These numbers are just estimates culled from news stories, NGO reports, and rumors. Although people tend to notice several-thousand dead bodies, Barack Obama's administration still refuses to openly acknowledge that the CIA uses drone strikes anywhere other than Pakistan (and this was acknowledged only recently and grudgingly).
But though drone technologies enable the United States to reduce some of the costs of using lethal force inside the borders of other states, overreliance on drones may have potentially devastating costs of its own.
For one thing, overreliance on drones reflects a dangerous blurring of the boundaries between "war" and "non-war," with grave consequences for the rule of law. As I wrote in an earlier column, whether one regards drone strikes as lawful acts of war or as extrajudicial killings (murders, in plain English) depends wholly on how far one is willing to stretch the law of war in efforts to make it fit an increasingly unprecedented situation.
Defenders of the administration's increasing reliance on drone strikes outside "hot" battlefields assert that the law of war is applicable -- in any place and at any time -- with regard to any person the administration deems a combatant. Such an assertion wouldn't be troubling if the United States were in a conventional conflict with the uniformed forces of an enemy state. If that were the case, it would be fairly easy for journalists or moderately intrepid citizens to confirm the basic facts justifying government claims about the applicability of the law of war: The presence of thousands of uniformed troops shooting at one another is hard to misconstrue.
But outside Afghanistan, the United States is not in a conventional war. It's in an open-ended conflict with an inchoate, undefined adversary -- and administration assertions about who is a combatant and what constitutes a threat are entirely non-falsifiable because they're based wholly on undisclosed evidence.
In this murky context, it's facile to assert that the law of war "obviously" applies to all U.S. drone strikes and leave it at that. As I wrote on Aug. 29, that amounts, in practice, to a claim that the executive branch has the unreviewable power to kill anyone, anywhere, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely anonymous individuals.
Law exists to restrain untrammeled power. Sure, it's possible to make a plausible legal argument justifying each and every U.S. drone strike -- but this merely suggests that we're working with a legal framework that has begun to outlive its usefulness. The real question isn't whether U.S. drone strikes are "legal." The real question is: Do we really want to live in a world in which the U.S. government's justification for killing is so malleable?
Defenders of administration policy argue that these criticisms miss the mark because -- insiders insist -- executive branch officials go through an elaborate process in which they carefully consider every possible issue before determining that a drone strike is lawful. No doubt they do. But formal processes tend to further normalize once-exceptional activities -- and "trust us" is a pretty shaky foundation for the rule of law.
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