I can understand why drones are used in a war zone. It protects the lives of pilots. Aircraft are in danger over a war zone of being shot down, so it makes sense to use a pilotless vehicle. But the thinking about using drones in other places, like in a country we are not at war with, is different. The government has told us that drones are used in those cases because they are more surgically-precise in their attacks than jets delivering bombs or missiles.Unfortunately, that may just be a myth -- or a lie the government tells us to justify their use of drones. There is a new report, co-authored by Lawrence Lewis at the Center for Naval Analysis and Sarah Holewinski of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, which compares the effectiveness of both jets and drones -- and drones don't come out looking too good.
It turns out that drones are not the surgically-precise weapons that we have been told they are. Lewis, who has a top secret clearance, studied strikes done by both drones and jets between mid-2010 and mid-2011. He found that drones are 10 times more likely that the piloted jets to cause the deaths of innocent civilians -- exactly the opposite of what the government has claimed.
He has called for better training of the people who control drones (who don't get anywhere near the training of a jet pilot). I would go even further. While more training would be a good idea, an even better idea would be to stop the drone attacks conducted outside of a war zone. Too many innocent civilians are being killed, and in addition to being an immoral act, that creates more enemies than it kills.
