I think most people would be very happy with a 7:1 militant to civilian kill rate, especially when the militants tend to have leadership roles. It's far, far higher than conventional operations.

Maybe in an actual just war. A defensive one against a real threat. Not this game being played with people's lives.

So in order for people to fight wars they have to do it inefficiently and expensively by using manned planes just so they don't look cowardly? Good argument.

More like using drones puts none of your own lives at any risk at all and makes turns killing people into a fucking video game. It's sick and only going to get worse. And yes, I understand this is a path we've been going down for a while. Doesn't make it right.

The Predator program is the most efficient war effort in the world, and it's not close at all

Yeah, if you just ignore that the war effort itself and all the lives that have been lost are needless.

That's the only reasonable claim in your comment, people in the Middle East largely have a massively wrong view of the prevalence of civilian casualties from drones, mostly due to poor education and news accuracy along with prevalence of conspiracy theories , and that perception undoubtedly drives recruitment to some extent. Alternatives like special ops raids and manned airstrikes likely create similar issues though, and you try to make an extremely complicated area of policy half a sentence long.

Fuck off. Yeah, you sure know better than they do about their own people. Because you gots an education and no one there does or anything... The hubris. We've been fucking with their people and nations since the end of WWII and the western world has been doing it for much longer. I think they have more than enough of a right to feel severely wronged.

which devastated much of al Quaeda

Oh. But now it's the ISIS, or some other excuse to continue waging endless war. And then we back these groups in other areas like Syria. All part of the game that hurts most of us.