Drone Warfare and Targeted Killing
The United States has killed thousands of people in countries it is not at war with, using remotely piloted aircraft, based on secret legal standards, administered by a classified process, with casualty counts the government disputed for years — a program that has become a permanent feature of American foreign policy.
The short version
- The U.S. drone strike program, operating primarily under the 2001 AUMF and claims of self-defense, has conducted strikes in at least seven countries where the United States is not formally at war: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Libya, and Iraq.
- 'Signature strikes' — killing individuals based on patterns of behavior consistent with militant activity rather than confirmed identity — have been used in Pakistan and Yemen, meaning some people were killed without the government knowing their names.
- In 2011, the Obama administration ordered the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen in Yemen, based on a classified legal memo — the first publicly acknowledged extrajudicial killing of a U.S. citizen by the American government since the Civil War.
- The Bureau of Investigative Journalism tracked more than 14,000 U.S. drone strikes between 2004 and 2020, with civilian casualty estimates the U.S. government consistently disputed and independent researchers consistently found to be higher than official counts.
What it is
The modern American targeted killing program began in earnest in 2004 in Pakistan's tribal regions, using the MQ-1 Predator and later the MQ-9 Reaper — remotely piloted aircraft operated by crews at bases in Nevada and elsewhere, flying missions thousands of miles away over Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and multiple other countries. The program has two distinct institutional structures that have coexisted uneasily: the CIA operates strikes under covert action authority authorized by presidential findings, while the military conducts strikes through the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) under military authority. Both programs operated with minimal public disclosure for years. The CIA's program in particular was officially unacknowledged — officials would neither confirm nor deny its existence — even as strike outcomes were reported in Pakistani and Yemeni news. President Obama became the first to publicly acknowledge the program in 2012, responding to a question during an online forum.
The legal architecture supporting the drone program has been constructed largely out of public view, through classified Office of Legal Counsel opinions and executive branch interpretations that were not disclosed to Congress in full or to the public at all. The primary legal basis asserted is the 2001 AUMF, which authorizes force against those who 'planned, authorized, committed, or aided' the September 11 attacks and those who 'harbored' them — language that the executive branch has interpreted to cover not only al-Qaeda but its 'associated forces,' a term that appears nowhere in the statute and whose definition has been expanded administratively over time. The second legal basis is the international law right of self-defense, which the administration has argued permits strikes against imminent threats — though the 'imminence' standard was redefined in classified OLC opinions to mean that an individual posed a continuing threat even without evidence of a specific imminent attack. A partially redacted version of one such OLC memo, obtained through FOIA litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union, revealed an interpretation of 'imminent' that bore little relationship to the word's ordinary meaning.
The process by which individuals are placed on targeting lists has been described in general terms but never fully disclosed. The Obama administration established a process involving a Restricted Counterterrorism Security Group that reviewed nominations, a Deputies Committee of senior officials, and ultimately the president — who was reported to personally review and approve a list of targets. This process was described by administration officials as rigorous; critics noted that a secret executive process with no external review is not accountability. The 'disposition matrix' — a classified database of terrorist suspects and proposed responses — became public through reporting in 2012. The most controversial element of the targeting process is the use of 'signature strikes': authorizations to strike based on patterns of behavior — groups of military-age males in known militant areas behaving in ways consistent with militant activity — without confirmed identification of specific individuals. Signature strikes have been acknowledged to have occurred in Pakistan and Yemen, and represent the program's sharpest departure from conventional law-of-war requirements for positive identification.
The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen on September 30, 2011, was the most consequential single act of the drone program from a legal and constitutional standpoint. Al-Awlaki was an American citizen, born in New Mexico, who had become a prominent al-Qaeda propagandist and was believed by the Obama administration to have had an operational role in the 2009 Christmas Day underwear bomb plot. He was placed on a targeting list — a decision that was litigated unsuccessfully by his father before his death — and killed by a CIA drone strike. Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, also an American citizen who had traveled to Yemen to look for his father, was killed in a separate strike. Neither had been charged with a crime, tried, or convicted. No judicial review had approved their deaths. The government's position was that the executive branch's determination that they posed a threat to national security was sufficient legal basis to kill them. The Supreme Court has never adjudicated the question of whether the Fifth Amendment's due process guarantee applies to a citizen targeted for extrajudicial killing by their own government.
Why it matters
The drone program's most significant political consequence may be its effect on the cost-benefit calculus of military action. Drones dramatically reduce the human cost of lethal force for the country deploying them: no pilot is at risk, no ground troops are exposed, and the domestic political consequences of casualties are eliminated. This reduction in cost has historically correlated with increased willingness to use force. The risk is not that drone strikes are less precise than conventional bombing — they may be more precise — but that their low political cost incentivizes the use of force in situations where the strategic benefit does not justify the human cost and political blowback. The Stimson Center's Task Force on U.S. Drone Policy concluded in 2014 that the ease of drone strikes had led the United States to use lethal force 'too readily' and was undermining longer-term counterterrorism objectives by generating resentment and facilitating terrorist recruitment.
Civilian casualty counts have been a persistent area of dispute between the government and independent researchers. The Obama administration adopted a methodology for counting civilians that presumed any military-age male killed in a strike zone was a combatant unless there was specific intelligence indicating otherwise — a definitional choice that produced officially low civilian casualty numbers. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, tracking publicly available evidence from Pakistan alone, documented between 416 and 960 civilian deaths in 430 strikes between 2004 and 2018. A New York Times investigation in 2021 found that the Pentagon had systematically misrepresented civilian casualty rates from its air campaigns in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, finding in internal records widespread incidents where civilian deaths had not been investigated or were investigated and findings of error were suppressed. The practical accountability for civilian deaths in classified drone strikes has been minimal: the program with the most civilian deaths received the least judicial, congressional, and public scrutiny.
The drone precedent is being set for a world in which the United States is not the only country operating armed drones. China, Turkey, Iran, Israel, and a growing number of states now operate armed drone programs. The legal standards the United States has established — or declined to establish — for extrajudicial targeted killing outside declared war zones are the standards that other governments will cite when they begin conducting their own programs. A Chinese drone strike against a Uyghur dissident in a third country, justified by China's version of the 'associated forces' argument and its own disposition matrix, would face international condemnation that the United States would have significantly less standing to lead given its own record. The norms of armed conflict that took decades to build through the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, and international humanitarian law are being rewritten in real time by the drone programs of a handful of states, with the United States having written the first and most consequential chapter.
Congressional oversight of the drone program has been limited and largely ineffective. The program's dual CIA-military structure, combined with the classification of its legal basis, operational details, and casualty statistics, has made meaningful legislative oversight difficult. The Senate Intelligence Committee requested the full OLC memos authorizing the al-Awlaki killing and received a document described as a 'white paper' — a summary — rather than the actual legal opinions. The Senate Armed Services Committee has jurisdiction over JSOC operations but receives classified briefings that members cannot discuss publicly. No congressional authorization has been sought or obtained specifically for the targeted killing program. The Trump administration's 2020 killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani — a drone strike in Iraq that killed a senior official of a foreign government the United States was not at war with — produced a War Powers Resolution notice to Congress that declined to share the legal basis for the strike on national security grounds.