Drones Done Right

Whereas Americans once scanned the Civil War photos of Matthew Brady, or read the prose of Ernie Pyle, or ingested TV footage of the war in Vietnam, today they find opacity. With the modern mode of surreptitious, anti-terror drone strikes, public knowledge is scant and any informed insight worth especial value. Last week, Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni citizen, provided exactly that in a testimony before Congress. Al-Muslimi related personal accounts of drone-induced backlash against America and against him, a U.S. supporter, explaining how civilian deaths from drones “destabilize my country.” His words should give us pause.

Of course, al-Muslimi’s sentiments will do little to derail the United States’ drone programs, in part for good reason. The lures of unmanned warfare have long attracted militarists—as early as the fifth century B.C.E., Thucydides described an unmanned “ship set on fire” employed against the Athenian navy. By now, the U.S. drone arsenal has expanded to roughly 7,000 aircraft, with benefits including maneuverability and elimination of risk to the pilot. A clear majority of Americans support drones’ anti-terror strikes. And some research even suggests that anti-personnel strikes via drone may cause fewer civilian deaths than similar attacks without drones. Still, drones remain regrettably imperfect implements.

In a previous editorial, we applauded Senator Rand Paul’s efforts to probe the Obama administration’s drone policies, with a particular eye toward domestic implications. We quoted Patrick Henry, who said, “The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.” Those words apply equally to drones used abroad. President Obama, the military, and the CIA should offer more transparency about U.S. drone programs.

That does not mean we want a list of strikes before they happen. Instead, however, we do need a greater understanding of their scope and nature. American voters should not be left with the Hobson between blindly endorsing the deaths of foreign nationals—plus U.S. citizens, too—and sitting idly. Hopefully, the administration’s plans to fold the CIA’s drone operations into the military’s will provide a better basis for establishing and appreciating the total scope. One fact is certain: The status quo is not sufficient.

In the past, the U.S. alternative to drone transparency in Yemen was for erstwhile Yemeni strongman Abdullah Saleh to claim ownership of the strikes. That arrangement lost its secrecy in the Wikileaks scandal (and may never have truly fooled locals), but the need for a cover-up in the first place is a tacit concession to al-Muslimi’s charge. Drones do not operate in a vacuum. In Pakistan, for instance, 93 percent of those aware of drone strikes believe they are a “bad” or “very bad” thing, according to Pew Research Center, and large majorities oppose drones even in countries whose residents are not at risk—from Egypt and Jordan to Japan and Brazil. The immediate, physical ramifications of drone strikes cannot be divorced from their role in a larger psychological and ideological struggle. The United States should take a more proactive role in making sure that its drone program is conducted with minimal international blowback and harm to civilians. It should carefully weigh the true costs of each strike.

In the face of those costs, the United States must grow its drone fleet transparently and responsibly, bearing in mind that the field’s whirlwind technological pace is not a proxy for normative sanction. Unmanned aerial vehicles have the potential, in the long run, to save American and foreign lives. But a belief in the importance or inexorability of drone warfare should not stop us from asking how we ought to conduct it.