261 Javier Jordán Drone attacks campaign in Yemen (COIN) since the outset of military aviation. The British used this against the Kurdish rebels in Iraq, just after the First World War, and again in Somalia and Waziristan in the 1920’s. During the rest of the last century, it was used in most of the COIN campaigns. Air resources provided great fire power in just a few minutes. This offers a competitive advantage to the conventional troops that are compelled, in order to effectively control the company, to disperse themselves into small outposts and patrols. But having recourse to air strikes (in general, we are not yet referring to the particular case of Yemen) is not exempt from problems. In June 2009, General McChrystal, who was the head of the United States forces and ISAF in Afghanistan at that time, stated that “air power contains the seeds of our own destruction if we do not utilise it responsibly”. McChrystal was alluding to the civilian victims that the air strikes were causing in supporting their ground troops in areas close to villages and towns.51 The counter-productive nature of the bombings, from the COIN viewpoint, when they lead to the deaths of a large number of non-combatants, has been empirically recorded in other historical cases: for example, in the Vietnam war.52 As is well-known, gaining the local population’s support constitutes a fundamental goal in any counter-insurgent strategy.53 But, obvious that this may seem, it is not an easy problem to resolve. On the ground, the troops very often need the degree of superiority that the air arsenal offers them, and at the same time, these forces usually operate in relatively populated settings. The drones offer advantages in this respect. They can fly for prolonged time spells over their potential targets, carrying high-resolution intelligence equipment and using guided munitions, features that make them more suitable than manned fighter planes, when it comes to carrying out precision strikes. However, the difficulty in distinguishing combatants and non-combatants, when they are mingled in together and they have similar appearances, the fact that some militant leaders of Ansar Al Sharia live with the (extended) families and the intelligence errors that can be minimised, but not wholly eradicated in a war context (let’s recall the concept of the “fog of war” of Clausewitz), have the consequence that the drone strikes in Yemen have also caused civilian deaths, in some cases, the elderly, women and children. The target of one of the erroneous attacks that attracted greatest media attention was a lorry occupied by fourteen people, on September 2, 2012. Amongst the dead passengers there was a women and two children. The intention of the strike was to finish off Abdelrauf Al Dahab, an AQAP leader who was supposedly travelling along the same road. As a protest, the tribal leaders tried to take the corpses to the presiden- 51 Motlagh, Jason, “U.S. to limit air power in Afghanistan”, The Washington Times, June 24, 2009. 52 Kocher, Matthew Adam, Pepinsky, Thomas B. & Kalyva, Stathis N., “Aerial Bombing and Counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War”, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 55, Issue 2, (2011), pp. 201–218, 53 Kilcullen, David, “Counterinsurgency Redux”, Survival, Vol. 48, No. 4, (2006/2007), pp. 111– 130.
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