droning on and on and . . .

From today’s NYTimes, an article on high-tech war:

Air Force officials acknowledge that more than a third of their unmanned Predator spy planes — which are 27 feet long, powered by a high-performance snowmobile engine, and cost $4.5 million apiece — have crashed, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pilots, who fly them from trailers halfway around the world using joysticks and computer screens, say some of the controls are clunky. For example, the missile-firing button sits dangerously close to the switch that shuts off the plane’s engines. Pilots are also in such short supply that the service recently put out a call for retirees to help.

But military leaders say they can easily live with all that.

***
Sure, we can afford to drop 4.5 million here and 4.5 million there, as long as we are killing an endless succession of terrorists – I say an endless succession, because every time one of our “surgical” strikes kills innocent men, women, and children (more often than not, it seems), we create a fresh batch of terrorists.

How about taking that 4.5 million here and 4.5 million there and using it as economic aid to the Afghan people, to give them some incentive not to turn to the Taliban? But no. As the old saying goes, Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; blow a man to smithereens, and he no longer annoys you