“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.
While it is impossible to definitively answer Rumsfeld’s question, we can, and should, examine some of the effects of drone strikes since they remain an imperfect yet necessary tool in the current counterterrorism fight.
On the positive side of the ledger, drone strikes have removed scores of senior terrorists from the battlefield, including top officials from al Qaeda, its affiliates, and the Islamic State. Replacing foot soldiers is relatively easy, but replacing experienced senior leaders is hard and disruptive to these organizations. Examples include al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) former leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi in 2015 and former Taliban head Akhtar Mansoor in May of this year.
Research shows that removing the top leader from such an organization makes the group more susceptible to organizational death than non-decapitated groups, and doing it in the first year of a group’s existence makes it statistically eight times less likely to survive. We also know from declassified letters written by terrorism’s most notorious leader, Osama bin Laden, that drone strikes significantly altered how al Qaeda operated and communicated.
Removing group members with special skills, like charismatic propagandists such as AQAP’s Anwar al-Awlaki and the Islamic State’s Minister of Media, Abu Muhammad al-Furqan, or highly competent finance officials such as al Qaeda’s Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, takes an additional toll. After seven men who had ascended to the No. 3 position in al Qaeda were killed by drone strikes in the decade following 9/11, some in terrorism circles joked that being third in the al Qaeda hierarchy was the world’s most dangerous job.
Drone strikes force terrorist groups to expend precious resources to protect and onboard new leaders, resources that might otherwise go towards plotting and executing attacks. They inject uncertainty and paranoia into the network. Groups start to question their means of communication, and more importantly, each other. They can create internal fissions over leadership succession that divide otherwise cohesive organizations. Additionally, drones have dramatically extended the reach of U.S. counterterrorism efforts in remote areas of failed or failing states that are inaccessible or inhospitable to U.S. forces, such as Yemen, Syria, and Somalia.
Drone strikes are cheaper in terms of both American blood and treasure, especially when weighed against alternatives, such as deploying large numbers of U.S. ground troops, or relying on host nation forces that are sometimes unwilling, incapable, or both. And although there have been tragic cases involving noncombatant deaths, drone strikes are as close to a precision weapon system as anything in our kinetic counterterrorism arsenal.
Because of those advantages, and the fact that drone strikes provide tangible evidence that our government is doing something against terrorists, it’s human nature for policymakers to see drone warfare as the proverbial “easy button.” A 2015 Pew poll showed that 58 percent of Americans support drone strikes, including a majority of Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Only 35 percent disapproved. Thus, for a number of reasons, the siren song of drones is undeniably attractive for policymakers. But it would be a mistake to view them as a panacea. If we are lulled into making drones strikes the centerpiece of our counterterrorism strategy, then we will be less apt to invest in other counterterrorism capacities that are better suited for long-term strategic success.
On the negative side of the ledger, drone strikes are, on their own, incapable of defeating terrorist groups. In fact, as presaged by Rumsfeld’s larger question, at some level drone strikes may help to perpetuate terrorism by motivating fence-sitters to radicalize and join the jihad. At the very least, regardless of the level of collateral damage, they provide terrorist propagandists with abundant fodder to promote the violent jihadi narrative of Muslims under attack by the West.
Drones have played an important role in preventing another spectacular attack on the homeland after 9/11, but it is unwise to think our enemies will not adapt. There are also geographic constraints on where they can be employed. While drone strikes are effective tools in the ungoverned FATA in Pakistan or the lawless regions of Yemen and Somalia, they are clearly less so against cells operating in Brussels or Paris.
Finally, the United States’ virtual monopoly on weaponized drones is nearing an end. Inspired by our success, our enemies are already employing weaponized drones against us. Last month, the Islamic State used a drone to kill two Peshmerga fighters and wound two French soldiers. As noted in a recent report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, it’s not a question of if terrorists will conduct a drone attack against the U.S. homeland, but when.
In trying to answer the question Rumsfeld posed in 2003, I’m reminded of a sign that hung in General David Petraeus’s tactical operations center in northern Iraq: “Will this operation take more bad guys off the street than it creates by the way it’s conducted?” I like to think of it as counterterrorism’s version of the Hippocratic oath. With that in mind, drones strikes, as evaluated today, are an imperfect yet necessary tool in the counterterrorism fight.
They put relentless pressure on terrorists all over the globe, and they provide time and space for other non-kinetic counterterrorism efforts to work over the long-term. The danger comes in when we mistake drones (either in theory or in practice) as the whole strategy.
So, barring the development of an even more surgical means of eliminating our enemies, drone strikes will remain a flawed but necessary tool in the fight against terrorism, right up until the time we determine the costs outweigh the benefits.
