You act as if the alternative to drones (20 year old kids with guns) never kills the wrong person.
Yvain's essay asking "what if drones came first" is highly relevant here.
Yvain's essay asking "what if drones came first" is highly relevant here.
Drones have the advantage of loiter time, they can spend ages in situ gathering intelligence and analysing whether to shoot or not. This does generate the mental health problems for the analysts the articles describes - the same as for snipers, they watch the person they are going to kill.
Aircraft and the infantry that call in air strikes and artillery do not have loiter time, usually the enemy know they're out and about (certainly in Afghanistan) and thus they are "reactive".
This is just another example of how the convenience of drone strikes has led to the belittling of war.
Mostly because the people in charge of approving that in the Yemeni government have approved it [1]
[1] http://www.presstv.com/detail/2012/09/30/264233/yemens-hadi-...
The soldiers we're sending over there aren't trained professionals, they're glorified mall-cops with sub-machine guns. The ones with special training are involved in special operations and they're few and far in-between, and personally I'd prefer we maintain a group of highly specialized individuals rather than an army of meat shields.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/army-to-cut-its-forces-...
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/15/news/economy/military-recrui...