War reporting has been a near-constant feature of armed conflicts from the early 20th century onward. This journalistic coverage of war has served a number of uses over the course of its existence: From propaganda for the purposes of recruitment and fostering political support for the war effort, to informing a civilian populace of potential impending risks and even critically examining the conduct of different involved parties. This practice has likewise undergone many permutations throughout the years. Where newspapers used to print grainy posed portraits of soldiers and armaments a safe distance from the frontlines, we now have live satellite footage filmed directly from fighter planes or reporters embedded with troops on the ground. But combat drones don’t seem to enjoy the same media presence conventional forces do. Footage recorded by surveillance drones is sometimes publicized, as in the case of the aftermath of the recent US operation against the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but actual footage of combat drones in action remains scarce.
This can in part be explained by the semi-official status drones held for a long time. As described in an earlier post, armed drones came to be not only as weapons of war, but equally if not more so as means of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. Accordingly, within the context of the so-called War on Terror, a large number of lethal drone strikes are committed outside of active warzones, with Pakistan being the most affected countries. It was not, however until early 2012 that the US government officially admitted to conducting a drone program in some areas of the country. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, more than 300 drone strikes, with a potential body count in the thousands, were conducted by the United States in Pakistan between 2004 and January 2012. Even today, the US government remains largely tight-lipped about drone operations in Pakistan. Donald Trump recently cancelled a short-lived executive order, enacted in 2016, that obligated the US government to file an annual report on casualties of US drone strikes outside of “areas of active hostilities”.
Without a clear limitation of use and with legal and ethical issues still being discussed at home and abroad, it stands to reason that official sources aren’t as eager to publicize drone strikes as they were bombings during the Gulf War.
This, however, complicates the work done by journalists who track the US’ ongoing drone war significantly more difficult. The above-mentioned Bureau of Investigative Journalism maintains one of the most comprehensive databases of US drone strikes. The organization details the difficulties of chronicling a phenomenon, which spans many years and countries and on which official sources are scarce. In this task, a variety of sources is essential. In warzones there are oftentimes official figures on executed operations and sometimes confirmed casualties. Furthermore, a large number of local and international media sources and in some cases even communiqués by targeted groups are analyzed. A common problem with many of these sources is, however, unreliability. Government sources usually don’t include strikes committed by Special Forces or the CIA and the Bureau reports cases in which the Yemeni government took credit for airstrikes, which it likely didn’t have the capacity to execute. Some local media sources have shown bias in the reporting of drone- and air strikes and even between reliable sources oftentimes discrepancies in reporting can arise.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is not the only organization struggling to document the ongoing irregular war that is waged using drones, but its effort signals a serious problem in the journalistic reporting of asymmetrical wars. The goal of journalism, to foster a well-informed public, which can in turn participate in determining public policy seems to be somewhat out of reach, if the obstacles to find reliable information on a government’s combat operations become bigger and bigger. Drone strikes aren’t invisible, thanks to the work of journalists around the globe, but they seem to exist in a space marked by near-constant uncertainty and large degrees of deniability.
Ex Machina 