According to the Director of National Intelligence, in a Friday report titled “Summary of Information Regarding U.S. Counterterrorism Strikes Outside Areas of Active Hostilities,” between Jan. 20, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2015, the U.S. military launched a total of 473 airstrike, killing between 2,372 and 2,581 militants in countries not including Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. However, the report also calculates somewhere between 64 and 116 civilian casualties during the same period.

“The official civilian death count is far lower than estimates compiled by independent organizations that try to track what the government calls targeted killings,” The New York Times says, “and human rights groups expressed doubts about the reliability of the government’s numbers.”

That’s probably at least somewhat true. However, in war, collateral damage is inevitable. And these drone strikes were pretty targeted to minimize that. At the same time, Americans are right to be suspicious. As even the leftist Times goes on to write, “In a seeming acknowledgment that the long-anticipated disclosure would be greeted with skepticism by critics of the drone program, the administration issued the numbers on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend.” That’s standard procedure whenever Obama wants to bury something.

That something might have something to do with the “war” against ISIL. Writing in National Review, attorney Dan McLaughlin observes:

> [W]hat’s dangerously seductive about drones is that precisely because they put no American servicemen’s lives at risk, they allow the government to engage in the pretense that using them is not war, and allow politicians to present themselves as peacemaking non-interventionists while lobbing bombs into other sovereign countries. This is the grave moral weight of war purchased on the cheap, with little effort to justify it to the American public, let alone the public in countries where we rain down death from the sky. It encourages the worst instincts of opponents of American ground interventions, even though the enemies we target from the air are likely sooner or later to require finishing off on the ground. That’s something we can’t do if the public has been conditioned to think ground wars are never necessary and American casualties are never tolerable — not even for causes that justify bombing places with a lot of civilians. And it encourages our enemies to see us as cowards who won’t risk our own people to fight them.

Which brings us to the biggest casualty of all — the integrity of the commander in chief.