We don't ***have*** to fight (on other people's lands). The only true enemy we have is right here at home.

I'd be opposed to these foreign so-called "pre-emptive" wars regardless of whether we were fighting them with swords, bayonets, jet planes, drones or any other method that's been tried so far.

The USA and UK governments pretend to be engaging in "defence" when they launch their wars of choice in the Middle East. That's not true. They are engaging in attack...outright pre-planned aggression, planned some considerable time before the first shots were fired, planned BEFORE 911....invasion of other people's lands...forcible regime change of other nations...strictly for the sake of USA and UK imperial objectives.

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But...The thing that troubles me about using drones and similar automated devices for either war or internal security is this: you can't talk to a drone. You can't negotiate with it. You can't reason with it. You can't surrender to it or even discuss anything with it. It isn't human. It has no empathy, compassion or moral sense, anymore than a bullet does. It has no pity. It doesn't even know what it's doing. It exists only to kill and it has no conscience. There is no hope of any mercy or any understanding in a machine.

Get that? Do you really want the equivalent of Terminator II movie hardware enforcing "order" in the world you live in? How would you feel if a flying military drone had you in its crosshairs, maybe by mistake even!, and there was not a soul in the world you could negotiate with about the situation, Bobert?

Most soldiers are capable of developing some respect for their human adversaries, because they too are human. Machines aren't. When you remove the human moral sense from the equation, you have essentially removed all hope from the equation as far as I can see. Welcome to the end of life and liberty as we once knew it.

There have been some famous prophetic books written in the 20th century about totalitarian regimes that would do stuff like this. I think you know the ones I mean. They'd rather use a machine to kill you, because it ALWAYS obeys the order, no matter what, no matter how insane the order, and it "kills without pain like a dog on a chain". People just aren't that dependable. Sometimes they will refuse to obey a criminal order from a totalitarian master.

Another point. If the drafted sons and daughters of a public have to serve and die in a war...then it's much harder to get that public onside to support a dishonest and criminal war effort. If you can do it with automated machines and hired mercenaries instead, which is more and more what's happening now on the part of the USA, you have effectively isolated most of the American public from the direct results of war.......thus getting their tacit consent. They'll put up with 500,000 nameless Iraqis or Afghans or Iranians invisibly dying, because it's not happening within their own family or community...but they'd never put up with 20,000 of their own sons and fathers and daughters dying over there!

See? Clever, isn't it? They've been really busy lately privatizing and automating their wars, because that's the easiest way to stifle a strong domestic antiwar movement which was what really brought an end finally to the Vietnam War. Of course...we had a more or less free press then too. They hadn't been "embedded" yet. There's only a few tattered shreds left of any free press around now...on mainstream media.