
The Secret Rules of the Drone War - davidf18
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/sunday/the-secret-rules-of-the-drone-war.html
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PhilWright
"officials said they had concluded that between 64 and 116 civilians died in
473 strikes."

This is a shockingly high number when you consider that any male 18-50 with
the target is automatically considered to be a combatant. So the real figure
it likely to be considerably higher. Imagine if you heard that Vladimir Putin
was sending agents abroad to assassinate people that Russia considered
terrorists. But they managed to also kill innocent civilians every other time.
I suspect most people would condemn that action. Is the drone war any
different?

Not to mention that I believe the drone war is actually counter productive in
the long term. Imagine you live in a village and regularly hear a drone
overhead. Every few months it kills somone in the village. Sure, might have
been a bad guy but that's not a great environment for people to live in. Only
likely to create resentment and create more terrorists.

America seems to never learn from conflicts like Vietnam and more recently
Afghanistan. If you sit in someone's backyard and kill people you create more
of the people that want to kill you. Want to bet how many years the drone war
continues before you realise it has not solved anything and your just
perpetually creating and then killing terrorists.

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davidf18
By killing terrorists, drones save lots of lives. By killing terrorist
remotely, they save lots of our soldier's lives.

Most of the elites that complain about drones are probably not from the class
of Americans that go into the Army to protect our country and/or to pay for
college through the GI bill.

