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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

The current nearly worldwide drone campaign that the US is engaged in is one of the least ethical things this country has ever done. It has proven to be a mostly indiscriminate weapon, little better than using car bombs, and it has not only eroded America's moral high-ground on the international stage, it has in many cases destroyed a favorable image of the US and turned entire populations against us, for very little tangible benefit.

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If you consider drone strikes to be indiscriminate, compare the upper bound of about 6,000[1] or so drone strike casualties over more than a decade to the 90,000[2] or so Vietnam bombing casualties, which in turn is dwarfed by the World War 2 bombing casualties[3]. Compared to the alternative of using traditional bombers or using ground forces, drone strikes represent a huge reduction in civilian casualties.

I don't understand the people who protest drone strikes. War is hell - if your country engages in any sort of violent military intervention, there will be civilian casualties. I can get behind opposing unnecessary usage of military force; I can get behind opposing attacks within the borders of a sovereign nation that we aren't at war with. Protesting the tools used to conduct war instead of the war itself makes little sense to me, particularly when that tool marks a dramatic improvement in reducing civilian casualties.

[1] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/dron...

[2] http://thevietnamwar.info/operation-rolling-thunder/

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_strat...

The drone system enables not a big war, but a war small enough it can be pretended away. It also represents a new kind of war: not against an opposing national force, but against a list of individuals whose names are computed from the global surveillance programme.

Yes, if you look at drones-the-technology the protest looks a bit mistargeted. But that's just because it's a convenient label for drone-bombing-the-politics.

Compare nuclear weapons. You could say that they're just another increase in scale from the lethality of World war 2. But the politics (mutual assured destruction etc, antiproliferation etc) are different.

I think that being unmanned is largely what makes it seem acceptable to engage in attacks on nations we aren't at war with (or rather, to not label it as a war when we attack them).

Less ethical than the systemic genocide perpetrated against Native Americans, I think not.

One of...

It's all relative. Compared to Dresden, small guided missiles are positively humane. Heck, the hammer that was dropped on Fallujah makes a drone look meek. War is by design very ugly.

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