To drone or not to drone.

The Obama administration is wrong.

Quite frankly the administration before them and the one before that were wrong as well. The use of unmanned drones to kill American citizens when in harm’s way of a battle area is tantamount to death by friendly fire…only organized.

We have a problem in our country today, that the military has been turned over to private enterprise…outsourced since the Bush Administration. It is as if Halliburton could be fighting our battles for us. In her book, Drift, Rachael Maddow paints a rather sobering picture that most Americans aren’t even aware of the wars going on fielded by this country unless you have a direct family involvement. There is no shared society pain. No community involvement. No victory gardens. Just business as usual. And its part of an organized Pentagon mission to take the heat off the  military in its actions by the civilians back home. Few dead soldiers and pilots, the better.

And the drone became a huge part of that strategy.

By flying unmanned drones into battle, the administration believed it could reduce the number of U.S. military deaths and could field a large air strike force for a whole lot less tax dollars. (Let’s face it, if you don’t have to make a plane with a cavity for life support— namely that of a pilot— the costs for such a flying tube just got a lot cheaper.) It was also reasoned that a fairly silent unmanned drone could reach into enemy territory and take out terrorists’ cells with precision.

This whole enterprise has the feeling of a video game.

It is the precision part that has come into question. Not that drones aren’t precise. They can be. With deadly accuracy. The problems truly lies in the information that is given to the commanders who use them, as to just where and who and what the targets the drones are going after are. And in too many cases those targets have been and could be American citizens.

Now comes the realization that Americans are actually being targeted (or can be) and under the patriot Act (thank you again Mr. Bush and Mr. Chaney) there needs to be no due process in the killings. An American caught in the fire of a drone, even targeted by a drone, is considered to be in a combat- sensitive zone and does not need protecting under our constitution for their rights and due process.

The killing of an American citizen by this country’s military without the necessary due process is wrong. Unless that American is killed accidentally or in some way as collateral damage which could not be helped.

But the preciseness of drones and the intelligence, which leads drones to their targets, suggests jut the opposite. If we have the power to pin point our targets with such amazing technology, then the ability to put a target on the back of a U.S. citizen overseas in a hostile area is quite possible and just as wrong.

Sorry. Mr. Obama I do believe you (and your predecessor) have overstepped your bounds as commander and chief in this matter.

Recognizing that today (and tomorrow’s) wars are not going to be fought conventionally like in the past — no cold war facing off across miles and miles of frontier lines with army tanks and brigades of armed troops— no, tomorrow’s battles will be fought more along the lines of the CIA insurgency tactics that we are using in Yemen and Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Slip in at night. Do the damage. Leave before sunrise. Slice and dice. Drone in. Drone out. Seals in. Seals out. And if Americans are in the targeted inner circle, too bad.

Don’t see it. Do not like it. Feels very, very uncomfortable and just like Guantanamo, makes us less a country of law and order and more a country of fear and strength. (Those two usually go together in a thing called a bully.)

Rethink the drone issue. Rethink the entire way in which we fight. I don’t disagree with drones as a weapon. They make perfectly good sense. I do believe, however, their usage should have the same moral and constitutional clothing as the soldiers who go into a region to carry out our bidding. We had the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which was soldiers acting outside of the code of conduct. Let’s not do it with drones now.