The fewer-collateral-victims argument is false because the alternative was no strike at all.

Evidence

It is claimed that drone use is justified because it would create fewer collateral victims than other weapons that could have been used in its place. What this argument postulates is that those other means really would have been used—in other words, that the military action would have taken place anyway, and it’s just a question of which weapon is used. But that is precisely what the moral hazard associated with drones renders doubtful. The sophistry becomes clear when one reflects that those other means might never have been employed because of the prohibitively high reputational costs associated with them. Another way of putting that is to say that in a situation of moral hazard, military action is very likely to be deemed “necessary” simply because it is possible, and possible at a lower cost. In such cases, it is necessarily false to say that the drone has inflicted less collateral damage: as Jeremy Hammond sums up, the number of civilian victims “of course isn’t lower than it would be if there weren’t drone strikes, in which case precisely zero civilians would be killed in them.” — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 591

Categorization

• SEED: The Hammond line is article-quotable: the civilian count is lower only against a counterfactual action that moral hazard makes doubtful.

Related

• Drone advocates came to believe their own claims of negligible collateral damage. (similarity 0.85)
• Drone use lowers the threshold so violence becomes the default foreign policy option. (similarity 0.83)
• Low cost of drone warfare removes congressional restraint on military action (similarity 0.81)
• Drone missiles have larger lethal radii than conventional infantry weapons (similarity 0.81)
• The drone exemplifies the moral hazard of acting without bearing costs (similarity 0.81)
• Drones lower political, economic, and ethical costs of war (similarity 0.81)
• Drones create a moral hazard that shifts risk onto others. (similarity 0.80)
• The drone state aims to replace mobilized citizen bodies with mechanical agents. (similarity 0.80)
• Drones are nondiscriminatory because excluding combat erases the combatant-noncombatant distinction. (similarity 0.80)
• Drones deactivate democratic war critique by removing citizens’ exposure to death. (similarity 0.79)
• The drone reconciles liberal security statehood with unrestricted waging of war. (similarity 0.79)
• Combat indifference to killing spread to accept civilian deaths by mistake (similarity 0.79)
• The discourse of ethical drones strategically lowers the cost of using them. (similarity 0.79)
• Drones fuse killing and caring into an integrated humilitarian power (similarity 0.79)
• Drones create a crisis in military ethos by contradicting traditional warrior values. (similarity 0.79)