Erik Voeten reframes the debate:
The key question is whether the marginal cost of a drone strike is too low? There are probably good examples where a drone strike took out a dangerous terrorist with minimal collateral damage. But is the U.S. now authorizing too many drone strikes because it has paid the fixed costs of an infrastructure that makes it possible? Much of the information that would guide a better judgment is confidential. Yet, as someone who believes that assassination attempts should be rare I worry about this a lot. Multiple parts of the military and government agencies have developed the ability to use drone strikes. Generally, when bureaucracies invest in such infrastructure they will find ways to use it; allowing the standards for individual justifications to slip.
Greg Scoblete asks another question:
[H]ow many drone strikes are targeting international terrorists (i.e. those training or plotting to hit U.S. and Western targets abroad) and how many are hitting local insurgents who are fighting the U.S. because it's decamped in Afghanistan? This seems like a critical distinction (although these two militant groups likely collaborate) because one group poses an enduring threat to the United States and the other ceases to be an American problem once Washington abandons its flailing nation building effort in Afghanistan. From publicly available information, it's not always clear which of these groups is being targeted.
The Dish 