Analysis: no, President Obama, drones kill more civilians than pilots do
On April 8, at the University of Chicago Law School, US President Barack Obama responded to a criticism of his use of armed drones.
“What I can say with great certainty is that the rate of civilian casualties in any drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that occur in conventional war,” he said.
Obama’s assertion that drones result in fewer civilian casualties than other weapons is a long-standing, and thus far unquestioned, argument for his administration’s defence of drone strikes. As former Secretary of Defence Robert Gates declared in 2013:“You can far more easily limit collateral damage with a drone than you can with a bomb, even a precision-guided munition, off an airplane.” The year prior, former CIA Director Leon Panetta claimed, “I think this is one of the most precise weapons that we have in our arsenal.” And as far back as 2010, Harold Koh, State Department legal advisor at the time, stated that drones “have helped to make our targeting even more precise.”
But the Obama administration’s assumption that drones cause less collateral damage than piloted aircraft is simply untrue: according to the best publicly available evidence, drone strikes in non-battlefield settings - Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia - result in 35 times more civilian fatalities than airstrikes by manned weapons systems in conventional battlefields, such as Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
Since the anti-Islamic State air campaign began in August 2014, coalition airstrikes totaling 41,697 have killed approximately 577 civilians, or one civilian per 72 bombs dropped. Naturally, there are disagreements among reporters, human rights organisations, and US government officials about civilian deaths. While the US Air Force reports total airstrikes, estimated civilian fatalities are based on the combined average of two sources: the US Defense Department, which acknowledges the death of only 35 civilians (and 25,000 Islamic State fighters), and the nonprofit research group Airwars, which claims 1,118 civilian fatalities and bases its estimates on numerous monitoring groups. Although some of these airstrikes are conducted using drones, the vast majority are not: In Iraq and Syria, 93 per cent of all US bombs have been dropped by manned aircraft.
In Afghanistan, between when Obama entered office in January 2009 and the end of last year, 24,848 bombs had killed 1,214 civilians, or one civilian per 21 bombs dropped. Again, the US Air Force provides a count for bombs dropped, while the civilian fatality estimates are released biannually by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. As in Iraq and Syria, drone strikes only made up a small percentage of all airstrikes in Afghanistan: 7 per cent, according to data released by the Air Force in 2013.