Obama Says Drone Strikes Significantly Less Damaging Than Ground Operations

US President Barack Obama claims that US drone airstrikes cause considerably less casualties among civilian population than conventional ground operations.

 

WASHINGTON, January 23 (Sputnik) — US drone airstrikes cause considerably less casualties among civilian population than conventional ground operations, US President Barack Obama said during his interview with YouTube stars at the White House on Thursday.

“Any kind of war is damaging, any kind of war results in casualties, and in fact the sort of damage that may have taken place with a drone strike is always significantly less than if I ordered a raid into a village where a high value terrorist target was,” Obama said.

Obama noted, however, that occasionally mistakes have been made during drone airstrikes that led to innocent people deaths. “Nobody grieves over this more than I do,” he said.

The US president underscored that as new technologies develop, the United States has “to make sure that we step back and say, do we have a legal framework and a set of controls on it.”

“Today’s technologies can enable us to defend ourselves causing less damage to those communities than in the past,” Obama concluded.

According to the UK human rights organization Reprieve’s report issued in November 2014, US drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen may have killed 1,147 civilians in error during attempts to kill 41 militants between 2002 and 2014.