In 2007 candidate Obama talked about troops air raiding villages in Afghanistan and killing civilians (see video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrW4fOGIMVY ). Perhaps Obama was just complaining about how inefficient they were at killing civilians unlike the industrialized targeting of civilians we are doing now. For example Business Insider reports:
“U.S. military adviser found that over the course of a year that U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan caused 10 times more civilian casualties than strikes by manned fighter aircraft.
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-drones-bomb-civilian-rescuers-2013-7
That’s not to say we should not use drones or that drones are inherently bad rather our policy about how we deploy them is awful. Something I foresaw a long time ago and started warning against that drones would make deploying of military power easy and seemingly antiseptic. Furthermore drones allow those to deploy them to heavily compartmentalize their activities with no pesky reporters or soldiers on the front line who might challenge or question. Drones also allow militaries, and other users, the ability to deploy violence with little worry of retaliation or concern that their soldiers might be killed and upset the folks back home. The problem is that without troops on the ground and in the kill chain its hard to have high level of confidence in your targeting and ability to know when to stop your attack due to subtle clues about civilians, children, allies being in the area or other reasons to call of the strike. This is why I wished we would move to a practice of trying to have eyes on intel for drone strikes and more solid intel unlike the approach we have not of striking poorly qualified targets and ignoring the potential for high casualties solely to process more targets.
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