From the NYT:
The drone's promise of precision killing and perfect safety for operators is so seductive, in fact, that some scholars have raised a different moral question: Do drones threaten to lower the threshold for lethal violence?  "In the just-war tradition, there's the notion that you only wage war as a last resort," said Daniel R. Brunstetter, a political scientist at the University of California at Irvine who fears that drones are becoming "a default strategy to be used almost anywhere." With hundreds of terrorist suspects killed under President Obama and just one taken into custody overseas, some question whether drones have become not a more precise alternative to bombing but a convenient substitute for capture. If so, drones may actually be encouraging unnecessary killing.

For the full story, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/the-moral-case-for-drone....

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