An Article On Drone Strikes

Article One: Dainel Byman, in his article Why Drones Work: The Case for Washington’s weapon of Choice in an August 2013 article in the Brookings Institute, identifies the positive impact of US drone strikes. Byman contends that US drone strikes are extremely efficient, at little financial cost to the government, and protect the lives of American soldiers. For these reasons, Byman believes that US drone strikes are necessary to the war on terror.

Much controversy surrounds the use of drone strikes to mitigate terrorism. Many believe it is effective in eradicating terrorists, however the aftermath of the situation is quite contradictory. Drone strikes “kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war,

In President Obama’s speech on drone policy, given on May 23, 2013 in Washington D.C., he asserts, “dozens of highly skilled al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers and operatives have been taken off the battlefield... Simply put, those [drone} strikes have saved lives.” Many American’s support this view. According to a July 18, 2013 Pew Research survey, 61% of Americans supported drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia (Drake). However, this belief that drone strikes make the United States safer by decimating terrorist networks around the world is widely contested. An opposing viewpoint is that these strikes create more terrorist than they kill. There is a common misperception that drones are precise, killing only the target and entourage. According to a meta-study of drone strikes, between 8 to 17% of all people killed are civilians (Sing). People who see their loved ones injured or killed in drone

The 9/11 attacks killed 2,996 people and injured over 6,000. According to the U.S. State Department’s annual Country Report on Terrorism 2015, 28,328 people around the world were victims of terrorists in that year. By killing terrorists with targeted drone strikes, the U.S. military disrupts and slows down terrorist organizations. In the War on Terror, it is difficult to determine how successful drone strikes have been. However, if we did nothing to fight or stop the terrorists they would be able to recruit, grow, and attack without fear. Despite potential downsides, drone strikes need to continue. It is impossible to estimate how many terrorist attacks have been stopped or how many lives have been saved due to successful drone attacks, but imagine the devastation of unrestrained terrorist

The U.S government started using unarmed drones in 2000 to monitor Afghanistan when the country was at war. The drone program was expanded when the September 11 attacks happened as a way to counteract the terrorists. Drones were used a surveillance but this time most drones are armed with missiles to weaken and destroy terrorist groups power. The death toll from the expansion of the program, according to the human rights group Reprieve, found that in 2014 that US killed 1,147 people in Pakistan and Yemen in the course of targeting only 41 men. This has caused a debate on whether to continue to use drones or to destroy the programs. A large amount of

In 2002, the CIA used a predator drone to conduct the first targeted killing. The strike was meant for Osama bin Laden; instead, it wound up; killing numerous civilians that were gathering scrap metal at the time. At the time, the government skirted the issue, claiming that the other individuals killed would prove to be ‘interesting’ once their identities were revealed. They weren’t. However, drone strikes occur today with civilian casualties, and there’s little to no public outcry. The public has grown numb and complacent due to prolonged exposure to a type of warfare that most academics agree is illegal at best.

Most Americans are in favor of drone strikes. A 2013 survey suggests 69% of Republicans, 60% of Independents and 59% of Democrats support the use of drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen (ProCon). The next president of the United States will have to decide if our country will keep using drones and improve the drone program. It has been said that drone strikes are used as a “recruitment tool” for terrorist organizations such as the Taliban and the Islamic State (Pilkington and MacAskill). Even though most civilians in the Middle East hate drone strikes; the United States collaborates with local governments in the Middle East who gives us jurisdiction to carry out these strikes. For example in Pakistan where most drone strikes occur; they have decreased violence in that region. The Pakistani President even admitted to asking the US to conduct more drone strikes in his country (ProCon). If drones were not effective foreign government officials would not ask for more drone

The US has conducted over four hundred drone strikes in Pakistan alone since. From these attacks, estimates state that between 700 and 900 civilians have died. This is almost one quarter of the total deaths from these strikes, and these people have died from no transgression. These people live in fear, earning small amounts of money, living small, innocent lives. However no life on our earth can be small enough to die for no good reason. Since 2004, there have been less than 50 recorded civilian deaths in the US that have been conducted by Islamic extremist groups, not just groups from Pakistan. These attacks do serve a purpose, however the cost of human life is too great. Those affected by drone attacks do not have the power to stop this. It’s down to me, it’s down to you and it’s down to us.

The second reason why why we should stop using drone strikes is because of a high rate of

Fourteen years ago on February 2nd, 2002, the CIA first used an unmanned Predator drone in a targeted killing. The attack was performed in Paktia province, Afghanistan, intended to kill Osama Bin Laden or at least someone who worked for the CIA had thought so, they ended up firing the drone against a “tall man”, someone who was 6 inches shorter (at 5 feet 11)than Bin Laden whom had long hair and was wearing robes. Even though this height is taller than average, it goes to say nearly anybody within this range who is a “tall man”, wearing traditional clothes and with lengthy hair (which is a very vague description for the CIA to go by), could have been mistakened for Laden himself. Drone warfare does not only target those who are not a threat,

Empirical studies of targeted killings and civilian casualties in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism show that drone strikes may obtain either of the following two outcomes:

Opponents argue that by removing one of the key restraints to warfare – the risk to one’s own forces – unmanned systems make undertaking armed attacks too easy and will make war more likely. Evidence is beginning to emerge that it is the persistent presence of UAVs sitting over remote villages and towns simply looking for ‘targets of opportunity’ that may be leading to civilian casualties. The CIA oversees drone strikes as part of counterterrorism operations, but US officials refuse to discuss the program publicly. According to a tally by the nonpartisan New America Foundation, since 2004 there have been more than 260 US drone strikes in Pakistan, which the foundation estimates killed between 1,600 and 2,500 people. Not everyone feels comfortable with all this. Critics say that the legal and

For some years now, United states involvement in foreign countries has been limited but their presence has been widely known and discouraged. For those islamic states drones strikes had been present for years but for how long?The first official drone strike was 9 months after 9/11, it was on Taliban Supreme Commander Mullah Mohammed Omar. It was initially a CIA secret weapon.The CIA had kept the project secret for as long as they could but U.S. Air force general William Begert. For years drone strikes in Islamic states have been problems and have been addressed by both countries. Many call them a problem while I say they are not.

In the first six months of 2014, a documented report of over 1,500 civilian deaths due to the crossfire from gun battles and roadside bombing, leading to the cause of many deaths (Ross, 2014). It was believed that even if the US forces is targeting the insurgents, the life of those civilians are still endangered and most of them die without realizing that they had became a victim of an airstrike. Drone strikes in Afghanistan have found out to be causing ten times more civilian casualties, than strikes by manned aircraft. We can see that an unmanned air strike can kill civilians without knowing if they are a rebel or an innocent resident. In Afghanistan, when a missile screamed down from the sky, two Taliban men were killed instantly and an innocent girl also died when a chunk of shrapnel flew at her left side, killing her before her family was able to took her to the nearest hospital (Cloud, 2013). The US military has acknowledged that there was a multiple times when they have accidentally killed civilians in a drone strikes, including in 2010 when 24 Afghans were killed in Uruzgan province after being mistaken for insurgents, which was later on determined that they were noncombatants (Cloud, 2013). The sad reality of life in Afghanistan is that, whether you’re an innocent inhabitant or a member of a terrorist group, when a drone strike hits a village and you’re inside

According to Sean D. Murphy, U.S. anti-terrorist operations in Pakistan so far have taken the forms of drone strikes, “hot pursuits” into Pakistani territory in immediate response to raids from within Pakistan, and secret missions by special operations forces, such as the CIA, against militant targets located deeper in Pakistan . The numbers of incidents involving “hot pursuits” of the militant hideouts inside the Pakistani territory have been very few, so they have not attracted as much attention as other operations. There has only been one real recognized covert mission in Pakistan, which took place on September 3, 2008 in South Waziristan , an area under the control of the Taliban. This was the US’ first ground-based battle against the Taliban within Pakistani borders. This caused the death of many civilians and no “high-value” terrorist target. The Pakistani government strongly criticized this act and passed a resolution demanding American cooperation on covert operations, so the US did refrain from repeating such a mission; however, the American strikes using Unmanned Areal Vehicles, known as drones, have been going on since 2004 and have only increased since then under the Obama Administration.