Drone Wars

How Drone Warfare Works

The US drone program operates primarily through two channels: the CIA (covert, deniable, no public accountability) and the military's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). The distinction matters: CIA strikes are classified and officially don't exist. When the US kills people with CIA drones, the government's official position is that the strike didn't happen.

The primary platforms are the MQ-9 Reaper ($32M each, manufactured by General Atomics) and the older MQ-1 Predator. Armed with Hellfire missiles ($150K each, made by Lockheed Martin), these drones can loiter over a target for 14+ hours, watching and waiting for the order to fire. Operators sit in ground control stations in Nevada, New Mexico, or at Ramstein Air Base in Germany (for Africa/Middle East operations), controlling aircraft thousands of miles away via satellite link.

Drone Strikes by Country

Source: Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Airwaves, New America Foundation. Figures are minimum confirmed estimates.

“Double-Tap” Strikes: Killing the Rescuers

One of the most condemned practices: striking a target, waiting for rescuers and first responders to arrive, then striking again. This is called a “double-tap” — a tactic so reviled that when used by terrorist organizations, it's cited as evidence of their barbarity.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented at least 50 double-tap strikes in Pakistan alone between 2006 and 2013. These strikes killed rescuers, family members, and medical personnel who arrived to help the wounded. The practice terrorized communities into not helping after strikes, leaving the wounded to die.

Under international humanitarian law, deliberately targeting rescuers is a war crime. The practice was widely reported by Stanford/NYU's Living Under Drones report, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and multiple human rights organizations. No US official has ever been held accountable.

The Economics of Remote-Control Killing

Drone warfare is often sold as cheaper than conventional military operations. The numbers tell a more complex story:

General Atomics — the sole manufacturer of the Predator and Reaper drones — has been one of the War on Terror's biggest beneficiaries. A privately held company (not publicly traded), it has earned billions from drone production. The Linden and Blue families, who own General Atomics, have contributed millions to political campaigns. The company has spent over $60 million on lobbying since 2001.

The proliferation risk is also enormous. At least 30 countries now operate armed drones — including China, Turkey, Iran, and the UAE. Turkey used drones to devastating effect in Libya, Syria, and the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. The US pioneered armed drone warfare; now every authoritarian regime on Earth wants the same capability. The precedents the US set — extrajudicial killing, signature strikes, civilian casualty tolerance — will be cited by every future drone user.

The Transparency Black Hole

The drone program has been characterized by systematic opacity — making accountability impossible:

Global Proliferation: America's Precedent Goes Worldwide

The US established the norms for armed drone use. Those norms are now being adopted by the world:

The precedent the US set — that a country can use armed drones to kill people in other countries without a declaration of war, without judicial process, and without accountability — has been enthusiastically adopted by authoritarian regimes worldwide. When China eventually uses armed drones to kill Uyghur dissidents abroad, or when Russia uses them to assassinate opposition figures, they will cite American precedent. The norms America established will be America's blowback.

The Escalation: President by President

How Drones Lowered the Political Cost of War

This is the core insight that explains everything about the drone program: drones made war politically free. When war costs no American lives, requires no congressional vote, generates no media coverage, and produces no visible sacrifice, there is no democratic check on its expansion. War becomes a background process — always running, never debated, never questioned.

“The danger of drones is that they make it too easy to go to war. When you can kill without risk, the threshold for killing drops.”— P.W. Singer, Wired for War

Blowback: Creating More Enemies Than You Kill

Multiple studies have demonstrated that drone strikes create more terrorists than they eliminate:

• →A 2015 study by the Stimson Center found that drone strikes in Yemen correlated with a dramatic increase in AQAP recruitment. Before US drone strikes, AQAP had ~300 members. After years of strikes, membership grew to over 4,000.
• →Former CENTCOM commander General Stanley McChrystal warned that for every innocent person killed, you create “10 new enemies.”
• →Michael Hayden, former CIA and NSA director, admitted: “Right now, there isn't a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these [drone] operations.”
• →Faisal Shahzad, who attempted to bomb Times Square in 2010, explicitly cited US drone strikes in Pakistan as his motivation. The underwear bomber cited Yemen drone strikes.
• →Stanford/NYU's Living Under Drones report documented how entire communities in Pakistan live in constant terror of strikes — children afraid to go to school, adults afraid to gather for funerals or weddings, a pervasive psychological trauma affecting millions.

→ Blowback — full analysis

The Drone Papers: What the Government Doesn't Want You to Know

In October 2015, The Intercept published “The Drone Papers” — a series based on classified documents leaked by a whistleblower inside the intelligence community. The documents revealed:

The whistleblower who leaked the documents said: “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and then potentially killing them — has been at the center of the government's anti-terrorism strategy. Anyone caught up in the dragnet of the watchlist can be forever affected.”Daniel Hale was later identified as the leaker. He was sentenced to 45 months in federal prisonin 2021 — while the officials who authorized the killing of thousands of people, including American citizens, faced no consequences.

The Future: Autonomous Weapons and AI-Driven Killing

The current drone program — with human operators making kill decisions — may represent themost restrained version of remote-control warfare we'll ever see. The military is actively developing autonomous weapons systems that can select and engage targets without human intervention:

“The question is not whether machines will be able to kill humans. They already can. The question is whether we will allow machines to decide which humans to kill — without a human in the loop. That line, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed.”— International Committee for Robot Arms Control

The Data

The Legal Black Hole

The drone program operates in a legal framework that wouldn't survive 30 seconds of scrutiny in any court — which is precisely why it has been kept away from courts:

• ✕ No declaration of war by Congress for any drone campaign
• ✕ All authorized under the 2001 AUMF — 60 words intended for Afghanistan
• ✕ No judicial review of targeting decisions
• ✕ No independent verification of casualty claims
• ✕ CIA strikes are classified — officially they don't exist
• ✕ US citizens killed without due process
• ✕ No country on Earth agrees with the US legal rationale (per former CIA/NSA director Hayden)

“If you live in a tribal area of Pakistan, you have a 1 in 50 chance of being killed by a US drone. How would Americans feel if a foreign power killed their citizens at that rate?”— Stanford/NYU, Living Under Drones, 2012

SKYNET: When Algorithms Decide Who Dies

Yes, the NSA literally named its terrorist-hunting algorithm SKYNET — after the AI that destroys humanity in the Terminator films. Revealed by Edward Snowden documents in 2015, SKYNET was a machine-learning program that analyzed metadata from Pakistani cellphone users — 55 million records — to identify “likely terrorists” based on behavioral patterns: who they called, where they traveled, when they turned their phone off.

Independent analysis of SKYNET's methodology by data scientists found that it had afalse positive rate of up to 50%. This means that potentially half the people flagged as terrorists by the algorithm were innocent. When combined with the “signature strike” policy — killing people based on behavioral patterns rather than known identity — SKYNET may have contributed to the deaths of thousands of innocent people.

Patrick Ball, a data scientist at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, reviewed the SKYNET methodology and concluded: “The NSA's SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people.” The program was fed into targeting decisions for drone strikes in Pakistan. The people killed by these decisions were never identified. Their names will never be known.

The Hellfire R9X: The “Ninja Bomb”

In 2017, the US developed a classified variant of the Hellfire missile designated the AGM-114 R9X, colloquially known as the “ninja bomb” or “flying Ginsu.” Instead of an explosive warhead, the R9X deploys six extendable blades moments before impact, essentially turning the missile into a 100-pound kinetic blade that slices through its target.

The weapon was developed to reduce “collateral damage” — killing the intended target without the blast radius that kills bystanders. It has been used in strikes in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and reportedly in the 2022 killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul. The strike that killed Zawahiri reportedly left the building he was standing on largely intact, with his family inside unharmed.

The R9X's existence raises a disturbing question: if a precision weapon that kills only the intended target was available, why were thousands of conventional Hellfires — with blast radii that kill everyone nearby — used in strikes that killed hundreds of civilians? The answer is that precision was always possible. It was simply not prioritized.

Countries Bombed by Drones Without a Declaration of War

The US has conducted drone strikes in at least 7 countries — none of which involved a congressional declaration of war, and most of which were conducted without specific congressional authorization:

The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to declare war. The drone program has killed people in 7+ countries under legal authorities that range from stretched to nonexistent. No member of Congress ever voted to authorize drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia. The American people were never asked. The people being bombed were never consulted. This is governance by assassination.

Sources & Further Reading