Sorry, I failed to be clear in what I was comparing to what here when talking about the ratio of civilian deaths. This is not analogous to civilian massacres or collective punishments, or the widespread death by starvation and disease that wars bring. There are contemporary analogues to these in our imperialistic wars. This is an analogue to the engagement of enemy forces in battle. And I firmly believe the ratio of civilian deaths is actually out of line here.
But as I said before the raw numbers are still very low. It is, I think, the asymmetricity that makes people particularly disgusted by drone warfare. We seem to prefer slaughter when the grunts take physical risk as well.
Interestingly, and contrary to points made above, one of the features of the current sequences of imperial wars is that the civilian damage is officially not estimated. Body counts are not considered. We deliberately and explicitly do not account for the deaths caused by the dislocation of populations, disruption of food and medicine and power and sanitation, and while we do actually record the automated killing the purpose of it is just like the gun cameras in WWII (technical efficiency) and has nothing to do with accountability for civilian killings. In fact, these are hidden with extreme prejudice and revealing them can lead to official persecution in the West.
