No, and I'm wondering why the asymmetry isn't being understood by most. I get the fictional characters just being fictional characters, but the others of you make me wonder if I'm just not explaining things well enough.
A) We're not 'at war' with any country. Our government is being asked by the nations involved, NATO or the UN to help governments stop people within their borders from committing crimes of such heinous nature that the President's only option left is to use the military (and not even the "normal" military--niches like cargo planes, special forces and a bunch of reservists and national guardsmen).
B) In your drone example, we can't target law-abiding citizens. We can't say "Ahmad looks like he's a sketchy raghead. Have the drone follow him to his house and kill him." Hell, we can't even say "that guy is known to supply money to terrorists. Kill him." or "I'm pretty sure he went to a mosque with a bad guy. Kill him". Now, have people been killed due to faulty intelligence? Sure. Have 'informants' played their allies for personal vendettas? Of course. But those are the vast minority, and those have to be explained or else operations get shut down. We aren't like the administrations in the past that correlated body count to success.
C) there wasn't a US military presence in Iraq post-2011. We left. And amazingly enough, people kept getting killed in more creative ways by more people who thought that, now that there wasn't a "sheriff" in town, they could act with impunity. To the point that Iraq/UN asked us to help, again, so we are, again. Believe me, most members of the military aren't chomping at the bit to go back.
D) Even if you believe that all's fair in wartime symmetry, the rest of the world disagrees. That's why we have the Geneva Convention and international laws on war, among other things. It doesn't matter if I'm absolutely convinced that we should practice symmetry and rape women, behead people who aren't my religion, set on fire our prisoners, etc. It's not allowed, even if it's "symmetric" to what the bad guys are doing. I'm not allowed to eradicate a tribe of people, knowing that if I leave a boy alive his tribal culture makes him hold a vendetta against his perceived "enemy" until fulfilled.
E) If it's a matter of them just going after the military member, as a matter of "symmetry", then I could almost understand that. Going after the military families as well? Not OK. But if you're still cool with people doing this, you better be cool when habeus corpus in the US gets suspended and I just start militarily eliminating perceived threats in my area of operations, which just got opened up from being 8000 miles away to my backyard and every city where ISIS just posted an address and a call to action. Or, wait, did that just get symmetrical for you, too?
