Drones Good or Bad?

I must admit I am actualy apposed to creating drones for warfare. If all we do is send over drones then what is there to keep war to becoming nothing more then a game, then when enemies realy want to hurt us they will attack civies again. and then who do we attack their factories where more civies work. Eventualy the enemy will be invisible behind a curtain of UAV's and we won't know who to attack. Don't get me wrong death is bad, but casualties keeps war in perspective, It lets us know that war is ugly. I am not saying UAV's are a completely bad thing I am just saying we have to keep the human eliment on the feild. and befor everyone jumps on me and calls me sick and a murder I plan on being on the feild as a helicopter pilot when I finish school.

I don't think that our enemies care about these sorts of things. We're not fighting against civilized western nations with modern notions of decency. We're fighting idealogues that would like to see the western way of life exterminated from the planet, and nothing no matter how dastardly, is off limits for them technique wise to accomplish this. Any advantage we can get to fight them is good, as there's no prize for coming in second.

He touched on the truth there.

The enemies we currently face use martyrdom as a weapon, and believe that our "bombing from afar" is cowardly and disgusting. They wont be using any remote drones against us.

Ask yourself this, why dont the car bombers park the car, and walk away before detonating the explosives? Because they want to be a martyr... they have no interest in living through this war, which means we have to keep as much distance between them and us when fighting them.

So long as we don't end up using drones agains civillians, then it's ok by me. As soon as someone like the US Administration decides to attack civillians with drones, trust me, I'll be sending a drone of my own their way...

[edit on 30-12-2006 by johnsky]

Well the smart insurgents have figured out that it's better to not get blown up in their own blast too. The problem is that they've convinced a lot of others to do things, they themselves won't do. That's why you don't see the Osamas, Zarqawis, etc...wearing explosive vests attacking the allies. They convince some poor schmo to do that for them. The huge problem that the allies face is the high unemployment in the region. A lot of the attacks are not from zealots, but merely some lackey that was looking to make a few $$$(i.e. we'll give you $200 to shoot this RPG/Mortar/set this IED against the allies), which is far more than they could hope to make otherwise. I don't doubt for a minute, if the insurgents had UAVs, that they wouldn't use them. They've found very crude designs in the works, to try to deliver some type of warhead(HE or other).

ok but i don't just mean for the current conflicts in which your country is firghting. I mean if there was ever a conflict between two countries of equal military strength. obviously the insurgents can't use UAV's because they do not have the equipment but what if they did. then what.

In otherwords a high intensity conflict- I still think the opponent would use all his technology as would we. The ultimate purpose of drones is to minimize casualties, so both sides would use them. It's the same purpose of precision munitions in order to minimize the # of sorties, air crews, etc... to accomplish a task, again minimizing friendly casualties. Anybody on the receiving end in this sort of conflict is going to be taking high casualites though, due to the lethality of modern weapons.(and this would be the deterrent effect you'd mentioned.)