SARAH DWIDER For the past two weeks, War News Radio has been speaking with a number of experts about drone strikes in the Middle East.  Each of these experts left us with some provocative ideas for the future of unmanned warfare.

STUART RUSSELL Journalist and author Tara McKelvey – who specializes in covering security issues – sees the recent success of covert operations like drone strikes as an indicator that they will increase in the future.

BISGAARD-CHURCH The Waziristan region of Pakistan, at the northwest border with Afghanistan, is currently one of the world’s least accessible locations for foreign journalists.  The area, a Taliban stronghold where the powerful Haqqani network as well as al Qaeda members are rumored to reside, is home to the most intense air strike campaign currently waged by the United States. It is a campaign fought not with humans flying planes, but with unmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly known as drones.  With so much action, it has frustratingly little on-the-ground reporting.

MCKELVEY It’s our job as journalists to cover the war, but in this particular instance, we can’t.

BISGAARD-CHURCH That was Tara McKelvey, a journalist and author who covers security issues, explaining the difficulty of reporting on drone warfare.  The U.S. military currently carries out drone strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, while the CIA wages covert, publicly unrecognized attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.  Due to the CIA’s secrecy, there are constant questions and a lack of information surrounding the controversy of drone strikes.  Some groups have tried to quantify the attacks, though.  The New America Foundation — a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute — estimates that 20% of the casualties caused by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004 were non-militants.  This statistic has been disputed, however — the overall void in information makes a full analysis of the situation all the harder.

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