UAV / UCAV - Drohnen

[Quintus Fabius]

Ein Blick auf die Drohnenkriegsführung - aus der Sicht des Feindes:

https://tnsr.org/2022/01/were-drone-stri...documents/

Conclusion and Implications

Debates among policymakers and scholars have yielded very different claims regarding how drone strikes might have affected the quality of al-Qaeda’s personnel, its organizational efficiency and control, and its safe haven in the FATA. This study evaluated these claims through the systematic analysis of internal correspondence between al-Qaeda’s senior leaders. This section reviews the study’s findings and examines the implications they have for policy and scholarship.

In sum, this study found that drone strikes were an effective instrument against al-Qaeda, but were perhaps not as effective nor as decisive as the most assured accounts claim. Drone strikes depleted al-Qaeda’s talent pool — particularly its external operations branch — and eventually slowed the group’s organizational processes, while steadily degrading its safe haven in the FATA. Although the temporal scope of the available archival materials only allows me to evaluate these changes up to May 2011, there is little evidence to suggest that these observed trends reversed after bin Laden’s death.206 And yet, even as drone strikes reached their peak, al-Qaeda was still able to orchestrate rather complex organizational tasks. This suggests at least a portion of its internal control remained intact even as the group faced significant operational challenges.

The significance of these findings rests on their broader applicability, as the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan is only a single instance of a fairly ubiquitous approach to counter-terrorism. The replicability of the drone campaign’s outcome depends on whether factors that facilitated its limited success will be present in future counter-terrorism campaigns. On the one hand, al-Qaeda’s combination of bucreacratic and decentralized organizational structures and practices rendered the group difficult to succesfuly degrade.207 On the other hand, the U.S. prioritization of defeating al-Qaeda during the period examined in this study may mean that this campaign was unusually well resourced.208 Future instances of lethal targeting against less organizationally robust adversaries may thus achieve more impressive results, just as dedicating fewer resources to future campaigns could limit prospects for success.209 With this in mind, one can draw broader implications from this single case, with the caveat that future work may find that variations in these and other contextual factors render it a somewhat idiosyncratic instance of middling results.

First, this study suggests that, in the aggregate, lethal targeting can yield favorable outcomes. Nowhere in any of al-Qaeda’s documents does the group reference the counterproductive effects that many pessimistic accounts claimed the drone strikes produced. This implies that the United States, its allies, and its partners can effectively employ targeted strikes against terrorist groups as an alternative to the large-scale deployment of ground forces to clear, hold, and restore local governance to territory held by transnational terrorists or local insurgents harboring them.

Second, the still modest results of the U.S. drone campaign may mean that future campaigns of this type will imperfectly contain or limit the reach of a terrorist group, not eliminate it outright. Despite having been the target of a considerable amount of counter-terrorism pressure, al-Qaeda’s senior leaders have remained active and influential.210 U.S. policymakers should thus anticipate incomplete and even impermanent results from future campaigns and should augment lethal targeting with ancillary instruments, including bilateral and multilateral law enforcement cooperation and efforts to limit terrorist groups’ access to financial resources.

Third, the results of future targeting campaigns may be slow to emerge. U.S. drone strikes did not yield an immediate, asymmetric effect on al-Qaeda’s ability to operate. Rather, the payoff from U.S. strikes generally rose as they increased in frequency. It took years of sustained pressure for al-Qaeda to begin reflecting on many of the detrimental effects that drones were having on its organizational capabilities and processes. The required time and resources needed to produce a similar outcome could increase as terrorist groups develop and share lessons learned in countering drones or as they rely more heavily on regional affiliates.211

Renewed U.S. emphasis on interstate competition has made small-footprint approaches to countering terrorist groups more attractive. The U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan presents one viable approach, although it is one that neither quickly nor comprehensively degraded al-Qaeda. Relying heavily on lethal targeting to contain future terrorist threats will likely achieve similarly real, but imperfect, results. U.S. policymakers would do well not just to understand these limitations, but to also consider the broader range of complementary counter-terrorism instruments they have at their disposal.