A/HRC/44/38 (c) Deniability. As drones can be operated at long range and clandestinely, their use is both easy to deny and more difficult to attribute. Furthermore, drones often look alike, having a similar design, range and lethal capability. The very same make and model may be deployed by States and non-State actors operating in the same geographical area; (d) Effectiveness. Drones offer an unprecedentedly asymmetrical advantage in favour of their deployer, promising limited damage to nothing but the intended target and posing little-to-no risk of direct damage to the initiator;28 (e) Acceptability. Drone technologies are perceived as largely “bloodless, painless and odourless” 29 and thus as the guarantors of a (more) virtuous war by providing “the technical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary, actualize violence from a distance with virtually no casualties”;30 (f) Political gain. As a number of drone strikes have demonstrated, a country’s ability to take out big-name targets without suffering any casualties is a political gain for the Government in power, even though it may not see military victory in the longer term. 14. These characteristics, however, individually and collectively, raise troubling moral and human rights questions and, just as importantly, spin dangerous myths. D. Myth of the surgical strike 15. Military officials and others have argued that drones enable the most surgical of strikes; that drones’ persistent overwatch capabilities offer clear military advantages; that drones’ greater endurance results in detailed situational intelligence; and that heightened accuracy comes with far fewer collateral casualties. But these assertions are not all supported by evidence. Far more casualties are attributable to drone strikes than has been acknowledged.31 16. The intelligence-gathering and complex coordination required across teams, agencies and countries, the diffusion of commands over visuals and other factors increase the risk of inaccuracy in use, if not in actual misuse, of drone technology. In practice, the potential for human error and therefore of imparting imperfect instructions to a drone is far higher than is usually acknowledged.32 17. In so-called personality33 or signature strikes,34 a major problem exists at the moment of identifying targets. While personality strikes may be based on intelligence gathered by various State agencies regarding specific individuals, signature strikes, immensely problematic, are based on defining characteristics associated with terrorists (e.g., making bombs or carrying weapons) and on metadata such as gender and age.35 Both kinds of strikes rely on often complex networks of informers and analysts and on information that is commonly convoluted and speculative. Mistakes are inevitable. 18. Furthermore, even when a drone (eventually) strikes its intended target, accurately and “successfully”, the evidence shows that frequently many more people die, sometimes because of multiple strikes. Those casualties may well amount to violations of international 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 6 Arthur Holland Michel and James Rogers, “Drone warfare: distant targets and remote killings”. www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/ISEC_a_00257#fn28. James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment-Network, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2009), pp. 241–244. Counting civilian deaths or collateral casualties can suggest that the intended targets were deprived of their lives legitimately. This is not the case, as highlighted below. Nevertheless, the focus here is on the killings of those who were not the targets of drone strikes. Interviews with Lawrence Lewis and James Rogers, March 2020. It has been alleged that low-level foot soldiers who possess no leadership roles are also targeted. Interview with Camilla Molyneux and Aditi Gupta, March 2020. Kevin Jon Heller, “‘One hell of a killing machine’: signature strikes and international law”, Journal of International Criminal Justice, vol. 11, No. 1 (March 2013), pp. 89–119. The author found that a significant number of United States signature strikes violated international humanitarian law. https://wilpf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/sex-and-drone-strikes.pdf.