David Bell is a fucking retard and The National Review hasn't had anything useful to say since Buckley retired.

The impressive thing is that he pays lip service to PW Singer without getting to the main argument against drones, laid out in a pretty accessible book (http://wiredforwar.pwsinger.com/): You can't have war crimes without war criminals.

The argument against drones isn't that they're new and therefore, somehow beastly. The argument against drones is that they eliminate responsibility and causality while also eliminating danger. Perhaps more importantly, they don't actually eliminate danger, they temporarily displace it.

Take your Taliban insurgents going to a birthday party in Waziristan. We dispatch a Reaper and take out the entire assembly with a pair of well-timed AGM-65s. Leon Panetta pats himself on the back for taking down Al Qaeda #34 with "minimal collateral damage" and somewhere in the suburbs of Vegas, four UAV pilots commute back to their Quadrant Homes mortgages and tax-deductible dependents. Just good guys getting bad guys from the safety of an air-conditioned trailer, right? So... when a car bomb goes off at rush hour in the parking lot of the Wal Mart between the base and the bedroom community killing one UAV pilot and 35 schoolchildren, is that terrorism?

Or is that a perfectly legitimate military counter-strike? Keep in mind - the guys in the Hindu Kush aren't the ones that blurred the lines. They were just going to a birthday party. Of course, the Air Force doesn't do their killing without involving the CIA so an equally-legitimate target would be the Buffalo Wild Wings in Reston, VA where all those lower-level intelligence operatives and actuaries gather every friday for Trivia Night.

We don't hate new weapons, we hate indiscriminate weapons. As we rely more and more on UAVs, we rely more and more on UAV intelligence, and it demonstrably sucks. This has not stopped our headlong rush into autonomous battlefield weaponry - and spare me the Skynet references, but when a drone blows up a school of its own accord who faces a tribunal?

Notable omissions in David Bell's screed are chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Which are not new - the Romans got a ration of shit for launching plague-infested corpses over walls. The Geneva Convention was enacted basically to prevent the further use of mustard gas. These are weapons where you use them, and their victims are pretty much chosen by proximity - war is hell, right? But going back 3000 years, those weapons where the lines between "those killing" and "those dying" aren't clearly drawn are the weapons that we tend to use once and then ban.

Something that nobody talks about with UAV warfare, however, is our stunning reliance on satellite technology. So, riddle me this: If it isn't a war crime to fly a UAV over Pakistan to kill a tribe of "enemy combatants" who ventured in from Afghanistan, Is it a war crime to detonate a nuclear weapon in orbit over Las Vegas to take out the UAV command center with an EMP?

'cuz a space burst will have zero casualties. It'll even make some pretty lights, just google "Starfish Prime." It'll also permanently destroy any electronic device reliant on anything more advanced than vacuum tubes, which includes hospitals, waterworks, telecommunications grids...

The Western World? Will see that as an "act of war." the Arab World? an "act of retaliation." After all, they didn't "kill" anybody.

These are the arguments against UAVs - not that they're "new." Pretending otherwise demeans the discussion, insults those with expertise and prevents those without from learning something.

(By the way, if you want to know what HAARP is really about, it's about dropping our reliance on those satellites... so that even when Las Vegas has been returned to the Dark Ages, we'll still be able to drop the Beast of Kandahar in Ahmadinejad's lap by remote)

The critics of drone warfare argue that without Americans running the risk of death, a vital restraint upon murderously aggressive military action will disappear, and countless innocent civilians will die. But in combating insurgents and terrorists, an action’s political effects matter just as much, if not more, than their purely military ones, and high civilian death tolls are not just moral outrages, but political disasters.

This is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, it assumes that drones won't be applied to non-insurgent conflicts when they next arise, and second, it assumes that civilians and insurgents are separable in some meaningful way that allows for an outcome, which our current evidence doesn't seem to bear out. If you look at Iraq and Afghanistan, many of the 'terrorists' or 'insurgents' switched sides, once or more. There is a real question about what drones are actually effecting. Can they win a conflict? Are they mostly just a suppressive aggression?

Also, I thought this was pretty ridiculous:

Which is certainly one reason why the administration likes drones. Drones are not cruise missiles, or shells fired by Big Bertha. They are controllable, and are explicitly designed to allow the military to target opposing forces as carefully as possible. Of course, targeting raises its own set of questions: War that takes the form of a campaign of assassination is both morally problematic and politically counter-productive.

But that is a separate issue.

Is it? Actually, I think it's the crux of the issue raised by the critiques in the beginning of the article.

And finally:

If you are concerned about American aggression, it is not the drones you should fear, but the politicians who order them into battle.

False choice. You can reasonably fear both.