Why drones Fail summary

In ”Why Drones Fail”, published in Foreign Affairs, the author Audrey Kurth Cronin, Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, discuss and argues why she believes that drones aren’t a working strategy in the long-term for the U.S. in their war against terrorism. She examines if the unmanned aerial vehicle actually fulfill the three main goals that are in counterterrorism’s best interest. Firstly, Audrey discuss the strategic defeat of al Qaeda, where she mentions the fact that drone strikes might not be the most efficient way to defeat the 25-year old organization. For instance, she explains how they’ve only succeeded killing about 50-100 al Qaeda members with 350 drone strikes. She also mentions that in previous similar cases the most effective way of intruding a terrorist group, such as al Qaeda, has been to capture their leader and in that way finding out their plans, how they would proceed it and who would be involved. Audrey also points out that drones work best where group members and the general population can be easily separated, which is a difficulty in the areas where U.S. use their drones. Therefore, she believes that not killing civilians is inevitable. Secondly, Audrey investigates if the conflicts actually stay local, or if they in fact breed new enemies. She brings out that even though America use drones as an advanced strategy it may only make local insurgents to join harmless jihadist organizations to help attack the U.S. because of their eager for vengeance. She explains that according to different polls over the years it has been shown that there are barely any countries supporting drones as a strategy. According to her it’s shown that UK, India and the U.S. are the only nations seeing drones as an effective and useful strategy in the matter. So since neither Europe nor any Muslim majority country seem to support America’s biggest investment in the counterterrorism program at the time, they fear that they’ll soon have more enemies