> But drone strikes are far more common currently
I here this from time to time, but I wonder how true this actually is. My guess is that most military actions are not publicly reported, so we don't have number to compare.
My understanding is that there are a few ways to reach out and kill people from far away:
- snipers
- artillery
- ground-to-ground missiles/rockets
- air-to-ground missiles/rockets
- ship-to-ground missiles
- aerial artillery/cannon (Spectre, A-10, Apache)
- air-to-ground bombs (for argument let's assume only "precision" munitions)
- drone strikes (which are a kind of air-to-ground missile, but we'll beak them out as distinct for fiscussion)
Before drones became common, all of the rest of the above were used frequently in both Iraq and Afghanistan (and in every previous modern conflict), yet there wasn't this kind of "let's have a problem with this specific method" and plenty of wedding parties and civilians were killed. Yet with the exception of snipers, none of these involve getting personal with the targets, and collateral damage is well known to happen with all of these methods.
In context, drones aren't really any different, yet they seem to be singles out because...?
My guess is that it's a fundamental lack of understanding of what drones are and how they work. My guess is that most people out there who specifically have a problem with drones, but don't comment on the rest of the methods, have a niggling suspicion that they work by showing a picture of a bad guy to a drone or letting it sniff a captured sock or something and sending it out on a kill mission and this cold computer killer terrifies them because of too many movies. But they effectively work the same as any of the other methods.
The same missiles, probably the same cameras/sensors and the same operators, ordered by the same command chain with the same legal oversight make the same decision to shoot-to-kill in the same way. Arguments about not wanting to put U.S. pilots in harms way also ring false since nobody the U.S. is shooting at has an effective airspace denial system in place.
The only thing the drones bring to the table is loiter time, and I'm not sure that "as loiter time approaches balloon or kite" crosses some kind of moral threshold that wasn't already crossed by any other listed method. There simply wasn't this kind of anti-AC-130H or anti-A-10 movement around when they were chewing up people. Nobody came down on Helicopter gunships, as a class of killing devices, even after Wikileaks' Collateral Murder came out.
It seems to me that the moral problem that should be addressed is killing people from far away, not the specific method you use to do it.