collateral damage, which is what war brings. Daniel Byman stated, “The United States simply cannot tolerate terrorist safe havens in remote parts of Pakistan and elsewhere, and drones offer a comparatively low risk way of targeting these areas while minimizing collateral damage”. The critics don’t realize that the other options are too dangerous and would cause more collateral damage than the drones do. Byman states, “Critics of drone strikes often fail to take into account the fact that the alternatives are either too risky or unrealistic”. The alternatives to drone strikes would be putting more of the U.S. soldiers on high value risky missions. This in turn could cause more casualties to the U.S. military and could cause more to civilians. Another alternative would be more strikes from piloted planes that don’t have the best field of view. A big issue that critics have is that drone operators choose and pick targets to kill. Etzioni stated, “When a predator drone detected three militants planting an improvised explosive device in a road in Afghanistan on February 17, the strike was aborted after the drone’s cameras revealed children in the area”. This shows that the U.S. military is doing their best to minimize the collateral damage. Etzioni goes on to say, “However, Baitullah Mehsud, head of the Taliban in Pakistan, was considered an asset of such high value that the presence of his wife and were not enough to abort a strike that killed all three on August 5 last year”. No civilian causality would be great, but that is something that cannot be accomplished at this time. Drones are better than a lot of the alternatives especially carpet bombing or full on invasion. Michael J. Boyle stated, “No one - among either advocates or critics-really knows the number of deaths caused by drones in these distant, sometimes ungoverned, lands. In the absence of official government statistics, a number of independent organizations have produced data on drone strikes based largely on newspaper reports and intelligence sources”. The critics that argue that drones cause more causalities than other means are not really reliable because no one knows how
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