[frickinLasers]

This isn't total war. Technically it's not even a war, but a "Military Operation Other Than War" (MOOTW). We're not fighting against a coalition of countries; we're fighting a few thousand dudes in caves with AK-47s and rusty Russian ordnance. Of course there will be fewer casualties. Yet still we've managed to kill upwards of 100,000 people, mostly innocents, across 18 years of occupation, in retaliation for a lucky strike that killed 3,000 Americans. You're right--that's actually a lower number for direct casualties than I expected. But I seethe knowing this is what my "defense" tax dollars fund.

Those drones just make it easier to continue killing people tagged as "militants" (a very flexible word in the hands of our government, I'm sure) while removing deterrents, like the idea that our children could be sent off to die in such a campaign. So now we have robots killing people the government doesn't care about, simply because they have been identified as the "enemy." I think I've seen this movie before.

[analognoise]

Mostly innocents? That's not supported by the numbers I was looking at.

Could you point me to these numbers? It looked to me like killing a whole slew of extremists for extremely minimal collateral damage.

[frickinLasers]

I wasn't referring to drone strikes in particular. I pulled the numbers from from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war... and might have misread the 30k wounded as additional deaths. So "most" could be wrong, but the numbers have a way of reflecting the best possible outcome for us.

I'll try to be more precise in future rants.

As for drone strikes: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/11/14/...