The CIA Wants More Drones

With the Obama administration increasingly worried about terrorist activity in North Africa, and hotspots in Pakistan and Yemen showing no signs of cooling, drone-powered surveillance and strikes have grown in importance in the military’s arsenal. Now the CIA wants to get deeper into the game: CIA Director David Petraeus has requested the White House approve a proposal to expand the agency’s fleet of drones, which has stood at around 30-35 in recent years, by as many as 10 aircraft.

That’s a big deal because the CIA is nominally an intelligence agency, but over the past decade of the War on Terror has increasingly had the ability to carry out paramilitary attacks. The various branches of the U.S. military already have hundreds of drones capable of carrying out strikes, and according to the Washington Post, military officials have previously questioned the CIA’s expanding strike capability. But this time around, no senior officials have yet opposed the plan.

Meanwhile, the War on Terror shows no signs of abating. The White House is particularly concerned about al Qaeda’s spread into Africa, where the U.S. is stuck relying on disguised planes for surveillance. The U.S. would surely like to get more eyes in the sky, and the CIA’s expanded drone fleet could help in that regard.

From the Post’s report:

The administration has touted the collaboration between the CIA and the military in counterterrorism operations, contributing to a blurring of their traditional roles. In Yemen, the CIA routinely “borrows” the aircraft of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command to carry out strikes. The JSOC is increasingly engaged in activities that resemble espionage.

The CIA’s request for more drones indicates that Petraeus has become convinced that there are limits to those sharing arrangements and that the agency needs full control over a larger number of aircraft.

The U.S. military’s fleet dwarfs that of the CIA. A Pentagon report issued this year counted 246 Predators, Reapers and Global Hawks in the Air Force inventory alone, with hundreds of other remotely piloted aircraft distributed among the Army, the Navy and the Marines.

Petraeus, who had control of large portions of those fleets while serving as U.S. commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, has had to adjust to a different resource scale at the CIA, officials said. The agency’s budget has begun to tighten, after double-digit increases over much of the past decade.

In early 2011, President Obama nominated Petraeus to head the CIA, a pick that suggested approval of the CIA’s continued paramilitary role. With the CIA’s request for more drones, that role is becoming increasingly solidified. On one hand, it means that the U.S. has more flexibility in rapidly dealing with intelligence and can cover more ground worldwide. But at the same time, it means just one more growing arsenal in the U.S.’s unending drone war.