Has drone technology made the art of war too impersonal?

Proponents of drone warfare say that any technology that allows the United States to achieve its military goals without risking American lives is a good thing. They say that the collateral damage (ie loss of innocent lives) is a part of any type of military operation when an enemy is embedded within the population the way al Qaeda is and it doesn't matter whether you send in tanks and troops or drones and bombs, there's going to be consequences. At least they're not (always) Americans, right? This is the sort of arrogance that can get our country in trouble with the international community. The Obama administration has ordered 7 times the number of drone strikes that the previous administration ordered. Their reliance on drones has become a sticking point amongst liberal supporters of the administration, a hawkish practice that is not suitable for a Democratic party that has been traditionally anti-war. It's not universal; many within the media that showed outrage and disdain over waterboarding as "barbaric" have convinced themselves that killing in this fashion is somehow more humane than torture. The support, however, is waning. An article by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship that was republished in the leftist blog AlterNet titled "America's Outrageous Imperial Drone Warfare" examines the buzz surrounding drone warfare and the ways that technology is making the art of killing easier while making it less precise. "Our blind faith in technology combined with a false sense of infallible righteousness continues unabated," Moyers and Winship wrote. Is drone technology really helping us be more practical with our war efforts or is it making war so impersonal that we're blind to horrific realities of these deadly machines?

Avoiding crying Americans