Global Drone Campaign

The drone war is the most Orwellian development in American military history. The United States government claims the legal authority to execute anyone, anywhere on earth — including its own citizens — based on secret evidence, reviewed by secret courts, with no public accountability. The targeted killing program has operated across at least seven countries, killed thousands of people (including hundreds of civilians and dozens of children), and faces virtually no oversight or democratic control.

The program began under Bush, expanded massively under Obama, and continued under Trump and Biden. Obama personally approved kill lists every "Terror Tuesday" in the White House Situation Room. The program uses "signature strikes" — attacks based not on identifying a specific target, but on patterns of behavior that analysts, watching through cameras from thousands of miles away, interpret as potentially suspicious. The term "military-age male" became the classification for any man between 16 and 65 in a strike zone — all of whom were automatically counted as combatants unless posthumously proven otherwise. This accounting trick allowed the administration to claim remarkably low civilian casualty numbers.

The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki on September 30, 2011, crossed a line that should have provoked a constitutional crisis. Al-Awlaki was an American citizen, born in New Mexico, killed by a drone strike in Yemen without trial, indictment, or any judicial process. Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman — also an American citizen — was killed in a separate strike. When pressed about the killing of a teenager, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said he "should have had a more responsible father." In 2017, al-Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter, Nawar, was killed in a Navy SEAL raid in Yemen.

The "double-tap" technique — striking a target, waiting for rescuers to arrive, then striking again — has been documented by multiple human rights organizations. This tactic, when used by other countries, is classified as a war crime. When used by the United States, it's classified policy.

The human cost extends beyond the strike zones. Drone operators, sitting in air-conditioned trailers in Nevada, watch their targets for days or weeks before killing them. They see the aftermath in high-definition video. PTSD rates among drone operators are comparable to those of combat troops. The psychological toll of killing by remote control — watching a person through a screen, pressing a button, and watching them die — has created a new category of moral injury.

The strategic failure is as clear as the moral one. The drone program was supposed to be a surgical tool for eliminating terrorists. Instead, it has proven to be a recruitment tool for extremism. Every civilian killed by a drone strike creates a family of people with legitimate grievances against the United States. Studies by Stanford, NYU, and the Stimson Center all concluded that drone strikes create more terrorists than they eliminate.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that US drone strikes have killed between 8,858 and 16,901 people across Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. Between 910 and 2,200 of those were civilians, including 283 to 454 children. These are conservative estimates — the true numbers are likely higher because the US classifies any military-age male killed in a strike zone as a combatant.