Are Drones a Superior Form of Warfare? "The Moral Case for Drones" (news analysis, Sunday Review, July 15), misses the most relevant considerations. It is not a matter of whether drones kill fewer civilians than my poor father did when bombing Germany (an experience that turned him into a strong supporter of the Geneva Conventions). Rather, the first question is the issue of legality: Targeting militants in Pakistan without declaring war is illegal. President Obama would not dare to send in F-16s because that would be a more patent act of war. Second, drones drastically lower the threshold at which politicians are willing to kill, because there is effectively no political downside. Witness the American military strikes in Waziristan, Yemen and Somalia, yet nobody in the United States seems to think twice about them. I have been to Pakistan and have seen the carnage that Mr. Obama's robot war has created. As Americans, we need a far more informed debate before declaring that this is the way to go. The writer, an American lawyer, is the director of Reprieve, an organization that advocates prisoners" rights. One crucial element is missing from the article: the fact that terrorists embed themselves and their weapons among the civilian population, vastly increasing the death count of innocents. The article, for example, cites Israel's collateral death rate of 41 percent, but leaves out that Hamas weapons are deliberately situated in private homes and mosques, violating long established wartime codes of conduct and guaranteeing the death of guiltless civilians. Unless that is figured into the discussion, the moral case for or against the use of drones is quite incomplete. AVROM JACOBS Jamaica Plain, Mass., July 16, 2012 I agree with your article that using drone aircraft to fight terrorists in Pakistan is ethically supported by their relative precision. I see two further ethical attractions of drones compared with ground operations or bombing: Drones fight fire with fire, inflicting on Taliban and Al Qaeda senior leadership the same kind of terror that those rogues inflict broadly by sending suicide bombers among the innocent. Drones can remain long after most of our troops come home to work on rebuilding American infrastructure. The moral case for drones is hauntingly reminiscent of the Vietnam War-era strategy of bombing villages to save them. The technology is more sophisticated, but the tactic remains barbaric.