Droning on and on and ...

First of all a disclaimer.  This is not meant to take sides in the discussion of the use of drones in warfare, but a look at the other side of the issue, a side that has not been articulated in anything  I've read.

Putting the blind fear survivalists have of the their own government spying on them or coming after them, the issue seems to be the cold, impartial way an inanimate object kills innocents.  Well, conventional war kills innocents too. It doesn't make it right, but that's part of the deal.  Civilians die in wars, always have, always will, that is the nature of war.

It is also the nature of war that young people in uniform die fighting for causes a lot of them don't even understand. Look at Iraq. Bush and Cheney rushed us into war against a country based on lies  emanating  from the 9/11 attacks and intelligence, or lack of it, concerning weapons of mass destruction. It was all couched in patriotism, and the troops were made heroes fighting to protect America. What exactly they were protecting America from still remains a big question.  Iraq was no threat to Americans, unless you count oil supplies.  But that's off the subject.  Plenty of civilians died in the Iraq conflict; as a matter of fact they are still dying even though the U.S. is not fighting there any more.  As a matter of fact it is a civilian against civilian war that kills innocents by the hundreds.  But let a U.S. drone go astray and kill a noncombatant, immediately the whole thing is vile.

While that is inexcusable, look at the other side of the drone effort.  Through history the development of equipment for war has been aimed at killing as many of the enemy as possible while slowly moving your own fighters farther and farther from danger.  Long range artillery does that, beginning with catapults.  Airplanes do that, putting fighters farther removed from those they are fighting, taking them out of  hazard while still exacting a toll on the enemy.

The drone carries that to a new extreme.  The fighting man or woman now can sit relatively safely in a room somewhere, while targeting  the enemy.  More casualties on the enemy, fewer on the good guys. It keeps our guys safer and less vulnerable to the wounds of war.

The horrors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed thousands of Japanese civilians, but World War II ended RIGHT NOW without the loss of one more American serviceman's life.  What is right?  Distance from the immediate battlefield? Maybe.

And, while we condemn those wicked drones for killing bystanders, keep in mind that they also do a job that used to have to be done by troops on the ground where they would have to face enemy fire.  What began as hand to hand combat and ever since the first cave man pounded the second caveman, armies have worked to remove combatants step by step away from face-to-face confrontation.  The drone is simply the most recent step in that process and it does save lives on our side.

Of course, any weapon of war can be used for other applications and therein lies the danger of drones.  If a government uses them to spy on its own citizens or attack its own people  or they get into the hands of terrorists, it becomes a different story.  For the time being given that we have to trust our own people with every other weapon of war, we have to trust them to do the right thing with drones as well, but not without what oversight we can manage.  The enemy here isn't the drones themselves, the enemy is war itself. If the energy put into condemning or defending drones were put instead into creating peace we would all be better off, and the world would be a better place.  Given man's history there's not much chance of that.

So if we do have to fight wars, isn't it preferable we fight them employing a gamer with a joy stick to assure someone's son or daughter, brother or sister, husband or wife comes home rather than dying in combat, especially when our national motives are suspect and history may show those precious men and women died for no good reason at all?

FAA approves use of drones over Alaska oil fields

Drones in Alaska.