talking about the burgeoning drone industry and the use of drone s unmanned aircraft to fire missiles in theaters. pam, you had an interesting question during the break. yeah, i was just curious. you know, what are the economics of drones. who s making their money off of these things? there are now 40 countries opening their own drone programs. i think right now, it s about a $6 billion a year industry. but it s projected to grow up to $06 billion in drone trams. and the joke that president obama made two years ago at the white house correspondence center, it reminded me of the famous george w. bush joke where he was looking for weapons of mass destruction under the table and couldn t find them. to me, having covered these wars and seeing the impact on both
and all americans need to be discussing how these drones need to affect their lives. and we need to set some rules to make sure we don t get in the model that we have of the nuclear path. what legal action can the human rights community take? you ve done some of the most important work on gone tan moe? what legal action can they take? and is the end game to shut the program down? oh, michael, we ll be here all week if you want to know what legal actions we re bringing. and i d love to go into it. but what we d love to do is not shut any program down. i m interested in us having an open discussion with the facts. when the c.i.a. wheezeles the way they did in that clip, then you re not getting the true facts. that s what we want from government first, but from some of these cormss, as well.
class smith live from d.c. let me get your take on this conversation because you said in the beginning you broadly support this strategy. and it is hard to first of all, in order to have the debate on the policy, which we re not having at all, if you look at the videos and you shake the hands of the people that we are killing or innocent and then conclude that that s worth it, that s one thing. but we re not even in that step. do you think the cost is worth it? is it your feeling about the approach? i think the cost is exceedingly high. more than boots on the ground or drones in the air, the idea that we re going ah to have civilian collateral cost is a constant. war is an ugly, ugly thing.
but then you have the military drone program where there s more checks and balances where you use it on an active war zone. what s driving it? it s essentially a politically there s no cost to using it. you don t put boots on the ground and it makes it seem like there s no human cost to war. there s places where we re waging this massive kind of bombardment campaign. it s very difficult to put a faces to the victim. it s something that the obama administration has embraced. vice president biden was very much relying on drones. the pentagon program, as far as i can tell, has a budget. we know what the budget is. we know how many planes there are, where they re operated out of and largely they re used for our soldiers who are on the ground in places is my understanding. right. potentially regular artillery.
liquor cabinet. just getting underway in washington this morning is a conference that s trying to bring the u.s. drone programs out of the shadows. decknology experts about the expanding use of drones worldwide. the operative word here being expanding. on wednesday, president obama gave the go ahead to expand his drone strike policy in yemen to allow the c.i.a. against suspected operatives even when the u.s. doesn t know that names of those won t be killed if certain fit a pattern of life. this new policy can open up the door to wider strikes in yemen where drones have been heavily used already. according to a report, in 2009, there were 51 reported strikes