on a late September morning in 2011, the Yemeni-American preacher Anwar al-Awlaki was finishing breakfast with a group of men in the Jawf province of southwestern Yemen. This desolate region, once known for its fine Arabian horses and beautiful oases, was now a chaotic no man’s land far outside of the control of the central government in Sana’a. For the last decade, the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh had struggled to restore order to the southern regions of the country amid a rising tide of tribal unrest and Islamic militancy. Like many other Islamists, Awlaki had retreated to the ungoverned spaces of the countryside because they provided free movement outside of the reach of Yemen’s ruthless security services. He had good reasons to fear another run-in with them. Awlaki spent eighteen months as a prisoner in Yemen’s jails after being arrested without charge in 2006 and knew that he would face a return to jail—or worse—if he were caught again.1
This breakfast meeting was not out of the ordinary for Awlaki, a leader in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), an increasingly powerful offshoot of the terrorist organization started by Osama bin Laden. Since returning to Yemen in 2004, Awlaki had become the public face of this organization through his charismatic sermons, both in Arabic and in English, which criticized US foreign policy and inspired people to join al Qaeda’s jihad. By 2009, he moved beyond inflammatory speeches and became “operational,” according to US counterterrorism officials.2 He had been linked to a mass shooting at Fort Hood in November 2009 by a disaffected US Army psychiatrist, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, as well as a plot by the young Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to destroy a Delta airlines flight over Detroit weeks later on Christmas Day. In the US media, he was being dubbed as the “next bin Laden” even before Osama bin Laden was killed by a US Navy SEAL team in May 2011.3
For the Obama administration, Awlaki posed a more vexing problem than bin Laden because he was a US citizen. Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, he spent several years as a child in the United States when his father, Nasser, was on a Fulbright scholarship. After living his teenage years in Yemen, he moved back to the United States to study civil engineering at Colorado State University in 1991. He was later active in mosques in Denver and San Diego and moved to Falls Church, Virginia, shortly before the September 11 attacks. Although the FBI investigated his links with the September 11 hijackers, they found nothing incriminating, but nevertheless continued to keep him under surveillance. For a brief time, Awlaki took on a public role as a spokesperson on interfaith tolerance. He was even invited to the Pentagon as part of an Islamic outreach program and to an interfaith prayer service at the US Capitol.4 After he moved to London in 2002, his sermons became more strident in their criticism of US foreign policy. He was jailed more than a year after his return to Yemen for unspecified charges, and only released due to family pressure on the Saleh government.5 By 2008, he was highly influential among jihadi groups around the world. His natural charisma and his ability to reach a global audience with his English language sermons praising jihad against the United States made him a dangerous enemy. What concerned the CIA was his global reach: Awlaki’s sermons were popular and widely quoted online and his influence was evident in al Qaeda’s English-language magazine Inspire.6 But he remained a US citizen, with all of the constitutional protections that this status implied, and all US government agencies were forbidden from conducting assassinations abroad under an executive order signed by President Gerald Ford in 1976.7
Even if that were not the case, a decision to assassinate Awlaki would hardly be expected from President Barack Obama. Obama had come into the presidency as a critic of the seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and wanted the United States to focus more on what he called “nation building at home.”8 By training and temperament, he was skeptical about foreign policy overreach, particularly under the banner of the war on terror. As an expert in constitutional law who had taught the subject at the University of Chicago, Obama knew well what due process rights a citizen like Awlaki would have in the United States and that killing him could be a violation of federal law.9 He also knew it was morally problematic. Obama’s thinking was shaped by scholars like Reinhold Niebuhr, who warned that evil was always present in the world and that a foreign policy committed to destroying every enemy abroad could be dangerous and even morally corrupting.10 Yet Obama also recognized that, as president, he had an obligation to defend US citizens from terrorist attacks, even when those attacks were orchestrated by one of their own. The specifics of the Awlaki case—that he was a member of a terrorist organization, not a recognized foreign army, and that he was living abroad in a country where the United States was not legally at war—would need to be swept aside in the face of that obligation.
Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked that lawyers spent a great deal of their time “shoveling smoke” to obscure issues that are well established within the law. To solve his Awlaki dilemma, President Obama turned to his own smoke-shovelers in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Department of Justice. They dutifully produced two memoranda that concluded that killing a citizen like Awlaki was permissible because he was participating in a war as part of al Qaeda and his activities could be considered an imminent threat.11 Notably, their analysis emphasized that killing Awlaki would constitute neither murder nor assassination, thus sidestepping the two actions that a US president could never officially authorize. Instead, the Obama administration’s lawyers embraced a legal gray area called “targeted killing,” which some influential legal scholars argued was permissible under conditions of armed conflict.12 According to this school of thought, targeted killings were different from murders because they were legal, and from assassinations because they were conducted against active combatants in a declared war. Meanwhile the Pentagon and CIA ramped up their search for Awlaki, using satellites, intercepts of electronic communication, and local spies. The chief way that they hunted for him in the distant regions of Yemen was with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), more commonly known as drones. The manhunt involved “near continuous coverage” of Yemen by powerful Predator drones flown from US bases in Djibouti and Saudi Arabia.13
In May 2011, only days after bin Laden’s death, the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) located Awlaki driving through the Shabwa province in the south of Yemen.14 With President Obama’s approval, JSOC deployed manned Harrier jets, a Special Operations Dragon Spear aircraft and Predator drones to kill Awlaki and his companions. Another drone, a massive surveillance aircraft called the Global Hawk, flew above the strike team and relayed a live video feed to JSOC commanders. This would be a drone strike which US officials could watch in real time, giving instructions to the pilots as needed. Within hours of their launch, they found him. Using the Predator’s laser guidance system, Harrier Jets launched three Hellfire missiles against his convoy, but they missed. His Suzuki truck raced through the dust and smoke to evade the US drones. He radioed for help from two sympathetic Yemeni brothers, Abdallah and Musa’d Mubarak, both of whom were widely known in the AQAP community.15 Taking advantage of the confusion, Awlaki quickly switched cars with them, speeding away in their Suzuki truck toward safe haven in a nearby cave. The Mubarak brothers took off in the other direction, followed by US drones, and were killed by the final series of missile strikes. Awlaki reported seeing a flash of light behind him and feeling a shockwave as his SUV sped away from the missile strike.16 Only later did it become clear to JSOC that Awlaki survived.17
For the rest of the summer, Awlaki lived as a hunted man. He knew his days were numbered. He warned his colleagues that the next set of missiles might be more accurate, reportedly saying that “this time eleven missiles missed [their] target, but the next time the first rocket may hit.”18 He became resigned to his fate, saying that no human being died until they reached their “appointed time.”19 He saw his upcoming death in religious terms, remarking that “the tree of martyrdom in the Arabian Peninsula has already got ripe fruits on it, and the time for reaping has come.”20 He moved around every few days for much of the summer but eventually settled for a longer period in a mud house in Khashef, allegedly planning to make another video exhorting jihad.21
Only a few months later, on a bright September morning, Awlaki and three companions again heard the familiar whirring noise of a US drone overheard and scrambled for their nearby jeeps to escape.22 But they were confronted not by one drone but by three: two Predators and a larger Reaper model equipped with Hellfire missiles.23 For their second attempt to kill him, the Obama administration relied on drones to fire the missiles rather than manned aircraft. As the Predator drone affixed a laser target on the jeeps, the Reaper drone blasted a series of missiles at Awlaki and his companions, instantly killing them and burning their bodies beyond recognition. What was left of their bodies was later cut out of the jeep by local officials and given an Islamic funeral.24 Amid the burning wreckage, villagers found a traditional Yemeni rhinoceros-horned dagger called a jambiya, known to belong to Awlaki.25 Along with two Yemeni members of AQAP, another US citizen, Samir Khan, a North Carolina–born jihadi responsible for al Qaeda’s English-language magazine Inspire, was also killed in the strike.26 In this drone strike, the Obama administration had killed two of its own citizens—one intentionally, one accidentally—in a country in which the US government was not at war.
Shortly after the strike, President Obama offered a carefully worded acknowledgment of the killing, noting that Awlaki “was killed” in Yemen and calling the successful strike “a tribute to our intelligence community and to the efforts of Yemen and its security forces who have worked closely with the United States.”27 He made no mention of Samir Khan, although Obama administration officials later described him as “collateral damage.”28 He also made no mention of drones or of the crucial role that this technology played in enabling the deliberate killing of US citizens on foreign soil. He did not tell the US public that buried in a CIA archive was a strike video made in real time of the killing of Awlaki.29 The strike was immediately controversial, as civil liberties advocates demanded to know the legal rationale behind the president’s decision to kill a US citizen without trial or criminal charges. At the same time, drone technology itself remained widely popular with the US public, despite the fact that its features—speed, precision, adaptability, and remoteness—provided the essential foundation for President Obama’s decision.30 What was sometimes overlooked in the debate that followed was that it was the rise of drone technology itself that had opened the door for a global expansion of targeted killing. While the policy decision was justly controversial, it was the technology that allowed President Obama to make life-or-death decisions about individuals in foreign lands from the quiet remove of the Oval Office. That technology—and now that capability to kill around the world—would be given to President Donald Trump and all those who held that office in the future.
In this case, President Obama did not believe this was a difficult choice, calling the decision to kill Awlaki an “easy one.”31 But drones and their messy human consequences would continue to haunt him. In early September 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman, went looking for his father in southern Yemen. Born in Denver and also a US citizen, Abdulrahman had not seen his father for two years, but he knew that Awlaki was on a “kill list” drawn up by the US government. Abdulrahman stayed with family and friends in Yemen and learned of the death of his father while there. Two weeks later, he was spending the evening with friends in a café in Shabwa when a US drone strike killed him and five of his friends.32 Abdulrahman was not deliberately targeted and was not involved in militant activity. US officials had received bad intelligence that suggested that an Egyptian al Qaeda operative, Ibrahim al-Banna, was in that café and struck the site to eliminate him. Abdulrahman and several of his cousins were killed instantly, with their shredded bodies left unrecognizable to their family. The US government refused to comment on the case despite an ACLU lawsuit and anguished calls by Nasser al-Awlaki for the US government to explain the deaths of his son and grandson.33
How did President Obama go from being a skeptic about the use of force, and mindful of his limits under the Constitution, to authorizing the extrajudicial killing of a US citizen on foreign soil? Is there something about drone technology that altered his choices or made his decision easier? The United States has long had the ability to see enemies around the world with satellites and to strike them with manned aircraft and precision-guided missiles, but only since the rise of drone technology has it done so on an almost daily basis. Equipped with what one former CIA director called an “exquisite weapon,” Obama wound up authorizing hundreds of targeted killings, including of US citizens, during his time in office.34 Yet even as this happened, he acknowledged that drones could affect his strategic choices and worried that they could be abused or misinterpreted as a “cure all for terrorism.”35
To understand how drones might have influenced President Obama’s strategic choices, it is important to begin by defining drones and identifying what makes them different. Drones are aircraft of varying size that do not have a pilot on board and are instead controlled by someone on the ground. Unlike missiles and other aerial projectiles, they are typically intended to be reused rather than simply rammed into a target. Most drones are not in and of themselves weapons, although they can be equipped to carry weapons of different sizes.
While most people use the term “drone” broadly, the language around drones is controversial. Within the US Air Force, for example, the terms “drones” and “UAVs” are generally rejected because they obscure the fact that all models are controlled by human beings even if the pilot is not physically located in the vehicle itself. These terms can be seen to imply that drones are flying in an autonomous way with relatively little control by a human on the ground. Although autonomous drones are on the horizon, this is not the reality today. The present generation of military drones is under direct human control, while the more sophisticated models—for example, the MQ-9 Reaper or RQ-4 Global Hawk—are no more automated than a commercial airliner. In fact, most large military drones are useless without a ground control station where pilots are located and a supply chain to ensure that the vehicle remains in the air.36 Because pilots are so essential, there is a vast bureaucratic infrastructure around the training and supervision of pilots during flight. For this reason, some have argued that drones are better described as remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) or unmanned aerial systems (UAS), as these terms emphasize the human control over the technology and the degree of control and oversight that they feature. Others have argued that retaining the term “drone” is important, because other formulations are not popular and too “bland and bureaucratic” to portray the reality of what drones do.37 Either way, it is important not to be too fixated on the term “unmanned,” as in reality it is the interaction between humans—the pilots, but also those supplying their operations on the ground and setting policy—and the technology which determines what drones are capable of doing.
This book will employ the term “drone,” to follow popular use, but it is important to bear in mind that not all drones are alike. Among the key characteristics that most drones share is that: (1) they are flown remotely; (2) they are capable of flight maneuvers; and (3) they are typically intended to be reused, unlike missiles and other disposable projectiles.38 But on many other criteria—range, endurance, speed, and ability to carry a payload—drones can vary so substantially that they hardly look like the same technology. The most famous drone, the now-retired MQ-1 Predator, is closer to a military jet like an F-16 than to the small drones employed by hobbyists.39 The Predator model MQ-1B, for example, has a wingspan of 55 feet, carries 2,250 pounds of weight upon takeoff and flies for 770 miles.40 Its larger cousin, the Reaper (MQ-9), is similar, although it has a slightly longer range (1,150 miles).41 These models can be flown by pilots located in ground control stations hundreds or even thousands of miles from the drone itself and are linked by satellites to an intelligence infrastructure that enables their use.
Compare this to the ordinary quadcopter drones employed by hobbyists and small companies for basic photography and delivery of goods. The popular Phantom 3 model drone, produced by the Chinese company DJI, has a weight of 2.64 pounds and can fly at 52.5 feet per second. At most, it can be flown 1.242 miles from the operator.42 The Phantom 3 has a sophisticated camera, but it cannot carry a significant payload and is small enough to be carried in its operator’s hand. In general, drones like the Phantom 3 must remain within the line of sight of the operator and have a standard radio link to that person. In many respects, they are closer to a hobbyist’s model airplane than to an F-16 or any other type of manned aircraft. The term “drone” encompasses all of these models. To date, the public debate has largely focused on the Predator and Reaper drones, due to their prominence in the targeted killing program, but has paid comparatively less attention to the rapid diffusion of small quadcopter drones in other areas of life.
There have been a number of attempts to classify drones, but a classification scale originally produced by the US Air Force focused on two general characteristics of drones: their altitude and endurance.43 In broad terms, some models are capable of only low altitude (such as several hundred feet in the air) while others can fly at the same height as commercial aircraft (approximately 30,000 feet). Some military surveillance drones can fly at even higher altitudes, such as 60,000 feet. The endurance for each model also varies substantially, with some small hobbyist drones capable of flying only a few hours and other, military models capable of remaining in air for more than a day. Table 1.1, drawn from that classification scheme, identifies the five tiers of drones and provides some examples of each.
TABLE 1.1 US Air Force UAV Classification System
| Tier | Altitude | Endurance | Examples |
| Tier N/A | Very Low | Very Low | Hobbyist Drones,Micro-Drones |
| Tier I | Low | Prolonged | GNAT 750 |
| Tier II(MALE) | Medium | Prolonged | Predator (MQ1),Reaper (MQ-9) |
| Tier II+(HALE) | High (30,000 feet) | Prolonged | Global Hawk (RQ-4) |
| Tier III | Very High (60,000 feet) | Prolonged | Dark Star (RQ3) |
Source: http://www.hse-uav.com/military_uav_platforms.htm, accessed July 27, 2015
Aside from the differences in the altitude and endurance of these drones, their functions vary across the different tiers. Drones have two distinct functions: (1) the collection and recording of images and data from the external environment; and (2) the delivery of payloads, ranging from food, medicine, and commercial packages to missiles. Some drones are capable of both, while others can do only one.44 Most small drones are equipped to collect images and scientific data and can be used for a wide range of development activities, such as monitoring crops and environmental damage. They can also be used for reconnaissance on the battlefield. Today, commercial retailers like Amazon are working on building small drones that are capable of delivering parcels and other commercial packages, but this effort remains a work in progress. Multipurpose medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) drones, like the Predator and Reaper models, can be used for both intelligence collection and delivery, as evidenced by their role in delivering the missiles that killed Awlaki. The high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) drones, such as the Global Hawk (RQ-4), are generally used for sophisticated collection tasks, such as advanced imagery surveillance, and they involve technology not widely available on the commercial market. Both collection and delivery models can be used for peaceful purposes (such as surveillance, scientific research, and commerce) and for military purposes (such as reconnaissance and targeted killing). In the debate over their use, it is important to keep in mind the diversity of models and functions of drones, as those most widely discussed types and missions—the Predators and Reapers used for targeted killing—are hardly typical.
It is equally important to recognize what is new—and what is not—about drones. Many of the most widely discussed characteristics of drone technology—for example, the distance between the operator of the weapon and the target and the depersonalized nature of the violence itself—have arisen before with other military innovations, such as artillery, aerial bombardment, and nuclear weapons.45 Drones are slower than most forms of manned aircraft and can be less precise than a cruise missile; they are no more automatic or dependent on computers than commercial airliners. Drones can see things on the ground just as satellites can, but not necessarily at a higher level of detail. Drones are less adaptable and nimble than manned aircraft and, at present, many military drones, such as the Reaper or Global Hawk, are less likely than a manned aircraft to evade enemy fire.
What makes drones different is that they combine characteristics seen elsewhere into a single technology that can be deployed at low cost. It is the amalgamation of these characteristics in a single technology that makes drones distinctive. They combine the speed and precision of a cruise missile with the durability and responsiveness of a manned aircraft. They convey images that are strikingly real and accurate like a digital camera or a satellite but are neither as small as cameras nor as removed from their subject as satellites. By combining features like speed, precision, adaptability, and remoteness into a single technology, drones become what is sometimes known as a “disruptive technology” and alter the strategic choices of those that have them.46
It is hard to overstate the speed with which drone technology has emerged as a force in global politics over the last twenty years. The concept of a remotely piloted aircraft has long been a dream for militaries and aviation enthusiasts, but the technology was difficult to develop and early prototypes failed more often than they succeeded. As late as 2000, the US military had only a handful of drones, most of which were seen as unreliable.47 By 2014, the total US military inventory had increased to over 10,000 drones.48 Inside the military, the demand for drone overflights is insatiable. In August 2015, the Pentagon announced plans to increase drone overflights in conflict zones by 50% by 2019.49 In December 2015, the US Air Force unveiled a plan to double the number of drone pilots, but even that may not be enough to meet demand.50 Other countries are following the lead of the United States in embracing drone technology. The United Kingdom, for example, announced that at least one third of the Royal Air Force (RAF) fleet will be drones by 2030.51 According to the Pentagon, China plans to produce as many as 42,000 land- and sea-based drones by 2023.52 Between 2004 and 2011, the number of states with active UAV programs doubled from forty to more than eighty.53 By 2017, according to an estimate by the Center for New American Security, ninety countries had developed some kind of unarmed drone technology.54 Of these, thirty had programs for armed drones, but many more had the latent capabilities to do so.55
Governments are not the only organizations to embrace the drone age: international organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), law enforcement, private companies, and even universities are also seeking drones for a variety of purposes. The United Nations and an array of NGOs are beginning to employ them for peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. Surveillance drones have proven useful in crisis mapping, search and rescue following natural disasters in Haiti and the Philippines, and monitoring refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.56 They are also being used in economic development and environmental conservation. For example,—small surveillance drones are now being deployed to deter the poaching of elephants in Malawi.57 Private companies are using drones to encourage economic growth in the developing world by monitoring crops, tracking weather events, and moving goods and essential supplies to hard-to-reach areas.
In the United States and elsewhere, law enforcement and emergency response organizations are discovering new purposes for drones almost daily. Local police across the United States have begun to deploy them to track suspects, to record videos of events, and even to produce heat maps which can help to rescue stranded hikers.58 One Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) estimate in 2013 suggested that there would be 30,000 drones in US skies by 2020.59 This turned out to be a wild underestimate. By 2016, the FAA predicted that “small, hobbyist UAS purchases may grow from 1.9 million in 2016 to as many as 4.3 million by 2020. Sales of UAS for commercial purposes are expected to grow from 600,000 in 2016 to 2.7 million by 2020. Combined total hobbyist and commercial UAS sales are expected to rise from $2.5 million in 2016 to $7 million in 2020.”60 Another estimate suggested that 200,000 drones are sold worldwide each month.61 The FAA has estimated that the global market for drones will be worth approximately $90 billion between 2013 and 2023.62
The rapid pace of innovation in UAV technology has also led to dozens of commercial applications. Among the most famous of these is the proposal by Amazon to deliver packages by drones. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has promised that seeing one of their drones in the future will be “as common as seeing a mail truck.”63 Small surveillance drones have now been used by real estate agents to photograph properties and by electricity companies to check for downed power lines. Farmers are also using drones to monitor their crops and check for disease. In 2015, a small Australian company called Flirtey undertook the first successful delivery of a package by drones, dropping medical supplies at a rural clinic in Virginia. While this flight was relatively short—the drone carried the package only 1 mile—Senator Mark Warner (R-VA) called it a “Kitty Hawk” moment in drone aviation.64 While the FAA has been slow to approve commercial drone deliveries, various lobbies and major corporations are pressuring the US government to open the skies and to allow drones to do even more.
One of the many reasons why drones are spreading so rapidly to so many domains is cost. For many governments, private companies, and individuals, drones are a way to take to the skies at a remarkably low cost. For example, the top-of-the line Predator model costs approximately $10.5 million, compared to the $150 million price tag of a single F-22 fighter jet.65 While new models such as the Reaper are more expensive to fly ($12–13 million) and to maintain ($5 million per year), their cost still compares favorably with manned aircraft.66 In general, the drones purchased for military use are vastly more expensive than those on the commercial market. Smaller commercial models, such as quadcopters capable of modest tasks like the collection of imagery, can be bought for hundreds of dollars through commercial retailers like Amazon or Best Buy. As the price drops every year, more organizations get the ability to fly, record images, and collect data. Due to their low cost and suitability for routine tasks, small drones are spreading with astonishing speed to a growing array of users.
What impact will the rapid diffusion of drones have? It is difficult to say because of how suddenly all of this change has come. Consider the comparison with manned aircraft. The first flight was conducted by the Wright brothers in 1903 in North Carolina with a rudimentary machine that could fly only a small distance. Although a press release was issued at the time, relatively little attention was paid to their experiment until the commercial and military implications of the technology became clear. Early planes were relatively crude, often unreliable, and had a limited ability to carry freight or passengers over a significant distance. In the words of one aviation historian, “the world still regarded airplanes as toys, and those who dared to fly them were looked upon as crackpots or madmen.”67 World War I changed all of that. Recognizing that aircraft could be an effective weapon, the British, French, and German militaries poured resources into making aircraft more reliable and lethal.68 By 1918, fifteen years after the Wright brothers announced the first heavier-than-air manned flight, world-changing advances in the technology enabled dozens of new uses for aircraft including mail delivery.69 By 1919–1920, the first steps toward passenger aviation had been taken, although large-scale commercial flying would not become a reality for another decade.70 The full consequences of the Wright Brothers’ innovation were hardly clear twenty years after the technology first made the news. It was another several decades before the extent to which the world had changed due to manned aircraft was known.
We are in a similar situation today with drones, although they do not represent as dramatic a change as the beginning of manned flight. It has been approximately twenty years since the Pentagon first developed models that could regularly be used for counterterrorism. Those initial drones, like the aircraft of the Wright brothers and other aviation pioneers, were prone to crashes and often far less effective than hoped. They were also widely ignored, with few realizing the vast commercial and scientific potential that they represented. As in the case of manned aircraft, it was war which spurred more research into drones and gave rise to new applications for their use. Once the military had adopted drone technology, allowing expertise to be established, commercial applications began to flourish. Today, this has resulted in a Wild West atmosphere in the field, with dozens of actors—governments, NGOs, private companies, even individuals—throwing out new ideas for their use. While many of these ideas will fail, a few will succeed and begin to quietly change our daily life. Over time, drones will be seen as manned aircraft are today: as a technological achievement once seen as extraordinary but now so ubiquitous that most people take them for granted.
What is different about the diffusion of drones is that they have wound up in the hands of a greater number of users than traditional aircraft ever did. We will soon be living in a world in which everyone can get their hands on a drone and take to the skies, for good or bad reasons. The spread of drones has effectively democratized the air: allowing many actors (individuals, terrorist groups, NGOs) into the skies for the first time, while enabling others long in the air (governments, private companies, the United Nations) to do things that they never thought possible. By expanding the number of people who can take to the skies, drones disrupt the traditional “knowledge monopolies” over information gleaned from the air held by the military and commercial aviation authorities.71
As a result, drones will empower a range of states and non-state actors, such as civilians, terrorist groups, and even humanitarian organizations, and change how they interact across the world. The net effect of a world full of drones will change over time. In the short term, the availability of drones will entrench the advantages of powerful countries like the United States, which has a vast fleet of drones that allows it to fight in a growing number of conflicts without risking the lives of pilots. At home, the availability of drones will initially work to the advantage of law enforcement and big companies like Amazon, who will use their resources to scale up drone use and take advantage of open airspace. But in a drone age these advantages will not last forever. In the long run, latecomers to the drone age will catch up. In time, we will see weak states use drones to strike against stronger ones, and other equally matched states begin to deploy drones against each other in a war of nerves. We will see non-state actors like rebel groups and terrorists use drones to attack governments and even civilian targets from the air. We will see authoritarian governments deploy drones to watch and even suppress their own population. We will also see drone technology become folded into the arsenals of humanitarian organizations and peacekeepers, amplifying their ability to understand the dangers facing and protect the vulnerable in war zones and other disaster areas. Over time, all of these organizations will behave and interact differently because of the impact of drone technology on their choices.
The Awlaki case gives us some glimpse of what drones can do. Barack Obama was not the first US president to face an enemy abroad who meant harm to the United States. He was also not the first president to try to eliminate his country’s enemies with the most advanced technology available. From far-fetched assassination plots against Fidel Castro to bombing raids against Muammar Qaddafi, US presidents have long sought to kill their enemies with a variety of tactics that sidestep legal prohibitions against murder and assassination. But they had to rely on costly weapons (e.g., cruise missiles) and ones that had a prohibitively long delay between seeing a target and being able to strike it. President Obama was the first to have sustained access to a low-cost technology that enables killing to occur almost immediately, while at the same time facing no risk to the lives of US personnel. Drone technology did not create the practice of targeted killing, but it enabled it to the degree that it is barely noticed by most of us when it is reported in the newspapers each day. Inside the government, the availability of drone technology quietly changed the doctrines and practice of the US military and intelligence agencies and led to the creation of a “kill list” of potential targets. It has also led to a series of shadow wars in places like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, which together are challenging the conventional models of counterterrorism and blurring the lines between war and peace. All of this is possible because drone technology produced a stepwise change in what states are able, and now willing, to do.
The chief argument of this book is that drone technology alters the strategic choices of its users, governments, and non-state actors alike, in two ways. The first is by transforming their risk calculation. Perhaps the most salient fact about drones is that they enable their users to get into the sky without risking the life of a pilot. This is naturally attractive for all of the obvious reasons: everyone wishes to do things with the least risk possible. But this change in the calculation of risk is especially important today because we live in what Ulrich Beck has described as a “risk society”—that is, one in which finding ways to avoid the hazards of life and misfortune is of paramount importance.72 As an example, consider the ways in which the growing aversion to risk has affected the way in which militaries fight their wars. In 1994, the strategist Edward Luttwak made the controversial argument that the great powers, especially the United States, Britain, and France, were increasingly eager to avoid battlefield casualties because of their low birth rates.73 Societies with fewer children, he argued, are less inclined to see death in battle as heroic and more inclined to consider it as a personal or even national tragedy. The result is that they seek ways to use alternatives, like technology, to fight their wars rather than risk the lives of their sons and daughters.74 Similarly, in 2001, Michael Ignatieff observed that many governments want to fight what he calls “virtual” wars: clean ones, conducted from the air, and with the loss of almost no lives on their side.75 Today, many governments try to protect their personnel from harm in war zones by insisting on strict rules for force protection and engagement with the enemy.76 This fact has led some scholars to suggest that we are entering an era of post-heroic warfare in which traditional notions of honor have given way to a more complex calculation of risk and reward.77 If war is reconceived as an exercise of risk management, as some have argued, it follows that governments will prioritize and exploit technologies which mitigate or even eliminate risk.78
From this perspective, it is not hard to imagine why drones are so attractive: they appear to offer a solution to avoiding casualties on the battlefield because they keep pilots out of harm’s way, often thousands of miles away from the scene of the fighting. Most US military drone pilots are working from small bunkers on bases across the continental United States and are able to go home to their families at night. This avoids a significant “footprint” of military personnel on the ground, which means that there is little risk for those supporting the operations and, at least in theory, a reduced risk of backlash from the local population.79 To governments, drones appear to be almost a magic bullet: a way in which one can fight wars without incurring the risk of deaths that warfare normally implies.
On some level, drones appear to minimize risks for civilians as well. US officials have argued that drones provide governments with the ability to wage war with such high levels of precision that they minimize civilian casualties to an extraordinary degree.80 With targeted killings, drones can follow prospective targets for a long time and determine if their activities constitute involvement in combat, thus making them a fair target under the international law of armed conflict. Even more, drone pilots can consult with an array of experts, such as lawyers and intelligence specialists, to ensure that the target is a legitimate one.81 They can also wait to strike the target until civilians have cleared out of the area. Given this, some argue, drones might actually be morally preferable to ground combat.82 At a minimum, they might allow for a more deliberative form of warfare where the combatants are given time to anticipate and reflect on their decisions without fearing for their own lives in the midst of battle. The political advantages are also clear: because drones appear to offer a clean form of warfare which minimizes civilian casualties, they may make longer military campaigns more sustainable for a casualty-sensitive public.
The problem with these arguments is that they derive from the myth that drones eliminate risk, or at least radically reduce it. In reality, drones do not eliminate risk but rather redistribute it. A closer look at how drones operate with targeted killings illustrates this point. First, military drone pilots are not as insulated from the costs of war as they are assumed to be. Some have reported higher levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because they view the horrors of warfare more directly than traditional pilots do.83 Drone pilots often follow their targets for hours and watch them interact with their wives and children. When their targets are killed, the drone’s camera lingers for a long time over the strike zone, allowing the pilots to see the bloodshed that their actions caused and the horrified reactions of family and first responders. This does not happen once, but continuously. As one pilot remarked, this is “war at a very intimate level.”84 An Air Force study found that drone pilots struggled with psychological distress, including emotional numbness and distance from families, as well as trouble sleeping caused by “images that can’t be unseen.”85 Drones may reduce ordinary physical risk for pilots but they also may increase the psychological risks, including that of depression and burnout, which all pilots face.
Second, drones may allow the United States to conduct targeted killings in places like Yemen, but they put US troops at risk of similar attacks in other theaters of war. For years, US military officers in foreign wars did not need to fear attacks from the sky because the United States established air superiority almost immediately in any war it fought. But today terrorist organizations are adapting commercial drones to take to the skies and to attack US troops with improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Here the pace of change is stark. In 2014, the Islamic State had just begun to employ rudimentary commercial models for surveillance over battle sites in Syria.86 Within a year, the Islamic State had mastered the use of drones for reconnaissance and propaganda over the battlefields in Syria and Iraq. By 2017, US forces had come under attack from the air for the first time in years. Near al-Tanf, Syria, US advisors and their Syrian allies found themselves shot at by a drone, likely made by Iran and operated by pro-Assad rebels, in an airborne attack that would have been unthinkable only a few years before.87 Although the United States destroyed that drone with an F-15 fighter, it nevertheless represented a dramatic illustration of how drones are shifting risks long thought virtually eliminated back onto US troops. As a result, the Pentagon is pouring money into anti-drone technology to prevent its soldiers from being attacked from the air, a risk it has not regularly faced for decades.
Third, drones can shift risks to people on the ground. When the war on terror started in 2001, people living in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen were not being watched by drones and did not face the risk of being accidentally caught up in drone strikes. Today, their reality is very different. US drones offer nearly continuous coverage of conflict zones around the globe as they seek out al Qaeda, Islamic State, and other affiliated forces. Even with the precision offered by drones, civilians are accidentally killed, and even those left untouched by drone strikes must deal with the negative psychological effects of living with the risk of drone strikes. The US journalist David Rohde described the psychological effect of living under drones after he was captured by the Taliban and held hostage for seven months in Afghanistan in 2008.
The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking 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.88
In the words of a Yemeni child later killed by a CIA drone strike, living under them has “turned our area into hell and continuous horror, day and night, we even dream of them in our sleep.”89 This fear also has political consequences: it leads people to turn on each other for allegedly cooperating with the CIA and to become disenchanted with their own government for allowing these strikes to take place.90 All of these risks are effectively offloaded onto the local population in the favor of reducing physical risks to US drone pilots.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the use of drones shifts the risk calculations of decision-makers and produces a danger of moral hazard: a condition in which someone increases their risk-taking behavior because they feel insulated against the consequences. Drones may allow for precise, careful wars, but they may also make wars easier to fight and thus more frequent.91 Because drone technology is low risk for their own soldiers, governments may be more willing to use force rather than seek other, non-violent means of addressing the problem. This can be seen in the expansion of the shadow wars beyond Pakistan and Yemen to more locations worldwide. Drones may not lead pilots to become heartless and indifferent to the lives of civilians killed by a push-button war, but they may lead politicians to become more risk-taking and to fight wars on an ever-greater number of fronts. These might be slow-burning, remote wars, but they have real consequences for those living where they are fought. To be watched by drones on a nearly constant basis and perhaps to be killed suddenly in a blinding strike, is a life that that none of us would want. Seen from this perspective, drones are producing a novel disjuncture in the calculation of risk, with those under the gaze of drones directly acquainted with their risks but governments more removed, and thus perhaps more risk-taking with the decision to use them.
The second major way that drones affect strategic choice has to do with goal displacement: the process by which an organization enlarges its ambitions and begins to substitute alternative, sometimes more expansive, goals for the ones that it originally had. This process, known to the military as “mission creep,” can be driven by two interrelated factors. The first is cost. When technology like drones are cheap, governments and other actors can afford to use them on an ever-greater number of tasks, including those only indirectly related to their original one. The reasoning behind this—that drones are cheap, so we can throw them at a problem and see what happens—can be clearly seen in expansion of the US targeted killing program. Under the Obama administration, the original purpose of the targeted killing program was to target al Qaeda and “associated forces,” although that phrase was left undefined. Over time, the United States began to use drones not just to destroy al Qaeda and its immediate allies, but also to strike an array of other Islamist groups around the world, including the Haqqani network and Tehrik-e-Taliban in Pakistan, al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula and its allies in Yemen, and even al-Shabaab in Somalia. It also began to involve itself in eliminating tribal enemies of the governments in these countries.92 Because they were so inexpensive and expendable, US drones drifted into becoming the “counterinsurgency air force” of these governments, implicating the United States in conflicts that it did not fully understand.93 Over time, drone strikes also became a substitute for a political strategy, with the United States abjuring traditional diplomacy to resolve conflicts in favor of building drone bases around the world to police them. What began as an effort to remove specific individuals from a battlefield drifted into an effort to conduct aerial policing over larger swaths of the globe.
Goal displacement can also come about because of the nature of the technology itself. Drone technology not only produces a rich stream of information, including photographs, video, and other types of data, but it also allows its users to see the world in a more vivid, textured detail than ever before. Drones also offer the promise of being able to monitor a place not just for a limited time, like a satellite, but rather on continuous basis. For governments, this is often a good thing, as a greater degree of information generally has a beneficial effect on decision-making.94 No one would ever want to know less about a crisis that they face. But technology that yields vast increases in information and data can sometimes lead to false confidence among its recipients about their ability to master their external environment and to tame the uncertainties that they face. This false confidence can, in turn, feed on itself and encourage its users to pursue new goals and to lose sight of their original ones. Just as the sketching of maps laid out new worlds for imperialists to conquer, technology that allows us to know more can also produce a corresponding impulse to do more and, in some cases, to control more.
This dynamic can be seen with the US military’s desire to deploy drones for “dominant battlespace knowledge” over present and future battlefields. In less than two decades, the United States has gone from using Predator drones selectively over a few conflict zones to building a vast surveillance system and fielding ninety combat air patrols (CAP) of drones per day.95 Each CAP consists of typically four drones, as well as nearly two hundred people supporting them.96 Although some officials recognize that the demand for drones is unsustainable, it has not stopped the appetite for drone imagery from increasing. The United States has now developed a drone surveillance system called Gorgon Stare—named after the figure from Greek mythology whose look could turn someone to stone—designed to continuously watch whole cities and record video of all movements on the ground for thirty days.97 The ability of the United States to see everything with drones has produced a cultural change within the military, prioritizing the acquisition of information as an essential goal in and of itself. Aside from fueling false confidence that the United States may eventually control the battlefield, banish risk, and even transform the nature of war, it has also led the United States to displace its original goal—to fight al Qaeda more effectively—in favor of a larger one of knowing, and possibly even controlling, greater portions of the earth than it had previously imagined possible.
This argument—that drones alter strategic choice through the recalculation of risk and goal displacement—does not imply that drones are necessarily good or bad. It accepts that drones, like all technology, are subject to human misuse.98 It also does not suggest that these changes in risks and goals are exclusive to drones; other forms of technology may produce similar effects. But this book seeks to show that the introduction of drones has fundamentally changed how we understand the strategic choices that we face in war and peace. These changes are often subtle: just like manned aircraft once did, drones are altering the field of vision of those that employ them and changing the habits of mind of their users. The French sociologist Jacques Ellul long ago argued that technology is accompanied by “technique,” a mode of thinking that emphasizes efficiency and instrumental rationality, but also dehumanizes those subject to the technology and banishes discussions of its moral dimensions.99 Some elements of this can be seen in the US government’s defense of the targeted killings, which emphasizes the efficiency of drones while sidelining the essential moral questions their use raises. As Ellul noted, technique can even go as far as to redefine what certain words mean and recast controversial behavior away from morally loaded terms (assassination) toward more conducive ones (targeted killing).100 Through altering our risk calculations and goals, drones go beyond being a mere tool, but rather have distinct political qualities that shape how we act.101 It is these qualities which helped to turn Barack Obama from being a skeptic of the US war on terror into the first president to authorize the targeted killing of a US citizen without a trial.
This book explores six ways in which drones affect risk calculations and goals of their users, government and non-state actors alike, and have consequences for war and peace in the twenty-first century. First, drones undermine the long-standing legal and ethical prohibitions on assassination and extrajudicial violence outside of wartime. Chapter 3 will trace the emergence of the practice of targeted killing from its origin to its embrace by the United States after the September 11 attacks. It shows how the United States adopted drones alongside the practice of targeted killing to control risks as it fought a new war against al Qaeda, but found itself gradually drifting into more conflict zones and fighting new enemies. While the United States used drones to protect its pilots from physical risk, it altered the nature of the risks that they faced and created new risks for the population who live under the drones’ watch. Drone technology also subtly changed how the United States wages its wars, making it more willing to countenance killing people off traditional battlefields, while undermining the standards of accountability and transparency that it has traditionally employed. Over the last twenty years, multiple administrations have shielded the targeted killing program from Congressional, judicial, and public scrutiny, thus pushing the United States’ embrace of drones deeper into the shadows. But the world has paid attention. Today, as more countries are getting drones, they are experimenting with targeting killings of their own and eroding the traditional barriers against killing people outside of wartime.
Second, this book argues that drones accelerate the trend toward information-rich warfare and place enormous pressure on the military to learn ever more about the battlefields that it may face. For the Pentagon, the collection and delivery of information to soldiers on the ground has long been essential to controlling the “battlespace” and ensuring that its operations are precise and effective. Over twenty years ago, the US military was openly declaring its desire to develop “dominant battlespace knowledge” integrated into a “system of systems” that will give it a decisive advantage over its opponents.102 Today, aided by drones, that desire is accelerating as the Pentagon increasingly conceives of war as a contest for information. This has had an organizational effect: the ability for the United States to know more through drone imagery has turned into a necessity to know more. As chapter 4 shows, the dangers of overreliance on images and data from drones are multiple and clear: militaries may underestimate the risks that they face on the battlefield due to overconfidence based on superior information coming from drone imagery. Alternatively, they may become so overloaded with information that they cannot convert imagery into intelligence, thus slowing the tempo of kinetic action so they can learn more. This might work with targeted killings, which operate on the logic of execution rather than combat, but it will not work if future wars are as lethal and fast as predicted.103 The US military is becoming so enamored of its ability to know more through drone surveillance that it is overlooking the operational and organizational costs of “collecting the whole haystack.”104 Using drones for a vast surveillance apparatus, as the United States and other countries have been doing, has underappreciated implications for the workload, organizational structures, and culture of the military itself.
Third, as chapter 5 shows, drones allow non-state actors like rebel and terrorist groups to level the playing field with powerful governments and to expand their goals as a result of being able to take to the skies. Traditionally, conflicts between governments and their non-state challengers are marked by asymmetry of power, with governments far better equipped with resources to defeat their non-state opponents. This pattern will remain intact, but the low marginal cost of drones will be a boon to non-state actors who will use them to blunt the advantages that governments have. In conflict zones, drones enable groups like Hezbollah and the Islamic State to watch the battlefield in a way that they never could before and to strike at their enemies in surprising ways. As the example of the Islamic State shows in its campaign in Iraq and Syria, drones may even help some of these groups to hold on to territory and make more powerful militaries pay a cost in lives for fighting in the open. At home, drones will enable terrorist organizations to strike civilian targets and perhaps even to assassinate world leaders. While the United States and a few other powerful countries had a virtual monopoly on drone strikes for many years, the practice is now coming home and distributing new risks to civilian populations in North America, Europe, and elsewhere who previously had little reason to fear terror attacks from above.
Fourth, drones will transform the dynamics of protest and surveillance in democratic and non-democratic states, as chapter 6 will illustrate. It is well acknowledged that the use of drones by law enforcement and private companies poses a serious challenge to the protection of privacy and could contribute to a creeping surveillance state. What is less noticed is how drones have empowered new groups—civil liberties groups and activists—to identify and publicize human rights abuses and to press democratic governments for action. In democracies, we are moving to a world in which both police and protesters will be empowered by drones in contrasting, perhaps offsetting, ways. But the stakes around drones are even higher in authoritarian states. The embrace of drone technology by authoritarian states raises the possibility that anonymous dissent may eventually become difficult if not impossible. Surveillance drones may allow authoritarian governments like Russia to monitor protesters and to punish them for opposing the government.105 If that happens, drone technology may actually diminish the chances of democratic reform. Drones may also provide another tool for governments to engage in surveillance and repression of their secessionist regions.106 As they have for China in Xinjiang, drones may also enable powerful governments and some non-state actors to experiment with new forms of political and social control in less governed territories, discarding the legitimate grievances of repressed populations and managing them with ever-increasing levels of drone surveillance.107
Fifth, drones will enable international organizations, NGOs, and advocacy groups to monitor human rights abuses, deliver relief, and pressure governments for change. As chapter 7 discusses, small surveillance drones are ideally suited for taking on the “dull, dirty, and dangerous” jobs that are needed in these situations.108 In the future, drones will be able to transport and drop food and medicine in crises where humanitarian organizations are reluctant to send their own personnel. Drones will ultimately give these actors another tool by which they can monitor events on the ground and possibly shame governments into stronger action. But there are risks on the horizon too. More than just another tool, drones may also increase the ambitions of international organizations (IOs) and NGOs to intensify the pace of humanitarian relief and social change, even if doing so is unsustainable. While some international organizations and non-state actors feel considerable unease over adopting drones because these so-called “bots without borders” bring with them a host of logistical, political, and ethical obstacles, an activist community is taking matters into its own hands, launching bold but sometimes unsustainable interventions in an increasing number of locales worldwide.
Finally, drones will amplify the competition for power and influence between states in conflict zones and produce new risks of deterrence breakdown and crisis escalation. Chapter 8 shows how states are already using drone technology to test the nerves and strategic commitments of their rivals. This is because risk calculations with drones have changed: what was once too dangerous to do with a manned aircraft is now possible with a drone. Today, we live in a world where India and Pakistan are flying drones over the disputed territory of Kashmir and where North Korea flies rudimentary drones across the demilitarized zone (DMZ) to provoke South Korea. These strategic gambits are now possible because of their low financial and human cost, as well as the illusion that drones can be used without the risk of conflict escalation. As drones are used in more conflict zones around the world, they will begin to quietly reorder the risk calculations behind deterrence and coercion and produce greater chances of miscalculation, error, and accident.
The six consequences of the diffusion of drone technology will be explored in the main chapters of this book. Throughout, we will see how drone technology altered strategic choices of its users through changes in risk calculations and goal displacement. It was these changes that enabled President Barack Obama to kill Anwar Awlaki on that bright September morning. To understand how drones led to this, it is important to return to the beginning of the story, when drones were an impractical hope of aviation enthusiasts. Chapter 2 traces the history of drones, with all of its fits and starts, and shows how the dream of unmanned flight was turned into a reality by the necessities of war.