The problem with drones is not the drones themselves, but the failure of humanity they represent. [View all]

[Robb]

I talked about this a bit in another thread but wanted to elaborate.

When people rail against drones, I think, they're not really against the drones themselves -- at least in the way people who defend the policy think.

Because everyone knows the drones are more accurate and kill fewer civilians than carpet bombing. And everyone knows they don't cost as much in children or treasure as 100,000 boots on the ground. That's not the point.

The drone program, indeed its very existence, represents a massive failure on the part of human beings.

Consider how much more of warfare we see, through television and the internet, than we did in the days of Dresden. We're not going to see bombing runs like that any more, destroying entire cities to get the military factories -- because the planners know we'd then see it all on video later. Wars are fought and won in the news now as much as on the battlefield. And we know that more information is a good thing.

But we have drones now. We must realize, they are as much a product of the 24-hour news cycle as they are a product of the technology they need to fly.

The fact that warfare did not simply end out of collective disgust under the tight scrutiny of the latter part of the last century -- but rather morphed into something we could shunt away and hide from our own eyes -- suggests enough of us have decided warfare is necessary. At least, necessary enough to craft elaborate ways of deluding ourselves about the horror of it all.

That's really, I think, the problem with drones. Not that they're somehow a worse weapon, but rather what their proliferation says about us.