United States' drone program: Analyzing its effectiveness through the lens of rational expectations

Abstract

The United States military, in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has drastically expanded its drone program as a key component of its counterterrorism strategy in the Middle East over the past decade. This paper seeks to contribute to previous literature that analyzes the effects of the United States' drone program on terrorist organizations, with the goal of gaining a better understanding of the effectiveness of the U.S.'s counterterrorism strategy as a whole. I adopt the explanatory theory of 'rational expectations' and hypothesize that the effects of drone strikes on terrorist organizations' operational output will diminish over time as terrorists become more resilient to such strikes by utilizing their rational expectations. I find no statistically significant relationship; as such, my hypotheses are not supported. I conclude by detailing the limitations of my data sources and recommend that future work employ the rational expectations theory to assess alternative measures of 'operational output' in order to yield more substantive results.