![]() ![]() The United States has used strikes in both “declared” theaters of operations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as “undeclared” theaters of operations including Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Why the current drone strategy should changeĪrmed drones have been a signature of U.S. The blue shading coincides with the Obama administration, which adopted the near certainty standard in 2011, according to our research resulting in a dramatic reduction of civilian casualties during U.S. The plotted values represent the midpoint of minimum and maximum casualty estimates provided by the BIJ data. This graph displays cumulative total, civilian, and combatant casualties from 2002-19 using data retrieved from the BIJ. Our research suggests that Obama’s policy shift drastically reduced civilian casualties in Pakistan, offering a possible guidebook for how to minimize the type of civilian deaths witnessed in late August. ![]() President Donald Trump relaxed Obama’s restrictive targeting protocol in favor of the more permissive “reasonable” certainty standard for civilian causalities, initially adopted by the Bush administration. Shortly following his inauguration in 2017, former U.S. The policy shift enabled Obama to instill higher degrees of morality and legality into the drone strike approval process, which was also important to rehabilitate the United States’ image abroad given its “ quasi-secretive” use of drones. That is, the data obscures the number of civilian casualties deemed acceptable during any given strike, which is a politically motivated calculation that shapes the overall rate of killing.īetween 20, the Obama administration implemented a “near certainty” standard of no civilian casualties during strikes in undeclared theaters of operations. What the data doesn’t show is variation in the targeting standard for U.S. Of these, between 800 and 1,750 are thought to have been civilians. strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen from 2002 to 2020 killed between 10,000 and 17,000 people. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), for instance, U.S. Indeed, widely available data reflects the prevalence of civilian casualties resulting from U.S. Based on 3,000 documents disclosed by the Pentagon, the study alleges to have identified “an institutional acceptance of an inevitable collateral toll” during U.S. This Essay traces the distance between principle and practice with respect to four aspects of that program: the premise of a world-ranging armed conflict, the scope of who can be targeted, the Administration’s continued withholding of information, and its opposition to judicial review.A recent report suggests that the botched strike is indicative of a larger trend. Department of Defense, articulated several sound statements of principle and policy, but none account for the Obama Administration’s targeted killing program. ![]() ![]() In discussing the Administration’s counterterrorism strategy during his ad- dress at Yale Law School in February 2012, Jeh Johnson, then the General Counsel of the U.S. Indeed, the CIA still maintains in litigation that the program’s very existence is a secret that it can neither confirm nor deny. The program that President Obama claims to keep tethered “on a very tight leash” has nonetheless killed between 2,000 and 4,000 people, according to various estimates, though the Administration refuses to release its own data. military, these operations target individuals not just in the battlefield in Afghanistan, but also routinely or increasingly in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and perhaps beyond. Conducted by the CIA and the covert Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) of the U.S. As high-ranking Administration officials have discussed, the government may conduct such killings on the premise of a global armed conflict with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and “associated forces,” and as a matter of national self-defense. The United States has carried out dozens of operations in Yemen as part of an expanding program of “targeted killing.” While the government deployed cruise missiles in the strike in al-Majalah in 2009 and today relies largely on unmanned drones in targeted killing operations, its underlying claim of authority is the same-that pursuant to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress in response to 9/11 and pursuant to international law, the United States may kill suspected terrorists outside of the usual constraints on the use of lethal force, potentially anywhere targets may be found. ![]()
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