  In 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama announced a policy to minimize civilian
casualties following drone strikes in undeclared theaters of war. The policy
calibrated Obamas approval of strikes against the near certainty of no civilian
casualties. Scholars do not empirically study the merits of Obamas policy.
Rather, they rely on descriptive trends for civilian casualties in Pakistan to
justify competing claims for the policys impact. We provide a novel estimate
for the impact of Obamas policy for civilian casualties in Pakistan following
U.S. drone strikes. We employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate the
effect of Obamas policy for civilian casualties, strike precision, and adverted
civilian casualties. We find a discontinuity in civilian casualties
approximately two years before Obamas policy announcement, corroborating our
primary research including interviews with senior officials responsible for
implementing the near certainty standard. After confirming the sharp cutoff, we
estimate the policy resulted in a reduction of 12 civilian deaths per month or
2 casualties per strike. The policy also enhanced the precision of U.S. drone
strikes to the point that they only killed the intended targets. Finally, we
use a Monte Carlo simulation to estimate that the policy adverted 320 civilian
casualties. We then conduct a Value of Statistical Life calculation to show
that the adverted civilian casualties represent a gain of 80 to 260 million
U.S. dollars. In addition to conditioning social and political outcomes, then,
the near certainty standard also imposed economic implications that are much
less studied.
