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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

Blowing up semi-random farmers on the other side of the world, those with no retaliatory strike capability, and posing no actual threat to your country? That's not defense. "The best defense is a good offense" sounds best to those who sell the missiles

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What about terrorist masterminds on the other side of the world who are deniably plotting to kill and maim many hundreds of innocent US civilians, but whose plans will be thwarted if they are blown up? What if there are a couple of accidental civilian casualties when the terrorists are blown up? What if only four of the five targets are terrorists, due to an unforeseen and unavoidable mistake, and the fifth target is semi-random farmers? What if we have five targets, and we know one is a terrorist, but not which one? I mean, nobody in the Pentagon is actually just sitting there thinking 'lets go and blow up some farmers today, those drones aren't going to target themselves, you know...'

Why should I care if some random angry guys on the other side of the world hate America? We have plenty of those here in the states.

> Blowing up semi-random farmers on the other side of the world

This crude propaganda cliche doesn't offer anything for the discussion. If you take an emotional snapshot of a complex situation and assume that's the whole truth of a situation you almost always are pretty far from the truth - even if in some subset of reality this snapshot is true.

How many of the 3000[0] "terrorists" that Obama ordered blown up (accruing about 400 civilian casualties in the process) had actual plans and setups in place to make the trip to America and kill someone?

My right wing uncle with his gun collection is a bigger threat to the American people. Why did those 400 innocent people die?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/12/reflecting-...

> How many of the 3000[0] "terrorists" that Obama ordered blown up (accruing about 400 civilian casualties in the process) had actual plans and setups in place to make the trip to America and kill someone?

This is a relevant question, but not precise enough. What I would be interested instead, is, what's the total mean and variance of american lifes saved in all those operations? And more importantly, what other hypothetical possible combinations of these variables (civilians killed, combatants killed, unuidentified casualties, mean and variance of americans saved) we could have if different decisions have been made - i.e. what's the whole problem space?

Of course, this data is impossible to get and hard to estimate, but this is much closer to the real dilemma at hand.

That is exactly my point.

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