No less honour with using drones than there is in using IEDs, IMHO.

I think that is spot on, Kurt.  Not to mention the extra resentment felt by the drones victims knowing that there adversary will not even show themselves.  There is a certain degree of Warrior dishonor in that. Then there is the what happens when our enemies have the same technology, which is inevitable........

Pardon my mistake. 

Regardless I stand by my remarks.

 
 I wasn't responding to your post at all.  In fact you hadn't even posted it yet when I started my reply to Winter.   I was just trying to point out it wasn't really a choice between bombing or drones as portrayed because with or without the drones bombing isn't really an option here.  I spent twenty years working for DoD and have no illusions as to how serious a matter combat is.  I don't think there are many there who do.   I have absolutely no qualms however with helping them make the smartest (most detached) weapons systems possible for our troops.   My problems are always with the civilian leadership for which I hold the electorate totally accountable.  

 If our only the two choices are drones vs. carpet bombing then obviously the drones produce far less collateral damage but I don't think those are really the choices.  

You totally missed my point about carpet bombing.  It wasn't presented as a choice. 

You totally missed my point about carpet bombing.  It wasn't presented as a choice. 

It was presented as an example of how detached the crew was from the carnage they unleashed in their wake.  In essence, they were so high up and far away from the targets that they were already headed for home before the bombs touched the ground.  Sure, its an exageration, but I remember remarks by flight crew back then about the detachment involved in just merely flying  for a couple of hours dropping their payload and turning around to do it again.  It was nothing more than a chore.  It wasn't war up there.

Drones are the ultimate detachment in terms of waging war.  Some guy sitting in a dark room an hour outside of Las Vegas looking at a monitor with a joystick.  No farwells of ships or planes carrying soldiers and sailors to the grimmest of all tasks.  No body bags coming home.  No reason for the citizens to look up from their smart phones. 

War is hell and the human carnage is what keeps it from happening more often.  War came home during Viet Nam and sat in your living room at dinner time on the tube.  It was seeing the war, in near real time, that led people to stand up and cry bullshit.  Drones will make war a faraway and distant thing in the minds of the public.  As long as there is gas, grocery stores are stocked full and Marcus Welby comes on every Tuesday night at 10 pm, no one cares.  As long as its NIMBY, who is going to object ?  Its happening faraway in a place no one can pronounce.  The .gov is perceived as doing a good job and no one cares anylonger what our .gov is doing in the rest of the world in our name.

This country is apathetic as it is because there is no draft, no one is forced to look at war.  I bet if we had a draft, more than 20% of NYC public high school graduates would be able to read and write.

peace

 If our only the two choices are drones vs. carpet bombing then obviously the drones produce far less collateral damage but I don't think those are really the choices.  If we didn't have the drones we wouldn't be looking at bombing as our only option especially for the kind of operations the drones tend to be used for.  The heart the problem is we don't really have any good tools for dealing with the kind of threat the drones are being used against.  Our antagonists don't really appear that interested in negotiation and is difficult to use any conventional military approach when the enemy is blending in with the "friendly" population.  My guess is that without the drones we might be doing something more like CIA hired local assassins or perhaps farming it out to the Mossad who probably have better contacts in the region.  This would likely produce less unintended carnage but be much less effective at eliminating the designated targets. Regrettably we probably don't have a better solution now for the adversary we are currently facing.  My problem with them is their low cost, low risk, and lack of other options makes them too easy to use in too many situations.  That and I'm not all together sure we aren't creating three more "terrorists" for every one we kill.

 

Yep we got em.  Drones are not going away.

Its time to stop and have a formal policy debate on them now. 

They have already been used to kill Americans without due process.  Does it really matter where it happens ?

They are capable of making standing armies a low priority. 

Less human involvement.  Less human oversight.

The human detachment is similar to the carpet bombing in Viet Nam with B'52's flying miles up dropping 500 lb. bombs on coordinates.

Just another out and back.  Mission accomplished, how about a beer ?

Valid points, and there needs to be a LOT of oversight on any use of this technology. I'm just a little perplexed by the "body count" argument: any innocent lives lost are too many, but it seems like drones are likely to reduce the "collateral damage" (for lack of a less bloodless phrase).

What makes them worse are the advantages you mentioned plus the lower cost and zero risk for US personnel makes them much more likely to be used than with the old technology where a little more effort might be put into diplomatic approaches.  The technology is still in its infancy too.  They are only going to get "better" with time.   The no losses of US personnel also means that Americans aren't likely to give the programs the kind of scrutiny they deserve either.

 

I'm not sure that drones are necessarily worse than the old way: dropping bombs from planes or firing cruise missiles. If anything, I'd think they'd be more accurate and less likely to kill innocents than the old technologies.

I think drones should be used to eliminate nasty and hateful people.  

Then the world will be a more harmonious place to live in.

You just don't get it do you.

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