Global Drone Campaign

The Global Drone Campaign is the most morally consequential military program in American history since the atomic bomb — not because of the scale of killing, which is modest by the standards of America's major wars, but because of what it represents: the routinization of extrajudicial execution as a permanent instrument of state policy, operated without meaningful oversight, accountability, or democratic consent.

The program began almost accidentally. In the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA armed Predator surveillance drones with Hellfire missiles, creating a weapon that could find, track, and kill a human being from the other side of the world with the press of a button. The first successful strike killed al-Qaeda commander Mohammed Atef in Afghanistan in November 2001. By 2004, the CIA was conducting strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas. By 2009, the program had expanded to Yemen and Somalia. By 2020, a drone was used to assassinate a senior military official of a sovereign nation — Iranian General Qasem Soleimani — at a civilian airport.

The evolution from targeted killing of identified al-Qaeda leaders to the routine execution of unidentified individuals based on behavioral patterns occurred gradually, without public debate, congressional authorization, or judicial review. The two most consequential innovations were "signature strikes" and the redefinition of "combatant."

Signature strikes, introduced around 2008, authorized the killing of people whose identities were unknown but whose behavior, observed through drone cameras from thousands of miles away, fit patterns that analysts associated with militant activity. Loading a vehicle, traveling in a convoy, gathering in a group — these "signatures" could trigger a Hellfire missile. The people being killed were frequently unknown to their killers. In one five-month period in Afghanistan (Operation Haymaker), 90% of those killed were not the intended targets.

The redefinition of "combatant" was even more insidious. The Obama administration adopted a policy of counting all military-age males (roughly 16-65) killed in a strike zone as combatants unless posthumous evidence specifically proved otherwise. Since the dead cannot protest their innocence and investigations in remote tribal areas are nearly impossible, this classification method effectively guaranteed that civilian casualties would be systematically undercounted. Official U.S. government casualty figures were, by design, fiction.

The Pakistan campaign was the most intensive theater of drone warfare. Between 2004 and 2018, the CIA conducted approximately 430 strikes in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, primarily in North and South Waziristan. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates these strikes killed between 2,515 and 4,026 people, including 424-969 civilians and 172-207 children. The strikes peaked under Obama, averaging one every three days in 2010.

The human cost in Pakistan's tribal areas was devastating beyond the raw casualty numbers. Stanford and NYU's "Living Under Drones" report (2012) documented the psychological terrorism inflicted on civilian populations who lived under the constant buzz of surveillance drones. Children were afraid to go to school. Families were afraid to attend funerals (which were targeted by "double-tap" strikes). Communities were afraid to gather for tribal meetings (jirgas) — a March 2011 strike on a jirga in Datta Khel killed 42 tribal elders meeting to resolve a mining dispute. The report concluded that drones had created "a pervasive atmosphere of fear and anxiety" among civilians who had no connection to militancy.

The Yemen campaign, conducted by both the CIA and JSOC, targeted al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and later the Houthi movement. Between 2002 and 2023, the U.S. conducted approximately 400 strikes in Yemen, killing an estimated 1,100-1,700 people including 130-230 civilians. The most legally and morally consequential strikes occurred in 2011: the deliberate killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki on September 30, and the killing of his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman two weeks later.

The al-Awlaki killings represent the most extreme assertion of executive power in American history. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen, born in New Mexico, who became an al-Qaeda propagandist and was involved in operational planning. He was undoubtedly dangerous. But he was never indicted, never charged with a crime, and never given any opportunity to surrender or contest the evidence against him. His killing was authorized by a secret Justice Department memo, reviewed by no court, and carried out by CIA operatives in a foreign country. When the ACLU filed suit challenging the program, the government argued that the president's authority to kill American citizens was a "political question" beyond judicial review — effectively claiming that the executive branch has unreviewable power over life and death.

The killing of 16-year-old Abdulrahman was even more disturbing. Born in Denver, the teenager had no known involvement in terrorism. He was killed while eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant. The government offered no coherent justification, and when pressed, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs suggested the boy "should have had a more responsible father." In 2017, the al-Awlaki family's suffering was compounded when 8-year-old Nawar al-Awlaki, Anwar's daughter, was killed in a Navy SEAL raid in Yemen authorized by President Trump.

The Somalia campaign, conducted primarily by AFRICOM under both CIA and military authority, targeted al-Shabaab militants. Between 2007 and 2023, the U.S. conducted approximately 280 strikes in Somalia, killing an estimated 1,200-2,100 people including 15-70 civilians (though these figures are likely significant underestimates due to the difficulty of monitoring strikes in Somalia's remote areas). Trump dramatically escalated strikes in Somalia, declaring portions of the country "areas of active hostilities" that allowed field commanders to authorize strikes without White House approval.

The rivalry between the CIA and JSOC drone programs created a parallel killing bureaucracy with different rules and oversight structures. The CIA's program, as a covert action, was subject to congressional intelligence committee notification but not public disclosure. JSOC's program, as a military operation, operated under different legal authorities and targeting procedures. In practice, the existence of two parallel programs meant that if one had restrictions, targets could be passed to the other. This bureaucratic competition actually expanded the killing — each program had institutional incentives to demonstrate its value by conducting more strikes.

The technology of remote killing also created a new form of psychological injury. Drone operators, sitting in climate-controlled trailers at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada or other installations, watched their targets for days or weeks through high-resolution cameras — observing their daily routines, their families, their children — before pressing the button that killed them. Then they watched the aftermath in real-time video: the explosion, the body parts, the survivors stumbling through the rubble. At the end of their shift, they drove home to have dinner with their own families. Studies found that PTSD rates among drone operators were comparable to those of combat troops — the intimacy of killing from a screen, combined with the bizarre normalcy of commuting to and from assassination, created a unique form of moral injury.

The strategic failure of the drone campaign is now well-documented. Multiple studies — by Stanford University, NYU, the Stimson Center, and former military and intelligence officials — have concluded that drone strikes are counterproductive in the long term. Every civilian killed creates a family with legitimate grievances against the United States. Every mistaken strike on a wedding, funeral, or tribal gathering radicalizes communities that had no previous hostility toward America. A retired general told the Stanford researchers: "Drone strikes are like mowing the grass. You kill the leaders, and new ones grow back — often more radical than the ones you killed."

The numbers tell the story of strategic failure: despite killing thousands of suspected militants over two decades, the organizations targeted by drones have generally grown rather than shrunk. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was more dangerous in 2015 than in 2009 despite hundreds of drone strikes. Al-Shabaab controlled more territory in 2020 than in 2011. The Taliban won the war in Afghanistan. The drone campaign has been tactically effective at killing individuals while being strategically irrelevant to the conflicts it was supposed to resolve.

Perhaps the most consequential legacy of the drone campaign is the precedent it sets for other nations. The United States established that a government can kill anyone, anywhere, without trial, evidence, or accountability, based on secret intelligence reviewed by no independent authority. China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, and dozens of other nations are now developing or have developed armed drone capabilities. The norms the U.S. established — that sovereignty is no barrier to assassination, that "signature" behavior can justify killing, that transparency is optional — will be invoked by every authoritarian government that acquires this technology. The world the drone campaign created is one where everyone lives under the shadow of potential execution by remote control — a dystopia pioneered by the world's oldest democracy.