Secret government documents leaked to the public on Thursday detail the United States’s escalating reliance on drones — and warn that they can be counter-productive and cause a staggering civilian toll.

The cache of documents from an unidentified intelligence official was published by The Intercept and appear to complicate the Obama administration’s narrative about the country’s ongoing military involvement around the world.

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The documents were published the same day the White House is expected to announce a continued presence in Afghanistan that will leave American forces in the country beyond his tenure in the White House.

“It’s a very slick, efficient way to conduct the war, without having to have the massive ground invasion mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan,” the source told the news outlet. “But at this point, they have become so addicted to this machine, to this way of doing business, that it seems like it’s going to become harder and harder to pull them away from it the longer they’re allowed to continue operating in this way.”

Among other conclusions, the documents appear to indicate that unintended casualties of drone strikes sometimes far outweigh those of the intended targets. In one five-month period, for instance, just one in 10 people killed in airstrikes was the declared target.

The Obama administration has often boasted about the minimal number of civilians killed during drone strikes, but it has tended to consider unidentified people near or associating with identified targets to be suspected terrorists.

People killed in targeted strikes who were not specifically targeted by the attacks are nonetheless labeled “enemies killed in action,” the documents show.

Additionally, the military has faced “critical shortfalls” in the technology and ability to find suspected terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, the documents assert, showing limits to U.S. intelligence resources.

The documents cover the years 2011 through 2013, when President Obama released for the first time a set of guidelines and standards to cover drone warfare.

“America does not take strikes when we have the ability to capture individual terrorists. Our preference is always to detain, interrogate and prosecute,” Obama said in a speech at National Defense University at the time.

“To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties — not just in our cities at home and our facilities abroad, but also in the very places like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu where terrorists seek a foothold,” he added. “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 drone strikes.

“So doing nothing is not an option.”

On Thursday, a senior administration official pointed back to that speech and said that the guidelines enacted then “remain in effect today.”

— This report was updated at 9:38 a.m.