The misplaced angst over drone strikes

Ralph Peters:

Hundreds of drone strikes so far this year, from Syria to Pakistan. Hundreds of dead terrorists, many of high rank. Thousands of lives saved. And what makes headlines?

Two Western hostages killed in an otherwise successful drone attack.

Sorry, folks. That’s war. And warfare will never be dainty or fully precise. We should be awed by the accuracy of our weaponry and the unprecedented reduction in the loss of innocent lives.

Instead, we bitch because military operations — humanity’s most complex and fraught endeavor — aren’t perfect.

We may regret the loss of an American and an Italian aid worker, but they’d voluntarily placed themselves in danger. And actions have consequences.

We cannot cripple our counter-terror campaign on the bare chance that a hostage might be co-located with a master terrorist. The war fanatics have forced upon us a zero-sum game: We kill them, or they kill us. And delay is defeat.
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The problem with drone strikes int eh Obama administration is that they lack other strategic moves that would make them more effective.  The Obama administration has quit capturing and interrogating the enemy reducing the intelligence needed to make the strikes more effective and giving the US a better chance of stopping terror strikes by the enemy which have increased dramatically under Obama.  By relying almost solely on drone strikes is like destroying the hard drive on a computer full of evidence before exploiting the information.