For example, a January 2018 strike in Yemen appears to have mistakenly targeted a 70-year-old farmer and his younger relative. Upon closer inspection, the rationale often crumbles. Drones are also used to conduct “signature strikes” based on vaguely defined, suspicious patterns of an individual’s behavior. government uses drones to target people on a “kill list” who the administration considers to be “high-value” targets and who may or may not be in an active war zone. has been engaged in armed conflict with, such as ISIS in Iraq and Syria and al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.īut beyond the context of armed conflict, the U.S. In post-9/11 war zones, drones have been used to target members of non-state organized armed groups that the U.S. If experts in the field disagree about how much money is even being spent on the drone program, we clearly do not have enough public information to have a substantive national debate. These discrepancies demonstrate the need for increased transparency. The Stimson Center assessed the administration’s request at $3.4 billion for drone procurement, research, development, testing, and evaluation. According to the Bard College Center for the Study of the Drone, the Department of Defense requested approximately $9.39 billion for drones and associated technologies in the fiscal year 2019 budget. Expert estimates differ on the annual cost of the program. Funding is spread across many different legislative line items and is often not clearly marked. The cost per flight hour varies by type of drone, but the larger armed systems such as the Global Hawk cost up to $18,591 per hour. How much do drones cost the United States? conducted drone strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. counterterrorism efforts since February 2021.įrom 2018 to 2020, the U.S. The Biden administration has yet to establish an official policy on drones, though it has been conducting a review of lethal U.S. drone program to the Department of Defense, the Trump administration reversed course by expanding CIA drone use. While the Obama administration took steps to transfer all authority for the U.S.
The CIA’s drone program remains largely secret.
military and the CIA use drones as part of conventional fighting in war zones as well as to conduct targeted killings of individuals they say are suspected of terrorism, and have done so both inside and outside of battlefields. How does the United States use drones?īoth the U.S. FCNL focuses primarily on the problem of lethal drone strikes and U.S. Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as “drones,” are remotely controlled aerial systems that are used to carry out lethal counterterrorism strikes as well as surveillance and other non-lethal operations.
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