IN THE NEWS
Armchair Generalist has some good comments about the CIA's expanded use of robot drones to attack terrorists. Experience shows that even the most precisely-guided weapons miss their targets, as they did recently in Pakistan. (Not surprisingly, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharaff, is now asseting that he neither knew about nor approved the recent US attempt to kill Ayman al-Zawahri with a similar drone.) As limited in their effectiveness as they are in counterterrorism, they are almost completely useless in counterinsurgency, as the Generalist states.
I wish I had bookmarked the page where someone, in the comments section of another blog, summarized what makes people in other countries uncomfortable with our use of robot drones. To paraphrase that person, How would you feel if a foreign power could send its robot drones to kill anyone in your country whom these foreigners felt were a threat? Sometimes, as traditional US Army doctrine states, it's better to send a bullet than a man. There are also times when sending either one might be a bit too risky for rather limited results.
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