In this op-ed, Azmia Magane explores President Barack Obama's legacy of drone warfare.

In February, Newsweek reported that great numbers of young people worldwide ages 15 to 21 cited “terrorism” and “violent extremism” as their biggest concerns, followed by continued warfare.

These are valid and legitimate concerns: The United States has been involved in wars for more than half of its existence. Despite this long history, President Barack Obama was the first president in history to be at war every single day of both of his terms.

Obama inherited President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” that began in 2001, after the horrific 9/11 attacks and included the invasion of Afghanistan and the war on Iraq in 2003. By the time Obama took office, many agreed that the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary; in 2004, the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, had declared the U.S.-led war on Iraq as breaking the UN charter and illegal. In fact, a report by the United Kingdom released in 2016 showed that both the American and U.K. governments were given intelligence reports that cautioned war with Iraq could cause massive instability, societal collapse, and could actually worsen terrorism, and that they were aware of this before making the decision to go to war. Yet both George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair proceeded.

Obama continued — and expanded upon — the Bush administration’s catastrophe. In 2013, an Iraqi refugee filed a motion in U.S. courts against President Bush and his administration's architects of the war for the consequences that she and her family suffered as result of the Iraqi invasion. In response, the Obama administration filed a petition to grant Bush and his administration immunity against all civil and criminal charges related to the war in Iraq — less than a week before Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for exposing war crimes in Iraq. (She has since been released in May, after receiving a commutation from Obama before he left office.) And in February 2017, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Bush and his executive branch "were entitled to official immunity."

While Obama’s warfare methodology focused on eliminating the presence of American ground troops in foreign countries, it did nothing to eliminate American interventions or wars altogether. His attempts at reducing “boots on the ground” (and thus American casualties) led to an increased reliance on airstrikes, some say.

Under Obama — in 2016 alone — the United States bombed seven countries: Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, with a total of 26,172 bombs dropped, according to a report from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Although Bush was the first to use drones, authorizing nearly 50 drone strikes, Obama expanded drone warfare, launching at least 10 times as many drone strikes as his predecessor.

Drones are unmanned – but not unpiloted – and used in lieu of traditionally manned/piloted aircraft. U.S. officials often praise drone strikes as having “surgical” precision, but data shows otherwise: Drone warfare is killing civilians — even outside of war zones.

In defense of killing people outside of war zones, the U.S. has cited the Bush-era Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) Act, a 2001 authorization that gives the president the automatic congressional go-ahead to use force against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, such as Al Qaeda or the Taliban. The AUMF was also cited by the Obama administration as justification to unilaterally initiate warfare in other countries without formal congressional approval for each individual strike.