
 Villasenor, “Observations from Above,” 498–500.
 Ibid., 498–500.
 Robillard, “Drone Wars Hit the States;” Serrano and Bennett, “FBI Uses
Drones inside U.S. for Spying, Director says.”
 Villasenor, “Observations from Above,” 509–510.
 Ewen Macaskill and Gabriel Dancensa, “The NSA Files Decoded,” The
Guardian (2014).
 Andrea Mitchell, “Interview with James Clapper,” NBC News (June 9, 2013).
 Leila Nadya Sadat, “America’s Drone Wars,” Case Western Reserve Journal of
International Law 45 (2012), 215–234.
 Horgan, “The Drones Come Home.”

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 6
Conclusion
Abstract: This chapter ties together the various arguments
over targeted killing, remote warfare, and military
technology and presents short summaries of utopian and
dystopian visions of a future where drones and other robots
commonly operate in wartime and peacetime. It offers the
author’s personal thoughts on this transformation, finding
that drones have a great many merits, particularly for the
prosecuting side. Yet it also suggests that the unintended
consequences of drone proliferation could upset traditional
international relations, the social contract between state
and its citizens, and even ordinary people’s daily life and
thus strikes a tone of concern, before offering a few short
recommendations to mitigate the downside of current
drone practices.

Keywords: future of drone warfare; pros and cons of

drones; technology in warfare

Rae, James DeShaw. Analyzing the Drone Debates:

Targeted Killing, Remote Warfare, and Military
Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
doi: 10.1057/9781137381576.0009.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0009

 Conclusion 

The drone campaigns are reminiscent of Homeric Greek epics the

Odyssey and the Iliad as mortals engage in combat on the ground while
the Gods from Mount Olympus regularly intervene to tip the scales
to their preferred advantage. Drones perform like the Gods, hovering
sight unseen above the human theater of war, directing and dictating
operations down below until deciding to act. The Roman poet Statius’
version of the Trojan War in the Achilleid imparts just such a parallel as
Paris targets the vulnerable heel of Achilles with his bow and arrow, the
Sun God Apollo takes control of the weapon and directs it precisely to
achieve the kill that would be unattainable by mere mortals with their
inherent limitations.1 In fact, Zeus himself created a loyal drone ant
army called the Myrmidons for Achilles in the Trojan War to defend
the homeland of Aegina. From the heavens, the Gods themselves, these
Predators and Reapers, can strike terror on earth with their Hellfire
thunderbolts and as men have done for millennia we must try to explain
their actions and motivations.
Among specialists, vigorous debates regarding drone warfare animate
discussion under each of these four elements: national security, law, eth-
ics, and public policy. Armin Krishnan expected that “the general debate
on the morality of extra-judicial kidnappings and targeted killings of
terror suspects is already decided; it is both illegal and immoral and
this policy will therefore most likely be discontinued with the end of the
presidency of George W. Bush in 2009.”2 In fact, “prior to 9/11, the idea
that state-sponsored killing would become a normal part of American
policy would seem unthinkable.”3 Instead, the technology to kill advances
in leaps and bounds. Jeffrey Sluka explains the common dichotomy:
“From the “top down” perspective, remote controlled hunter-killer
drones are perceived as a fantastically successful new weapon, right out
of science fiction. But from the “bottom up” perspective of the targeted
populations, they have been experienced as a flawed weapon which is
feared, resented, and despised because of the collateral damage they have
caused.”4
Unmanned aerial vehicles and remote warfare represent a continua-
tion of a long pattern of technological changes moving combatants away
from the battlefield and enhancing the ability to kill efficiently. The end
point is unknown, though now is an appropriate time to consider the
prudence of the present course. Utopian imaginings of robotic servants
and ever more automated appliances that foster a life of ease are part
of the collective consciousness in modern life. Drones may indeed help

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

achieve such progress through the wondrous applications mentioned

in the previous chapter, providing public safety, reducing crime, and
assessing threats from natural or man-made disasters. Certainly, drones
can do the dirty work of flying into a contaminated area or perhaps into
extreme heat to identify problems or perform the hard labor of countless
hours monitoring borders or patrolling cities without rest. The use of
cameras for security purposes is already ubiquitous and making them
mobile can assist law enforcement in tracking suspects or perhaps
preventing certain categories of criminal activities and watching out for
planned acts of terrorism, riots, or organized violence. Their civilian uses
are endless and only now being realized; as Peter Singer recalled, “there
was a point in history when no one would ride in an elevator without
someone driving it.”5
Dystopian visions of killer robots autonomously terminating human
lives also abound. Beginning with Czech author Karel Čapek’s 1921 play
R.U.R. (or Rossum’s Universal Robots) where his humanoid robots rebel
against their human masters, some have feared that machines may
overthrow the human order. Nanotechnology may eventually enable
“invisible machines” that could invade other countries or even human
bodies, and the military is exploring neural interfaces and sensor devices
to read brain activity and use inner thoughts to remotely fly aircraft or
target and fire weapons.6,7 Armin Krishnan describes the progression of
technology from manned vehicles pre-programmed to attack a particu-
lar area evolving to then identify some targets and pursue them, then
picking individual targets, and finally choosing their own targets and
launching itself directly.8 At the same time, law enforcement and gov-
ernment agencies may direct such devices toward domestic spying and
bypass constitutional guarantees of privacy or due process, trampling
on civil liberties like search and seizure protections and the need for
warrants. With the technology’s relative affordability and access, citizens
may increasingly watch each other and thus upset the very nature of the
social contract, community relations, and the public square.
The purpose of this book was to inform ordinary readers of the scope
of debates on military policy, drone technology, and remote warfare and
to engage a further academic debate by attempting to briefly categorize
competing perspectives from multiple disciplines. Simple adages are
sometimes profound, like putting oneself in another person’s shoes to
understand their perception. Of all the perspectives on drone strikes
and targeted killing, the field reports of human rights groups who

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 Conclusion 

interviewed local officials and civilians were among the few that offered
local knowledge along with an emphasis on interpersonal relations and
cultural dynamics. Too little public debate has arisen regarding these
fundamental concerns; thus I conclude by summarizing the strategic,
legal, and ethical impacts of drone warfare, and offer my perspective
on the potential influence of this new military technology in domestic
society and private individual lives. Plausible assertions to defend drone
technology and usage in each category are reasonable, but considering
the counterarguments together I find cause for concern.

Final Thoughts
From the national security perspective, drones can easily gather intel-
ligence from human movements to signal transmissions over greatly
extended periods of time. In fact, on a rotational basis, they offer near
permanent observational installations that can hover anywhere a per-
missive environment exists. With their various sensors, sophisticated
cameras, and infrared and night vision, they can pinpoint individuals
and track their daily lives, waiting for the opportune moment to strike.
They can also accompany other forces on a wide variety of expeditions,
alerting human personnel to the potential risks prior to any engagement.
Their missiles are relatively small and precision-guided but capable of
destroying a building, a vehicle, or a person. They also enable a range of
tactical options, with oversight provided by multiple people in the kill
chain, including frequent legal advice on targeting decisions that help
reduce the likelihood of inaccuracy.
Euphemistically, this presents a dichotomy between the hardware and
software of drone warfare; the people guiding the unmanned planes may
be more subject to faultiness than the instrument itself. The human factor
is not eliminated, at least not yet, and thus the potential for mistakes and
miscalculations persists. Policymakers claim that their focus is on high
value targets, but the reality leans more toward low level persons tenu-
ously called militants based in many cases on patterns of life signatures,
thus diminishing the promise of precision. Since drones offer so many
more opportunities to kill, it places more life-and-death decisions in the
hands of young drone pilots who may have little experience with combat
or even piloting aircraft for that matter. They may be anxious to kill for
patriotism, for the adrenaline rush, or to stifle the monotony; to the

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

contrary, they may be overly passive, lose focus due to long hours, mis-
interpret still distant images, or become overly sensitive to the possibility
for error and rendered gun-shy. This great distance from targets creates
a superman complex and encourages callous disregard for human life;
remote pilots are more attuned to the gruesome reality of a drone strike
on a human body but are also empowered with great capacity to wield
death’s sword while knowing little about the customs, conversations, or
concerns of people on the ground they target.
Moreover, this is currently a war based on intelligence gathering
so every target killed foregoes any attempt to glean more information
through capture and interrogation, by cultivating an informant, or by
seeking out some ultimate peace process to gain a settlement. In fact,
drone strikes may sufficiently erode public support for such tactics that
it undermines the overall strategy to deter and defeat terrorism, itself
the tactic of a particular ideological struggle maintained by loosely affili-
ated Muslim groups around the world. Global acceptance for counter-
terrorism has dwindled and along with other U.S. hyper-technologies like
NSA spying risks undermining relations with traditional allies and key
strategic partners that currently acquiesce to American interventions.
The mechanical and dehumanizing aspect of the all-seeing eye afforded
to those with drone capabilities seems to create an unfair playing field
and may indeed encourage greater use of force in international affairs
since the risks of casualties are essentially removed from the equation.
By expanding the battlefield and making it supremely easy to conduct
operations, lesser threats may be deemed open season for a government
or other actors.
Certainly unmanned aerial vehicles are a cost-effective alternative to
piloted airplanes for military application and perhaps commercially as
well in the future. The human cost is lowered, certainly in comparison to
putting infantry on the ground or even deploying special forces and the
hardware materials may have a lower fly-away price, but in reality they
are only marginally cheaper with the extensive man hours needed to
operate an unmanned system for round-the-clock surveillance and the
occasional engagement of weapons in targeted strikes. In conventional
settings, drones are a much more acceptable tool, but when they are
employed in counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism actions in non-
combat zones they become more suspicious. In fact, drones do not appear
to play a great role in conventional warfare planning in a non-permissive
environment nor are suitable as a tactic by international terrorists since

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 Conclusion 

they are easily shot down. Leadership sometimes focuses on fighting the
last war and indeed the United States was caught unawares for insur-
gency in Afghanistan and Iraq, which the United States had not faced
for decades. Drones reduce risk in counter-insurgency operations, but
the next war may still primarily involve conventional forces so it would
be a mistake to discontinue manned jet fighters or allow pilot training
for aerial combat to atrophy even while the application of drones to that
environment will be an important if not essential aspect of planning.
So far, the United States has threaded the needle in the legality of its
drone wars, operating plausibly in self-defense following the September 11
attack emanating from Afghanistan, receiving host state permission in
Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, and Yemen, or employing unmanned
vehicles in the active war zones of Iraq and Libya. Whereas the United
States is fighting a just war against al Qaeda, targeting associated groups
like the Taliban, Haqqani network, AQAP, al Shabaab, Abu Sayyaf, and
others may not be in self-defense and attacking every group that pro-
claims jihad may be impractical. Those groups have not attacked the U.S.
homeland nor in many cases do they even have the ambition to do so and
are rarely directed by core al Qaeda but may be simply co-religionists
or similarly inspired by strict Islamic interpretations. Policies must be
clear as to whether the goal is strictly to decapitate high-value targets in
the upper echelons of al Qaeda leadership or is an attempt to generally
eradicate junior and lower level members of the other aforementioned
movements.
At the same time, drones enlarge the battlefield and lessen the inhibi-
tions of policymakers who are ordinarily anxious to avoid mission creep
involving boots on the ground. Surveillance may violate a country’s
sovereignty and could still be a provocative step but remains a giant leap
from outright targeted killing in peacetime. The laws and ethics of armed
conflict are greatly undermined by the disproportionate capabilities
drones provide, particularly when operating through asymmetric warfare
in foreign countries that are non-combat zones. Of course, most drones
are not themselves weapons, but as part of a weapon system or platform
are capable of abiding distinction. Yet military necessity does not demand
drone strikes and in asymmetric warfare the choice to use them reflects a
disproportional calculus. Drones are more acceptable against a commit-
ted ideological foe like al Qaeda when it represents an imminent threat to
launch an attack and the recognized leaders are within reach. Even then,
targeted killing is a form of assassination and sets dangerous precedents,

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

particularly when applied against the official government of a country

that allows a head-of-state to become fair game.
Drones are more accurate than other instruments of killing, perhaps
even more so than humans themselves who are often trapped in the
fog of war. Despite their relative precision, they are not so gifted as to
eliminate civilian casualties altogether despite the best efforts of those
in power to pretend they do. The Bush administration was correct that
the United States is not in a traditional armed conflict with al Qaeda,
but they were wrong to assert that by consequence essentially no law
governs. Human rights law is always in effect, certainly where an armed
conflict does not exist but arguably at all times, anywhere, for all people,
and especially in the shadow wars that so insult constitutional limits to
foreign adventurism. Civilians in any affected area possess basic human
rights that cannot be bargained away by an insensitive or supine govern-
ment and innocent people must be safe and secure from the collateral
impact of drone strikes and should never be expendable in a choice to
target a prominent figure in the opposing force.
Many in the military and intelligence communities have expressed
grave doubts regarding the efficacy of unmanned systems as it applies
to winning or losing the hearts and minds of key constituencies neces-
sary to conclude an insurgency and determine the greater success of the
strategic objective of defeating al Qaeda. While not wishing to re-litigate
the past decade of the war on terror, the simplicity of drone strikes
allows decision-makers to ignore the complex causes of global terrorism,
including negative reactions to American foreign policy itself, particu-
larly in the Muslim world. Drones do little to burnish the credentials of
the United States as an honest-broker or fair-minded actor in Middle
East politics, damaging its credibility. Americans may equate U.S. drone
policy with great shock if it was perpetrated by World War II Germany,
Cold War Russia, or contemporary China and if the United States was
substituted for al Qaeda in Attorney General Holder’s speech on drones,
it may appear equally true of CIA targeted killing operations. “As we
learned on after 9/11, al Qaeda the United States has demonstrated the abil-
ity to strike with little or no notice, and to cause devastating casualties.
Its leaders are continually planning attacks against the United States, and
they do not behave like a traditional military, wearing uniforms, carry-
ing arms openly, or massing forces in preparation for an attack.”9
Many states are pursuing advanced technologies like unmanned
aerial vehicles and may also equip them with the latest weaponry, but

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 Conclusion 

the concern expressed by many in the United States of a woeful scenario

where other less trustworthy nations gain access to drone technology is
exaggerated for the United States is the country most willing to use force
in its international relations over the past century and has proven less
than inhibited from employing any type of weapon system that would
provide it short-term military advantage. The United States has almost
categorically refused to adopt international treaties, rejecting popular
conventions banning anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions
as well as the rule-setting protocols like the Law of the Sea and the
Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court. Major global
powers operating against inferior foes are the biggest concern and the
United States must resist the temptation to act unilaterally with its drone
air force. Instead, now is the time to engage the world in dialogue and
liaison with other nations more effectively to combine multiple strate-
gies that will help de-link militant groups from the population they hold.
For instance, great international conferences were conducted to launch
the arms control movement with a series of gatherings of heads-of-state
in The Hague at the turn of the 20th century to wrestle with similar
challenges and ultimately led to successful limiting mechanisms like the
nuclear non-proliferation regime under the authority of the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
National governments must be informed each time a drone strike
occurs and should always have close cooperation in such decisions.
Governments should not only tolerate but encourage full-scale post-
mortems led by the United Nations, non-governmental organization
(NGO) watchdogs, and international media along with the compliance
of local officials after a strike. Moreover, the general public everywhere
needs to be fully informed about the nature of this program with forth-
right policy briefs and announced kill lists (should they continue), espe-
cially if an American is targeted for extrajudicial assassination. Relatedly,
the AUMF should be repealed or revised as it has been stretched beyond
its elasticity and provides the executive branch almost unrestrained
authority to trample settled limits on its constitutional powers. Targeted
killing of Americans violates constitutional protections afforded to U.S.
citizens and should never occur barring the affirmative act of renouncing
citizenship and joining an avowed enemy force. Signature strikes should
be discontinued immediately, especially in non-combat zones. Every
attempt to capture suspects should be made before homicide is adopted.
In fact, it would be appropriate to adopt a moratorium on attacking

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 Analyzing the Drone Debates

mourners gathering at funerals out of dignity for the memorial process

even if known targets are in attendance. Indeed, I am deeply skeptical
of the armed conflict model of combating terrorism that simply accepts
America’s cause as just and recognizes American forces as the only law-
ful combatants, and would prefer to see the adoption of an aggressive
law enforcement approach coupled with greater diplomatic cooperation
among states impacted by non-state threats of terrorism or insurgency.
Authority over all drone strikes should be transferred to the Defense
Department and uniformed military to prosecute openly under the laws
of war.
In reality, drone applications by the domestic security forces of the
state are more worrisome. In illiberal nations, separatists, disadvantaged
ethnic groups, the economically disaffected, and other vulnerable popula-
tions may be increasingly oppressed from surveillance and killer drones.
In more open societies, law enforcement applications of unmanned
systems may greatly weaken the civil liberty expectations for privacy and
due process that are core to the rule of law in democracies. The slope is
too slippery when exceptions to the constitution for certain classes of
people are carved out. Of course, unmanned vehicles offer a wide range
of positive roles that could achieve a new level of public safety, but at
too great a cost to privacy. For those skeptical of the mechanization of
human existence that wires us together in a vast web of information
technology leaving a near permanent digital footprint, the intrusion of
remote killing and perhaps autonomous execution into human relations
is deeply troubling. Moreover, the images of an Orwellian Big Brother
watching, tracking, and cataloguing all ordinary activities of daily public
and even private life seems much closer to reality today.

Notes
 Publius Papinius Statius, edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey,
Thebaid, Achilleid (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
 Armin Krishnan, Killer Robots: Legality and Ethicality of Autonomous Weapons
(Burlington, V.T.: Ashgate, 2009), 103–104.
 Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New
American Security State (New York, N.Y.: Little, Brown, 2011), 220.
 Jeffrey A. Sluka, “Death from Above: UAVs and Losing Hearts and Minds,”
Military Review (May–June 2011), 74.

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 Conclusion 

 Nick Paumgarten, “Here’s Looking at You: Should We Worry about the Rise of
the Drone?” The New Yorker (May 14, 2012).
 Krishnan, Killer Robots, 61.
 Ibid., 111.
 Ibid., 31.
 Eric Holder, Speech delivered at Northwestern University (March 5, 2012).

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 Index
Abdulmutallab, Umar Asaro, Peter, 10
Farouk, 106 Atef, Muhammad, 14
Abu Sayyaf, 29, 125 Australia, 10, 99
Academi, 15 Ayotte, Kelly, 69
AeroVironment, 12–13
al-Alimi, Rashad, 59 Baluchistan, 28
al-Asiri, Ibrahim, 34 Bates, John, 110
al-Awlaki, Abdulrahman, 105 Beard, Jack, 25, 27
al-Awlaki, Anwar, 34, 105, Beauchamp, Zack, 85
106, 111 Bekey, George, 92
al-Harithi, Abu Ali, 14 Belgium, 99
al-Hijazi, Abu Ahmad, 14 Bellamy, Alex, 82
Alito, Samuel, 113 Benjamin, Medea, 61
al Qaeda in the Arabian Bergen, Peter, 35
Peninsula (AQAP), 14, 29, 53, Bezos, Jeff, 102
71, 106, 125 Bhutto, Benazir, 30
al-Raymi, Qasim, 34 Blair, Dennis, 28, 106
al Shabaab, 29, 125 Blee, Richard, 5
al-Shihri, Said, 34 Boeing, 13
Alston, Philip, 70, 71 Bosnia, 9, 42
Altman, Andrew, 81 Bowden, Mark, 4, 20–21, 27, 32
al-Wazir, Khalil, 55 Brazil, 10, 99
al-Wuhayshi, Naser, 34 Brennan, John, 3, 10, 24, 26, 32,
al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 82 34, 36, 37, 70, 87, 111
al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 28 Bryant, Brandon, 89
Amanullah, Zabet, 40 Bureau of Investigative
American Civil Liberties Journalism, 38–39
Union (ACLU), 104, 106, 111, Burridge, Brian, 84
112, 117 Burundi, 10
Amnesty International, 27 Bush, George W., 3, 31, 35, 53,
Andersen, Kenneth, 22 54, 60, 88, 107, 111, 121, 126
Annan, Kofi, 60 Byman, Daniel, 32
Archytas, 7
Arkin, Ronald, 92 Caleré, 8
Arkin, William, 15 Canada, 10, 99, 103

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0011 

 Index

Čapek, Karel, 122 Firebee, 8

Carter, Jimmy, 67 Fire Scout, 11, 103
Cartwright, James, 27 Ford, Gerald, 67
Casey Maslen, Stuart, 53, 55, 57, Foster, John Stuart, 8
67, 72 France, 8, 99
Cassidy, Thomas, 8
Chappelle, Wayne, 24 Gates, Bill, 84
Chesney, Robert, 108 Gates, Robert, 15
China, 10, 11, 126, 99 Gaza, 11
Christopher, Russell, 84 General Atomics, 8, 10, 86, 100
Clapper, James, 115 Gentry, John, 33
Clark, Victoria, 5 Germany, 3, 10, 82, 107, 126
Clinton, Bill, 9 Global Hawk, 9, 10, 11, 23, 102, 106
Cloud, David, 40 Gnat, 8
Colbert, Stephen, 110 Gorgon Stare, 13
Coll, Steve, 110 Grossman, Dave, 90
Cronin, Audrey, 26 Gross, Michael, 64
Cuba, 107
Cummings, Missy, 102 Haiti, 102
Czech Republic, 99 Hamas, 68
Haqqani, Badruddin, 29
Dark Star, 23 Haqqani, Jalaluddin, 29
Dark Sword, 10 Haqqani network, 35, 66, 125
Defense Advanced Research Projects Hassan, Nidal, 106
Agency, the (DARPA), 8, 9, 14, 100 Heymann, Philip, 73
Denmark, 99 Hizbollah, 10
Denny, Reginald, 8 Hobbes, Thomas, 105
Derwish, Kamal, 14, 105 Holder, Eric, 56, 60, 62, 65, 68, 87, 109,
Deutsch, John, 9 111, 126
Dinstein, Yoram, 64 Honeywell, 100
Djibouti, 9, 14 humanitarian interventions, 9, 85
Dreyfus, Mike, 64, 108 Human Rights Watch, 28
Hummingbird, 13
Egypt, 10 Hussein, Saddam, 9
Enemark, Christian, 4, 80, 81, 84
Ethiopia, 9 Ignatieff, Michael, 5, 43, 80, 83, 89
Exum, Andrew, 84 India, 10, 28
Indyk, Martin, 54
Federally Administered Tribal Areas International Court of Justice
(FATA), 28, 30, 39, 58, 84 (ICJ), 72
Feingold, Russ, 111 International Criminal Court (ICC),
Feinstein, Dianne, 37, 114 53, 55, 127
Ferdaus, Rezwan, 105 Iran, 23
Fieseler glide bomb, 8 Iraq, 9, 57, 59, 60, 67, 77, 82, 83, 84,
Finkelstein, Claire, 83 89, 125
Finland, 99 Ireland, 99

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0011
 Index 

Israel, 8, 99 Mazzetti, Mark, 5

Italy, 10, 99 McCaffrey, Barry, 84
McCain, John, 69, 111
Jackson, Brian, 42 McChrystal, Stanley, 40
Japan, 3, 10, 88, 93, 99, 102 McDonald, Kent, 24
Johnsen, Gregory, 28 McKeon, Buck, 69
Johnson, Jeh, 65, 82, 107 McMahan, Jeff, 65
Johnson, Rebecca, 36, 68 McMillin, Tom, 114
Joint Special Operations Command McNeal, Gregory, 36
(JSOC), 15, 24, 37, 54, 56, 66 Mehmood, Ghayur, 28
Jordan, 30, 82 Mehsud, Baitullah, 30, 33, 37, 68
Mehsud, Hakimullah, 30
Kahn, Paul, 72 Mexico, 10, 99, 102, 103
Kaplan, Fred, 13 Milgram, Stanley, 90
Karem, Abraham, 8 Mohammad, Jude Kenan, 105
Kayyem, Juliette, 73 Morocco, 10
Kennedy, Joe, 8 Moseley, T. Michael, 15
Kenya, 85 Munter, Cameron, 28
Kettering, Charles, 8 Musharraf, Pervez, 28
Khan, Daraz, 40
Khan, Imran, 30 Nadler, Jerrold, 110
Khan, Samir, 105 National Security Agency (NSA), 13,
Kilcullen, David, 37 114, 124
Klaidman, David, 25 National Security Council (NSC), 14
Koh, Harold, 54, 62, 65, 68, 70 New America Foundation, 30
Kosovo, 9, 42, 80, 85 New Zealand, 10
Krishnan, Armin, 22, 104, 112, 113, Niger, 9
121, 122 Nigeria, 10
Kucinich, Dennis, 111 North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Kuwait, 9 (NATO), 10, 30, 39, 59, 66, 85
North Korea, 10
Lashkar e-Jhangvi, 29 Northrop Grumman, 103
Lebanon, 9 Norway, 99
Lewis, Michael, 36
Libya, 14, 25, 57, 59, 60, 68, 125 Obama, Barack, 3, 20, 24, 25, 31, 34, 35,
Lightning Bug, 8 36, 40, 52, 53, 54, 57, 65, 81, 86, 87, 99,
Lockheed Martin, 13, 22, 24 106, 108, 111
Long War Journal, 38 O’Connell, Mary Ellen, 53, 58, 69
Lucas, George, 22, 92 Ohlin, Jens David, 64
Luttwak, Edward, 83, 84 Oman, 9
Omar, Mohammed, 28
Mali, 73 Otto, Jean, 25
Markey, Edward, 114
Martin, Matt, 22, 33, 67–68, 80, 87, 89 Palestine, 30, 55, 68
Mastiff, 9 Palestinian Liberation Organization
Maxwell, Mark, 52 (PLO), 55

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0011
 Index

Panetta, Leon, 20 signature strikes, 3, 31, 35, 37, 65, 66,

Paul, Rand, 111, 114 123, 127
Petraeus, David, 37, 59 Singapore, 99
Phantom Ray, 13 Singer, Peter, 59, 83, 122
Philippines, 14, 29, 125 Sluka, Jeffrey, 21, 121
Pioneer, 9, 42 Smith, Donald, 115
Plaw, Avery, 34, 40 Soaring Dragon, 10
Praeire, 8 Solar Eagle, 13
Predator, 8, 12, 40, 42, 86, 87, 100, 103, Somalia, 14, 125
106, 121 Sotomayor, Sonia, 113
Priest, Dana, 15, 24 Soviet Union, 8, 126
Pterodactyl, 10 Spain, 99
Pugliese, Joseph, 86, 87, 88, 93 Sparrow, Robert, 84
Statius, 121
Qaddafi, Muammar, 55, 60 Sterio, Milena, 71
Qatar, 9, 37 Strawser, Bradley, 89
Sudan, 85
Raytheon, 13, 100 Sweden, 99
Raza Gilani, Yousuf, 59 Syria, 9
Reagan, Ronald, 67
Reaper, 10, 11, 12, 14, 22, 23, 86, 121 Tarantula Hawk, 13
revolution in military affairs, 1, 4, 8, 15 Tenet, George, 15
Robertson, Geoffrey, 65, 69, 70 Tesla, Nikola, 8
Roosevelt, Franklin, 88 Netherlands, the, 99
Russia, 10, 99 Thompson, Marshall, 72, 107
Rwanda, 85 Tunisia, 55
Turkey, 9, 99
Sadat, Leila, 88, 115
Saleh, Ali Abdullah, 59 UMass DRONE, 38, 39
Saudi Arabia, 9, 10, 106 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 9
Savulescu, Julian, 85 United Kingdom, 11, 72, 82, 99
Scalia, Antonin, 113 ur-Rehman, Wali, 30
Schmitt, Michael, 57 Uzbekistan, 9
Schwartz, Norton, 15
Sentinel, 23 Vietnam, 8, 35
Serbia, 9, 39 Villasenor, John, 113, 114
Seychelles, 9 Vogel, Ryan, 61, 67, 70
Shadow, 23 Vulture, 13
Shah, Pir Zubair, 30
Shah, Sikander, 29 Walsh, James, 26
Shahzad, Faisal, 27, 106 Walzer, Michael, 81, 82
Sharif, Nawaz, 30 Warren, Vince, 106
Sharkey, Noel, 35, 41, 92 Wasp, 11
Shurtleff, D. Keith, 84 Waxman, Matthew, 22, 92
Sifton, John, 80, 86, 89 Waziristan, 9, 28, 29

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0011
 Index 

Webber, Bryant, 25 Yamamoto, Isoroku, 65

Wittes, Benjamin, 72, 111 Yousafzai, Malala, 30
Wynne, Michael, 15
Zardari, Asif Ali, 59
X-47B, 14 Zenko, Micah, 23, 29, 37, 41, 66

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381576.0011