From the first weeks of the Afghanistan war to its final days, U.S. officials repeatedly championed the use of aerial surveillance technology to distinguish friend from foe, fighter from civilian, and eliminate America's enemies with pinpoint accuracy. The technology was heralded as a way to minimize civilian casualties and reduce the risks and costs of ground deployments. In practice, though, the U.S. military got it wrong — a lot — leading to high-profile civilian deaths and handing the Taliban a potent recruitment tool.

After weeks of hesitation, the Pentagon admitted Friday that it got it wrong again in the final days of the frantic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, when an Aug. 29 drone strike took out 10 civilians who had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorists. What makes the admission so embarrassing for the administration is that President Joe Biden has staked the future of America's security strategy in Afghanistan on what he calls "over the horizon" surveillance technology to take the place of troops and human intelligence.

American commanders at the time spoke with certainty about what the Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Mark Milley, asserted was a "righteous" strike. At the time, relatives of the 10 civilians killed insisted that their family members had been wrongfully targeted. But U.S. officials refused to budge from their version that they had annihilated an Islamic State terrorist threat.

The Pentagon only admitted its mistake after various U.S. news outlets, led by The New York Times, interviewed survivors and investigated the victims' backgrounds. News reports made clear the attack was a mistake. But the Pentagon and Biden administration, anxious to avoid even more embarrassments after a chaotic withdrawal, remained reluctant to admit any error.

U.S. commanders have long tried to justify technology shortcuts as the modern way to conduct war. One early airstrike, in December 2001, took out a convoy of Afghan tribal leaders traveling to a meeting to fill a governance void left after Taliban leaders had fled. U.S. Central Command spokesman Maj. Brad Lowell at the time spoke confidently about "aerial imaging and ground intelligence" that established that the 10 to 12 cars in the convoy constituted "a legitimate military target." The victims turned out to be civilians. A jealous rival had provided the United States with bogus intelligence in order to eliminate them so he could take control.

On a few occasions, the military has admitted fault, such as in 2010, when then-Vice Adm. William McRaven traveled to a remote village to apologize for bad intelligence that sparked a U.S. attack that killed two pregnant women and three other civilian noncombatants.

The Aug. 29 mistake exposes a yawning intelligence gap threatening to undermine Biden's plan to prevent Afghanistan from serving as the launching ground for another 9/11-style attack on America.

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