Why obama embraced drones

Paul Butler, law professor and former prosecutor. Jameel Jaffer, A. Kori Schake, Hoover Institution. Please upgrade your browser.

See next articles. The Opinion Pages. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. The absurdly low figures cited by Obama administration figures were lies. In Pakistan, Mr. But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C. The joke was that when the C. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers—but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.

Later, a whistleblower provided The Intercept with a cache of documents detailing the U. One campaign, Operation Haymaker, took place in northeastern Afghanistan. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets.

During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. Reforms to drone policy in subsequent years much reduced the number of innocents killed. Today, given significantly reduced casualties, Obama is on much firmer ground defending his drone policy, which he did in his interview with Coates. By The Washington Post. More in Politics. Over-the-horizon implies something relational, namely that the United States still needs bases somewhere.

These seemingly easy drone strikes require an elaborate array of bases from which to launch, recover, refit, and extend the loitering potential of armed drones; synchronize intelligence to identify targets; and manage cooperation with allies and partners, especially to corroborate intelligence, which is decisive in targeting high-value terrorists. Yet this extensive infrastructure is out of sight and often out of mind. There is a tendency to define drone warfare in terms of the platform rather than the systems required to carry out drones strikes.

It encourages people to focus more on what armed drones do, namely the targeted killing of terrorists, as opposed to how they do it. Mapping the requirements of drone warfare suggests that the use of strikes for an OTH strategy in Afghanistan is more complicated than most observers realize. Though U. Armed drones are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the broader technological and analytical infrastructure on which they rely. This infrastructure consists of a globe-spanning intelligence collection and analysis architecture that one U.

Some personnel launch and recover drones, especially the MQ-9 Reaper, through a sophisticated software that now increasingly enables automatic takeoff and landing.

Pilots use satellite imagery to generate reference points for the automated landing procedure. Other personnel maintain and rearm drones.

Intelligence is fed into a Multi-Spectral Targeting System. This is a powerful graphic user interface for the MQ-9 Reaper that consists of multiple visual sensors that also allows pilots to fix targets through a laser designation application that guides a Hellfire missile onto a target.

Beyond the hidden human toll, the OTH strategy assumes that without regional bases across Central and South Asia, the United States will still be able to conduct drone strikes against terrorists in Afghanistan.