Most importantly, the Pakistani Taliban and Afghan Taliban have reportedly made an agreement to unite their forces to fight not against the Pakistani government but to overthrow the pro-U.S. government in Afghanistan.2 The Taliban alliance will be emboldened by the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014 and will doubtless widen their operations inside Afghanistan. As the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies try to carve out sanctuaries in Afghanistan, drone strikes will increasingly be necessary to keep them from openly gathering and exerting authority à la the FATA model.
The withdrawal of the majority of U.S. troops in Afghanistan will also bolster support for al Qaeda in the FATA. The need for counterterrorism-counterinsurgency personality strikes in this de facto Taliban statelet will be greater than ever. Pakistani major general Shafiq Ahmed has presciently stated, “If America wants to stay in Afghanistan, or safeguard its interests in case of a proposed pull-out [from Afghanistan], it has to tame North Waziristan.”3 This will certainly mean a continuation of signature-strike attacks on Taliban foot soldiers as well.
The drones will also play a key role in keeping up the pressure on AQAP in Yemen and al Shabab in Somalia. The new Yemeni president, Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, has condoned the strikes against the terrorists and insurgents who took advantage of the turmoil following the 2011 downfall of the Saleh government to carve out sanctuaries in the remote Abyan Province. In 2012 there were forty-two strikes in Yemen, almost as many as in Pakistan that year (forty-six).4 And in Somalia, U.S. special operations troops and drones are increasingly being used both to raid Shabab militants and to monitor pirates who have seized Western captives.
Libya provides an example of future uses for drones. As mentioned previously, in 2011 there were more drone strikes in Libya during the overthrow of Gaddafi than there were in Pakistan. The Global Post described this Libyan campaign as the model for future drone campaigns: “The death [of Gaddafi] is the latest victory for a new American approach to war: few if any troops on the ground and the heavy use of air power, including drones.”5 Regarding the drawbacks of conventional warfare, as opposed to drone campaigns, Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, “The lessons of the big wars are obvious. The cost in blood and treasure is immense, and the outcome is unforeseeable. Public support at home is declining toward rock bottom. And the people you’ve come to liberate come to resent your presence.”6
The drone-centric alternative to “big wars” dovetails with the Pentagon’s and CIA’s long-term plans for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations in the Islamic world and beyond. Former CIA official Bruce Riedel has said of Obama’s plans, “This administration has made a very conscious decision that it wants to get out of large conventional warfare solutions and wants to emphasize counterterrorism and a lighter footprint on the ground.”7 Obama has said that the U.S. military of the future will focus on “intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, counterterrorism, countering weapons of mass destruction, and the ability to operate in environments where adversaries try to deny us access.”8 All these tasks can be done by drones. As Vice President Joe Biden put it in the October 2012 vice presidential debate, “We don’t need more M1 tanks, what we need is more UAVs.”9
Although the recent economic crunch has led to huge cuts in the U.S. military’s budget (the Pentagon is making $487 billion in cuts over ten years, eliminating at least eight brigades, and reducing the size of the active army from 570,000 to 490,000 troops), the Pentagon is set to increase its drone combat air patrols from sixty-one to eighty-five. It has called for a 30 percent increase in the drone fleet in coming years.10 This represents a shift from big bloody wars, like the invasion of Iraq, which cost more than $1 trillion and forty-five hundred American lives, to the aerial campaign in Libya, which cost just more than $1 billion and no U.S. lives.
In addition to bases in Turkey, Sicily, Afghanistan, and (potentially once again) Pakistan, drones will be launched from forward staging bases that some advisers are calling “lily pad bases.” These bases include those currently found in Camp Lemonier, Djibouti, and Arba Minch, Ethiopia.11 Similar new bases may be built in Jordan and Turkey to help monitor Iraq and in the Seychelles Islands of the eastern coast of Africa to hunt Somali pirates.12 President Obama also authorized the building of a new secret drone base in the Rub al Khali Desert in eastern Saudi Arabia to carry out strikes on AQAP.13 In response to the takeover of northern Mali by extremists from Ansar Dine, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and allied Tuareg rebels in the winter of 2012–2013, the president called for the creation of a drone base in Niamey, the capital of neighboring Niger.14 Obama’s most recent defense budget calls for funding for the construction of an “afloat forward staging base,” that is, a launching pad for drones and special operations units that can be sailed around the world to potential hot spots.15 This base could park offshore and send CIA or JSOC drones into nearby countries to kill targets without having to ask the local government for permission.
The U.S. intelligence community keeps its plans more secret than the military, but these drone basing trends certainly reflect the CIA’s drone future as well. In fact, their drones have already flown from lily pad bases in Ethiopia, Djibouti, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps elsewhere. The CIA division that controls the drones, the Counterterrorism Center, has grown from three hundred employees to two thousand since 9/11 and now represents about 10 percent of the agency’s workforce.16 Thus the CIA, which once focused more on espionage, will doubtless continue to carry out is counterterrorism drone operations in all the previously described contexts.
THE DRONE REVOLUTION
Whether one supports the drone strikes or is opposed to them, there is no doubt that drones are here to stay. A few facts about drones will make their permanence abundantly clear:
■ In 2000 the United States had just fifty drones. Today almost one in three U.S. warplanes is a drone. That translates to approximately 7,500 drones in the U.S. fleet. The majority of them (5,346) are Ravens, a small hand-launched surveillance drone used by the army.17 Nearly every brigade that fought in Iraq or Afghanistan had a Raven for “look down” or “overwatch” surveillance purposes.
■ In October 2012 the CIA asked the White House for ten more drones to add to its already existing fleet of as many as thirty-five. There has been discussion of deploying these additional drones in North Africa against al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, against militants in post-Gaddafi Libya, and in the vast expanses of northern Mali that were briefly conquered by al Qaeda–linked militants in the winter of 2012–2013.18
■ Since 2005 patrols by drones have increased 1,200 percent.19
■ The Air Force trained more drone pilots in 2011 than regular pilots.20 More than half of all undergraduate pilot training graduates are assigned to pilot drones rather than manned aircraft.21 Since 2008 the number of Air Force drone pilots has grown fourfold to eighteen hundred.22