> But no drone strike is launched with the sole intent of killing civilians. That is a world of difference.
I used to agree with your assertion. I will explain why I no longer do.
The goal of warfare is very simply to break the will of the opposing population to keep fighting.
Taking out roadways and bridges and sewage treatment plants with smart bombs is another way to break the opponent's will. Not quite as demoralizing as a funeral for a loved one killed by the enemy, but demoralizing nonetheless. That is why we use smart bombs to take out infrastructure... to make life harder for the enemy so that its will is broken.
In the revolutionary war, guerrilla tactics like taking cover behind a tree were considered morally cowardly and abhorrent by the British, yet were embraced by revolutionaries as an effective tactic in an asymmetric battle.
During WW2 the US carpet bombed the Japanese mainland, intent on total devastation of entire cities (civilians included) so that the Japanese would relent and give up the fight.
During the Vietnam war the US used chemical weapons extensively, which had extensive civilian consequences.
The point if the argument so far is to illustrate that the line between acceptable and unacceptable civilian casualties is (for the US, at least) very flexible based on the urgency of the battle. The closer we are to not winning the more readily we will do away with any aversion to civilian casualties. The same is true for any nation or other group of fighters.
The second question is, why has the US invested so much money in smart bombs and drones? We are told that it is because the US has an extremely high moral standard when it comes to warfare, and we are spending Trillions on these weapons systems simply because we value the lives of civilian populations so much that we are willing to make this massive investment.
The real reason we have done this is because after the cold war the US lost its appetite for discretionary war-making. The jig was up. The threat of the spread of communism never panned out and a generation had been deeply impacted by the Vietnam war. Many had seen combat, many had lost friends or family in a war that was widely viewed as a horrible mistake.
In order to sell Americans on war again, our leaders had to be able to launch a hygienic war. Recall during GW1 how we saw live video of bombs dropping precisely onto targets that we were told contained munitions or other weapons bunkers. These bombs could be dropped right next to a hospital or school and create no harm for the patients or students. Finally, the US had technology that allowed the exceptional moral character of our war initiatives to be reflected in the character of the battle. The people were reassured that only the bad stuff was being harmed.
As US entanglement in the middle eastern wars got bigger and bigger, opposition groups grew more resilient to the smart bombs and were able to put up a fight that required something even more precise.
So drones were created that contain precision cameras and weaponry, allowing areal executions of enemies to be undertaken cleanly, without killing anyone who wasn't deemed guilty by whoever in the US had ordered the strike.
This all makes sense if you believe the story that Afghanistan and Iraq (for example) are full of mostly US-loving people and a few hostile combatants who hate us for our freedoms.
In reality, there is widespread public support of so-called terrorist groups, widespread resentment of US involvement. How can the US manage to police this sort of environment?
If you are driving a car and you go too fast you can be caught speeding. The penalty of the time wasted and the cost of the ticket discourages people from speeding. In US drone-controlled areas, the drone killings offer a broad deterrent for behavioral misconduct.
Only if one buys into the US definition of guilt as being appropriately determined by someone who has been authorized to order the strikes is this remotely fair or reasonable.
What is more effective to intimidate a population into compliance, a system with too many false negatives or one with too many false positives? I'd argue that false positives (unwarranted or loosely-justified killings) are exactly the sort of thing that helps enforce the sort of control that the US wants.
Imagine if in the US we heard about people being killed via drone killings on American soil. It would terrify lots of people. Imagine if some foreign body was determining who was guilty and innocent and we had no democratic say in the criteria used to make this determination?
It leaves no choice for the target population but to live in fear and to supplicate to the US and hope for mercy. We Americans are told that there is some incredibly humane stuff going on and that we are able to make all this happen without sending as many American troops into harm's way. But in reality we are being led to believe a story of humane and judicious use of force that is simply a story meant to get us to support the war and nation building efforts and has no basis in reality.
Drones are like lethal sheep dogs herding the population (sheep) in a way that the US wants. They use just enough brutality to get the job done, and the brutality comes in the form of actual death for some, but constant teeth gnashing stress as the propellors are heard overhead, constant empty reassurances given to children that everything will be OK and that they won't be targeted, etc. The purpose of the drones is to keep the level of terror and fear just high enough to get compliant behavior... to coerce the target population into compliance.