Robowars

You can tell the difference between ordinary farmers and insurgents by the way they move across terrain, apparently

Yeah, the ones who run are insurgents, and the ones who don’t are clever insurgents.

“terrorist murder of a non-combatant or a legitimate act of war”

This is a distinction that’s been badly eroded by lots of parties since the end of WWII.

odd …. there are backslashes in the url that are getting stripped out for some reason.
oh well. google “analysis: Drone attacks: challenging some fabrications —Farhat Taj” if anybody is interested.

“This is a distinction that’s been badly eroded by lots of parties since the end of WWII.”

Well, a lot oe people have tried to throw smoke up, but it is not usually very difficult to see through, is it? If you are operating a weapon used to attack people or as part of an army at war, you are military target. If you are not, you are not. There are bound to be hard cases, but not many, it seems to me. Certainly a drone operator would be a legitimate military target just as a sniper would be. Again, this proinciple sems to be clear from precedent. Allied bombing of German command centres (which are doing the same thing as our drone operator) was militarily legitimate. Or is that disputed?

Anyone who runs, is a VC. Anyone who stands still, is a well-disciplined VC

The difference between operating a drone and shooting from a gunship or dropping bombs from a B52 is not that large.

“The difference between operating a drone and shooting from a gunship or dropping bombs from a B52 is not that large.2

I think the main difference is that the drone will tend to be more accurate. I think it would be easier to make a case that the aerial bombing of Berlin in WWII was a war crime.

“Is an armaments factory a legitimate target? How about an armaments R&D facility? A software development office? A university computer science department?2

Yes, yes, depends, no.

I am no expert on this, but I think the precedents have been failry set. It is legitimate to attack infrastructure that has a direct military purpose, so railway lines, yes, hospitals no. Of course there will be hard cases, but not so many, I wouldn’t have thought.

Oh, it would be an act of war. I loathe and despise the claim that terrorism is hard to define. It is not. It has a perfectly clear and easily recognizable definition and form. “Deliberately trying to kill civilians” The only ambiguity stems from people trying to taint their enemies with the label even when its not correct.
Roadside bombs aimed at soldiers: Not terrorism. Depending on details (is the person planting the bombs doing so while in uniform? Ect) , it may be violation of the laws of war, murder, or any other number of crimes, but terrorism it is not.
Bombs aimed at marketplaces: “Terrorism”.
And if you are shooting at people while in the employ of a military, you are not a civilian.. (And, strictly speaking, if you are not uniformed and in a proper chain of command, you may qualify as a saboteur or spy under the laws of war, which permits your enemies to summarily execute you if they can..)

Wasn’t the “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad in 2003 largely achieved by Cruise missiles fired from the Persian Gulf? I suppose remote-controlled drones operated from the other side of the world is just another step in long-distance warfare. The moral problem would seem to be that the minimisation of risk for American (and allied) combatants is seemingly being prioritised ahead of the minimisation of risk for non-American non-combatants.

John Meredith:

“But I do agree with you last comment, we are talking as if the Taliban is an organisation that has scruples over killing civilians for aany reason at all, which is evidently not the case.”

As opposed to the USA? And by scruples, I mean scruples, not PR worries.

“John Meredith: you have exceeded your comment quota for the day.2

I hadn’t realised you were operating a quota system. Have I said something to offend? None of my comments strike me as especially inflammatory.

Despicable cowardly programists hide behind women and children.

A university computer science department?

I was reading about the Mark I computer at Harvard, which was used to calculate ballistics trajectories and similar stuff during WW2. Had the Germans known about it and been able to bomb it, presumably it would’ve been a legitimate target, as would Grace Hopper, one of those programming the thing (and a lieutenant j.g. in the Navy).

I guess it’s the operator that can be considered a combatant and not the engineer programming the SW that allows the operator to shoot.

Otherwise: fascinating indeed. I hadn’t looked at it that way. The guy that shoots is the soldier, in my view, whereever he is pulling the trigger from.

@ 30

“Irregular” just refers to the style of combat or the sort of tactics used. Legally it just means fighters who don’t have a distinct uniform and/or don’t openly bear arms.

But I don’t think it would be ok to bomb the housing of ordinary drone workers, the assemblers, engineers etc.

The difference with the programmer is his direct active connection, from his apartment, with the operation of the drones. IOQ, the apartment (and computer connection) is a part of the weapon system.

If the programmer is maintaining the software from his apartment, via the Internet or military connection, then it must be ok for the Taliban to bomb his apartment building.

This is not how the western forces operate, you’re suggesting a much higher standard. The western forces identify individuals they consider dangerous, and then they assassinate these individuals regardless of what they do and where they are. IOW, it doesn’t matter if the programmer is, at the moment, maintaining the software from his apartment, or visiting his granny in the nursing home, or riding a train with his family – he is a target in any of these situations.

chris, do you and john meredith have some history?

because, otherwise, i have to echo his (disemvowelled) puzzlement: the rule against jumping in repeatedly is not a rule i have ever seen enforced or even mentioned around here before.

(i mean–there are ordinary social rules that argue against boorishness and dominating conversations. those are good rules. sometimes i have even shut up on a thread so as not to run the risk of violating them. but i have also seen plenty of violations here at ct–plenty of boorishness and thread-dominating–that did not get called out by the poster).

Since it was perfectly OK – in the sense that no negative consequence was ever subsequently applied – to spray napalm over Vietnamese kids, to bomb Hamburg into a firestorm, and to displace the ethnic-German population of eastern Europe [among many other things that might theoretically be regarded as transgressions], can’t we all just agree that war is hell, and it would be much better if people weren’t allowed to do it AT ALL? Because it seems that any more discriminating attempt to distinguish ‘nice’ and ‘nasty’ warmaking practices will just descend into the usual spewfest of vitriol. And it’s much more fun to do that about Zizek than about something which, distressingly, actually matters.

Chris I am going to have to join John and kid bitzer in expressing puzzlement at a limit on the number of comments someone can post. John’s comments were all reasonable and politely stated.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned P.W. Singer’s newish book Wired for War. I haven’t read it, but from this discussion my impression is that he raises many of these types of questions without answering too many of them.

Zamfir wrote: The difference between operating a drone and shooting from a gunship or dropping bombs from a B52 is not that large.

To whom, by what metric. The US lost over a dozen B-52s during the 1972 Xmas bombing; i.e., there was a cost imposed on the US, a relatively substantial one since B-52s, presumably, don’t come cheap, not to mention the crews on those planes. According to the story at the link, it was more than 2 dozen planes all told. I’d be surprised if the cost of that machinery didn’t exceed the cost of all the drones that would have been necessary to accomplish equal damage. I’m not going to try to quantify the human cost of the Americans who died. I won’t mention the Vietnamese cost because, to those who planned and ordered the bombing, that was a feature not a bug. So there certainly was a big difference (to the US), which likely why the US now fights in this manner.

John Quiggin could likely do a quick and dirty analysis of this, based on the economist’s axiom that as an activity becomes less expensive, people engage in it more frequently: in this case, the activity is war, and the ‘people’ is the US.

@36: something the Dalai Lama said

D. H. Lawrence was there before him. See Chapter XI of “Education of the People” in Phoenix, vol 1 (pp. 655-661).

Drone attacks are an aspect of a broader trend over the last century of war-making, which ethicist Jonathan Glover called “the shift to killing at a distance.” Quips about longbows aside, the 20th century introduced the means to kill masses of people by remote means including efficient blockade, aerial bombardment of cities, R&D for advanced anti-civilian weapons. Glover finds that bureaucracy is an important component of these operations, and that this structure serves to ease the psychological and ethical burden of each individual’s participation; they are not personally responsible, and in most cases can feel that their role is not crucial to whether the operation continues. Bureaucracy also tends to generate a sustaining inertia for these operations, as no one is singly responsible for stopping it. I believe we’re seeing both phenomena (evading guilt, inertia) in the drone program, which persists and expands despite serious doubts as to its strategic value.

@48. Software Engineer would be SE, not SF. I think you mean Sheep Farmer (SF). As in:

If we take it that the technologists (T) are unjust combatants in that they are causing an objectively unjustified threat to country or persons X; and take it also that the sheep farmer (SF) is a just combatant in that he is defending members of X ( and is perhaps a member of X himself albeit from a sheep-filled location), then I see no reason why T is permitted to kill SF simply because they are in a situation of war and T is sitting in an armchair with a cup of coffee.

Someone controlling a weapon is clearly a combatant IMO however he controls it and I don’t think this is even a close case. In John Q’s case, recall that the Geneva criterion is that collateral damage must be not excessive relative to a concrete, definite, military advantage expected to be gained. A drone-centre is clearly concrete and definite, and I would think that the destruction of a big one would potentially be such an important military objective that even quite a lot of civilian casualties might not be considered excessive.

There’s another and quite interesting issue with respect to drones though – a big part of the reason why airstrikes are often thought to shade into war-crimes is that they’re indiscriminate, and any form of attack which can’t discriminate between combatants and noncombatants is per se illegal. It appears to me that a drone is much less indiscriminate than an airstrike, and so it’s potentially quite significantly reducing the incidence of war crimes.

A software engineer who intentionally messed around with the software of a war-bot to make it into an indiscriminate weapon might be considered a war criminal, I can certainly see how that would happen.

Doesn’t that mean that locating a drone control center in a standard office park would be the morally disgusting tactic of using “human shields”? It ensures that the drone controllers can’t be taken out without significant collateral damage.

I think the real issue here is the increased willingness that technologically-superior powers will have to aggressively pursue war when their own risk of casualties is so slight. That’s what’s behind the objection to drones. The risk your own side takes is a natural control on your willingness to wage war.

I think the real issue here is the increased willingness that technologically-superior powers will have to aggressively pursue war when their own risk of casualties is so slight.

Isn’t it balanced by the increased threat of terrorist attacks? I don’t think the amount of casualties is a serious factor.

Henri, the technology behind terrorist attacks is of necessity that which is generally available. The only truly sophisticated technology in 9/11 was the jets themselves. For OKC, modern chemistry. The great powers can use terrorism too, if they’re of a mind, as when the US developed the Contras to undermine the Sandanistas. So it’s not a question of drones balancing terrorism. The US uses drones and terrorism both, and its financial and armament muscle can support terrorist groups beyond what would be normally possible in a given situation (it’s very difficult to see the Contras being viable without outside help from a very powerful source).

I don’t believe there’s a lot of evidence in the public domain that drones are more “discriminate” than more traditional bombing methods – there are quite a few wedding parties and toasted families to the contrary, however.

There’s also zero human cost to the US for operating combat aircraft in Afghanistan.

The case for the Taliban as being illegitimate combatants is also pretty shite. I’d have thought that the fact that we invaded in order to destroy their movement makes their defense just – or is anyone who defends themselves against us automatically on the wrong side of “just”?

What worries me is where this all goes. The ability to remotely pilot instruments of death from halfway around the world is an extraordinary power. It’s Godlike, it really is. So then what? Well, people will just take it to it’s natural conclusion won’t they? Welcome to your new remotely administered police/judiciary.

Chris Bertram said:

The programme raised the issue of whether software engineers might one day be tried for war crimes…You can tell the difference between ordinary farmers and insurgents by the way they move across terrain, apparently.

Why not charge small arms engineers with war crimes too? After all rifles have been used in the commission of atrocities. Its a legal nonsense to blame the weapon maker, it is the weapon user who has to be held accountable. Philosophical howler.

Coalition military authorities appear to make a fair and reasonable effort at gathering intelligence in the inquisition, acquisition and destruction of enemy targets by drones. That is why Taliban suicide bomber, posing as a real time informant, was able to penetrate the local drone control unit in Afghanistan.

There are undoubted moral risks associated with drone warfare. But they are outweighed by the marital rewards. (Assuming an ethical Machiavellian approach to a “just cause” war.)

This form of warfare is helping to win the war, or at least avert an ignominious defeat. We have to destroy the Taliban’s sanctuaries in Pakistan. The best way to do that, and to divide and demoralise them, is to “call down fire from the sky”.

Although personally, I think the sooner we are out of there the better, providing we can reach a settlement with the “moderate Taliban”.

Drones tend to minimize civilian casualties if the operators use them in accordance with proper rules of engagement and good, real time intelligence. According to Human Rights Watch:

“When used properly, drones and their precision missiles can help a military minimize civilian casualties,” Garlasco said. “But drones are only as good at sparing civilians as the people who command and operate them.”

Its true that drone attacks in Pakistan have killed far more civilians than insurgents, if you accept figures from unnamed “Pakistan authorities”.

But this has to be set against the likely higher casualties that would be inflicted by conventional air raids, indirect artillery fire and “search and destroy” operations.

Not to mention the higher civilian costs of untrammeled rule by the Taliban, safe harbour for Al Queada and a possible militant take over of the Pakistan state. The people at most risk from drone attacks tend to support them most fervently, going by this survey:

in areas most affected by US strikes against high-value Taliban and al Qaeda figures (South & North Waziristan, Kurram Agency) that the population actually seemed to favor the strikes. These findings stand in stark contrast to the loud voices in the Pakistani media which paint the targeted air strikes as “civilian massacres”.

It sounds like Chris Bertram is being played for a stooge by the ISI propaganda machine.

Chris Bertram@#22

The Taliban, as irregulars, are arguably more problematic, since they do not wear recognized uniforms or insignia. But that puts them in the same boat as, say, US special forces operating behind enemy lines, or some WW2 resistance groups. You certainly can’t make that quick move from the injustice of their cause to the impermissibility of a given act of war.

Wrong. The Taliban are not simply irregular soldiers supporting a secessionist movement for the Pashtuns. They are stateless insurgents cum die-hard bandits.

Their military organization operates without the formal authority from the legitimate (more or less democratic) government in Kabul. No way are they entitled to all the rights of enemy prisoners of war.

There is no analogy with US special forces operating behind the lines, since these operate with the legal authority of a recognised state. Which government in the world recognises the Taliban? (Resistance forces in France, Italy and Germany are another matter and were fair game for the authorities, providing anti-partisan sweeps were done on behalf of a legitimate state.)

Martin 63, I think you misunderstood me. You said:

I think the real issue here is the increased willingness that technologically-superior powers will have to aggressively pursue war when their own risk of casualties is so slight.

But imagine that using this (or any other) kill-with-impunity technology increases the probability a nuclear explosion in a US city (by terrorists) in the next 10 years from, say, 0.1 to, say, 0.2. Do you think the authorities would stop using drones because of that? …neither do I. So, my point is that what you call “their own risk of casualties” is not really a big factor in their decision to use/escalate violence.

I’m rushing out at the moment and really don’t have much time to on about this, but this really touches on two issues that are integral to the world of the ‘West.’.

In terms of the ‘West’s’ self-image, of course, at least since WW2, ‘we’ have become more civilised, more humanitarian: we abide by the rules of war (whereas, of course ‘they’ don’t).

On the other hand, (and I just don’t have time to check this…facts please!) my understanding is that the ratio of civilians to military personnel killed has gone up throughout the 20th century.

And this has a lot to do with the technology of modern war: especially the use of airpower and the absolutely lamentable ‘blurring’ of the distinctions between civilians and soldiers, which really began in WW1.

Take a battle like Culloden for example. Not much fun for all concerned, but

1: It took place in the middle of nowhere and

2 therefore the only people killed were people who signed up so to speak to fight. And obviously, there were actions taken against civilians afterwards (the break up of the clan system). But the battle itself didn’t involve any civilians.

I choose this example as it was the closest recent example, in the British Isles, to the Afghan or Iraqi situation: an ‘insurgency’ against the ‘legitimate’ govt. (the ‘troubles’ occurred AFTER the blurring of civilian and military I’m talking about).

In other words, whereas it is generally accepted that warfare has become less awful in recent decades, I think that at least in this particular case, it might in reality have become worse.

As for cowering in your darkened room and killing people more or less at random on the other side of the planet: Homer would have had a few words to say about that.

I might also add that ‘we’ are all presupposing that the invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent occupation are actually, in terms of international law, legal: a debatable point.

A minor aside: during the run-up to the first Gulf War, a colleague and I speculated about product liability for a weapon manufacturer: would one be at fault for a product that worked or one that didn’t?

I’m missing something on the whole drone thing. I’m a pretty big hawk on fighting terrorism (doesn’t mean sacrificing American Constitutional principles though by the way or any other basic principles of our country), finding, and eradicating terrorists.

But I don’t get the drone thing. Either I’m reading reports incorrectly, or I feel like I am living in a country which is looking at things very differently

Apparently, these drones very frequently SIMPLY KILL INNOCENT people.

This is not, if correct, a random and hard to avoid act of occasional “collateral damage.” This is an antiseptic program that is known to routinely cause the death/killing/murder of complete innocents, in the pursuit of terrorists or those who are assisting.

If this is the case, this is simply unacceptable, and, frankly, an outrage. What almost as big of an outrage, is that we are seemingly not outraged about it.

Ultimately all we are left with as a society is our humanness, our justice. This does not comport here.

On the slight analogy that the original post also makes, I made this analogy to Instapundit and that site editor’s rather stretched strategy calls. Someone called it unfair. I never got an explanation as to why. I thought the case was made objectively, and fairly, and created the perhaps discomforting awareness of what the bigger picture really looks like when we are able to remove ourselves from the center of the scene, and view it objectively, and dispassionately.

Apparently, these drones very frequently SIMPLY KILL INNOCENT people.

So did V1. So did Little Boy. Simply killing innocent people has apparently been an acceptable tactic to people who actually fight wars since before most of us were born. Is the entire modern military inherently criminal? (I don’t rule out that conclusion, but you don’t often see it drawn.)

Yes, of course an organisation devoted to the efficient killing of people is inherently criminal. Just because we guss it up with high moral values and “rules” doesn’t change this fundamental fact.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t draw distinctions in the actually existing relaity of military operations. One of the advantages of drones over planes is supposed to be the former’s ability to distinguish between the people the US wants dead and those that it has no such desire for. But since the reality on the ground seems to be that drones are just as likely to cause wedding parties to be obliterated for much less risk, the increasing use of them is not something to be applauded in this context.

In a more wider context, anything that makes it easier and less risky for such an agressive power as the US to wage war is worrying. It was the Vietnam experience that kept it reasonably docile during the seventies and much of the eighties; is it a coincidence that military operations increased as technology improved?

I don’t want to say, “I told you so”, but in 1999 I told you so.

From http://www.red-star-research.org.uk/rpm/maxingun.html

“Delivering death from above on demand

The ultimate military aim is to completely destroy your opponents with impunity. It led to the British use of ‘air control’ via ‘police bombing’ in the 1920s and 1930s. It led to the German state wasting millions on the V2 in World War 2. Closest to success yet, it led to the H-bomb and the ICBM. The US lost in Vietnam because of the steady stream of body-bags: Reagan was forced to pull out of Beirut for a similar reason. Even if the enemy is only bombed from the air, never engaged by ‘our’ ground troops, it’s still a dicey business where ‘real’ (i.e. Western) people might get killed.

The US adventure in ‘lawless Somalia’ can be precisely timed. It began in December 1992 with a landing by US marines scheduled to coincide with the prime time news hour. It ended in October 1993 when the TV cameras showed a new scene: the mutilated bodies of US helicopter pilots being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Another example: in 1995 a US navy pilot, Scott O’Grady, was shot down over Bosnia by Serb forces. He was rescued several days later. In the US, national euphoria greeted the news. The window had not cracked: the barrier erected by advanced technology and overwhelming force had stayed up. ‘We’ were not going to suffer any loss at all.

It is no surprise, therefore, to see the SDR introduce an increase in the ‘death from above’ component of the UK’s armed forces. All the navy’s nuclear-powered attack submarines will be modified to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles while submerged. These have a range of 900 miles, and there is no realistic defence against them: as the people of Belgrade found out. They are perfect for destroying the infrastructure of uppity ‘dictators’ (or even democratically elected leaders… ), who might be tempted to question their place in the scheme of things. This capacity also bodes ill for any future re-proliferation of nuclear weapons: Tomahawks can also carry nuclear warheads, and their presence or absence aboard a top-secret submarine is almost impossible to verify. We were sold the Euro fighter (at £70m each) on the basis that it was the only way our boys could overcome the awesome power of the latest Soviet planes. Now the Soviet fighters are rust, but the UK is still buying it, to be overwhelmingly superior to any possible enemy, and thus suffer no losses.

This is not caused by any peculiarly British hooligan tendency. If you look reasonably closely, you can see that several of the NATO countries (France, the Netherlands, and Spain) are tooling up in a similar fashion. They are cutting down on their ability to fight the Red Army, and investing in ‘amphibious warfare’ – the ability to invade unreliable clients. The armed forces of the advanced capitalist countries are no longer devoting themselves to fighting the Soviet Union. Instead, they are going back to a nineteenth century model, optimised for fighting small wars in other countries, using high technology to maximise their advantage. One important change from the nineteenth century is that due to a growth in egalitarianism within the liberal democracies, their soldiers are no longer considered dispensable. This in turn leads to a greater use of disproportionate firepower (as we saw over Serbia) in an effort to eliminate NATO casualties totally, at the expense of passers-by.”

Simply killing innocent people has been accepted as an outcome of war for much, much longer than commenters admit above. Whatever happened on the battlefield, across the wider sphere of warfare civilians were ‘fair game’ under an alarmingly wide set of circumstances, unless they explicitly surrendered themselves into the power of military forces. Sieges are a particularly concentrated example of this, in which the freedom of troops to rape, pillage and murder a population, that had frequently been constrained by their own leaders to remain in peril, was accepted with very little question as late as the Peninsular War. Or one might cite the several thousand innocent casualties of the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, as sorry a tale of the ‘pre-emptive’ invasion of a small, weak country in pursuit of geopolitical dominance as you will find in the annals of British warfare.

One should not make the mistake of thinking that there has been progress in anything except technology. The evidence suggests that the pronouncements of the United Nations, for example, bear the same relation to warmaking now as, shall we say, Kant’s ideas for perpetual peace in 1795 did to the history of the following 20 years. This is terrible, but it is also true.

And one might also say, looking to a future in which it is increasingly unlikely that perpetual peace will result from some friedmanite levelling, that it will remain, sadly, in the individual interests of everyone to live under the umbrella of a state equipped to deal death as efficiently as possible in as many ways as possible. Or to hope that wherever you are becomes such a backwater that nobody wants to attack you. But unless you are extraordinarily lucky, like the Swiss, and combine difficult geography with providing valuable services to more powerful states, you might find in that instance that instead you become Belgium, not merely ignored, but rather fought over as a convenient location to settle the scores of bigger powers, for a few hundred years or so.

Is someone misappropriating the mustachioed metaphor-mixer?

(Not any of the Henrys above.)

I find it hard to reconcile any form of aerial bombardment with any of the concepts of “limited warfare” that are implicit in the Geneva conventions, etc. As other posters have at least alluded to, WWII saw the extension of “military target” to mean “the people who work in armament factories, their homes, and those of their neighbors.” “Total war” is not a moral position, in my thinking.
Consider the conventions on landmines and sea mines, for an earlier example, parallel to automated drones. And consider how rarely the word of those conventions was followed. Setting loose machines that kill autonomously is an act likely to have consequences.
Could a software engineer face war crimes charges for a shoot/don’t shoot algorithm? Or would the charges be closer to the point of release, or further back in the chain of requirements? Writing a requirement for an algorithm “kill nine of every ten without discrimination” would seem to be a moral crime right there – but instantiating it and letting the machine loose would also be clear crimes.
Contrariwise, writing an algorithm “target humans carrying objects longer than 60 cm and with length to width ratio of 4:1 or greater” is not a clear crime; pointing it at people coming out of a store known to sell brooms might well be.

At least in theory drone use could lead to fewer civilian casualties. I can imagine a drone operator lingering in disputed airspace long enough to obtain a high degree of target certainty, whereas a manned attack platform under very real threat wouldn’t want to take the chance of waiting for strict confirmation. Of course it cuts the other way as well. Less worry about the politically damaging possibility of own country casualties -or worse having your captured military
personel used as political hostages. So the threshold for use is lowered, but potentially the threshold for avoiding the use of lethal force when target identification is ambiguous is lowered as well.

I found the software engineer thing a bit disingenuous. Having once had a minor part in a highly classified program, I know that they operate by compartmentalization of information. The programmer needs to know about technical capabilities, but not actual operational details. It will be illegal for him to enquire about these, as they are not necessary for his job function. So he is essentially a tool maker, pretty much like a gun smith. So the whole idea of who is supporting a military operation is a very fuzzy one. Do I have to work in an armaments factory? How about the guy who mines the metal used to construct the weapons? Or the farmer whose crops feed them? There are only degrees of separation, but never the sorts of certainty that our binary logic based legal systems are constructed to deal with.

There are undoubted moral risks associated with drone warfare. But they are outweighed by the marital rewards.

Well, that’s true. If you’re flying them from an office in Nevada rather than an airbase in Kandahar, then you’d be able to get home to see your family every night rather than once in six months, which would put a lot less strain on your marriage.
But I think you meant “martial”…

Have you ever sat face to face and listened to Iraq vets talk about what happened in Iraq? or Vietnam?
If you had, I don’t think you would ever repeat anything the US, or any military organisation, puts out for public consumption.
Here’s an article in Truthout that is quite eye-opening:
The US Military: A Mindset of Barbarism, Part 2
http://www.truthout.org/the-us-military-a-mindset-barbarism-part-256724

Dahr Jamail interviews “Dr. Stjepan Mestrovic, a Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University who has written three books on US misconduct in Iraq: “The Trials of Abu Ghraib: An Expert Witness Account of Shame and Honor,” “Rules of Engagement?: Operation Iron Triangle, Iraq” and “The ‘Good Soldier’ on Trial: A Sociological Study of Misconduct by the US Military Pertaining to Operation Iron Triangle, Iraq.” He has three degrees from Harvard University, including a Master’s degree in clinical psychology, and has been an expert witness in psychology and sociology at several Article 32 hearings, courts-martial and clemency hearings involving US soldiers accused of committing crimes of war in Iraq, including the trials of prison guards involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal.”
On drones:
“Numerous news stories report that the government is currently using drones to kill pre-designated human targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan based upon “intelligence.” These news stories also routinely report that women, children, and civilians are often killed in the process. The mechanical drones are used exactly the same way as human soldiers are used: to carry out the same ROE that applied to Operation Iron Triangle. Incidentally, news stories suggest that the drone operators who execute these missions while sitting in remote control areas in the US are developing PTSD rates faster than the soldiers who actually engage in battle.
It seems to be the case that we are supposed to be mesmerized by the “postmodern” technology that leads to the use of “simulacra” soldiers and missions. The “target” becomes an image on a screen. But real human beings are carrying out the same ROE, whether in face-to-face confrontations or “simulacra” remote control engagements. And the human toll on both the soldiers and the civilian populations is not “simulacra,” but is very real.”

By the way, in case I’m not clear, Dr. Mestrovic and Dahr Jamail are very clearly outraged by the fact that officers aren’t ever prosecuted for atrocities that they have ordered those under their command to commit. Another reporter who condemns the military’s abrogation of its duty to its soldiers: Seymour Hersh, who broke both the Abu Ghraib and My Lai massacre stories.