Drones are the diet Shasta of war crimes

When I think of "war crimes" I think of Nanking or Dachau. The use of drones is more like a war misdemeanor by comparison.

I am dovish. 99 times out of 100, I think the war itself is the crime. Drones don't change the underlying moral status of any war.

I do not recognize an ethical distinction between striking a suspected terrorist base with a drone vs. launching a missile from a ship. If anything, the drone is more precise and less likely to cause collateral damage.

If I am on a battlefield, and I am killed, do you think I care if the hellfire missile that blew me up came from a Reaper or a Thunderbolt/Warthog?

Drones might make strikes happen more often, so whether they’re ‘better’ depends on the rules and who’s calling the shots, not the aircraft.

States that develop drones keep them, and states that fight alongside them adopt them. No one, to my knowledge, has ever put that genie back in the bottle.

I get the moral outrage, but I dont really feel like it. Im more mad that he expanded the War on Terror.

I saw a recent comment about the murder of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, that I think is worth including for discussion:

"The drone strike was aimed at al-qaeda which the US was at war with, a conflict voted on by Congress. I dont know if the US knew the kid was at the target (US military denies it) but id say there’s a pretty flimsy legal argument that the military has to treat potential civilian casualties differently based on their nationality. If the enemy is meeting up at a safe house somewhere and the military blows it up, and a teenager is killed accidentally, it makes it a not-war-crime if the teenager has dual Yemeni-German citizenship but a war crime if he has dual Yemeni-US citizenship?"

I'll add that collateral damage during war is NOT a war crime. It has happened in every single war in human history. The use of drones in this regard doesn't change that fact.

And in fact, have likely decreased the amount of collateral damage due to their precision. Its certainly preferable to carpet bombing, or lobbing missiles from carrier groups two countries over.

Plus the civilian head of the military isn't personally signing off on something like a drone strike, so its debatable how much culpability they have over any individual case.