This post is about the U.S. drone war. While no discussion of the drone war lately failed to include Mr. Obama, as either a hero or a villain, here I just look at the data and avoid making any judgement about the President.
Analyzed here are data from 2013 and 2014 regarding total and civilian casualties. As I show below, the drone program is remarkably good in avoiding civilian casualties of late and has removed a significant number of combatants in the global war on terror. While there have been allegations about whether or not many of the reported combatants killed were actually active combatants, most articles are long on outrage and supposition and short on facts. Those data are not included in this post.
First a little background. Since retiring, I get curious about things. Sometime last year it was web crawlers. In digging about for information on web crawlers, I came upon an article about an iPhone App, called Metadata+, that crawled news feeds and captured reports of US drone strikes throughout the world. It captures the data and then sends a notification to your phone. I loaded the App on my phone and iPad.
When the notification of the first strike of 2015 reached my phone, I found myself wondering how many people were killed by drones last year. Doing it the hard way, I compiled a list of all of the reported strikes from Metadata+ (see below) and totaled the numbers. This method showed 292 people killed, a bigger number than I would have anticipated. After this I found myself wondering about civilian casualties. Now, I could have gone to the trouble of going through all of the media reports and independently compiling my own data but I discovered two organizations that were already doing that.
Analyzed here are data from 2013 and 2014 regarding total and civilian casualties. As I show below, the drone program is remarkably good in avoiding civilian casualties of late and has removed a significant number of combatants in the global war on terror. While there have been allegations about whether or not many of the reported combatants killed were actually active combatants, most articles are long on outrage and supposition and short on facts. Those data are not included in this post.
First a little background. Since retiring, I get curious about things. Sometime last year it was web crawlers. In digging about for information on web crawlers, I came upon an article about an iPhone App, called Metadata+, that crawled news feeds and captured reports of US drone strikes throughout the world. It captures the data and then sends a notification to your phone. I loaded the App on my phone and iPad.
When the notification of the first strike of 2015 reached my phone, I found myself wondering how many people were killed by drones last year. Doing it the hard way, I compiled a list of all of the reported strikes from Metadata+ (see below) and totaled the numbers. This method showed 292 people killed, a bigger number than I would have anticipated. After this I found myself wondering about civilian casualties. Now, I could have gone to the trouble of going through all of the media reports and independently compiling my own data but I discovered two organizations that were already doing that.
When I first saw the 292 number, I estimated 10-30% civilian deaths. Even using the high end of the estimate, civilian fatalities amount to only 3.77%. Of course we don't know what percentage of the wounded are civilians so the 3.77 value may understate the civilian impact. Still, less than 4% civilian deaths is pretty impressive, to me, considering that we are dealing with high explosives.
While I list all of the data below, the major reason I wrote this post was to see how I felt about the drone war. After review, I conclude that we are using targeted assassination by drone to impact our enemies in the global war on terror and that the program has little civilian impact last year. All in all, it looks like a very effective program to me. It also appears that we have gotten more careful since the percentage of civilian deaths for 2014 is substantially lower than for 2013.
Data follows.
The total number of persons killed in the drone war for 2014 was 292 per the Metadata App. I have verified the data by finding media reports for nearly every strike. The vast majority of the media data listed below is from The Foundation For Defense of Democracies (FDD). The FDD news media data was the easiest to find and correlates well with the Metadata+ App data. At various times during the year I also spot-checked the Metadata+ App's data against media reports and satisfied myself that it tracked the media reports.
It should be noted that the FDD organization is very supportive of the global war on Terror and the drone war and represents one political view . That does not make their data incorrect but it needs to be disclosed. At this time their organization has not reported a summary of civilian casualties for 2014.
Another organization, UK-based "The Bureau of Investigative Journalism" (TBIJ), an organization opposed to the drone war and likely the global war on terror, has summarized the reported data for both total casualties and civilian casualties for 2014. For 2014 they report a total number of fatalities of 206-319 vs Metadata+'s reported value of 292. They also report 4-11 civilian fatalities for 2014. They also are reporting 125-266 wounded for the year.
Using the TBIJ's reporting (Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia Data), the totals for 2013 had about 10% civilian casualties (171-294 total with 17-30 civilian deaths). It is apparent that we either were more attentive to collateral damage in 2014 or we got incredibly lucky.
Data from the Metadata+ App Follows:
6 Jan, 2014 2 injured by a drone strike in Yemen
8 Jan, 2014 2 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link1) (News link2)
15 Jan, 2014 1 farmer killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
23 Jan, 2014 5 killed by a drone strike in Wadi Abeeda, Yemen (News link)
26 Jan, 2014 2 killed by a drone strike in Somalia (News link)
3 Mar, 2014 3 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
3 Mar, 2014 1 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
3 Mar, 2014 2 killed by a drone strike in Shabwa, Yemen (News link)
5 Mar, 2014 3 killed by a drone strike in al Jawf, Yemen (News link)
10 Mar, 2014 2 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
12 Mar, 2014 2 killed by a drone strike in Jebel Jame, Yemen (News link)
1 Apr, 2014 3 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
19 Apr, 2014 15 killed by a drone strike in Yemen, including 3 collateral? (News link)
20 Apr, 2014 25 killed by 3 drone strikes in Yemen including 3 civilians (News link) (News link2)
20 Apr, 2014 5 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link1) (News link2)
12 May, 2014 6 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link1) (News link2)
4 Jun, 2014 3 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
11 Jun, 2014 6 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
12 Jun, 2014 10 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan plus 4 injured (News link)
14 Jun, 2014 5 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
18 Jun, 2014 6 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
10 Jul, 2014 6 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link1) (News link2)
16 Jul, 2014 15 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
19 Jul, 2014 15 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
6 Aug, 2014 5 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
9 Aug, 2014 3 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
16 Aug, 2014 3 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link1) (News link2)
1 Sep, 2014 8 killed by a drone strike in Somalia (News link)
11 Sep, 2014 4 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
24 Sep, 2014 10 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
26 Sep, 2014 3 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
28 Sep, 2014 4 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
5 Oct, 2014 5 killed by a drone strike in the Shawal Valley, Pakistan plus 3 wounded (News link)
6 Oct, 2014 8 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan plus 6 wounded (News link)
7 Oct, 2014 6 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
7 Oct, 2014 4 killed by a drone strike in Kundser, Pakistan (News link)
8 Oct, 2014 2 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
9 Oct, 2014 3 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
11 Oct, 2014 4 killed by a drone strike in Khyber, Pakistan (News link)
11 Oct, 2014 2 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
15 Oct, 2014 4 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
24 Oct, 2014 3 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
30 Oct, 2014 5 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
4 Nov, 2014 10 killed by a drone strike in Radaa, Yemen (News link1) (News link2)
5 Nov, 2014 5 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
6 Nov, 2014 2 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
11 Nov, 2014 4-7 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
12 Nov, 2014 7 killed by a drone strike in Yemen (News link)
20 Nov, 2014 6 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
26 Nov, 2014 8 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link)
7 Dec, 2014 4 killed by a drone strike in Pakistan (News link1) (News link2)
20 Dec, 2014 5 killed by a drone strike in Data Khel, Pakistan (News link)
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