If these were automated drones that were killing people without human involvement, I would agree that they are a problem. However that isn't the case here. There are still flight and maintenance crews on the ground and there is still a human pulling the trigger. Drones just make things cheaper and less costly in terms of (friendly) human lives and they aren't alone in that regard.
Here is another comparison technology for you, satellite imagery. That has made military planning massively more effective as generals can now see the real time location of both our troops and our enemy. Should we stop using that because it allows us to kill our enemy too effectively without paying a high enough cost?
I can't see how drones made killing any more economical than high-altitude daylight bombing did in WWII and Vietnam.
Once you've established absolute air superiority, and the USAF is good at that these days, the bombers would be approximately as safe as people flying drones are now, and a single plane dropping literally tons of high explosive is a pretty efficient way to kill a lot of people in the target zone.
> I can't see how drones made killing any more economical
> than high-altitude daylight bombing did in WWII and Vietnam.
Presumably there is a USAF whitepaper or two that outlines exactly how much cheaper drones are (else: why are they using them?) but here are a few possibilities that spring to mind:
* The drones themselves are cheaper than the equivalent manned aircraft
* Supplies and support for the pilot are cheaper to procure on a base in the US than on an aircraft carrier or forward base
* No need to carry life support, etc so drone can carry more weapons or fuel
* Lower pilot training costs due to no KIA on drone loss and lower lifetime medical costs for survivable injuries.
>Presumably there is a USAF whitepaper or two that outlines exactly how much cheaper drones are (else: why are they using them?)
Have you considered that perhaps they are used for ethical reasons such as being a precision strike that kills less innocent bystanders than an indiscriminate bombing?
(Believe it or not the military does care about that sort of thing.)
Any technology that could allow for more precise bombings could be more easily fitted to a manned bomber because they wouldn't need the video link back to base. Remember, image quality matters a lot here since it restricts how well they can make out the target - innocent people have died because the video links on the drones were too poor-quality to see what they were doing and the operator's superiors jumped to conclusions. It's clearly about cost.
Total Obama strikes: 362
Total US strikes since 2004: 413
Total reported killed: 2,438-3,942
Civilians reported killed: 416-959
Children reported killed: 168-204
Only 168 children out of 3,942 that's 4% of killed children. If you accept this statistic as reasonable casualties then in my book you're a murderer.
Because, surprisingly, most people seem to prefer killing people in a manner that is more like a video game, safely at home, over actually going halfway across the world, to an actual war zone, where they actually are confronted with the destruction and havoc they wreak.
That's some really heavy shit to expect from most people.
And then they come back with all sorts of psychological trauma from the terrible things they've done and witnessed, getting those people the help and support to heal their mental wounds to live a relatively PTSD-free life isn't cheap either (as you mentioned in your fourth point).
And fortunately, because for the USA war is an export-only product, you have this option.
Sure there's economical factors, but I would not underestimate just how much nicer it is not having to actually go there and breathe the same air as the herds they're ordered to thin, or think about. Think of it as a Roomba, but for the desert.
There may be other ways to address the problem than banning the weapons entirely. When things are expensive people seem more likely to engage in them out of necessity than convenience. But when things are cheap people become more careless about employing them. While it is desirable that in a situation where you are already fighting a war and have no choice about it you have the best weapons, and the highest chance of victory, it is not necessarily desirable – in terms of thought that is put into employing violence as a tool to resolve a dispute – that before the war you have access to those things.
While it is madness to suggest that in a war people will not use their most effective weaponry, the relative costs of war influence who is going to become your enemy in the first place and the scope of the wars that you will fight. Consequently as the technological disparity increases, and the cost of war against any particular foe decreases, it becomes more important to enforce greater discretion in the use of those weapons by other means - and in some cases it would naturally follow that if you really are enforcing greater discretion in the use of weapons there are some situations in which you do not use them when you otherwise would.
Simply because you have a weapon does not mean you use it in every case.
Effecttively? Yes, it kills 'some people' effectively.
No one cares about the details like that those people are women, children, or unarmed men, because who would, if he judges based on his hunch from watching pixelated video feed, and there are no consequences.
I would think that the logic is that if there were no drones, the US army would drop no bombs at all. I wouldn't expect them to instead start carpet bombing cities in the middle east.
Reasoning in that way, the drones result in civilian deaths that wouldn't have happened without drones.
If you take away a kid's toys, they'll grow bored and start vandalizing public property in more creative ways.
> I wouldn't expect them to instead start carpet bombing cities in the middle east.
Except that is almost exactly what most drone-apologists are threatening the US will do instead when they argue they have to use drones because otherwise, well, they'll just have to kill more children and civilians.
So according to joering2's statistics, 4% of drone kills have been children.
Maybe we can agree that's probably a bad thing. Regardless of whether killing children provides a tactical advantage (they might grow up to become terrrists, after all).
However, your argument to me sounds a little like
"You want us to stop using drones? Guess we'll just have to go back to murdering even more children, then. Seriously, you're forcing our hand here."
And BTW, I have a brilliant idea. If you put drones over your roads that shoot missiles at drunk drivers (preferably as soon as they enter their car), it'll reduce civilian deaths! So it's probably a good thing. You only need to figure out a way to guesstimate blood-alcohol levels from a distance, but if you can get its fault tolerance below 24% (or 4% if they're drunk children), you'll have a pretty solid net-win in civilian casualties over having to transport your flying death robots halfway across the globe.
import drone, random
if drink() and drive() or random() < 0.24:
get_blasted()
Here is another comparison technology for you, satellite imagery. That has made military planning massively more effective as generals can now see the real time location of both our troops and our enemy. Should we stop using that because it allows us to kill our enemy too effectively without paying a high enough cost?