I get the feeling most of this video is wishful thinking.

"... far more PRECISE". Goddammit.

People don't like drone strikes? Last I heard they had something like 70% approval in most polls.

Also I can think of at least one tactic that would kill fewer innocent people.

About that one tactic that would kill fewer innocent people ... are you factoring in whom we're going after and why we're going after them? Tell me you would have begrudged a drone strike against bin Laden in 1998 or so, preventing 9/11 and two wars.

Just to be clear, I am entirely in favor of more oversight, to make sure we're going after targets who legitimately pose a threat, as opposed to people we kinda sorta think might belong to al Qaeda. But once that determination is made, this becomes a real life ethics class trolley problem, where the administration has to decide whether to send the trolley to kill the group of five people, one of whom is a serial killer.

You know Al Quaeda isn't actually a real organization, right? Going after Al Quaeda is literally exactly like going after Anonymous, except the stakes are much higher on both sides.

It's not a real organization to the extent that it doesn't lend itself to an org chart and a rigid chain of command, I'll grant you that. But I'd say a truer analogy would be the French Resistance.

Wrong.

"People" (that is, Americans) like drone strikes because the US is light years ahead of their enemies in this department and can currently use them with basically impunity.

A Hellfire missile from a drone is no different from a well-placed car bomb, only the fact that somewhere miles away there's a guy in a uniform pushing a button, so it's not a war crime.

When others have drones with lethal capability the US will be scrambling to declare that all other drones are somehow a war crime while theirs are perfectly legal, I'm sure.

Here's the latest PEW research poll on drone strikes:

http://www.people-press.org/2013/02/11/continued-support-for-u -s-drone-strikes/1/

More than 50% approve of them in places like Pakistan, sure. It's when you ask about civilian casualties that you get closer to 70%... among Democrats and Independents. Republicans only have 37% of their respondents concerned that innocent people will get killed.

Since when are drone strikes imprecise? When you hear about a drone slamming a missle into a wedding, are you actually under the impression that they weren't aiming at the wedding?
Innocents are getting killed not because the strikes are off target, but because there's people standing beside the target and the military just doesn't care.

Whatever happened to just bombing your enemies into the stone age and sticking them with the costs for the entire war?

It worked against my people...well, for about 20 years.

That's a point that critics of drones ought to acknowledge, I think; if you're going to hate something, hate it for the right reasons. Drones ARE a much less indiscriminate killer than widespread bombing, or sanctions, full-scale invasion. Now you can easily argue that drones are still employed too readily and cause too many civilian deaths, but make no mistake, if we were truly indifferent to civilian casualties, we wouldn't limit ourselves to drones.

Wow, uncanny.

isnt that what we're doing though?

They're just looking towards the future, when we'll be producing all of China's gadgets for them and they can market it as FLAPPY WING MICRO AIR VEHICLE very charming ¥749.9 from AMERICA DIRECT WHOLESALE please allow 15-30 days for shipping