Drone strikes have become a centerpiece of American military strategy in recent years, delivering ten times more lethal attacks than the conventional bombers and jet fighters used in the past. Despite their immense military efficiency, drones have also brought unprecedented moral challenges, including the potential for “blowback”: civilian casualties that can fuel anti-American sentiment and contribute to recruitment to terrorist and insurgent groups.
To study how public perceptions of drones’ moral legitimacy are shaped, I ran a survey experiment with 555 Americans on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of five scenarios, including a control scenario and four experimental scenarios with different combinations of how countries use drone warfare and how they constrain their strikes.
Each experimental scenario presented a real-world case in which Country A conducted a drone strike in Country B, which resulted in one civilian casualty. I then asked participants four to five questions on their evaluation of the scenario.
I found that the public’s evaluation of a strike’s moral legitimacy is not reducible to either its use or how it is constrained. Instead, the way that both factors interact with each other creates a complex constellation of moral norms that varies between different types of strikes.
For example, the experiment shows that people tend to perceive a country’s strikes as more morally legitimate when it uses drones strategically with multilateral constraint (group two). This pattern suggests that a higher level of external oversight – in the form of regional or international security institutions imposing targeting protocols on a country’s use of drones – seems to enable the public to meld its considerations of soldiers’ battlefield courage and civilian protection.
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