The NSA watches you poop.

Lets me be honest here. They hate everything we do with military in our country. Imagine the cop thread, now imagine it was literally impossible to do anything about those cops, and then imagine cops were told they had to kill people on purpose.

No shit other countries hate our military and what it does.

Also, looking at it from the side of the insurgent, the risk of getting turned into a smoldering crater is the same whether it is a drone or a manned aircraft. But it is a lot more demoralizing when they risk life and limb (or suicide attack) against a drone and the only consequence is "a_drone_002" spawning a little later with the same dude at the controls. We literally have the capacity to delete their shit stain of a country completely by remote control without resorting to nukes, until we blow through all our cash doing it. The best part is that if our guy fucks up, he gets to learn and improve instead of us having to retrain a new dude from scratch. Allah Sandyballs is most likely a grease spot if he fucks up. They are living in a war zone, while our guys are essentially playing Xbox with little personal consequence. Never underestimate the demoralizing effect of not ever being able to make the enemy bleed, which is what drone warfare means to the people subjected to it.

From our end, I think anyone ESPECIALLY those with experience in armed conflict would agree that its a lot easier to make the decision to take a human life when you are more removed from the situation. This obviously does not apply to men defending themselves in the field, but I am referring to missions where the specific goal is to eliminate a specific person especially when a high risk of collateral is involved. If you are going in with boots on the ground, chances are those guys are going to not blow away women and children casually and be very clear about confirming their target. Assistant Director Needledick at drone HQ is probably not going to give as much of a shit about those factors, since he is manning a desk back on US soil and his job is all about the numbers and he does not have to see the killing eyeball to eyeball. It's really a basic fact of human nature.

tad10_sl said:

I don't talk day to day with Al-Qaeda leaders (sorry NSA asshole who is following this thread) but I'm going to guess from the fact that we've been drone-bombing them for years and AQ seems as strong as ever that it's not as demoralizing as you think.

When you're 18, living in Yemen, and can't have sex unless you rape a girl and can't do much else - picking up a gun and killing people probably seems like a rational choice.

Instead of sending in drones, we should pay for brothels, that would cut into AQ recruitment.

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I don't disagree with this, but really warfare being conducted solely by drones is a relatively new development (as opposed to the drones supplementing existing forces in a specific theatre) and the outrage has gotten pretty intensified since. Its a lot different being able to run in with a bomb strapped to you and gib a bunch of foreigners and collect your 72 virgins, as opposed to getting raped by skynet periodically and having to cross the Atlantic to meaningfully retaliate. Technology has changed a shit ton since the Afghan resistance of the Soviets and while we are not capable of occupying a foreign state effectively (thanks Iraq for proving that), we can basically fuck them up on a near constant basis with drones and other forms of remote ordinance. They could fuck us by sabotaging oil production in the region, but that would put them at odds with the very people financing their bullshit.

tad10_sl said:

I like how nothing like this happens in the 6 years of Obama then right after the NSA shit is revealed suddenly we've got the super secret AQ info, thanks to the NSA.

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How do you define "like this" so that it doesn't include benghazi or killing obama bin ladden? It's not like terrorists have been quiet for 6 years.

tad10_sl said:

We haven't shut down 23 embassies and yelled about how dangerous AQ was. Indeed, Obama said AQ was on the run back in 2012. Many, many, many times.

Dave, can we go to playback -> 30 seconds in.

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You honestly think there is ever going to be a day where the government says "Yup, were safe! Terrorism isnt a threat anymore!"? Any entity with power has one overriding objective; preserve its power and expand it whenever possible.

What better way to do that than an ever illusive boogeyman to scare the populace with?