Keep those drones flying

President Barack Obama has taken a lot of heat over America’s targeting of terrorists overseas with lethal drone strikes. Critics argue that the secret CIA-run program provokes political backlash in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, outweighing the value of the terrorists killed. That the attacks too often go awry and inadvertently kill innocents. That there’s no effective oversight. And that Obama hasn’t given Congress sufficient legal rationale for the aerial strikes.

Those complaints include kernels of validity but often have been exaggerated. Drone attacks also have eliminated many sworn enemies of this country without risking U.S. lives on the ground or in the air.

Obama on Thursday answered his critics with a full-throated defense of drones:

“To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties-not just in our cities at home and facilities abroad, but also in the very places-like Sanaa and Kabul and Mogadishu-where terrorists seek a foothold,” Obama said. “Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from [U.S.] drone strikes.”

He’s right. The drone campaign has been extremely and surgically effective, targeting militants across Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and parts of Africa. It has killed wide swaths of al-Qaida leadership.

But the president also has suggested that he thinks the program has shortcomings. That’s why Obama administration officials have indicated that the drone strike program will be narrowed and subjected to greater scrutiny.

Bottom line: This speech wasn’t some dramatic new statement of policy.

The United States risks losing the advantage of surprise if individual drone strikes become entangled in slow-motion bureaucracy back home.We fear U.S. warriors will shrink from what in effect are battlefield decisions because they have one eye on Congress, or judges, or some other overseer who is not their commander-in-chief.

We don’t want drone operators hoping their targeted terrorist will stay put in Pakistan while judges in Washington debate whether it’s appropriate to fire the missile. Nor, we imagine, would the president.