You're making an interesting argument, but one that was rendered obsolete a long time ago.
We've used beyond line of sight weapon systems on massive scale for at least 40 years, and weapons like the Tomahawk and JSOW have taken things completely out of the realm where such an argument can be taken seriously.
The decisions you talk about are probably valid doing close air support in something like a helicopter where the aircraft actually operates at an altitude where the pilot can actually distinguish targets on the ground.
There's a whole vast world of aviation delivered ordnance that has nothing to do with that world.
Good point,and drone strikes are being used as well. Some is vastly different than all. There hasn't been a major war where most or majority of kills happened remotely yet. I think either wars will be very short or exremely long if it was mostly done by unmanned operators and it will mean more civilians and less soldiers will die.
I think the most recent wars we've been involved in have been very tilted towards standoff weapon strikes. I suspect, although I don't think there are real numbers to really look at, that the vast majority of deaths over the last few years in wars the US has been involved in have been from weapons where no pilot was physically in danger.
To your last point, I think we've reduced the civilian death toll greatly by use of precision weapons. Compare what we do now to what was done in WWII or even Vietnam to an extent.
We've used beyond line of sight weapon systems on massive scale for at least 40 years, and weapons like the Tomahawk and JSOW have taken things completely out of the realm where such an argument can be taken seriously.
The decisions you talk about are probably valid doing close air support in something like a helicopter where the aircraft actually operates at an altitude where the pilot can actually distinguish targets on the ground.
There's a whole vast world of aviation delivered ordnance that has nothing to do with that world.