Drone strikes have become a key part of America’s strategy against terrorist and militant organizations around the world. They can silently observe a group or individual for hours on end and take immediate action, all without risking the life of an American pilot. This combination of capabilities has helped to decimate the leadership of al-Qaeda and disrupt the activities of many other militant groups.
But drone warfare also raises questions about moral legitimacy and the limits to the use of force. While the public hears a lot about drone strikes from political leaders and the media, we know very little about how the public forms their own judgments. To fill this gap, we conducted a new survey experiment on the morality of drone strikes, led by Paul Lushenko, a doctoral student at the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy Tech Policy Institute and a General Andrew Jackson Goodpaster Scholar.
Our study showed that variation in how a strike is used and governed shapes perceptions of its legitimacy. Americans and French citizens perceive different patterns of drone strikes as more or less legitimate, with the strongest perceptions occurring when a strike is used strategically, with multilateral constraint, and is invariant of whether it kills civilians. These findings have important implications for how countries use drones going forward. For example, in order to sustain the legitimacy of a military use of drones, it is crucial for officials to understand how the public is forming its judgments and to provide more transparency on the decision-making process.