"When it works well, it works well".
in other words:
"60% of the times, it works every time".
in other words:
"60% of the times, it works every time".
It's a difference between knowingly killing and accidentally killing. Legally, there is a huge difference. I'd argue morally there is too, but you can decide for yourself.
That opens up a whole other debate about whether the US is reckless with the targeting. But I think it's necessary to distinguish between the two types of civilian causalities.
No, it's not. When assessing weapon capabilities, precision and collateral damage are irremediably linked, with precision including actual chances of hitting the specified target.
In this case the weapon is the "droning process" as a whole; if the process hits the wrong target too many times, its precision is low and hence the likelihood of collateral damage is high.
These casualties cannot be justified as "accidental" once the weapon/process' capabilities and actual limits are clear: it would be like throwing a hand grenade in a crowd to hit a single person and then argue that other victims were "accidental" because the question of explosion radius is unrelated to effectiveness at the center of it.
Drawing this sort of distinction in reality moves the debate from the main question (should we use this weapon, given its known limits?) to other, often-unanswerable ones (how many collateral casualties can be filed as "accidental" while ostensibly respecting moral and legal thresholds?) that inevitably imply the previous question can only be reasonably answered in a certain way.
I wonder if the victim's families give much of a shit about the difference in question here.
Actually, the question I've got is why the U.S. is still meddling in the Middle East full-stop.