endthelie.com / By Madison Ruppert / July 2, 2013
(Image credit: Steve Rhodes/Flickr)
A new study conducted by a U.S. military adviser examining a year of drone strikes in Afghanistan has determined that drone strikes resulted in 10 times more civilian casualties than strikes carried out by manned aircraft.
This is especially interesting given theradically understated claims about the number of civilians killed by drone strikes made in the past and claims made by Obama himself.
The study also contradicts the claims made by Obama in a May speech in which he said that “conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage.”
The unclassified executive summary of the study states that drone strikes in Afghanistan were “an order of magnitude more likely to result in civilian casualties per engagement.”
That quite clearly and directly contradicts the government’s claims.
The study used classified military data on air strikes in Afghanistan from mid-2010 to mid-2011 which includes the civilian casualties caused by the strikes. This period included the most air strikes during the entire war in Afghanistan.
The study was co-authored by Larry Lewis, a principal research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded research and development center.
Lewis told the Guardian that missile strikes carried out by drones were a staggering 10 times more deadly to civilians in Afghanistan than air strikes conducted by fighter jets.
