You're thinking about it all wrong. Set down that burden of compassionate liberalism and put on your neocon hat. I know, I know. It's itchy and gives you headaches, but work with me here, for just a minute at least. UCAVS: - can be blown up if they crash - never require pilot rescue - can loiter for hours and hours and hours - dissolve culpability for any kill order across an entire chain of command - allow for global force projection with modest logistical outlay Look. A Reaper UCAV has a flyaway cost of $13m and costs about $20k an hour to fly. An F-35, should one ever fly, has a flyaway cost of $345m and gawd only knows how much airtime costs. And only the armed forces get F-35s. The CIA can have damn near all the drones it wants - I'm pretty sure they now have more aircraft than the Marines but I don't have time to dig it up. UCAVs permit the CIA kinetic operations with no oversight, no intramural bullshit and no accountability. They're a spook's wetwork wet dream. I'm willing to bet the CIA would give up wire taps before they'd give up drones. As far as "don't work at all" you'd be surprised how punishingly ineffective warfare in general and clandestine warfare in particular tends to be. 41 targets dead and 1100 bystanders killed? This is the outfit that dreamed up the Bay of Pigs invasion, remember. Not to mention Noriega. Shit - we put up a $10 billion dollar spy satellite just to make sure bin Laden was in Abbotabad. For the record, that's double the cost of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. When you look at it through the dispassionate, presbyopic eye of operational clusterfuckitude that is war in general, drone strikes are a goddamn bargain. The tricky part, as brought up by PW Singer, is that when your kill order is executed by a robojock in Las Vegas, setting off a car bomb in the Walmart parking lot to take him out when he stops in for diapers and Doritos on his way home suddenly becomes a defensible act of war in the eyes of the World Court. Assuming you give the first fuck about the World Court.