Back in 2012 a senior U.S. army officer let it be know that we were targeting "children with potential hostile intent" in Afghanistan.
If you don't remember this, you aren't alone. Few Americans care about Afghan lives.
In fact, quite possibly the only successful part of the GWOT has been the ability of the American public to dehumanize everyone perceived as an enemy. By "enemy", that means whomever we end up killing. Women, children, the elderly, they are all suspect if we killed them.

The other side of the coin is the unshakable belief that we are always the good guys. We only act with the most righteous of intentions. For instance, our drone strike program, where we carry out remote, extrajudicial killings in seven (or more) different nation, none of which we are at war with, isn't a global assassination program to put down popular insurgencies against corrupt governments.
Instead, drones “have helped to make our targeting even more precise.” (Harold Koh, State Department legal advisor)
“You can far more easily limit collateral damage with a drone than you can with a bomb, even a precision-guided munition, off an airplane.” (Secretary of Defense Robert Gates)
Even President Obama agrees, “What I can say with great certainty is that the rate of civilian casualties in any drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that occur in conventional war.”

It's self-evident that if you make wars just like a video game and completely dehumanize the enemy that this will reduce the number of civilian casualties.

Wait a sec.
Why does that make no logical sense?

Well, maybe because its all a big lie.

The Obama administration’s assumption that drones cause less collateral damage than piloted aircraft is simply untrue. According to the best publicly available evidence, drone strikes in non-battlefield settings — Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — result in 35 times more civilian fatalities than airstrikes by manned weapons systems in conventional battlefields, such as Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
...
Meanwhile, drone strikes in non-battlefield countries tell a much different story. Since Obama entered office, 462 drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia have killed an estimated 289 civilians, or one civilian per 1.6 strikes.

One day someone will look back on our drone wars legacy and apologize to the world, but for now, that day is still a long ways off.