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Effective but Insufficient: Drone Strikes in Counterterrorism

Posted: November 13th, 2016

By Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Price

Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Price, Ph.D, is the Director of the Combating Terrorism Center and an Academy Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of the U.S. Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. Government.

“Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?”

That was the question posed by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to his staff in 2003. If answering this question has proven difficult in the 13 years since, it is because evaluating individual counterterrorism tools such as drone strikes, one of the defining features of U.S. counterterrorism efforts during this period (and quite possibly the most controversial), is extremely difficult.

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