Required Reading

Ralph Peters:

Hundreds of drone strikes so far this year, from Syria to Pakistan. Hundreds of dead terrorists, many of high rank. Thousands of lives saved. And what makes headlines?

Two Western hostages killed in an otherwise successful drone attack.

Sorry, folks. That’s war. And warfare will never be dainty or fully precise. We should be awed by the accuracy of our weaponry and the unprecedented reduction in the loss of innocent lives.

Instead, we bitch because military operations — humanity’s most complex and fraught endeavor — aren’t perfect.

Read the whole thing.

Peters adds an important reminder, “We may regret the loss of an American and an Italian aid worker, but they’d voluntarily placed themselves in danger.” That’s exactly right, and gets forgotten in the urge to point fingers at the Administration. I’d remind you that unless the Pentagon or the White House was somehow lax in its efforts to ID the targets, the President was exactly right to order the kill.

Obama’s Drone War is no substitute for a concerted effort to kill some seriously bad guys who are in serious need of some killing, but it’s a nice addition.

Now if we only had that concerted effort…