It is the OP who has made a statement about innocence, and implied that it's meaningful to make a comparison. The Guardian article sets a baseline as otherwise we're just flapping jaws.

Another baseline is to declare that all males of military age in a given zone are be definition enemy combatants. (Or that all people living in a city which contributes war materiel to the enemy are enemy combatants.)

The Guardian says "An estimated 142 children were killed in the course of pursuing those 24 men" and "17 named men were targeted multiple times. Strikes on them killed 273 people, at least seven of them children". That's about 150 children. I'll presume that these children were not militants. So how about the baseline of saying that for every 6 militants we kill, we also kill one child?

It doesn't really matter though. The questions are 1) does the use of drones improve the baseline (the OP's argument) and 2) does it really make a difference to argue the issue, or draw a distinction? (my argument).

I think it's worth making the distinction among the people killed in addition to the target. These guys aren't just sitting alone in some hut, nor are they exclusively surrounded by innocent families. They're on top of a hierarchy of militants.

I say this worth knowing because even if we assume these were all 100% innocent civilians, this rate of collateral damage is far better than has ever been achieved in an armed conflict. That is not to justify this behavior or say it isn't shocking or disturbing, but it's statistical truth and it shouldn't be ignored.

We don't know these numbers. The US government uses numbers with a horrible baseline, or at the very least, one that is very different than used for previous wars. In the recent ISIS bombings, for example:

> Washington also continues to insist it cannot confirm a single noncombatant death from more than 1,100 airstrikes against Islamic State targets — despite a number of apparently well-documented cases of error or collateral damage in both Iraq and Syria. - http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/12/03/pentagon-in-denial-about...

As that Foreign Policy article describes, the numbers from the US government are not believable.

I know that you are over exaggerating when you say "this rate of collateral damage is far better than has ever been achieved in an armed conflict" because there have been had wars with no casualties at all ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodless_war ).

Even in wars with casualties, the first Gulf War had some 3,500 civilian casualties in Iraq, and about ~25K military casualties. That's 1 civilian killed for every 10 military.

The numbers in the recent Guardian article are 1 civilian killed for at least every 6 enemy combatants, if you assume that only the children are non-combatants, or up to several innocent civilians killed for each enemy combatant if assume these were all 100% innocent civilians. Hardly "far better than" the first Gulf War.

> I know that you are over exaggerating when you say "this rate of collateral damage is far better than has ever been achieved in an armed conflict" because there have been had wars with no casualties at all ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodless_war ).

I'm not sure why you even included this. Of course we're talking about conflicts where there is bloodshed.

> Even in wars with casualties, the first Gulf War had some 3,500 civilian casualties in Iraq, and about ~25K military casualties. That's 1 civilian killed for every 10 military.

The first gulf war was against an organized military and it lasted for roughly 4 months. It wasn't a long term occupation with ISAF essentially playing peacekeepers within the country. The US basically destroyed most of the Iraqi military and then withdrew after a peace agreement was struck.

The Iraqi military the US faced during the invasion in 2003 was a shadow of its former self, and during the occupation obviously they were fighting an insurgency. It's a terrible comparison. A more suitable example might be the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which is similar in many important respects, but the doctrine followed by each military was vastly different. The Soviets killed indiscriminately during their occupation. Their strategy was generally to seek out and kill every person in the direction from which they were shot at. This very article shows that there are multiple levels of approval that must be sought before the order to kill is given. Obviously, it has flaws, but it's not even in the same ballpark was the "conventional" way of doing things.

You said "has been achieved in an armed conflict". That's an exaggeration because 'armed conflict' is so very broad, and includes bloodless wars. You've qualified it now with "has been achieved in long term occupation by peacekeepers." I agree that if you narrow the definition enough, you can make it be correct.

(I should have included the Falklands War as a war with few innocent/non-combatant civilian deaths compared to military deaths. Argentina lost 649 people as part of their military force, the UK 255, and three Falklands civilians died, from friendly fire.)

There's little need to look towards Soviet occupation for a comparison. We did long term occupations of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924) (http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a491390.pdf is the best document I found on the occupation; most other references are to the 1965-1966 occupation) and Haiti (1915-1934), which was publicly described as a mission to 're-establish peace and order'. We also controlled the Philippines from 1902 to 1946. There was insurgent opposition in all three places. By comparison, the US response in Iraq is indeed much better than General Smith's order to "KILL EVERY ONE OVER TEN" as part of the American atrocities in the Philippines.

In any case, when you talk about long-term peacekeeper forces, you need to include things like the UN peacekeepers on Cyprus, who have helped prevent sectarian conflict between ethnically Greek and Turkish Cypriots. And done so with very few casualties. (Go ahead and add another qualifier, in that the UNFICYP has only 1,000 people.)

But put all that aside. When you write "this rate of collateral damage is far better than has ever been achieved in an armed conflict" ... how do you know? How do you measure collateral damage? Whose numbers do you trust, and why?