Civilian casualties Israel In March 2009,
The Guardian reported allegations that Israeli UAVs armed with missiles killed 48
Palestinian civilians in the
Gaza Strip, including two small children in a field and a group of women and girls in an otherwise empty street. In June,
Human Rights Watch investigated six UAV attacks that were reported to have resulted in civilian casualties and alleged that Israeli forces either failed to take all feasible precautions to verify that the targets were combatants or failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
United States Collateral damage of
civilians still takes place with drone combat, although some (like
John O. Brennan) have argued that it greatly reduces the likelihood. Although drones enable advanced tactical surveillance and up-to-the-minute data, flaws can become apparent. The U.S. drone program in Pakistan has killed several dozen civilians accidentally. An example is the operation in February 2010 near Khod, in
Uruzgan Province,
Afghanistan. Over ten civilians in a three-vehicle convoy travelling from
Daykundi Province were accidentally killed after a drone crew misidentified the civilians as hostile threats. A force of
Bell OH-58 Kiowa helicopters, who were attempting to protect ground troops fighting several kilometers away, fired
AGM-114 Hellfire missiles at the vehicles. In 2009, the
Brookings Institution reported that in the US-led
drone attacks in Pakistan, ten civilians died for every militant killed. A former ambassador of Pakistan said that American UAV attacks were turning Pakistani opinion against the United States. The website PakistanBodyCount.Org reported 1,065 civilian deaths between 2004 and 2010. According to a 2010 analysis by the
New America Foundation 114 UAV-based missile strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 killed between 830 and 1,210 individuals, around 550 to 850 of whom were militants. In October 2013, the Pakistani government revealed that since 2008 317 drone strikes had killed 2,160 Islamic militants and 67 civilians – far less than previous government and independent organization calculations. In July 2013, former Pentagon lawyer
Jeh Johnson said, on a panel at the
Aspen Institute's Security Forum, that he felt an emotional reaction upon reading
Nasser al-Awlaki's account of how his 16-year-old grandson was killed by a U.S. drone. In December 2013, a U.S. drone strike in
Radda, capital of Yemen's
Bayda province, killed members of a wedding party. The following February,
Human Rights Watch published a 28-page report reviewing the strike and its legality, among other things. Titled "A Wedding That Became A Funeral", the report concludes that some (but not necessarily all) of the casualties were civilians, not the intended regional
Al-Qaeda targets. The organization demanded US and Yemeni investigations into the attack. In its research, HRW "found no evidence that the individuals taking part in the wedding procession posed an imminent threat to life. In the absence of an armed conflict, killing them would be a violation of international human rights law."
Political effects As a new weapon, drones are having unforeseen political effects. Some scholars have argued that the extensive use of drones will undermine the popular legitimacy of local governments, which are blamed for permitting the strikes. On August 6, 2020, U.S. Senators
Rand Paul (R-KY),
Mike Lee (R-UT),
Chris Murphy (D-CT),
Chris Coons (D-DE), and
Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a bill to ban sales, transfers, and exports of large armed drones to countries outside of
NATO amid concerns that civilians were killed with American-made weapons used by Saudi Arabia and the UAE during the
Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen. Congress had previously passed a similar measure with bipartisan support, but failed to overcome President Donald Trump's veto.
Psychological effects Controllers can also experience psychological stress from the combat they are involved in. A few may even experience
posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There are some reports of drone pilots struggling with post traumatic stress disorder after they have killed civilians, especially children. Unlike bomber pilots, moreover, drone operators linger long after the explosives strike and see its effects on human bodies in stark detail. The intense training that US drone operators undergo "works to dehumanise the 'enemy' people below whilst glorifying and celebrating the killing process." Professor Shannon E. French, the director of the Center for Ethics and Excellence at
Case Western Reserve University and a former professor at the
U.S. Naval Academy, wonders if the PTSD may be rooted in a suspicion that something else was at stake. According to Professor French, the author of the 2003 book
The Code of the Warrior: If [I'm] in the field risking and taking a life, there's a sense that I'm putting
skin in the game ... I'm taking a risk so it feels more honorable. Someone who kills at a distance—it can make them doubt. Am I truly
honorable?The
Missile Technology Control Regime applies to UCAVs. On 28 October 2009,
United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions,
Philip Alston, presented a report to the Third Committee (social, humanitarian and cultural) of the
General Assembly arguing that the use of unmanned combat air vehicles for
targeted killings should be regarded as a breach of
international law unless the United States can demonstrate appropriate precautions and accountability mechanisms are in place. In June 2015, forty-five former US military personnel issued a joint appeal to pilots of aerial drones operating in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere urging them to refuse to fly and indicated that their missions "profoundly violate domestic and international laws." They noted that these drone attacks also undermine principles of human rights. Stanford's ‘Living Under Drones’ researchers, meanwhile, have shown that civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan are reluctant to help those hit by the first strikes because rescuers themselves have often been killed by follow-on drone strikes. Injured relatives in the rubble of the first strike have been known to tell their relatives not to help rescue them because of the frequency of these so-called ‘double-tap’ strikes. People also avoid gathering in groups in visible places. Many children are permanently kept indoors and often no longer attend school. They see them in the ordinary rhythms of their lives—with their wives and friends, with their children. War by remote control turns out to be intimate and disturbing. Pilots are sometimes shaken." This assessment is corroborated by a sensor operator's account: Back in the United States, a combination of "lower-class" status in the military, overwork, and psychological trauma may be taking a mental toll on drone pilots. These psychological, cultural and career issues appear to have led to a shortfall in USAF drone operators, which is seen as a "dead end job".
Stand-off attacks The "unmanned" aspect of armed UAVs has raised moral concerns about their use in combat and law enforcement contexts. Attacking humans with remote-controlled machines is even more abstract than the use of other "stand-off" weaponry, such as missiles, artillery, and aerial bombardment, possibly depersonalizing the decision to attack. By contrast, UAVs and other stand-off systems reduce casualties among the attackers.
Wrongful targeting There are only estimates of the magnitude of the errors in target selection. However, they do occur, and some of them become known. One fatal "error" happened in December 2023, when the
Nigerian army accidentally hit a village in
northwestern Nigeria, killing 85 civilians celebrating a Muslim festival. The army said they thought the people were rebels.
Autonomous attacks The picture is further complicated if the UAV can initiate an attack autonomously, without direct human involvement. Such UAVs could possibly react more quickly and without bias, but would lack human sensibility. According to Mark Gubrud, claims that drones can be hacked are overblown and misleading and moreover, drones are
more likely to be hacked if they're autonomous, because otherwise the human operator would take control: "Giving weapon systems autonomous capabilities is a good way to lose control of them, either due to a programming error, unanticipated circumstances, malfunction, or hack and then not be able to regain control short of blowing them up, hopefully before they've blown up too many other things and people." Others have argued that the technological possibility of autonomy should not obscure the continuing moral responsibilities humans have at every stage. There is an ongoing debate as to whether the attribution of moral responsibility can be apportioned appropriately under existing international humanitarian law, which is based on four principles: military necessity, distinction between military and civilian objects, prohibition of unnecessary suffering, and proportionality.
International regulation Under the framework of the
Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, states have discussed lethal autonomous weapon systems since 2014. In 2016, the treaty's states parties established an open-ended
Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems to continue those discussions. The discussions have addressed international humanitarian law, accountability, possible prohibitions and regulations, and the extent of human control required over AI-enabled weapons. == Public opinion ==