Drone Program Research Articles

Drones and Civilians: Emerging Evidence of the Terrorizing Effects of the U.S. Drone Programs

The Biden Administration, in one of its first consequential foreign policy decisions, announced that it would undertake a comprehensive review of the United States drone program. Officials promised that this review would consider all available evidence. In this Article, show that the U.S. drone program violates international law because of the ways it terrorizes civilian populations. U.S. officials from both parties have argued that drones are an effective part of the U.S. counterterrorism strategy. But effectiveness is not the legal standard. The law requires that the program not unduly harm civilians. For as long as the U.S. has been using drones, communities in targeted countries have contended that the U.S. kills innocent civilians. The U.S. has typically minimized these claims, even as it has acknowledged some of the deaths. Until recently, this was the state of the argument: the U.S. argued that the drone program was effective, with minimal effects on civilians, and others argued that it caused undue harm to innocent civilians. Neither side found the evidence cited by the other side credible or gave much credence to the other side’s arguments. There is now a growing body of empirical evidence that shows how the U.S. drone program terrorizes civilians in ways that violate the law. Drawing on research from several disciplines, I show the ways the drone program affects the targeted population, civilian and militants alike. The evidence shows that even if drone strikes kill terrorist leaders—strikes the U.S. would consider successful—militants shift their attacks from military targets to civilians. The evidence also shows that the main reason militant violence goes down is not the strikes themselves but the monitoring and surveillance apparatus associated with the drone program. Areas in which the U.S. maintains an active drone strike program are typically under persistent surveillance and monitoring. Communications are monitored, movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and intelligence-gathering operations are ongoing. Civilians are terrorized by these practices. Taken together, this evidence shows that U.S. operations violate international law because they are indiscriminate: they affects civilians and militants alike, with little effort made to reduce civilian harms.

Using unmanned aircraft systems for live event monitoring: The benefits of aerial observation

What started as a project on how to detect unwanted drones during University of Colorado Boulder football games has turned into a programme providing live aerial coverage of campus events. The use of drones (or unmanned aircraft systems) has improved situational awareness for event command and control, enabling adjustments to tactics and strategies during events. This paper will detail the humble start-up of a drone programme, describing the need for partnerships, the basics of flying, the essentials of a drone programme, and examples of drone use during incidents and/or events. The reader will walk away with an understanding of the benefits of their agency having an ‘eye in the sky’ during incidents or events.

The proliferation of drones to violent nonstate actors

ABSTRACT Scholarship on the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (or drones) mainly focuses on states’ use, sidestepping the consequential proliferation of drone technology to violent nonstate actors (VNSAs). Meanwhile, an increasing corpus of media, military, and policy publications underscores the latter’s importance. The source of the gap is that existing proliferation models overlook civilian drone technologies. Applying supply- and demand-side proliferation models, we confirm conventional wisdom that military-grade drones are not likely to proliferate to VNSAs. Including civilian drones inverts proliferation logic across the boards. Shifting from cost-prohibitive, inaccessible, and technically complex military technologies to cheap, simple civilian platforms, we demonstrate that VNSAs have the resources, capacity, and interest to effectively incorporate drone programs to advance their aims. Furthermore, in context of state and nonstate actors’ security environments and normative constraints, the proliferation of civilian drones matters for international security. Norm-abiding states need expensive, high-performance, norm-enabling drones. For norm-defying VNSAs, civilian platforms are sufficient, even efficient, to advance their agendas.

The Institutionalization of Drone Programs, Entering the Normal Functioning of the State

This paper demonstrates how drone strikes were progressively embedded in an institution in the US, thereby substantiating the shared intuition that they deserve to be referred to as part of a “machinery” or a “program”. I show that this process derives from a combination of factors, among which (i) the formation of a bureaucracy, narrowly defined as the structured, harmonized and de-personalized interaction of agents, (ii) the existence and continuing enhancement of technological tools, and (iii) the elaboration of sophisticated legal rationales. Making sense of the process of institutionalization of drone programs is essential to understand how and, maybe even more importantly, in what form drone programs persist despite the political and legal criticisms they suffer. I argue that when fully institutionalized, the use of drones is implemented in the normal functioning of the State and becomes an organized and permanent solution, and not the temporary or punctual solution, to the problem of transnational jihadist terrorism. By describing the results of the rationalization and legitimation of drone programs through law, the paper brings to light the external power of legality and the pivotal role it can play in the legitimization and stabilization of a practice. In this, it offers another legal perspective in the current discussions on perpetual/forever war. In concluding remarks, the paper points to the implications that this etat des lieux comprises for the concept of sovereignty.

Drones in Railways

Evidence shows that the applications of drones are increasing quickly in many industries. Railways are no exception. Due to fast advances in technology, drones are on the verge of breakthroughs that will affect future applications, implementations, and their consequences. Looking ahead, we elaborate on the potential for drones in railways. We use scenario planning and combine it with the findings of an action research project, which we conducted with Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). First, we explore the applications and future trends of drone use in railway operations. Second, based on seven identified factors that may affect the future of drones in railways by 2030, we develop three future scenarios: pessimistic, realistic, and optimistic. The study results help practitioners make informed decisions regarding future drone programs in railways. We also contribute theoretical insights into how high-potential technologies can unleash new capabilities in railway operations.

Drones, Discretion, and the Duty to Protect the Right to Life: Germany and its Role in the US Drone Programme before the Higher Administrative Court of Münster

In 2014, three Yemeni claimants filed an administrative complaint against the German government addressing Germany’s role in the US drone programme. Relying on the right to life under the German Basic Law, the claimants argued that German authorities must prevent the US from using its air base in Ramstein, Germany, for purposes of conducting drone strikes that might unlawfully harm the claimants. On 19th March 2019, the Higher Administrative Court of Munster overruled the court of first instance and partly decided in favour of the claimants. In what is a highly interesting and thought-provoking judgment, the Court not only finds strong reasons to suspect that US drone strikes in Yemen, at least partially, violate international law. Even more, it orders the German government to ‘ascertain’ that the US drone strikes conducted via Ramstein Air Base are compatible with international law and, ‘if necessary’, to ‘work towards’ compliance with international law. Remarkable enough, this outcome is not the only reason why the judgment is worth being discussed: It furthermore raises interesting and difficult questions as to the material and territorial reach of fundamental rights under the German Basic Law, their inter-relation with international law, as well as the scope – and limits – of judicial review in matters of international law and foreign affairs.

The Psychosocial Effects of Drone Violence: Social Isolation, Self‐Objectification, and Depoliticization

The U.S.‐led drone program has severe and wide‐ranging psychosocial and political effects on people in targeted areas. This article draws upon the author's interviews with people living under drones in Afghanistan to argue that drone surveillance and bombardment causes social isolation and self‐objectification. Interviewees reported that social gatherings, and any activities that involve nighttime travel, are shortened or avoided out of fear that drone surveillance will spot so‐called “nefarious activity” and bombardment will follow. Drawing upon feminist and postcolonial scholarship, the article contends that drone surveillance constitutes a form of psychological colonization. Civilians are frequently made to think of how they look to drone operators and change their behaviors accordingly—therein “self‐objectifying.” Narratives of “precision” warfare allow citizens of Western liberal democracies leading/supporting the drone program to avoid psychologically confronting these effects, while people living under drones face relentless psychological insecurities.

A Source of Our Strength

Eighteen years after the first American drone strike, the US drone program now operates in a record-setting number of countries across the Middle East and Africa. This paper examines the Obama administration’s expansion of the US drone program through the lens of Ontological Security Theory, wherein states fulfill their need for security as a sense of being by engaging in uncertainty-reducing and identity-building international relationships, including dilemmatic conflicts. This paper argues that President Obama and his administration failed to adequately address the drone program’s domestic, constitutional, and international legal brokenness due to an ontological attachment to the morality behind the conduct of drone operations. In their public statements, administration officials rationalized the program as a medical tool eliminating “the cancerous tumor called an al Qaida terrorist” and presented drones as a morally superior alternative to the use of torture and of indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay. As such, the Obama-era drone program existed both as an uncertainty reduction routine vis a vis the dilemmatic conflict of terrorism, as well as a reflexive, identity-building international relationship that established the program as a key element of the ‘forever war’ against al-Qaeda and set the stage for Trump-era program expansion. As this expansion proceeds, the program will only become further at odds with America’s long-term rational interests.

Drones, Surveillance, and Violence: Theory and Evidence from a US Drone Program

AbstractWe investigate the impact of the US drone program in Pakistan on insurgent violence. Using details about US-Pakistan counterterrorism cooperation and geocoded violence data, we show that the program was associated with monthly reductions of around nine to thirteen insurgent attacks and fifty-one to eighty-six casualties in the area affected by the program. This change was sizable, as in the year before the program, the affected area experienced around twenty-one attacks and one hundred casualties per month. Additional quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that this drop is attributable to the drone program. However, the damage caused in strikes during the program cannot fully account for the reduction. Instead, anticipatory effects induced by the program played a prominent role in subduing violence. These effects stemmed from the insurgents’ perception of the risk of being targeted in drone strikes; their efforts to avoid targeting severely compromised their movement and communication abilities, in addition to eroding within-group trust. These findings contrast with prominent perspectives on air-power, counterinsurgency, and US counterterrorism, suggesting select drone deployments can be an effective tool of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism.

Pseudoisolationism: the Neoimperialism of the State(s)

During the Obama administration years, the American military seemed to be withdrawing and American global hegemony withering. The administration had adopted a new foreign policy doctrine called “offshore balancing,” and its critics were many, dubbing the doctrine “neoisolationist.” However, this label has misdiagnosed the doctrine, which as this essay will first argue, can more accurately be labeled “pseudoneoisolationist”—the American military may have withdrawn its conventional forces to a degree, but it continues to become increasingly reliant on unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs). These UCAVs have allowed the United States to maintain Pax Americana while appearing to have staged a global retreat. This essay will then argue that two aspects of the American drone program have redefined territoriality: targeting methods and legal justification. This redefinition is a neoimperialist understanding, although admittedly it is one that cannot be correctly categorized as imperialist nor neoimperialist based on their traditional definitions. Finally, this essay will discuss why it is important to discuss the first two subjects (i.e. offshore balancing and the American drone program’s redefinition of territoriality) together, rather than in isolation.

Making Terrorist Targets

This essay examines drone aircraft as a technique of power. What is named “drone” is a set of governmental practices used to make state enemies, producing the terrorist target it is purported to counter. I compare the US drone programme in the Horn of Africa to anti-terrorism laws in Ethiopia. On the one hand, targeted strikes carried out by the US military claim, in effect, all military aged males killed, unless proven otherwise, are “terrorists,” and thus, legitimate targets. On the other hand, anti-terrorism law in Ethiopia labels journalists and others attempting to critique the state as terrorists, resulting in their imprisonment, exile, and death. I use the parallels between the two cases to examine how technologies and law produce bodies that can be detained, sanctioned, and killed by the nation-state. This account articulates the drone through the day-to-day application of power by the state and how governmental practices define threats.

“The Language We Use Matters”: Streams, Narratives, and the Obama Administration Drone Strike Program in Yemen

Despite its ubiquity in the literature, John Kingdon’s multiple streams framework (MSF) has rarely been applied to defense and foreign policy domains. Moreover, as a rationalist‐based systemic explanation, scholars have generally underappreciated the framework’s attention to the role of ideas and policy narratives. Deriving theoretical insights from the narrative policy framework (NPF), this article marries MSF’s systemic components with a policy narrative–based explanatory logic to examine decision coupling in the Obama administration’s lethal drone strike program in Yemen. Narrative‐specific meanings associated with MSF’s systemic features offer both theoretical insight on how the streams interact with respect to the drone program and how policy narratives offer a vehicle for better explaining the manipulation of ambiguity in the policy process. Policy narratives can be seen as cause and effect stories designed to bias certain policy decisions and provide important insights for enriching conventional MSF explanatory mechanisms, including manipulation, decision coupling, and alternative selection.

“You Think I'm Joking”: Examining the Weaponized Comedy of President Obama's Stand-Up Addresses at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner

ABSTRACT Satire and stand-up comedy are forms of cultural examination generally perceived as tools used by everyday citizens against the powerful and not by the powerful themselves. This article examines the less-analyzed side of stand-up comedy and satire as malleable instruments of cultural interrogation when employed by powerful agents such as President Obama. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of carnival and Henri Bergson's concept of humor as a form of social corrective in my textual analysis of his stand-up addresses, this article interprets how Obama's on-the-offensive, comically insulting addresses provided a unique way for him to attempt to normalize political criticisms and controversies, such as the “birther theory” and his administration's drone program. In its interpretation of a substantial satirical and comic strategy within Obama's stand-up addresses, this article reflects on the nature of modern satire and stand-up comedy and their complex relationship with forms of American power.

Experiments in Posthumanism: On Tactical Rhetorical Encounters between Drones and Human Body Heat

Abstract This essay examines a particular, and particularly fraught enactment of digital and material rhetoric: a tactical media intervention into the militarized drone program, to map a posthumanist reading of “tactics,” updating Michel de Certeau’s famous concept for the current global situation. To introduce what will be posthuman about the model of tactics presented, this essay reviews the current state of work in rhetoric and composition on posthumanism and rhetorical materiality, arguing that it points us to a materiality that is not reducibly, simply present. This situation, on the one hand, produces a political need for experimentation, and yet if we encourage an experimental, tactical response to complex posthuman encounters such as that with the drone’s thermal vision, then we are also encouraging an affirmation of that encounter, which entails its own risks. This essay then argues that while Certeau gives us the tools to imagine how we can tactically use the things of the world, we need to reimagine tactics in a posthumanist key. This essay calls for a retooled model of tactics that would draw out the experimental possibilities of media tactics through understanding their imbrication in systems that are material, distributed, and yet not simply self-present things.

Drones, Discretion, and the Duty to Protect the Right to Life: Germany and its Role in the United States' Drone Programme Before the Higher Administrative Court of Münster

Drones, Discretion, and the Duty to Protect the Right to Life: Germany and its Role in the United States' Drone Programme Before the Higher Administrative Court of Münster

State terrorism: orientalism and the drone programme

ABSTRACTThis article builds on the recent and growing scholarship on the negative effects of the drone programme. Current literature has shown that the drone programme terrorises the civilian population that it keeps under surveillance. Furthermore, it has articulated the drone programme’s violence as biopolitical and its surveillance as a necropolitical technology of distinction. It is argued in this article that the Orientalist attitudes and logic necessary for drone targeting form the basis for the biopolitical and necropolitical component of the drone programme. This article explores the Orientalism that suffuses the US drone programme in order to juxtapose it with governmental discourses that characterise the drone programme and its surveillance as neutral and humane – demonstrating the gap between government discourses of modernity and the actual drone programme. The necropolitical logic of distinction used for targeting leads to the assimilation of those under the drone’s gaze to a population that can be put to death, leading the drone programme to operate indiscriminately. The biopolitical logic is visible in the US practices, which I argue constitutes terrorism with the corroboration of civilian testimonies.

Rivals in Arms: Sino-U.S. Cooperation, Problems, and Solutions and Their Impact on the International UAV Industry

Research and development into drone technology has exploded in the United States in the recent decades. From the operation of killer drones in the military to agricultural survey drones in farms, the proliferation of drone technology is well on its way to radically altering the American future. However, there remains numerous laws, policies, and regulations that place stifling restrictions on drone development and operations in America. Halfway across the world, China has also begun to experience the "drone revolution," but with its relatively laxer laws regarding both commercial and public drone operations and manufacturing, it seems poised to surpass the United States in not only drone R&D, but drone export as well. In recent years, China has expanded to become "a prolific developer and no-questions-asked exporter of UAVs" selling to a plethora of nations ranging from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and Nigeria. Domestically, China has relied firmly on indigenous production and R&D since the 1980s to expand its UAV technologies, expanding its UAV industry to include a variety of defense firms as well as academic research groups. However, China's drone program is not without its own issues and setbacks, forcing the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) to issue new drone regulations to be implemented on a trial basis. This paper will analyze and compare the two comprehensive UAV regulations—the stricter FAA regulations and the newer UAV regulations promulgated by the CAAC—and explore the differences between the two regulatory policies (both commercial and military), their benefits and drawbacks, and attempt to present solutions as to how the CAAC and the FAA can help build an initial framework for other nations to follow.

See it/shoot it: the secret history of the CIA's lethal drone program

See it/shoot it: the secret history of the CIA's lethal drone program

Drones in War: The Controversies Surrounding the United States' Expanded Use of Drones

The Obama administration, during his presidency, had embarked on a mission to redefine the guidelines for the development and deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones. There are a number of debates surrounding the use of drones, the most contentious of which have been as to whether governments have legal authorization to do so, and of how combatant status is defined under current international law. The most salient issue today regarding the deployment of drones has been the “culture of secrecy.” In Obama’s first second term, his administration promised significant improvements on openness and scrutiny for U.S. drones strikes in a major speech in May 2013. Although the US has presented a public move to distill the US drone policy more out of the shadows, the actual mechanism by which the US is actually, in practice, employing armed drones and executing targeted killings still presents serious international legal questions. Recently, the White House had proposed that the Pentagon would take over much of the drone operations from the CIA, whereby making drone strikes more transparent. Yet, during this same period, the Obama administration has not shifted key aspects of the drone program to that of being unclassified in form. Given the alarming increase in the use of drones and the sophistication and ease by which such weapons can be used in violent situations, the time is now for the Trump administration to take action on critical alterations of the current policy in the use of drones.

Presidential Policy Guidance: Procedures for Approving Direct Action Against Terrorist Targets Located Outside The United States and Areas of Active Hostilities

With the rise of terrorist threats emanating from outside the territory of the United States and simultaneous advancements in armed drone technology, the United States began a rapidly escalating lethal drone program in the years after 9/11. While the first U.S. drone strike occurred in Yemen in 2002 during the George W. Bush administration, President Barack Obama dramatically increased the number of drone strikes during his first term.