> I don't understand this logic. Drones are a weapon. They are not any more evil than any other weapon that the military uses. They aren't killing people autonomously. There is a human pilot behind every death. The pilot just happens to be hundreds or thousands miles away from the aircraft. Would we be fine with the military killing the exact same people if the pilot was simply on the aircraft that launched the missiles or bombs?
Not "fine", but I think "maybe a little bit less horrified" might be accurate, because a remote video feed apparently makes it even harder to tell what you're shooting [1]:
What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because of a bad image or angle.
Another former operator said similarly [2]:
Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot.
“And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ “
Bryant and the pilot replayed the shot, recorded on eight-millimeter tape. They watched it over and over, the figure darting around the corner. Bryant was certain it wasn’t a dog.
Though in any case it seems like quite an awful argument that distancing yourself from whom your killing should be fine because killing-isn't-okay-anyway-so-whatever.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones...
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/...