Landmines can be dropped from the air by the thousands and many land mines can survive for decades. Placing a landmine anywhere is essentially the same as firing a bullet blindly through time. And no individual soldier has ever been held accountable for a landmine that killed a civilian years down the road.
Which doesn’t make what you said about drones any less awful. Just that landmines are already uniquely awful.
Beautifully said and truly clarifies how evil of a weapon they are.
With that said, are these drones paradoxically more ethical because their loiter time is dramatically shorter and therefore won’t harm civilians after the conflict is over?
But I think there is an extreme ethical boundary we are traversing by putting targeting and trigger-pulling in the hands of a robot. The ways this will later be abused by authoritarian regimes is just staggering. We are reducing the necessary footprint of a loyal junta and automating dictatorships with this technology. It’s very disturbing.
I would even argue that anything that enables broad-area targetting since the invention of the Maxim machine gun and artillery would qualify as a weapon of mass destruction. In an ideal world, the first machine gun or dynamite would've made everyone see war as a very bad resolution mechanism since the 19th century.
But here we are, so the game is to not make war much worse than it already is.