Here's another reason to worry about the U.S. overreliance on drone strikes: Other states -- and ultimately, nonstate actors -- will follow America's example, and the results won't be pretty.
Right now, the United States has a decided technological advantage when it comes to armed drones, but that won't last long. The country should use this window to advance a robust legal and normative framework that will help protect against abuses by those states whose leaders can rarely be trusted. Right now, the country is doing the exact opposite: Instead of articulating norms about transparency and accountability, the United States is effectively handing China, Russia, and every other repressive state a playbook for how to get away with murder.
Consider Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev's Russia, in which the life expectancy of dissidents, inquisitive journalists, and unwanted political rivals is already quite short. At the moment, the Russian government at least feels constrained to disclaim responsibility when a troublesome citizen is conveniently murdered. But with the United States putting forward an infinitely flexible interpretation of the law of war, why should Russia bother to cover its tracks in the future?
Far simpler just to shrug off the next dissident's death (whether by drone strike in Chechnya or radioactive sushi in London) with a dignified news release. The dead "dissident"? A combatant in Russia's war with terrorists. The evidence? That's classified, but all actions taken are lawful and subject to a rigorous internal Kremlin review process. You got a problem with that? To quote Obama, "There are classified issues, and a lot of what you read in the press … isn't always accurate.… My most sacred duty … is to keep the … people safe."
Here's one final reason to worry about drone technologies: They enable a "short-term fix" approach to counterterrorism, one that relies excessively on eliminating specific individuals deemed to be a threat, without much discussion of whether this strategy is likely to produce long-term security gains.
Drone strikes -- lawful or not, justifiable or not -- sow fear among the "guilty" and the innocent alike. What impact will they ultimately have on the stability of those societies? To what degree -- especially as we reach further and further down the terrorist food chain -- are we actually creating new grievances? As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked during the Iraq war, are we creating terrorists faster than we kill them? And will our increasing use of cross-border strikes have an impact on global stability, undoing fragile post-World War II bargains about sovereignty and the use of force?
As far as I can tell, none of these questions is being discussed within the Obama administration in any structured or systematic way. Meanwhile, U.S. reliance on drone strikes continues to increase. And because so much about U.S. drone strikes is classified, it's almost impossible for journalists, regional experts, human rights groups, or the general public to weigh in with informed views.
There's nothing preordained about how we use new technologies, but by lowering the perceived costs of using lethal force, drone technologies enable a particularly invidious sort of mission creep. When covert killings are the rare exception, they don't pose a fundamental challenge to the legal, moral, and political framework in which we live. But when covert killings become a routine and ubiquitous tool of U.S. foreign policy, everything is up for grabs.
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