The death of Iran’s most powerful general in a drone strike ordered by US President Donald Trump has highlighted the enormous scale and technical complexity of the US drone war. It also raises new questions about high-tech assassinations and their effectiveness in changing the course of a conflict.

To understand how drone strikes work, we need to look at some details about the January 3 killing of Major General Qassem Soleimani. He was commander of the Quds Force, which is part of the Iranian military and not a non-state group like the Islamic State or al-Qaeda. The US designated Quds as a terrorist organization in 2007.

Soleimani arrived at Baghdad airport shortly after midnight. He left the airport terminal after being greeted by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of a pro-Iranian Iraqi militia. According to local media reports and military sources in Washington, two cars were waiting outside. As they drove off, they were hit by 100-pound Hellfire missiles fired from MQ9 Reaper drones flying high overhead.

The cars exploded and turned into fireballs that reduced Solimani, al-Muhandis and eight of their helpers to ashes.

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The U.S. Air Force officer who pressed the launch button and killed Solimani was sitting in front of a bank of computer screens at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, nearly 12,000 kilometers from Baghdad, U.S. military sources said.

For years, most American drones in the skies over conflict zones have been “flown” via satellite links from Creech, which, according to an Air Force Profile is “the home base of remotely piloted aircraft systems that fly missions around the globe.”

While the drones, officially known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are physically based at bases in the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and Africa, they are controlled from the United States, where pilots deeply reject comparisons to video gamers. They face no physical risks, but a 2013 Pentagon report study found that pilots of drone aircraft are exposed to stress of the same intensity as pilots of manned aircraft.

Details of Soleimani’s travel schedule, precise enough to be coordinated with a drone strike, come from US intelligence agents and days of aerial surveillance of his activities. Why the American president ordered his death is disputed. Trump and other members of the US administration have given varying reasons for the attack. Skeptical lawmakers have demanded evidence that Soleimani poses an imminent threat.

Deadly effect

The American campaign to remotely kill people on an enemy list began in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

A few weeks later, the US military succeeded in equipping Predator drones, which had previously only been used for surveillance purposes, with Hellfire missiles. The first attempt to use the new weapon failed on October 7: the missiles missed a convoy carrying the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar.

Despite the failure, the era of armed drones had begun, and a legal distinction between “assassination” and “targeted killing” soon followed. The former was explicitly prohibited by a series of executive orders, the last of which was issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and is still in effect.

“No person employed by or acting on behalf of the Government of the United States shall participate in or conspire to commit murder,” the command says.

After 9/11, government lawyers invented a definition that circumvented the murder ban. The new term “targeted killings” referred to cases of self-defense against imminent threats.

There is no definition of the term “imminent,” and critics compare the term “targeted killing” to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the term used to circumvent the ban on torture.

The idea of ​​lethal measures without endangering American lives appealed to former US President Barack Obama, who was a law professor before entering politics.

In his eight years in office, Obama gave the green light for 563 drone strikes, after According to the London-based Bureau of Investigation Journalism. Under his predecessor, George W. Bush, there were 57. The number of civilians killed is in the hundreds – “collateral damage” in military jargon. Although Trump supports drone strikes, military experts agree that they are less common than under Obama.

Proliferation of drones

In the 19 years between the failed drone assassination of Mullah Mohammed Omar and the death of Soleimani, drones became a central part of the American arsenal. The production and use of drones exploded: by the end of the 1990s there were dozens. In 2014, specialized websites counted more than 10,000 drones.

The growth was so rapid that, according to then-Air Force Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz, in 2011 the Air Force was training more drone pilots than bomber and fighter pilots.

Unmanned aircraft come in a wide range of sizes and ranges, from drones no bigger than those civilians fly for weekend fun with their kids to the Global Hawk, a massive long-range reconnaissance aircraft with a wingspan larger than a Boeing 737.

The rapid proliferation of drones in the US military prompted other countries – friends and enemies alike – to launch their own drone programs. According to a report According to a study published last year by the Center for the Study of Drones at New York’s Bard College, 95 countries now operate military drones.

This includes Iran, which attacked oil processing facilities in Saudi Arabia last September with a swarm of 18 drones and several missiles. The attack on the state-owned oil company Aramco temporarily paralyzed oil production at the world’s largest processing company and reduced global oil supplies by five percent.

Dan Gettinger, director of the center, noticed that the proliferation of drones around the world “will have significant implications for the future of armed conflict.” It remains to be seen what those implications will be and to what extent other countries will follow the U.S. lead and use their drones to kill opponents.