"But can they bomb them legally, and without killing innocents?"

OK, I'll bite. When did US military planners start worrying about killing innocents with bombs? If you don't want to kill innocents with bombs then you might consider not dropping bombs near innocents.

He describes the nice clean collateral-damage-free strike on two guys with a mortar, because that's the movie he was shown. I would have appreciated at least the recognition by the author that he was being spun.

The other comment that crosses my mind is, can enough money buy a technological fix to a hopelessly flawed policy? What will break first, "Bubba" (presumably replaceable cheaply from the perspective of the insurgency) or our bank account? We're at nearly a trillion and counting.

But they might just be able to wipe out most of Iraq, to get rid of most of the evidence of our crimes. Same idea as destroying the torture videos (see other Salon story).

The appropriate question is whether the US war-of-choice is legal! Not whether the perceived "combatants" can be legally "smithereened".

Is any person who confronts US occupying forces (anywhere in the world) necessarily a threat to America? Does that make it all legal? Gimme a break fom this circular logic of the US Military.

This whole fiasco could have been avoided with small amounts of rational thinking (instead of thinking of a rationale for war).

No matter how you spin it, the US is the villain here.

Cheers.

If by using equivalent force it helps you to sleep at night.

Oh, by all means, please kill people right. You don't want to fuck up the meat.

Using aerial bombs, no matter how small, is still the equivalent of swinging a bat at a watermelon (as opposed to, say, an orange or maybe a baseball) and a lot of people are likely to get some of it on them. Especially if you do it "right."

If sniping and, effectively, assassination, were truly possible via the methods described here (and described to Benjamin by what amounts to a high school gym class sex ed. class), it might be at least militarily acceptable, if not truly humane ("humane" pretty much loses its meaning in a military setting, especially given the Commander-in-Chief). Since it appears to be pitched as "humane" while there is no way to guarantee that it will be (but plenty of probability that it will not), I find this article and the whole exercise pretty much moot and am left feeling slightly nauseated, yet once again.

But the most disturbing thing contained in this article may not have directly involved killing at all: the 37.5 million pounds of fuel flown across Iraq daily by U.S. aircraft to fuel other U.S. aircraft dedicated to killing "Bubba." To paraphrase Everett Dirksen, a million here, a million there, and pretty soon we're talking real fuel waste.

But it isn't a waste, is it? Because it's being used to "support our troops" and kill evil people somewhere in East Bumfuck Iraq. And besides, there's plenty more where that came from, right beneath the feet of the people we're killing "right."

Thank god we're the good guys.

the nation that gave us 'free-fire zones' and then moved up to 'collateral damage' is once again demonstrating the surgical precision of military justice.

why is no one saluting?

So why wasn't Saddam Hussein removed from power via a fleet of such drones and economy-sized bombs?

Some day remote bombs, under guidance from our support bases in countries around the globe who were made offers they couldn't refuse in the best interests of their national security, raining down from the sky upon "suspected militants" and their unlucky associates, will seem as quaint as the spreading of napalm over villages with foliage problems. Everyone will sleep so much better when suspected militants, suspected political opponents, suspected economic rabble-rousers, etc. are handled via focused pulses from our satellite space fleet with total global coverage, including right here at home. Eliminating such societal problems outright, in case you're wondering, is just so much more cost-effective than stunning and capturing, detaining, arresting, trying and convicting and other such messy tasks involving any actual interaction with actual people ... er, sorry ... suspected militants. Those actual tasks could be done if found necessary, but after all, there's no such thing as a virtual tax dollar unless you work in the White House.

Sounds like fun. Is there a website where I can go and kill Bubba too?

I almost joined the Air Force, 20 years ago. But today it seems more like playing video games and flying model airplanes. I do both of those things today. But I'd really like to kill someone, too.

During the first Gulf War, a squadron of stealth bombers based in Italy were flying sortees over Iraq on a nightly basis. Although they were thousands of miles from the actual battlefield, these Air Force "ramp rats" who loaded the ordinance onto the bombers felt like they were not getting the fair share of the battlefield glory. After all, the "grunts" on the ground were getting Bronze Stars and the pilots in the stealth bombers were getting the Air Medal, but the bomb loaders were getting nothing. So they started bitching about it and before long an Air Force general tried to get the Pentagon to create a special combat service medal for the ramp rats so they would have something to show for their efforts. When the army and Marines found out about it, they were not pleased. The thought of a group of service people thousands of miles from the actual combat theater wanting their own combat medals was not only absurd, it was insulting to the men who actually closed with and killed the enemy nearly face to face.

We've come a long way since Gulf War I. But I suspect it won't be long before the people who sit in a darkened room, killing people from a thousand mile range, will demand their own combat medals.

With our new stand-off and kill weaponry, war is heck.