This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 22nd, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Drones are changing how America does war.

And that could make the United States more willing to engage in the kinds of

devastating hostilities like those undertaken in Libya. Steve Vladek is a

professor of law, the associate dean for scholarship at American University Washington College of Law.

We spoke following an event on drones held today.

One of the notable moments in your talk was that you said you were a little critical of

Ran Paul's filibuster and sort of what it focused on.

You said it failed essentially to answer some of the very difficult questions surrounding

drone warfare. What are those hard questions and how did what

Ran Paul argued on the floor of the Senate fall short?

Sure, I mean so I think the hypothetical that motivated Senator Paul and his supporters

was the prospect that the government might use a drone strike even against a U.S. citizen on U.S.

soil.

And I think that's a rather sort of out there hypothetical

when you contrast it with what we actually know

or at least reasonably believed to be true already,

which is that upwards of 4,000 non-citizens have been killed in drone strikes outside the United

States.

And so I think the hard question that drone strikes raise is just what the geographical

scope of the armed conflict is and who exactly it is that

...