US drone strikes killed 64 to 116 civilian bystanders outside war zones

If you take these numbers as accurate and compare them to conventional methods, seems like an easy choice to continue using it. Of course any civilian death is tragic, but that's not avoidable - unless you are simply for no engagement at all.

WASHINGTON — Partially lifting the secrecy that has cloaked one of the United States’s most contentious tactics for fighting terrorists, the Obama administration on Friday said that it believed that airstrikes it has conducted outside conventional war zones like Afghanistan have killed 64 to 116 civilian bystanders and about 2,500 members of terrorist groups.

The official civilian death count is hundreds lower than most estimates compiled by independent organizations that try to track what the government calls targeted killings in chaotic places like tribal Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Most of the strikes have been carried out by drones, though a small number have involved traditional aircraft or cruise missiles.

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The civilian death numbers between Mr. Obama’s inauguration in 2009 and the end of 2015 were contained in a report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It said the numbers came from 473 strikes, which also killed 2,372 to 2,581 “combatants.”

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The administration’s count of civilian deaths is about half of the lowest estimate from independent watchdogs, which base their estimates largely on press reports and information from local officials. Mr. Roggio’s Long War Journal, the Washington-based security policy organization New America and the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimate that 200 to 1,000 civilians have been killed by American airstrikes outside war zones since 2009.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/w...oll-from-airstrikes-outside-of-war-zones.html​