Drones

Sarah Kreps published Drones: What Everyone Needs to Know with Oxford University Press in 2016, mid-way through what was still being called the drone war. By then the United States had been running armed Predators and Reapers for more than a decade over Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Iraq; President Obama was two years from the end of a tenure that had made targeted killing the signature tool of American counterterrorism; and the policy conversation outside government had barely begun to catch up to the technology or the body count. Kreps joined that conversation from an unusual position for a scholar of security. She teaches at Cornell, where she holds a chair in government and law, and she served first as an officer in the United States Air Force before moving into academic work. She was already a familiar voice on the subject: her shorter 2014 primer, Drone Warfare, co-written with the philosopher John Kaag for Polity Press, had put her inside the small circle of academics who were trying to think clearly about the aircraft and its consequences at once.

The Oxford series she had agreed to write for — What Everyone Needs to Know — imposes a strict Q&A design. Each chapter is a sequence of questions a non-specialist might reasonably ask, each answered in a few hundred words of plain prose. Kreps’s volume reads like a careful briefing book: no polemic, no insider jargon, and no attempt to settle a debate the author knows is still open. The format pushes her toward observational writing even where a longer monograph would allow argument. The result is a book that will frustrate readers who want a verdict and reward those who want the shape of a problem.

The central argument, to the extent that the Q&A form permits one, is that the public discussion of drones is distorted by a confusion between the aircraft and the policy. “Drone” names a platform, not a strategy. The platform is a decades-old idea — remotely piloted aircraft date to the First World War — that only became decisive once sensor packages, satellite links and precision-guided munitions caught up to the airframe. The strategy is targeted killing at distance, which has its own history and its own set of consequences, most of which would be unchanged if the munition were delivered by a manned fighter or a special-forces team on the ground. Kreps keeps the two apart, chapter by chapter, so that the familiar objections to the drone war can be examined one at a time rather than argued as a bloc.

The book opens with definitions and a short technical history. Readers learn that the modern lineage runs from Israeli reconnaissance drones over Lebanon in the 1980s through DARPA and CIA experiments in the 1990s to the arming of the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator in late 2001 and the subsequent fielding of the heavier, better-sensored MQ-9 Reaper. Kreps distinguishes clearly between the tiers — the hand-launched RQ-11 Raven that an infantry squad throws into the air, the tactical Shadow operated at battalion level, the medium-altitude long-endurance Predator and Reaper that fly from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada by crews rotating twelve-hour shifts, and the high-altitude Global Hawk and stealthy RQ-170 Sentinel that gather intelligence from above sixty thousand feet. She notes the oddity that the Air Force had to be dragged into the Predator programme by a secretary of defense’s direct order; the service’s fighter community wanted nothing to do with uninhabited aircraft and the culture resisted them for years.

Having established what the hardware actually is, Kreps devotes a long section to how it has been used in combat and in what the US government terms “operations outside areas of active hostilities” — a phrase that does a great deal of legal work. She walks through the CIA campaign in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, which under Obama ran into the hundreds of strikes a year at its peak; the Yemen campaign that followed the merger of local Al-Qaeda franchises into AQAP; and the smaller sustained effort against al-Shabaab in Somalia. The 2011 strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, in Yemen is treated as a case study in the elasticity of executive authority rather than as an outrage, and Kreps lays out the Justice Department white paper’s three-part test — imminent threat, infeasibility of capture, compliance with the laws of war — without insisting the reader endorse it. She devotes separate space to the signature-strike doctrine, under which pattern-of-life analysis rather than named-individual intelligence could trigger a lethal engagement, and to the eventual tightening of the rules under the 2013 Presidential Policy Guidance.

She is similarly careful on the question of civilian casualties. The datasets — those maintained by the New America Foundation, the Long War Journal, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism — disagree sharply with one another and all of them disagree with the US government’s own figures. The methodological reasons are instructive and Kreps draws them out: ground-truth is nearly impossible in the areas being struck, Pakistani press reports mix militant and civilian in ways that reflect local political pressure, and the US government’s definition of “combatant” at one point counted all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants until proven otherwise. The point is not that the strikes are secretly worse or secretly better than one of the published counts; it is that any confident claim about the ratio is downstream of a definitional choice. The book treats this epistemic problem as fundamental, not as a distraction from a more important moral argument.

A substantial middle section examines the law. International humanitarian law — the body of treaty and custom that governs the conduct of armed conflict — permits targeting enemy combatants and incidental civilian harm proportionate to the military advantage sought. It does not, by itself, limit how the munition is delivered. The harder questions sit elsewhere. Is the United States in an armed conflict with Al-Qaeda in Pakistan at all, given that Pakistan is not a party to it? The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center, gave the executive branch very broad authority, and the Obama administration construed it broadly enough to reach groups that did not exist in 2001. Kreps traces the resulting controversy without reaching for a verdict. On human rights law, which applies outside armed conflict and requires that lethal force be used only against imminent threats, she sets out the critiques of successive UN special rapporteurs — Philip Alston, Christof Heyns, Ben Emmerson — and the US rebuttals in parallel columns.

Having given the current operator a long chapter, the book turns to the next ones. Proliferation is the section that has aged the most interestingly. In 2016, Kreps was writing just as China was beginning to export the Wing Loong and the CH-4 — crude copies of the Predator and Reaper respectively — to buyers that American export policy under the Missile Technology Control Regime excluded. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt all appear in her inventory of early Chinese customers; she notes the irony that an American export restriction designed to slow proliferation ended up ceding the market to a less restrained supplier, with no apparent gain in restraint. She discusses Iran’s Shahed and Mohajer lines, Turkey’s then-emerging Bayraktar programme, and Israel’s long experience as the second-largest drone exporter in the world after the United States. The predictions in this section are measured; Kreps does not forecast the Nagorno-Karabakh war of 2020 or the industrial scale of first-person-view drone warfare in Ukraine, but she sets out the vectors along which proliferation was moving and the chapter remains legible against what actually followed.

The final movement of the book turns away from weapons entirely. Half the chapters discuss civilian and commercial applications: Amazon’s Prime Air announcement, which was then two years old; the Federal Aviation Administration’s long struggle to produce a regulatory framework for small unmanned aircraft that would permit beyond-visual-line-of-sight operation; the use of fixed-wing drones in precision agriculture; the Hollywood exemption that allowed film crews to use multirotors long before most other commercial uses were permitted; the humanitarian deployments in Nepal after the 2015 earthquake and in the Democratic Republic of Congo by the UN peacekeeping mission; the journalism applications, which Kreps treats sympathetically; and the privacy questions raised by domestic law-enforcement use, which were already live in Washington State and North Dakota. The civilian material is denser and more sympathetic than a reader expecting a book on war might anticipate, and it reflects a judgement that runs through the whole volume: that the drone is a dual-use technology whose consequences are inseparable from the institutions that deploy it.

The academic reception was substantial for a general-audience book. It was adopted widely in undergraduate security-studies courses and in military professional education, where its measured tone and absence of advocacy made it unusually portable across the political spectrum. Reviewers commended the breadth and the discipline with which Kreps declined to editorialise; they also noted, with varying degrees of sympathy, that the Q&A form shortchanges some of the harder normative arguments. Audrey Kurth Cronin, Daniel Byman and Peter Bergen have each written books that cover overlapping ground more polemically — Byman defending the strikes as effective counterterrorism, Bergen cataloguing the Obama programme in depth, Cronin treating the broader diffusion of lethal technology to non-state actors as a strategic problem of its own. Kreps’s book sits as the balanced reference between them. Her own subsequent work turned toward the demand side of the drone war: her research on public opinion, published with Sarah Maxey and others, developed the finding that armed drones measurably reduce the political cost of using force and therefore make force more likely at the margins. That empirical argument sharpened in the years after this book; readers coming to Drones for the first time should know that Kreps’s own view has grown somewhat more worried since.

Where the book sits in the field is as the briefing a reader should give themselves before taking sides. It pairs naturally with Peter Singer’s Wired for War, which is older but broader in its treatment of military robotics and more enthusiastic about the technology; with Hugh Gusterson’s Drone: Remote Control Warfare, which is anthropological and more sceptical; and with Grégoire Chamayou’s Drone Theory, a philosophical polemic against the whole enterprise and the opposite of Kreps in temperament. Analysts of the Ukrainian drone war have moved far past the hardware she describes, and the serious conversation about autonomy and artificial intelligence in weapons systems, which was still inchoate in 2016, has since produced its own literature. Kreps’s volume does not reach into that literature, and a reader following the subject now will want to supplement it with newer work on loitering munitions, swarming, and the policy debates around autonomous target selection.

The parts of the book likely to age well are its handling of the law, its treatment of the civilian–military dual-use problem, and its insistence on separating the platform from the policy. Those framings are durable, and policymakers still argue about them in the terms Kreps laid out. The parts already dated are the hardware specifics — a decade of Russian electronic warfare, Ukrainian first-person-view strikes, Turkish Bayraktar exports and Chinese commercial-drone dominance has produced a world the book does not describe — and some of the proliferation predictions, which were cautious where the actual trajectory turned out to be sharp. For a reader who wants a disciplined entry point to the subject and is willing to update the technical details from more recent reporting, the book remains a useful foundation. For a reader looking for a verdict on whether to approve or condemn drone warfare, it was never going to deliver one, and it does not.