Geopolitical Monitor
Last week, a UN investigator called on the Obama administration to
provide legal justification for its ever-expanding drone war in Yemen,
Somalia, and Pakistan. Of course, no such justification was forthcoming,
and the UN shouldn’t hold its breath for one given the fact that
unmanned drone strikes are widely supported across the American
electorate and carry very little direct political risk. But beyond the
high profile targets that have been successfully assassinated, there is a
more abstract indirect risk involved; one that threatens to drag out
the long war that birthed the drone program in the first place.
If we were to take a step back and observe the drone program from every possible angle with perfect objectivity and full knowledge, we could be absolutely positive of one thing: the results of our study wouldn’t matter. Unmanned drone attacks are simply too popular, too effective, and too easy for any American president to drastically scale them back. To do so would certainly imperil his position by opening him up to charges of being an overly-judicial softy who isn’t committed to keeping the country safe. Thus it should come as no surprise that the United States government is planning to expand its fleet of unmanned drones by around 30 percent over the next ten years. And given the fact that active soldiers will be scaled back from 570,000 to 490,000 over the same period, it seems that unmanned drones will be occupying an important position in US national defense strategy over the short to medium term.
