The Rhetoric of Perpetual Warfare: A Political Discourse Analysis of the Obama Administration’s Legitimation of U.S. Drone Strikes

Since 2002, the United States has engaged in a new form of warfare that is not fought by armies or navies but by pilotless aircraft able to conduct surveillance and direct missile strikes across the globe. To date, US military drones have launched hundreds of attacks against locations in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen (Bureau of Investigative Journalism 2016). During the Obama presidency, a program that began as a strategic alternative to direct military intervention became the dominant means of confronting imminent threats to national security before they came to fruition. Increased reliance upon this new technology has resulted in international criticism (IHRCRC 2012; Amnesty International 2013a). Using a theoretical framework based upon critical discourse analysis, I examine the discursive features employed by President Obama and his advising legal and counterterrorism staff to legitimate the use of drone missile strikes. Taking into account previous research on metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 2003), legitimation (van Leeuwen 2008; Reyes 2011), and temporal discourse (Dunmire 2011), I examine how the political discourse incorporates metaphorical conceptualizations that dehumanize, use fear to discourage regulation of drone strikes and create projections of the future that cast the drone program as an imperative to national security.