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The Washington Post editorial board stated,

“Mistakenly dropping bombs on noncombatants is abhorrent and counterproductive, and feeds anti-U.S. propaganda….Yet collateral damage is sometimes unavoidable, particularly in a conflict in which the United States confronts a deadly enemy dispersed among civilian populations.

Transparency about drone policy assures U.S. citizens and allies that the country is employing this deadly technology with all due care. But it is also essential to avoid tying military and CIA operators’ hands too tightly as they pursue would-be terrorists….

Like any rapidly advancing technology of war, drone power deserves close scrutiny and rules tailored to its unique attributes. Drones are an inexpensive and low-footprint means of eliminating militants seeking to kill Americans. They have helped the United States strike at several generations of terrorist leaders and keep others on the run. Though the horrifying 2021 Kabul strike illustrated drones’ potential to maim the innocent, the approaching 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, should remind Americans of drones’ potential to protect and defend, too.”

—The Washington Post editorial board, “Biden Offers Smart Rules of Engagement for the Drone War,” washingtonpost.com, June 27, 2023

Amnesty International stated,

“While Amnesty International does not oppose the use of armed drones, it has consistently called on the USA to ensure that the use of armed drones complies with its obligations under international law, including international human rights law and international humanitarian law. In its 2013 report on drone strikes in Pakistan, Amnesty International concluded that the USA had, by justifying the so-called targeted killing of individuals or groups suspected of involvement in any kind of terrorism against the USA, adopted a radical re-interpretation of the concept of ’imminence’ under the purported right of self-defence, in violation of international human rights law.

In particular, by permitting the intentional use of lethal force outside recognised conflict zones and in a manner incompatible with applicable human rights standards, the USA’s policies and practices regarding the use of drones violate the right to life. Furthermore, drone strikes carried out by the USA outside conflict zones against persons who were not posing an imminent threat to life may constitute extrajudicial executions. There have also been drone strikes in armed conflict situations that appear to have unlawfully killed civilians as they were carried out in a manner that failed to take adequate precautions or otherwise violated international humanitarian law.

President Trump’s reported dismantling of the limited restrictions imposed by the Obama administration on the US drone programme therefore increases the risk of civilian casualties and unlawful killings.”

—Amnesty International, “Deadly Assistance: The Role of European States in US Drone Strikes,” amnesty.org, 2018

Brian Finlay, president and CEO of the Stimson Center, stated,

“Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, continue to shape how, when, and where the United States conducts military and counterterrorism operations around the world. Yet U.S. use of armed drones remains controversial, in large part because of ongoing secrecy surrounding the use of lethal drone strikes outside of traditional battlefields and the resulting lack of accountability that often goes hand in hand with the absence of transparency. Currently, the U.S. drone program rests on indistinct frameworks and an approach to drone strikes based on U.S. exceptionalism. Ambiguity surrounding U.S. drone policy has contributed to enduring questions about the legality, efficacy, and legitimacy of the U.S. drone program. And the drone debate continues in the Trump administration.…

Given these and related concerns, such as the rapid spread of drone technology for military and national security purposes around the world, it is important that the United States develop a drone policy that is both practical and comprehensive, and that sets a constructive international precedent for future drone use worldwide.”

—Brian Finlay, president and CEO of the Stimson Center, “An Action Plan on U.S. Drone Policy,” stimson.org, June 2018

Con Arguments

 (Go to Pro Arguments)

Con 1: Drone strikes create more terrorists while terrorizing civilians.

“Growing evidence, including by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), suggests a troubling trend: RPA [remotely piloted aircraft] strikes seem to be encouraging terrorism and increasing support for local violent extremist organizations. This seems to especially be the case in the absence of supporting narratives and perceived legitimacy, wherein terrorist and extremist groups can exploit civilian deaths to further their propaganda and recruitment efforts. For example, research from Pakistan published in 2019 shows that drone strikes ‘are suggested to encourage terrorism’ and ‘to increase anti-US sentiment and radicalization,’ Similarly, one 2020 study found that terrorists were more likely to increase their attacks in the months after a deadly drone strike. Put more bluntly, RPA strikes ‘radicalize civilians faster than they kill terrorists,’” say Erol Yaybokeand and Christopher Reid, both of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. [167]

Of the 500 “militants” the CIA believed it had killed with drones between 2008 and 2010, only 14 were “top-tier militant targets,” and 25 were “mid-to-high-level organizers” of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or other hostile groups, reported Reuters. According to the New America Foundation, from 2004 to 2012 an estimated 49 “militant leaders” were killed in drone strikes, constituting “2% of all drone-related fatalities.” [59][60]

Killing low-level terrorists and civilians creates more terrorists. Abdulghani Al-Iryani, senior researcher at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, noted that many militants operating in Yemen have been “people who are aggrieved by attacks on their homes that forced them to go out and fight.” While Abdulrasheed Al-Faqih, executive director of Mwatana Organization for Human Rights, explained, “Incidents of civilian harm in Yemen continue to negatively affect the reputation of the United States in the country and push local communities to consider violence and revenge as the only solution to the harm they suffer.” [49][146]

General Stanley McChrystal, former leader of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, said that the “resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes…is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.” [79]

Furthermore, innocent civilians are terrorized by the drones. Yemeni tribal sheik Mullah Zabara said, “We consider the drones terrorism. The drones are flying day and night, frightening women and children, disturbing sleeping people. This is terrorism.” Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, a human rights organization, elaborated, “An entire region is being terrorized by the constant threat of death from the skies. Their way of life is collapsing: kids are too terrified to go to school, adults are afraid to attend weddings, funerals, business meetings, or anything that involves gathering in groups.” [49][58]

Con 2: Drone strikes violate human rights and nations’ sovereignty.

As the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School explained, “While interrogation and detention, as recent history shows all too well, carry their own risks of human rights abuses, these nonlethal approaches at least provide the opportunity for an assessment of whether targeted individuals in fact pose a threat to U.S. interests—an opportunity taken off the table by drone strikes.” Drone strikes, however, are secretive, lack sufficient legal oversight, and prevent citizens from holding their leaders accountable. [153]

The United States frequently calls drone strikes “targeted killings,” which Charli Carpenter, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, defines as “the extrajudicial execution of nonstate political adversaries,” or political assassinations, which is “taboo in war,” banned by the 1907 Hague Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute, and is a “violation of the human right to life enshrined in Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” [154]

The strikes are especially problematic outside declared war, when even terrorists must be arrested, tried, and convicted of a capital crime before being killed. [154]

In addition, strikes are often carried out without the permission and against the objection of the target countries. The former speaker of Iraq’s parliament Mohammed al-Halboosi called the Jan. 2020 strike that killed Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani “a flagrant violation of sovereignty, and a violation of international conventions.…Any security and military operation on Iraqi territory must have the approval of the government.” [155]

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry called drone strikes “illegal” and said they violated the country’s sovereignty. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said that the “use of drones is not only a continued violation of our territorial integrity but also detrimental to our resolve at efforts in eliminating terrorism from our country.…I would therefore stress the need for an end to drone attacks.” [70][71]

United Nations officials have called U.S. drone strikes a violation of sovereignty and have pressed for investigations into the legality of the attacks. [72][73][74]

Con 3: Drone strikes inflict psychological damage on drone pilots.

“As war becomes 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,” argues D. Keith Shurtleff, a U.S. Army chaplain at Fort Jackson. Without this deterrent, it becomes easier for soldiers to kill via a process called “doubling,” in which “otherwise nice and normal people create psychic doubles that carry out sometimes terrible acts their normal identity never would.” [157]

Journalist Elisabeth Bumiller describes a drone pilot as “fighting a telewar with a joystick and a throttle from his padded seat in American suburbia” thousands of miles away from the battlefield and then driving home to help with homework. [76]

“What has not been widely understood is that the close-up views of the people they observe, and sometimes kill, place military drone operators in a distance paradox. They are physically far away but visually, emotionally and psychologically intimate. Increasingly high definition live video imagery—say, of a prisoner being beheaded—magnifies this intimacy. The impact of the powerlessness to intervene or help in those situations is profound,” explains Peter Lee, professor of applied ethics at the University of Portsmouth in England. [170]

Piloting a drone is “more intense,” says Neal Scheuneman, a former U.S. Air Force drone sensor operator. “A fighter jet might see a target for 20 minutes. We had to watch a target for days, weeks and even months. We saw him play with his kids. We saw him interact with his family. We watched his whole life unfold. You are remote but also very much connected. Then one day, when all parameters are met, you kill him. Then you watch the death. You see the remorse and the burial. People often think that this job is going to be like a video game, and I have to warn them, there is no reset button.” And yet, because they are not combat troops, drone pilots have rarely had the same recovery periods or mental-health screenings other troops must complete. [168]

A study from the department of neuropsychiatry at the U.S. Air Force’s School of Aerospace Medicine found that drone pilots, in addition to witnessing traumatic combat experiences, face several unique problems: lack of a clear demarcation between combat and personal or family life; extremely long hours with monotonous work and low staffing; “existential conflict” brought on by the guilt and remorse over being an “aerial sniper”; and social isolation during work, which could diminish unit cohesion and increase susceptibility to PTSD. Several studies have found that drone operators experience psychiatric distress at rates higher than pilots of directly piloted aircraft. [46][169]

Con Quotes

Maha Hilal, founding executive director of the Muslim Counterpublics Lab, stated,

“Drone technology has rendered those in distant lands so much more disposable in the name of American national security. This is because such long-range techno-targeting has created a profound level of dehumanization that, ironically enough, has only made the repeated act of long-distance killing, of (not to mince words) slaughter, remarkably banal.

In these years of the war on terror, the legalities of drone warfare coupled with the way its technology capitalizes on an unfortunate aspect of human psychology has made the dehumanization of Muslims (and so violence against them) that much easier to carry out. It’s made their drone killing so much more of a given because it’s taken for granted that Muslims in ‘target sites’ or conflict zones must be terrorists whose removal should be beyond questioning—even after a posthumous determination of their civilian status….

We should all reject a war on terror committed to the disposability of Muslims because no one (including Muslims) should have to mourn the killing of civilians the United States has targeted for far too long. Muslim lives have inherent value and their deaths are worth grieving, mourning, and above all valuing. Drone warfare will never change that fact.”

—Maha Hilal, “As Long as We Use Drones, Celebrating ‘American Values’ Is a Farce,” thenation.com, Sep. 12, 2023

Drone Wars stated,

“The reality is that there is no such thing as a guaranteed accurate airstrike While laser-guided weapons are without doubt much more accurate than they were even 20 or 30 years ago, the myth of guaranteed precision is just that, a myth. Even under test conditions, only 50% of weapons are expected to hit within their ‘circular error of probability.’ Once the blast radius of weapons is taken into account and indeed how such systems can be affected by things such as the weather, it is clear that ‘precision’ cannot by any means be assured.…

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the rise of remote, drone warfare is that it is ushering in a state of permanent/forever war. With no (or very few) troops deployed on the ground and when air strikes can be carried out with impunity by drone operators who then commute home at the end of the day, there is little public or political pressure to bring interventions to an end.”

—Drone Wars, “The Danger of Drones,” dronewars.net (accessed Oct. 21, 2020)

Omar Suleiman, founder and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, stated,

“Now that [George] Floyd’s murder has forced a national conversation about policing within our country’s borders, it’s time the American public begins to reckon with the victims of our foreign policy abroad. Since waging the war on Iraq, how many Americans can name a single one of the approximately 200,000 civilian casualties of that war? Even when exposed to the gross images of torture at Abu Ghraib at the hands of members of the U.S. military, the victims’ faces remained blurred and their names unknown.…

For years, researchers have logged the details of America’s opaque drone war, a fulcrum of the war on terror that is a signature part of President Barack Obama’s legacy, now continued by Trump. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that up to 17,000 people have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia, while Airwars has tracked reports of nearly 30,000 civilians being killed by the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.…

Despite these efforts, there has been an overall paucity in news coverage of the drone war, and specifically of the stories of those killed by drone operators pushing buttons from thousands of miles away: a combination of public apathy and efforts by the federal government to shield the drone program from public view.…

We cannot make our government accountable for the victims of state violence if there is no transparency into its actions. We also cannot generate the moral outrage necessary to usher in change if we don’t consider the humanity of our victims.”

—Omar Suleiman, “America’s Problem with Policing Doesn’t Stop at the U.S. Border,” theintercept.com, July 21, 2020

Take Action

  1. Analyze the history of drones at the United Kingdom’s Imperial War Museum.
  2. Consider types of drones at Aircraft Compare.
  3. Explore the Friends Committee on National Legislation’s con position on drones.
  4. Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? If so, how? List two to three ways. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the other side of the issue now helps you better argue your position.
  5. Push for the position and policies you support by writing U.S. senators and representatives.

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