"narco-trafficking boats"

There's no public evidence of that though. No trial. It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.

100% agreed with this and this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.'

All of this really sounds so much better than what it really is. It's murdering people all around the world, many of whom are 100% innocent. For instance the last person we droned in occupied Afghanistan was Zemari Ahmadi - a longtime worker for a US humanitarian aid organization. A US drone operator mistook bottles of water he was loading into his car for his family as bombs, and so they murdered him as well as 10 other civilians, including 7 children, all with the press of a button. [1]

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-...

Murdering people for "committing" a nonviolent crime in international waters that still wouldn't qualify for capital punishment if it was committed on US soil. It wouldn't matter if they provided mountains of evidence, it would still be wrong, and yet they are providing zero evidence. We're just openly committing war crimes knowing that no one can really stop it.

Taking the moral argument aside the fact that the largest best funded navy run by the wealthiest country have to call in airstrikes against barely(if at all) armed fishing vessels, that may or may not be smugglers, rather then board arrest and at least make an attempt at tracing the cash flow back to the wealthy businessmen who is organizing/funding the smuggling reeks of weakness and desperation rather then being the signal of strength and competency it's intended to be.

Sure it's a widely understood and often repeated problem with especially western naval and military doctrine that the peace time buildup favors white elephants(battleships, F35s etc) that, as was the case of the British high see fleet of WWII, end up inactive while entire new(often much cheaper and less sophisticated) classes of ships like destroyer escorts or Patrol boats have to be build as replacements. But still the US haven't quite deteriorated so badly yet that it couldn't reacquire whatever boarding capacity got lost in the relentless pursuit of military industrial complex profits quite quickly.

The US gov cartel is ruthless - military members get to be murderers, but its good preparation for when they are deployed against US cities

There is a non zero chance one of these strikes was a mistake and instead hit an innocent fishing boat. Because humans make mistakes all the damn time.

Well luckily it turned out that they were all ne'er-do-wells so it's all good.

Just like when the US used drones on Iraqi convoys and amazingly they were all Al-Qaeda sympathisers.

> It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.

That would work too but why risk american soldiers? This is much more efficient and the footage makes for good deterrent/propaganda.

this kind of stuff lines up with the US military MO going back to at least 2008, when more than a few civilian wedding parties in Afghanistan were hit by drone strikes (not the last wedding party in the region to be blown up during the Obama administration). We can say that perhaps we are regressing but it is not really a new development.

Droning people without public evidence is nothing new for any POTUS in the last 20 years.

It’s not quite the same. It’s considerably more cowardly.

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