Protecting pilots at altitude made it impossible to verify legitimate strike targets.

Evidence

The NATO planes carried out 38,004 raids in seventy-eight days without sustaining a single loss among the members of their crews. The Americans had indeed managed to invent warfare that inflicted zero deaths in their own camp. However, this did not rule out contradictions. For the very altitude that ensured that the lives of the pilots were not exposed also meant a potential loss of accuracy for the air strikes. NATO officials questioned on this matter by Amnesty International acknowledged this: “An aircrew flying at 15,000 feet would be able only to identify whether the objective was the intended one according to the planning preparations, but would be unable to tell whether, for example, civilians had moved within its vicinity. The 15,000-feet rule thus effectively made it impossible for NATO aircrews to respect the obligation to suspend an attack once circumstances had changed on the ground rendering the objective no longer legitimate.” — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 433

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Preserving pilot lives at altitude undermined accuracy and civilian protection; Weapon precision cannot improve the adequacy of target identification.

Related

• Preserving pilot lives at altitude undermined accuracy and civilian protection (similarity 0.90)
• NATO prioritized pilot lives over the civilians the operation claimed to protect (similarity 0.86)

Broader Connections

• Weapon precision cannot improve the adequacy of target identification. #complicates (0.70)