And thanks to the American moral leadership with drones innocent people will not be bombed. /s oh wait the US just put the Whistleblower that showed most US drone attacks kill innocent people in prison for 4 years. Our moral standing in the world is in the gutter which is extremely sad. Don't expect Turkey to be even close to the US moral standard. We are heading to a very sad future.
Considering the lengths the US has gone to develop highly localized and targeted systems, like literally using knife missiles instead of bombs, your despair confuses me.
Using drone strikes actually leads to much fewer unintentional deaths than classical warfare. Boots on the ground not only lead to more direct casualties, but the knock of effects of the infrastructure disruption inevitably leads to orders of magnitude more beyond that. Targeted drone strikes, in terms of the ratio of unintended death to intended death are honestly better for everyone involved (except the target :P).
Only if they don’t also encourage drone warfare. The US used to be quite isolationist, but the capacity to kill people at zero risk somehow mysteriously morphed into the need to regularly assassinate people. Military targets inside countries we are at war with is one thing, but drones strikes are not nearly so limited.
You could argue that we were isolationist until we became the dominant world power. I wouldn’t say we’ve been isolationist since WWII— well before drones.
Honestly, you could argue that we’ve rarely been isolationist. We attacked Native American nations, then took over bits of the pacific, etc. We’ve been at war in some form or fashion for nearly all of our history.
I’m mostly libertarian and mostly pacifist, so I hope we change, but I’m not holding my breath.
The MQM-57 Falconer for example was doing battlefield reconnoissance in 1955. But, it’s far to say attaching weapon systems to drones rather than using the drone its self as a weapon was more recent.
Every weapon that provides an asymmetrical advantage does that. The problem is that weapons capability doesn’t stay asymmetrical forever. Once both sides have them in abundance they start being used in completely different ways that usually involve killing a lot more people indiscriminately.
Oh look now we killed just 65 wedding guests with our super-precise bombing instead of wiping out half a village (happened so many times in Iraq and Afghanistan due to poor intelligence and trigger-happy rednecks in chain of command).
US moral standard? What was that exactly? The firebombing of Japanese urban areas during WW2, or the dropping of 2 atomic bombs that killed and poisoned hundreds of thousands of civilians?
