The Case Against Drones

Andrew Exum calls Jane Mayer's article "perhaps the very best piece on the use of unmanned drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan." Exum, a long time critic of the drone program:

My worries have always centered around how the attacks are perceived on the ground, so it has been frustrating to read careless readers of our argument mistakenly assume we agree with open-source reporting out of Pakistan. To the contrary. I focus on Pakistani press reports because, in a war of perceptions, I am less concerned with how many civilians we are actually killing and more concerned with how many civilians the neutral population thinks we are killing.

Spencer Ackerman has further thoughts.