Over five years drones have led to the deaths of 147 civilians (ie, "verified" "non combatants"), 94 of which are children. It's about one and half children per month. Over 2400 people have been killed via drones during this time. Around 37 "combatants" have been killed per month via drones during this time. That's about 94% intended kills, 6% civilian, 4% children.
Further, the only difference between blowing up a child with a drone, and doing it with a piloted jet is cost. The drones are operated by pilots in real time, in or near the area they are targeting (the drone centers in the US are for training, latency requires drone pilots be nearer their targets than halfway around the world). The pilots, and by extension their leaders and their intelligence, are responsible for blowing up children.
They aren't robots any more than your garage door is a robot that you can control with a pushbutton from a nearby distance.
In completely unrelated news, garage door openers killed about a child a month from the mid 70's to the mid 80's prior to the introduction of minimal safety standards for garage door openers. Today it's only 3-4 children per year. So today the US led drone attacks in the warzone appears to be beating garage door openers in the US led war on children by a factor of 5.
Honestly, though, the deaths of the civilians, as bad as it is, might not compare to the PTSD we are forcing on entire nations who live with near daily drone strikes.
We cannot possibly comprehend the terror we are inducing in other populations with our drones, though who knows - a day may come when portions of the US are under fire from drones belonging to other nations.
