Should Drones Are Not Be Used In Non-Active Combat Zone?

such as Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. These are sovereign territories which means the CIA violates the LoAC.
What of the distinctions between combatants and non-combatants? What about key principles of non-combatant immunity and discrimination in ius in bello? Principles which are “codified within the international law of armed conflict (Orend, 2006, p. 107). Drones fail the discrimination, threshold; in fact it blurs the line between who is an enemy and a civilian. Should drones even be used in non-active combat zones? International law clearly prohibits certain types of weapons for their indiscriminate nature of killings. Is the use of a drone proportionate to the threat posed? Although from a realist lens, governments would champion their
The US has killed “anonymous suspected militants who appear to be associated with terrorists based upon their observable activity” (Watson, 2007, p. 3). If indeed the CIA eliminated high value targets, the identities of those killed would have been revealed. At the moment, information on who has been killed and how many were of people were intended targets is shrouded in secrecy. Moreover, according to statistics from the TBIJ children have been killed in these drone strikes yet the US claims that they are Al-Shabaab terrorists. One chilling question is, who decides who a terrorist is and is not? What happens when civilians are killed based on faulty meta-data? Article 4 of the Geneva Convention stipulates that an individual must satisfy certain criteria to be termed as a lawful target. While little is known about all the signature strikes which have happened in Somali soil, it is highly unlikely that they all fall into the category of a lawful target or combatant (Watson, 2007, p. 3). Somalia posing as a distant threat to the United States does not justify its actions. Why use hellfire missiles when you are not at war with a country? US lacks the legitimacy to conduct a drone strike over the territory of Somalia, it is a violation of both national and international laws. Moreover, under the LoAC “the law of self-defense states to attack before they possess evidence of armed attack occurring”
The US drone program begun in “2004 as part of the War on Terror”. The initial goal of the of the program was the targeting of high value targets associated with the September 9/11 attacks. “The permission to use drones was given to the CIA by President Bush, with orders to act in anticipatory self-defense (Brunstetter & Braun, 2011, p. 9)”. A report by Amnesty international in 2013 held that, “Missiles fired from US drone aircraft have reportedly inflicted significant losses on the Taliban and other armed groups operating in northwest Pakistan”. However, according to data collected by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), “346 drone strikes were conducted between June 2004 and October 2012” with an approximated “death toll of 2,570–3,337 which indicated an average of 7.4 to 9.6 people killed per strike”. TBIJ informed that between “1,232 and 1,366 civilian Pakistanis” were injured in drone strikes (TJIB, September, 2012). Since 2006, the Pakistani government “publicly signaled its rejection of drone strikes as a violation of sovereignty” (Boyle, 2013 Pp. 14). In 2013, the newly elected “Pakistani Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, called for an immediate end to US drone strikes (Committee on International law, 2014, p.