Drone warfare immoral? Less moral than traditional combat?

For the record, I think that (for the most part) drone warfare is preferable than, say, sending in that Kenyan unit that was prepared to raid the bad guys' house. With the two bomb-vests and the Al-Shabbab militia that was controlling the streets, the bad guys would have taken out a majority of the Kenyans. [I don't remember why they called off the Kenyans at the first house (something about the uncertainty of the identities of the bad guys plus they lost track of the two Americans that we last saw at the airport).]

After some of the bad guys' move to the second house (the one where they were making the vests and was down the alley from Alia's) the subject of sending the Kenyan unit never came up--precisely for the reason I mentioned above.

The moral conundrum here was: Alia's life versus the scores of lives that would potentially be lost at the "Mall". I wouldn't want an innocent girl killed. But, after Jama Farah (Barhad Abdi) tried to buy Alia's bread, I would have figured that we gave it the old college try and would have done the same thing that they did...pound the house.

~~Bayowolf
There's a difference between being frank... and being dick.

To be honest, warfare makes no sense to me, whatever the kind we're talking about.

Shooting enemies two by two, hoping that somehow bombs falling from the sky in the middle of a village won't make more enemies out of civilians is a losing strategy.

Digging trenches and getting young men to shoot at each other and to bomb each other with chemicals, hoping that you'll inflict enough loss to the other side that they give up before you makes no sense to me.

And getting people to strap bombs to themselves and walk into bars, malls and airplanes, killing civilians a few hundreds at a time, out of millions of people, hoping that you'll scare them enough that their governments will turn tail and abandon their economical and military interests in the Middle East makes no sense to me either.

For every lie I unlearn I learn something new - Ani Difranco

You've made excellent points and I believe most people would logically come to the same conclusions that not only are drones more precise but that they ultimately save more lives on both sides of the battle.
But I think the real danger is losing that moral dilemma that we see in this film..Couldn't such physical detachment create, in time, the same kind of detachment emotionally?
Sure...one can actually view the cost of any collateral damage on a screen and be aware before the strike and attempt to avoid it but then how calloused might it make some people to make these decisions and push these buttons from a secure and protected environment thousands of miles away ...Even shooting an arrow from 400 feet away one might feel some sense of danger and the threat of physical harm which actually involves one in the act that they are performing (and a personal reason that they are performing it); the taking of another or other lives.

I'm all for Terrorism being attacked with any tools available...
But what about the future..
If war becomes too antiseptic could that possibly make it easier to engage in?

The cost of wars for politicians was always the body bags of young soldiers returning home. Now we can engage in perpetual warfare and nobody back home cares.

How many years has the US been at war again? I've lost count.

Who are we fighting again? Nobody and everybody.

War shouldn't be cost effective or convenient.

Drone warfare is just as moral, maybe even more so as you put fewer people (i.e. your own people) at risk.

Just ignore libtards. They are collectively deluded beyond salvation.

Most of the fighting death and destruction is occurring in the middle east and parts of Africa.

Yes Islamic radicals do kill in the western world but comparatively speaking it's minuscule. There's also the death and destruction being perpetrated by other middle eastern countries and groups on others in those areas, but again at least one reason for that is b/c of the instability created over the last 15 years of constant war.

The fact that we're able to limit casualties b/c of our superior tech allows us to continue to bomb and fight in these regions without too much public dissent (Vietnam only ended b/c the casualties suffered were too high).

Limiting casualties has allowed for perpetual war, which creates more angry, poor, and/or uneducated young people in those regions. Some of those people go on to become suicide bombers or members of isis or whatever other group that inevitably springs up as the bogey man in the west (not saying they aren't actually a bogey man just not my bogey man). And we get more war and violence.

It isn't more immoral than artillery would have been. They adjusted to where they thought the enemy was and shot off hoping to hit. Now they're shooting from even further away and they know when they hit.

"You'll be taking a soul train straight to a disco inferno where you never can say goodbye!"

In WW2 they'd have bombed the city with 500 bombers.

A pinpoint strike with a drone is a lot more reasonable to get a specific target than laying waste to the entire city.