Do you think that if part of Google's work were to make it more precise, would that be less evil?

If they could make sure they are killing only the guy they wanted, and act on that using pinpoint precision?

Uh, actually, now that you mentioned it, that would be even more scary.

That would be totally consequence free assassination device. At least the civilian casualties put some lid on the tendency to wantonly fly around in glorified RC planes murdering people.

The way I see it, if you are intending to assassinate a person (i.e. kill them not part of a military engagement) you could at least have the decency to have operators on the ground, with visual range to the target to pull the trigger. That's skin in the game. That's proper balancing of the calculus.

When you remove the chance of your own guys getting hurt, you are lowering the threshold to apply deadly force.

The whole point of due process and so on is to guarantee human rights for all and more importantly, put checks and balances on the actions of the political leaders.

When it suddenly becomes "ok" to kill people in automated fashion around the globe, that's a serious threat to all civil liberties regardless if one is a US citizen or not.

I think a free and open society is the only reason US has any credibility in claiming a moral high ground and things like eliminating targets on the disposition matrix [0] without due process erodes that high ground quite effectively.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix

Every military technology from bows and arrows to GPS is doing exactly what you are objecting to by lowering the danger to the attacker and increasing the success of a potential attack. Drones are an incremental step in that process. It just seems strange to me to draw the specific line at drones when we are seemingly fine with other advancements that are almost identical in effect like stealth technology. Once again, my argument is not that drones are good. My argument is that drones are not inherently more evil than other weapons.

I completely agree with your last three paragraphs. But once again, none of that is specific to drones. It is true whether the trigger is pulled by special forces soldier from feet away, from an manned aircraft thousands of feet in the air, or a pilot in trailer hundreds of miles away.

I accept a global superpower sometimes assassinates people, and perhaps sometimes for good reasons.

My main opposition is to the factory like efficiency in which these extra-judicial executions are carried out by the drone pilots in a cost effective manner.

It gives me associations with other human organizations in the past which have carried out their mission with cruel detachment and efficiency.

I can't really put my finger on it, but it's just something I feel Stalin or Himmler or Robespierre would have totally agreed with.

Automated elimination of the enemies of the state? Wonderfull!

I used to feel similarly about guided missiles during Operation Allied Force (when the US inadvertantly struck the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia).

My opinion on the topic has not translated into a reduction in automated warfare as a policy. On the plus side, independent of my opinion, technology has moved forward so that given similar circumstances, the embassy would at least have a chance that a drone pilot would realize during visual confirmation that the target has a big Chinese flag out front.

> Drone strikes, as they are used, are a more evil way of taking out identified targets of other nationalities. I find the concept of a nation state summarily assassinating people a bit troubling, but drone strikes make it even worse by making it imprecise and cheap.

There's no significant difference between a drone-strike and a conventional airstrike by a manned aircraft, at lest when it comes to targeting, precision, etc.

Drone-strikes might even be better than conventional airstrikes because the pilot may have less workload (therefore more focus) during the strike part, meaning fewer errors and mistakes.

> There's no significant difference between a drone-strike and a conventional airstrike by a manned aircraft, at lest when it comes to targeting, precision, etc.

But there's a significant difference in the sense that drones are the only way these strikes are conducted. Manned strikes would be more risky, since they expose a pilot, and less practical because manned aircraft can't be "parked" over a target for anywhere near as long as a drone. And whatever the legality of the situation, the political reality is that manned strikes look substantially more like an act of war.

So the difference is that many of these strikes wouldn't happen without drones. It's not about how the bomb is delivered, it's about whether we're assassinating people without a declaration of war in the first place.

Sounds like your issue is with the current political system not with drones. Direct your anger to the appropriate places.

I'm not angry at drones, any more than someone who opposed the V2 bombing of London was angry at rockets.

I have been against politicians who support this, though every presidential nominee for at least 12 years has supported it. But political opposition isn't limited to the voting booth. If a horrible act can be blocked by means reduction then dissuading people from enabling the means is a way to change politics.

Drones have the ability to be more precise than a typical forward air controller plus manned airplane as a drone can be above a target for much longer and that long duration video surveillance gives the opportunity to find the best time for a strike and to verify that it is the target.

You claim that a person on the ground is going to get better identification but they need to be hidden rather far away so that they aren't noticed and aren't hit. This reduces the typically achievable accuracy substantially from the theoretical maximum. Manned aircraft can't stay on target because of refueling needs, speed, and how loud they are, so you have very narrow windows of opportunity. Most ordnance from manned aircraft are also much larger than those used by drones, so manned aircraft typically have larger blast radius and can kill many more unintended people.

So while their can be narrow specific situations where FAC + F35 can deliver more precision, overall a drone provides much more precision and less danger to others.

This is obviously an emotional situation and many people don't believe that it is valid to kill specific individuals, as many others have claimed on this thread.

Sorry, I was imprecise. I did not mean it would be better to use conventional aircraft. I meant to claim that it would be better to use a human with a gun to do the assassination - at least when operating in an area with potential for civilian casualties. Use of heavy ordnance in an area with civilians should have no excuses if there is the alternative to use human operators.

I don't care how far up the rank of Isis or Al Kaida the person targeted is. Risking civilian casualties should not be acceptable.

A combat in a war and an assassination are two different things - I was condidering an assassination which by nature should be fine grained.