Read the Report – Over the past fifteen years, the United States has increasingly used drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as tools of foreign policy. Since the Bureau of Investigative Journalism began tracking U.S. drone activity in 2002, the U.S. government has authorized approximately 574 drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, and since January 2015, at least 404 additional drone strikes in Afghanistan. This increased use of drones has received support from senior decision makers, and has also been met with high approval ratings from the U.S. public. A February 2013 Gallup poll, for example, reported that 65 percent of Americans agreed with the U.S. government’s decision to launch drone strikes against terrorists overseas. In the same month, 75 percent of respondents to a Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll approved of the U.S. military’s use of drones to carry out attacks overseas on targets deemed a “threat to the United States.” And in May 2015, a Pew public opinion poll reported that 58 percent of U.S. adults approved of the use of drones to carry out missile strikes against extremists in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia: a 2 percent increase from the same Pew poll of February 2013.
What is driving U.S. public support for drones? Despite the large number of opinion polls available – there is very little known about the reasoning behind U.S. public preferences for unmanned air strikes, how strong these preferences are, and in what situations the American public would prefer unmanned over manned air strikes. There are two reasons for this.
First, the formulation of questions in current surveys fails to compare the use of drones to other options available to decision makers. Second, they rarely, if ever, explore why the public holds this preference. For example, a Pew Research Center survey question of February 10, 2013, asked respondents: “Do you approve or disapprove of the United States conducting missile strikes from pilotless aircraft called drones to target extremists in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia?” The CBS News Poll of February 6, 2013, asked: “Do you favor or oppose the United States using unmanned aircraft or drones to carry out bombing attacks against suspected terrorists in foreign countries?” In neither case do these binary formulations help in understanding how the U.S. public perceives the use of these weapons, or how the U.S. public views UAVs in comparison to other weapons available. As a result, existing polling data may simply be capturing American opinions about air strikes delivered from any platform, rather than gauging preferences for unmanned air strikes specifically.
So how does taking the human out of the conflict affect what the American public views as acceptable uses of force? Under what circumstances does the American public favor the use of unmanned over manned aircraft? And is it true that the U.S. public is more likely to support the use of force generally when drone strikes are an option?
We designed a survey with seven experimental scenarios and a series of survey questions in order to understand the circumstances under which the American public favored unmanned air strikes, manned air strikes, either platform, or no strikes. This experimental design allowed respondents to make choices among different platforms, and also provided individuals with the option to explain their reasoning. Our results revealed a much more nuanced set of opinions on the use of force than is generally conveyed in existing surveys. Our findings also shed light on political and demographic divides that characterize this debate. These divides have significant implications for domestic support for the future use of U.S. military force overseas.
An online survey of a representative sample of 2,148 U.S. citizens age 18 or older was conducted through Survey Sampling International on November 5–6, 2015. Survey respondents were given a set of demographic questions, followed by a randomized selection of seven scenarios that each introduced different policy trade-offs, a series of current policy preference questions, and three knowledge questions about UAVs. When possible, answer order and question order was randomized to avoid introducing systematic bias.
