Drone Strikes Effective for Counterterrorism, but Not Counterinsurgency

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As a tool against counterinsurgency, air strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles have limited effectiveness–but there’s reason to think that drone strikes “might achieve their objectives in a more narrowly circumscribed counterterrorism” campaign, concludes a paper published in September by the Strategic Studies Institute.

According to Fierce Homeland Security, the paper, authored by University of North Carolina-Charlotte political scientist James Walsh on an Army grant, notes that drone strikes are intended as a selective form of violence that targets insurgents but spares civilians from harm.

Drone strike effectiveness is both difficult to assess and hotly debated. Independent databases tracking strikes and casualties from open sources estimate the ratio of militant to civilian deaths ranging anywhere from more than 26:1 to about 4:1. Compared to other types of force, the proportion of civilian victims is similar or lower, Walsh says.

Critics, however, say that drone strikes backfire against the United States, since civilian deaths caused by drones can “create powerful grievances against the United States” to such a degree that insurgent political gains could outweigh the harm inflicted by successful targeted killings.

There’s also the question of whether killing insurgent leaders works – as a strategy it’s known as decapitation. Quantitative studies that have attempted to answer those questions using open source data have found no consistent relationship between civilian deaths in drone strikes and terrorist violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Walsh says. Terrorist attacks are an imperfect way of measuring insurgency capacity, Walsh writes, since the ability to execute terrorist attacks doesn’t necessarily reflect an ability to carry out military attacks. A greater number of terrorist attacks could even be a sign of a weakening insurgency shifting to softer targets.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

Those studies also don’t address the core U.S. counterterrorism goal of disrupting and degrading al Qaeda, he adds. There is a good reason why open source analyses avoid that topic: It is difficult to obtain reliable information about al Qaeda’s activities and plots. Studies use terrorist attacks in northwest Asia as a proxy, but the ability to undertake terrorist attacks there “may be only weakly related to the strength of al Qaeda.”

Drones also can operate in areas where the United States or the local national government can’t (or won’t) send ground troops – allowing the United States to project power in a place it otherwise wouldn’t. The case for strikes in those areas still isn’t straightforward, however, since Walsh notes that human intelligence gathering can be difficult there, meaning that drones “might occasionally hit the wrong targets or kill civilians.”

Rapidly shifting local alliances might also lead to strikes against groups that don’t favor actively opposing the United States, due to the difficulty of distinguishing between militants based on their exterior characteristics. Doing so could lead at-odds militant groups to actually cooperate, an outcome Walsh says is consistent with analysis finding that civilian deaths in drone strikes are unrelated to subsequent terrorist attacks, but that militant deaths in drone strikes are associated with increases in terrorist attacks in Pakistan.