The First Drone Strike

The reliance on drones--and the tendency to regard them as the default tool for taking out jihadi suspects on the battlefield--subsided in Obama's second term, in part because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were winding down, in part because the drones weren't having the dramatic effect that they seemed to promise. It turned out that killing a key terrorist or destroying a terrorist hangout--while sometimes fruitful and always tempting--has little impact on the course of the war. Al-Qaida had a seemingly endless line of No. 3–ranking officials to replace the ones just killed. And to the extent terrorist groups have been decimated on the battlefield, it's been due to a combination of conventional airstrikes and forces on the ground. And sometimes, in drone strikes, innocent people get killed, not because the Hellfire missile veers off course but because the intelligence was poor, the images were fuzzy, someone has made a mistake about who was (or wasn't) in the crosshairs. And when innocent people get killed, new terrorists--their husbands, cousins, fathers, sons, or neighbors--are often created.