US drone strikes more deadly to Afghan civilians than manned aircraft – adviser | World news | guardian.co.uk
▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/02/us-drone-strikes-afghan-civilians
Larry Lewis, a principal research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, a research group with close ties to the US military, studied air strikes in Afghanistan from mid-2010 to mid-2011, using classified military data on the strikes and the civilian casualties they caused. Lewis told the Guardian he found that the missile strikes conducted by remotely piloted aircraft, commonly known as drones, were 10 times more deadly to Afghan civilians than those performed by fighter jets.
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[Sarah] Holewinski [of the non-governmental organization Center for Civilians in Conflict] said the disparity reflected greater training by fighter pilots in avoiding civilian casualties.
“These findings show us that it’s not about the technology, it’s about how the technology is used,” said Holewinski. “Drones aren’t magically better at avoiding civilians than fighter jets. When pilots flying jets were given clear directives and training on civilian protection, they were able to lower civilian casualty rates.”
Yet the demand for additional drone strikes by commanders in the war zone creates pressure to reduce training, Holewinski and Lewis note.
“Adding or improving training on civilian casualty prevention is a resource decision in direct tension with the increasing demand for more UAS [unmanned aerial systems] and more operations, since additional training on civilian protection means time must be taken from somewhere else including the mission itself,” Lewis and Holewinski write in their Prism article.
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